Reagan at mid-term (1983)

From the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

In November 1980 Ronald Reagan swept to an overwhelming victory in the United States Presidential election - the culmination of one of the longest campaigns ever. In addition to his two terms as Governor of California, Reagan had unsuccessfully tried for the Republican Party nomination in 1968 and 1976, his image as a right-wing extremist possibly contributing to his defeat on those occasions. The main campaign issues were inflation, rising unemployment, the crisis over the American hostages in Iran, law-and-order, and the stance taken by the incumbent Jimmy Carter on the need for energy conservation. Reagan stressed the “communist” (Russian ruling class) threat abroad (who doesn’t in American politics?) and the dire effect so-called “big government” was having on the nation’s economy. He never clearly spelled out his remedies other than calling for a massive cut in income taxes, but then, who does (we might say, who can) among those seeking political power under capitalism? Basically his fiscal policies have been those nowadays dubbed as monetarist, similar to those of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in Britain.

During his campaign Reagan hammered away at bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, portraying himself as an untainted outsider who would clean up the mess, defeat unemployment and inflation, and restore faith in America at home and abroad. Jimmy Carter’s task, like that of most incumbents, was somewhat harder, particularly with capitalism in recession. His tactics were to minimize critical scrutiny of his administration’s record and to emphasize Reagan’s extremist image, suggesting on many occasions that his opponent was too dangerous to have his finger on the nuclear trigger. Reagan’s acting skill was a considerable help in defeating this tactic, and the television debates screened nation-wide provided just the right setting in which to exploit this asset: one that can still win a trick or two for him after two years in office. By speech and gesture Reagan still manages to convey the image of a crusader battling against the Washington establishment. As could be foreseen he has failed to deliver the goods he promised to American workers in 1980, but despite this a recent opinion poll published by the Los Angeles Times, and quoted by Nicholas Ashford (The Times 14 October) revealed that “. . . American workers believed OPEC, Japan, big business, the trade unions and even former President Jimmy Carter, were more responsible for the recession and rise in unemployment than Reagan”.

In one of his typically emotional campaign speeches Reagan stated that “recovery begins when Jimmy Carter loses his job”, a promise particularly directed at the unemployed workers. The grim reality after two years was graphically illustrated on the television news. (BBC1). We were informed that over 11 million American workers are out of a job and shown a negro Baptist church in New York where charity is handed out to the destitute. A thousand or more are given a daily basic ration yet always supplies have run out before applicants. It was claimed that many were actually starving.

The President’s tax cut program me has also suffered a considerable setback. Congress, after weeks of bitter debate, passed a bill on 29 July 1981 to cut income tax rates by 25 per cent over 33 months, the largest reduction in United States history. Despite appearances, however, tax cuts are of no benefit to the working class as a whole. The wage or salary which the worker receives is the price which his or her labour power will fetch on the labour market. On average this is just enough to keep the worker and any dependents in a state fit to carry out the tasks required by the capitalist class. Of necessity it must be the net wage, the worker’s take-home pay, which  represents the price of labour power, otherwise the worker’s efficiency as a wage slave would tend to diminish, all other things being equal. Thus the income tax deduction on an employee’s pay slip is in fact part of the employer’s contribution to the exchequer and not a charge on the worker.

The contrary argument used by supported of tax cuts is that the extra money left in individual or corporate hands will lead to increased investment, and hence more jobs. The immediate effect of the cuts however is to reduce the living standards of the lower paid workers quite considerably as the tax reductions were made possible by swingeing cuts in spending on social security. As The Times (14 October 1982) reported: “since January of last year the poor in America have lost more than $10,000 million in federal support. Some 660,000 children have lost Medicaid coverage. Almost one million poor children no longer receive free or reduced price school lunches. One million people have been dropped from food stamp rolls. “The increased investment however has not taken place. How can there be investment without the prospect of a profit? Instead, in a sharp U-turn the President has been forced to persuade Congress, after an intense lobbying campaign, to vote in favor of a record $98,300 million tax bill intended to reduce federal government budget deficits and speed up America’s economic recovery (The Times, 21 August 1982).

Reagan has been no more successful  on the “law and order” issue. A firm believer himself in the Almighty, and given considerable support by a right-wing, semi-religious movement calling itself the Moral Majority, he made much emotional play during the 1980 campaign on how, by having the right party in government, a moral climate would be created in which the crime rate would come tumbling down. However the president was recently forced to admit (The Times, 13 September 1982) that the “US was in the midst of a crime epidemic which has touched nearly a third of American households”. A Bill now before Congress to toughen the law includes revision of the insanity defense. (Apparently reagan is particularly upset at the acquittal of his assailant, John Hinckley, for this reason. The insanity of the social system which produces such unbalanced minds has, of course, escaped him.) In any case, attempts to introduce tougher legislation have proved ineffective on countless occasions, leaving untouched the social cause of crime.

The ruthless suppression of the strike staged in August 1981 by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (one of the few unions to endorse the Reagan ticket in 1980) is very much in the Republican tradition. It was a Republican controlled Congress which passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act over the veto of Harry Truman, then President on the Democratic ticket. Not that the record of the Democrats, though possibly less openly aggressive, is really much better, as was shown by the crushing of a national rail strike in September of this year. On 22 September an emergency order was approved which ordered an immediate return to work and removed the engineers right to strike for the remaining 21 months of their present work contract. The votes were overwhelming in both Houses of Congress, even so-called liberal Democratic representatives chipping in. Edward Kennedy was quoted (The Times, 23 September 1982) as saying: “The National Interest is overriding and there is not, I believe, any alternative”.

The recent mid-term elections produced just enough gains to enable the opposition Democrats to claim a substantial victory but, by and large, their gains were of debatable significance. The political system in the United States differs in a number of ways from its British counterpart. For instance, the executive (President) and legislative (Congress) branches are much more separate. In Britain, loss of a parliamentary majority almost invariably forces the government to resign; in the United States his has never happened. The 1980 elections produced a Republican Senate but a Democratic House of Representatives and, while the Democrats increased their majority in the lower house this autumn, there was no change in the Senate. There have been many instances where a President has governed without  a real deadlock with both Houses of Congress containing a majority of the opposition party. Conversely there have been occasions when the President’s party has had adequate majorities in both Houses but considerable friction has existed. Congress represents many capitalist interests spread over a large and diverse geographical area - hence they have difficulty in uniting on a common viewpoint. For this and various other historical reasons, party discipline is much more lax in the United States than is usually the case in Europe, and ad-hoc coalitions often form across party lines.

This does not however prevent the whole government machinery from acting effectively when called on, as shown by the railway strike. Here all sections of the capitalist class united against what they saw as a common threat, and decisive action was taken.

In the presidential stakes the Democrats have made little headway and, despite their mid-term gains, still seem to be in some disarray. Ronald Reagan (The Times, 14 October 1982) is the only president in recent history whose popularity rating has never fallen below 40 per cent and the most recent polls say that his popularity is on the increase again. This, linked with the poll published by the Los Angeles Times, suggests that the President, somewhat unusually for someone actually in power, has succeeded in diverting the blame onto other influences at home and abroad, In this situation the Democrats might once have hoped that Edward Kennedy would regain power for them but whatever they now do, we obviously cannot rule out a second Reagan term.

E. C. Edge

Notes on Economic History (4) (1961)

From the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before the Physiocrats

Sir William Petty (1623-1687)

Marx, in Volume 1 of Capital, says: "Once for all, I may add that by classical political economy I understand that economy which since the time of W. Petty has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society, in contradiction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only".

This is a tribute to the genius and originality of Sir William Petty, the founder of modern political economy. It is in his Treatise of Taxes and Contribution, London 1662, that we find the first idea of surplus value.

Petty distinguishes the natural price of commodities from the market price, the "true price current". By natural price he means value. This is his main point, as the determination of surplus value depends on the determination of value itself. What, then, is value? Petty determines the value of commodities by the relative amounts of labour which they contain; he is concerned not with appearances, but with foundations.

In the following quotation from his Treatise of Taxes and Contributions we get the first definition of value:

If a man brings to London an ounce of Silver out of the earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other; now if by reason of new and more mines a man can get two ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did one, then corn will be as cheap at ten shillings the bushel as it was before at five shillings, caeteris paribus (all things being equal).

The next quotation from the same work interests us, as it is the early examination of the value of labour;

The law . . . should allow the labourer but just the wherewithall to live; for if you allow double then he works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would; which is a loss to the publick of the fruit of so much labour.

In modern words, in receiving for six hours' labour the value of six hours, the labourer would receive double what he receives if he worked for twelve hours and got only the value of six. he would therefore not work more than six hours. Thus the value of labour is determined by the minimum necessary for subsistence. To induce the labourer to produce surplus value and to perform surplus labour, it is necessary to compel him to expend all the labour power of which he is capable, as the condition upon which he may earn the necessities of life.

Petty recognises two forms of surplus value, ground rent and money rent (interest). He divides the second from the first which, for him, as later for the Physiocrats, is the true form of surplus value. He depicts rent not as simple surplus of labour expended over and above necessary labour, but as a surplus, of the surplus labour of the producer himself over and above his wages and the replacement of his capital; as for example the following"

Suppose a man could with his own hands plant a certain scope of land with corn, that is, could dig, or plough, harrow, weed, reap, carry home, thresh and winnow so much as the husbandry of this land requires; and had withal seed wherewith to sow the same. I say that when this man has subtracted his food out of the proceed and given to others in exchange for clothes and other natural necessaries, that the remainder of the corn is the natural and true rent of the land for that year, and the medium of seven years, or rather of so-many years as make up the cycle, within which dearth and plenties make their revolution, doth give the ordinary rent of the land in corn.

To Petty, the value of the corn is determined by the labour time which it contains, while rent, equivalent to the total product after the deduction of wages and seed, equals the surplus labour represented by surplus product. Rent, therefore, includes profit which is inseparable from it.

Petty also shows that the individual character of the labour is of no consequence. Labour time is what matters.

As a final tribute, and summing up of Petty's contribution to political economy, we quote the following extract from Volume III, of Capital.

Petty . . .  and in general the writers who are closer to feudal times, assume that ground rent is the normal form of surplus value, whereas profit to them is still vaguely combined with wages, or at best looks to them like a portion of surplus value filched by the capitalist from the landlord. These writers take their departure from a condition, in which the agricultural population still constitutes the overwhelming majority of the nation, and in which the landlord still appears as the individual, who appropriates at first hand the surplus labor of the direct producers through his land monopoly, in which land therefore still appears as the chief requisite of production. These writers could not yet face the question, which, contrary to them, seeks to investigate from the point of view of capitalist production, how it happens that private ownership in land manages to wrest from capital a portion of the surplus-value produced by it at first hand (that is, filched by it from the direct producers) and first appropriated by it.

John Locke (1633-1704)
John Locke is probably better known for his philosophy than he is for his contribution to political economy. He follows William Petty in that he regarded human labour as the principal source of wealth, though Petty regarded both labour and land as the important factors. For Locke, nature was out of the prime importance. He believed that the laws of nature established personal labour as the natural limit of private property—the limit arising from the physical limitation on the amount of labour an individual can perform, and from the fact that no one should accumulate more than his needs.

Locke was opposed to the private ownership of land. In his opinion ground rent was no different from usury and, due to the unequal distribution of the means of production, was a transfer from one person to another of the profit that should have been the reward of one man's labour. The following quotation from his Consideration of the Lowering of Interest is an illustration of this:

Money, therefore, in buying and selling, being perfectly in the same condition with other commodities, and subject to all the same laws of value, let us next see how it comes to be of the same nature with land, by yielding a certain yearly income, which we call use or interest. For land produces naturally something new and profitable, and of value to mankind; but money is a barren thing, and produces nothing, but by compact transfers that profit that was the reward of one man's labour into another man's pocket.

Locke's importance is that he is the voice of the juridical theories of capitalist society as opposed to feudalism. His work in philosophy was the basis upon which the thinking of subsequent English economist rested.

Sir Dudley North (1641-1690)
Sir Dudley North is best known his Discourses upon Trade. This is mainly concerned with commercial capital, and as such is outside the scope of these notes. The importance of North is that he reflects in his writing the period in which he lived.

From 1663 to 1798, except for the years 1708 and 1709, wheat prices were falling. Landlords complained continuously about falling rents. Industrial capitalists and landowners were concerned about, and did in fact bring about, a reduction in the rate of interest. Up to 1760 it was considered to be in the national interest to maintain and increase the value of land. From 1760 onwards an economic investigation began into the rise in rents, about the increase in the price of land and corn, and of other consumer goods.

The years 1650 to 1750 were full of struggles between "monied interests" and "landed interests". The landowners gradually lost out to the money lenders and financiers of the period. The financiers, with the establishment of the credit system, and the system of State debt, became predominant in society.

Petty, in his works, refers to the complaints of the landlords regarding the fall of rents. He defended the monied interests against the landlords, and placed the rent of money and rent of land in the same category. North, in his writing, follows Petty. It was in this form that capital gave landed property its first set-back, since money-lending at interest was one of the main means for the accumulation of capital.

North seems to have been the first to understand interest correctly. He included both capital and money in "Stock". On price and money his observation that gold and silver serve not as gold and silver in themselves, but only as forms of exchange value, is, for his day, remarkable.

To sum up, the position of the economists before the physiocrats was that they had to try and understand the conditions in which the landlord was being forced out, to the advantage of finance capital which was growing.

Bob Ambridge

Notes on Economic History (3) (1961)

From the January 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rise of the Merchants

The earlier feudal economy had to be curbed by the encouragement of manufacture through privileges and monopolies (thus breaking the power of the Guilds), through exemption from taxation, and through other forms of support. Skilled craftsmen were imported, industrial secrets were purchased or stolen. On the other hand, by official supervision of the whole process of production, industry was to be kept up to the mark, and at the same time the consumer was to be protected by subjecting the process of sale to inspection. Here the traditions and customs of the older urban economy showed their influence.

Another method adopted was the establishment of colonies and trading companies. The East India Company, founded in 1660, was given the right in 1661 to carry on war and make peace in non-Christian countries. Similar companies were set up by other Powers.

Attempts were made to provide cheap labour so as to promote and strengthen industry. One method was to encourage the increase of population (a special need in Germany in those days after the Thirty Years War); prohibitions on marriage was removed and payments made to fathers of large families. Another was to cheapen the necessaries of life, so that wages could be kept down. Foodstuffs were freed from import duty, while high levies were placed on exported grain, or its export totally forbidden. These measures were opposed to the interests of the agriculturalists but, though not openly advocated, were often put into practice, for example, in France by Colbert.

Finally the output of gold and silver was to be increased where possible by mining in the home-land, assisted by state subsidies if needed. The attraction of wealthy foreigners into the country, the prohibition of the export of precious metals, and similar measures, were to supplement and round off the expedients for increasing the national wealth.

A survey of mercantilist policy shows that its advocates placed great importance on money, but did not hold that money was an end in itself; they valued it for its productive effects. Thomas Mun, the mercantilist, wrote "money begets trade" and "trade increases money". Charles Davenant, of the same school, says "Foreign trade brings in the stock. This stock, well and industriously managed, betters land, and brings more products of all kinds for exportation; the returns of which growth and product are to make a country gainers in the balance". Colbert says the same thing from the outlook of the State financier: "If there be money in the country, the desire to turn it to advantage makes people set it in motion, and public funds benefit thereby".

It is necessary to remember that mercantilism differed greatly at different times and in different countries. In England, Holland and Italy, it was predominantly commercial; in France and Germany it was rather industrial. These variations notwithstanding, and allowing for differences in the details of application, all the European rulers and statesmen from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century were guided by the principles set out above.

In England, though agriculture and manufacture were not neglected, mercantilism had a strong commercial trend. Cromwell's Navigation Law of 1651 decreed that no merchandise from Asia, Africa or America should be imported, except in ships built in England, owned by English subjects, navigated by English captains, with at least three-fourths of the crew English. Sea-borne commerce from England to other European countries was to be carried either in English boats, or else in ships belonging to the country with which trade was being carried on.

These conditions meant a practical monopoly of the seas for the English, to the detriment of the Dutch carrying-trade. By a treaty of 1703, Portuguese ports were opened to British woollens in return for concessions to Portugal allowing the importation of wine into Great Britain.

In Germany and Austria, owing to the devastation of the Thirty Years War, the need to increase the population was of paramount importance. There could not be much endeavour to promote foreign trade. The main concern was to hinder imports from countries whose manufactured goods were so cheap that the compensation could not be met. A demand for laws to limit expenditure on clothes, food, furniture, etc. was a feature of mercantilism here.

In Italy, in conformity with the nature of the financial and commercial aristocracies of the republics of that period, the mercantilist school was especially interested in the balance of trade and monetary problems.

In France, Jean Baptiste Colbert was the most successful exponent of the mercantile system, especially after 1666 when he became controller general of the national finances. At the time he took office, French industry was a long way behind England, and even Germany, and the finances and administration were in a bad state. It was not long before internal customs dues had been largely abolished, canals had been made, and skilled workmen and contractors attracted from other countries. By such stimulants as State subsidies, protective duties, and the establishment of technical schools, French industry began to flourish.

Adam Smith considered the mercantilists as a school of united thinkers. This is not so. Mercantilism was essentially a vague principle of applied economics, stemming from the historical, economic, and political foundations of the period. The economists of those days, in order to further the advance from the feudal and localised urban economy to a unified national economy, had to put forward the ideas of the balance of trade, attach great importance to money, study the effects of customs tariffs, examine the source of national wealth, and thus come to form a durable though somewhat loosely organised unity.

It was the economics of early capitalism—the period of history in which Capitalists and Workers make their appearance, showing a difference in the form of the class struggle from the feudal period before it.

Bob Ambridge

Notes on Economic History (2) (1960)

From the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Mercantile System

This was the beginning of the modern era. A new form of economic practice was developing, and new theories made their appearance in the form known as Mercantilism. This term (introduced by Adam Smith) is, however, a little misleading for its advocates were quite as concerned with industrial development as with the exchange of merchandise.

The term "Mercantile system" is loosely used to denote all the principles applied by the governments and traders of those days—though it is a fact that these principles have a general conformity. Mercantilism was a growth of its time. It was a system of political absolutism and centralization in favour of the burghers and mobile capital, to the detriment of the lords of the soil. To throw light on this we must glance at the economic process of this period.

The economic organisation of the Middle Ages was disrupted mainly by those political changes which led in Western Europe to the formation of the national states (France, Spain, Portugal and England); and in Germany, later in, to the formation of territorial princedoms. As a result, the Mediaeval economy, with its urban units, was replaced by larger units of different kind—the unified national economic areas. Political concentration in these areas resulted in money and wealth becoming elements of political power in a way very different from of old.

The idea of money as the nerve of the State was in many respects new. The State, which had been constituional (in the Feudalist sense) became absolute; a State army replaced the Feudal militia; and the centralisation of the administration established a paid civil service, judiciary, etc., where Feudal methods of self government had previously prevailed. The result was that military and civil concerns, taxation, and the processes of State credit, tended more and more to be carried on upon a monetary basis instead of by the payments in kind of the earlier economy. Money acquired a significance that was quite new.

These changes were accompanied by the economic upheavals that followed the discovery of America (1492) and the opening of the sea route to the East Indies (1498). New possibilities of world trade came into being, giving power to those traders situated on Western seaboards (the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English) but weakening those cut off from the new commerce. Trade, and the money standing behind trade, became important as sources of wealth and political power.

The effects of these displacements of wealth was reinforced by a new process. Soon after the discovery of the New World a vast amount of gold and silver began to move from Spain across Europe. As a result, the purchasing power of these metals fell enormously, with a consequent tremendous rise in prices. It is true that the rise in prices began about 1510, whereas the increase in gold and silver began to make itself felt about 1520. This was the result of famine, plague, and other causes, but nonetheless, the superabundance of gold was a factor, and a major one, in the rise of prices. The influx of gold played a great part in undermining the foundations of the old feudal economy, for it favoured the diffusion of the means of credit, and laid the ground for the development of the capitalist system.

All these circumstances tended to emphasize the importance of money, to stress the importance of commercial wealth as compared with the wealth that changed hands in kind during the feudal period. Thus, whereas in earlier times there had been the endeavour to check the growth of a monetary economy, the opinion now was that money, of not the only source of wealth, was certainly of decisive importance.

The primary aim of the mercantilists was to achieve a favourable balance of trade. When exports exceed imports, when the value of the goods sold to buyers abroad exceeds the value of the goods purchased from such buyers, the amount of money entering a country will exceed the amount of money leaving it. Then the balance of trade is said to be favourable to the country in which money thus accumulates. To achieve this favourable balance (which was the desire of the mercantilists) it was necessary to stimulate export trade. With that end in view, it was essential to foster industries that created commodities for export and, on the other hand, to check as far as possible the import of commodities.

But if home industry was to be fostered, special attention had to be paid to internal communications. It was necessary to abolish or reduce tolls and the like, and to break down the barriers erected by the urban economy of the Guilds. Good roads had to be built, canals dug, internal communications facilitated, home markets established. Customs policy was, therefore, of supreme importance in the mercantile system. The champions of that system wanted to abolish export duties, and if necessary stimulate exports by subsidies; at the same time they aimed at reducing imports by a high import tariff, or by actual prohibition. Instances are in France, the unified import tariff in 1664, and the development towards such a tariff in England after 1692. As corollaries to the restriction of imports, there had to be freedom for the import of raw materials needed by home industries and prohibition of the export of such materials.

Bob Ambridge 

Notes on Economic History (1) (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economics before Mercantilism

The object of these notes is to provide a general introductory guide for those who would like to know more about the subject of Political Economy. They cover the period from early times to Marx and set out the main developments and theories that arose during that time, using as a key the Materialist Conception of History.

Engels in his preface to the 1888 edition of the Communist Manifesto says: "The 'manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch."

That proposition is, in short, the Materialist Conception of History.

By the term economics is meant throughout these notes the study of the production and distribution of wealth. Such a study must take into consideration historical, geographical and many other factors, always bearing in mind that behind the abstractions are real people, who combine, deliberately or otherwise, to produce and distribute wealth.

Neither in classical antiquity, nor yet in the Middle Ages, did there arise any finished systems of economic thought. In those epochs, when men's thoughts were concerned with the heroic and supernatural, the economics of life was regarded as of little importance. Only when, as today, life is dominated by the forces of competition and struggle, is civilised life dominated by economic considerations to the extent we know it today. Even in those earlier ages, however, economic thought such as it was showed signs that it had arisen out of earlier forms of society, and developed and evolved with these societies.

It is an error to picture the course of economic development as though mankind has passed simply from a primitive form of society to a slave-owning form, then to a Feudal one, and finally to a Capitalist economy. At all times there have been lesser economic groups that formed integral parts of the larger, nation-wide or world-wide complexes.

During the primitive period of man, in the Stone Age, the exchange of things went on, and there are proofs of the existence of some form of primitive trading as far back as the Bronze Age, since the constituents of bronze (tin and copper) are not generally found together. At the beginning of historical times, in Babylon, Persia, Carthage, Egypt, Greece and Rome, there was a well-developed form of trade, with industry carried on for export, together with monetary systems and credit.

The beginnings of economic science itself go back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato (347 B.C.) and Aristotle (322 B.C.). made some contributions to economic science, but as far as economics is concerned, mention need only be made of Aristotle's remarks on money, interest and taxation. Aristotle saw the essential nature of money as this: "That it is an intermediary in the exchange of utilities, thus acting as a medium of exchange." To him, however, it is sterile; "it brings forth no children." It cannot of itself produce any goods; therefore interest is wicked. This teaching was to have a great influence in the later Feudal period.

The economic thought of the Middle Ages was dominated by the teachings of Thomas Aquinas (1274), who derived from Aristotle and the Roman civil and canon law the concept of a "just price." Aquinas held that there were two kinds of justice:

1. Distributive justice.
2. Compensatory justice, or the justice of exchange.

In the matter of price, justice is found in the equality of mutual benefit in an exchange. What determines income is not the supply and demand of labour, but a normal outlook, the customary and average mutual adjustments between the individuals who exercise functions. To quote Aquinas, "Wherever a good is to be found, its essence is due measure." Thus we get the idea of income that is "suitable" or "proper" to a man's position in society. Interest on money, or usury, is frowned upon. "Money is a medium of exchange, its use is in its consumption." Consequently, for the use of borrowed money it is wrong, or at least improper, to expect anything beyond simple repayment. Aquinas does make exception in the case of tenancy, hire and credit for goods supplied. In later years, missed opportunities for gain, and loss incurred by or injury to the lender, became good grounds for demanding interest.

The prohibition of interest or usury is basically designed for an economy based on land as property, that is Feudal society, which endeavoured to keep money, and those ideas that flow from an economy based on money, under control.

Economic ideas, and the practical application of them, show a gradual growth and conflict as the old Feudal society begins to decline. The development which economic science made after this period are bound up with the growth of towns and the increasing power of the traders. The early stage of these developments is generally known as the Mercantile period and this will be dealt with in our next issue.

Bob Ambridge

Mixed Media: Dennis Hopper (2015)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Four hundred black and white photographs taken between 1961 and 1967 by film director and actor Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) went on show last year at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. These photographs haven't seen the light of day since his first ever photography show in Fort Worth, Texas in 1970. Hopper used a 28 mm lens Nikon camera, and later said 'I didn't crop my photos. They are full frame natural light.' He turned to photography in the 1960s 'because the reality of the things going on around me was more interesting than the fantasies of the world I worked in.'

Hopper's photographs capture the Counter Culture and other historical, social and political events during the sixties. He carried his camera with him everywhere around his neck during this period.

The Sixties Counter Culture was inspired by Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O Brown's Life Against Death, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, and Alan Watts' The Joyous Cosmology. Foucault described the era as a 'surge of libido modulated by the class struggle.' Hopper reminisced that 'it was an incredible moment. There was practically a revolution going on to stop the Vietnam war', and that 'I've always been political... I was with Martin Luther King and at the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I was a hippie. I was probably as Left as you could get without being a Communist.'

Hopper is critically acclaimed for his direction of such films as Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue, and outstanding acting in films like Tracks, The American Friend, and Blue Velvet.

He was trained in Stanislavski Method acting at the LeeStrasberg Actors School. Hopper got his directing start as second unit director on the LSD film The Trip.

His 1964 photograph The Trip is a psychedelic all-seeing eye of God with a homunculus in a Stetson. Hopper photographed the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967 and photographs from this include Timothy Leary, Love-In, Hippies,Flower Children,andHippie Girl Dancing. He formed a close friendship with beat poet Michael McClure at this time. Hopper would later say 'We're a new kind of human being. We're taking on more freedom and more risk. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries.'

He photographed the Hells Angels, outlaw motorcyclists who became notorious with the filmThe Wild Angels, and publications of Hunter S Thompson's Hells Angels, and Freewheelin' Frank by Frank Reynolds and Michael McClure. The exhibition includes Hells Angels San Pedro, Hells Angel Girl, and Bruce Dern as Hells Angel from the 1966film The Wild Angels.

The defining moment of the Civil Rights movement: the 54 mile march of 4,000 people from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama led by Martin Luther King in 1965 was captured by Hopper. He later recalled that 'Marlon Brando got me involved in the march.'

He photographed the street life of Harlem and Los Angeles. His 1961 Double Standard is a quintessentially LA image complete with convertible top and traffic. Seamstress, All Night Diner, Downtown LA, Working Man, Homeless guy & belongings in pram demonstrates Hopper's humane view of those on the margins of society subject to poverty and hard work. Hopper said 'I saw myself as a political artist at the time, or rather as one aiming to express social protest.'

Hopper's photography is influenced by Aaron Siskind, Robert Capa, and Cartier-Bresson. He is in the American tradition of photographers like Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks who were employed by the 'New Deal' Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and '40s. This was a rural rehabilitation programme to improve the lives of share-croppers, tenants, poor farmers, and included a program to purchase submarginal land and resettle farmers in group farms which was an experiment in collectivising agriculture. Hopper's photographs can be compared to Robert Frank's record of life on the road in The Americans (1958).

In the 1980s Hopper became a Republican; 'I read Thomas Jefferson, the idea of having less government, more individual freedom, is something that I liked' but in 2008 he supported Barack Obama saying his reason for not voting Republican was the selection of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate.

Hopper's politics are essentially philosophical individualist anarchism drawing on Thomas Jefferson's belief that people needed to be vigilant against any laws that 'violates the rights of the individual' and 'that government is best which governs least.' He is also in the tradition of Emerson's 'Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well ... Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience', and Thoreau's 'action from principle', and 'government is best which governs not at all' in Civil Disobedience. Both Gandhi, and Martin Luther King cite the huge influence of Thoreau's essay.

Ed Ruscha concluded 'Like me, Dennis's art grows out of alienation. Dennis always responded to city anxiety, graffiti, etchings on walls, expressing the frustrations of urban life.'

Steve Clayton

Material World: Exiled from Gardens of Eden (2015)

The Material World Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘First we were dispossessed in the name of kings and emperors, later in the name of state development, and now in the name of conservation.’ (A statement from the Indigenous peoples’ Forum at an international conference in 2004).

Just what degree of naivety are we to believe existed among the normally politically savvy international conservation bodies such as London Zoo, Kew Gardens and even Greenpeace UK? They were fully aware of the well-publicised plight of the evicted Chagos Islanders, yet they didn’t consider that the purpose behind Her Majesty’s Government’s initiative in setting up a vast marine reserve (exempting, of course, the huge American military base on Diego Garcia), may have been to further ensure the non-return of the native islanders. There was, in the words of the Chagos Conservation Trust, ‘some controversy’ over the removal of the local inhabitants but that merely involved compensation because the courts had upheld the legality of the expulsions.  However their website is careful to omit that it was the use of the royal prerogative powers of the Privy Council which legalised the eviction.

The real sharks these august organisations were protecting were the sharks in Whitehall and the Pentagon, while the small fish they were failing to defend were the people who once lived on the Chagos Islands. A sordid but isolated tale, perhaps? Not so. This column has previously drawn attention to the Bushmen being excluded from their ancestral home on the pretext of conservation reserves which still welcomed diamond mines and tourist resorts yet not the indigenous people.

In fact, throughout the world conservationists have been collaborating with governments in the removal of people supposedly in the interests of nature conservation but more often than not, for political and/or pecuniary motives. In a 2004 meeting of the United Nations International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all 200 delegates signed a declaration stating that the ‘activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.’

Great efforts are taken to conduct animal number censuses. The true figures for what Mark Dowie calls in his book ‘conservation refugees’ as in the title of his book  Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, is more difficult to establish. If it can ever be known, it partly depends upon the semantics of words like ‘eviction,’ ‘displacement’, and ‘refugee’, and no one formally counts people displaced for the sake of environmental conservation, but they exist all over the world and have been banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years. In 1962, there were some 1,000 official ‘protection areas’ worldwide. Today there are 108,000 with more being added every day.

The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet’s surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now classified as protected by governments and conservation groups. That’s an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.

The locals who have been pushed off their lands could be as high as twenty million. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million. During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. A study by Harrison Esam Awuh recorded approximately 3,058,000 conservation refugees, making up 28 different indigenous groups, displaced across 48 protected areas. 

Across the world millions of people – the majority of them indigenous – have been illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation. Many evictions have been brutal, with little or no warning. Communities who once hunted or grazed livestock within the boundaries of nature reserves find themselves labelled squatters or branded as poachers. Whether they lose their land to conservation or other ‘developments’ such as mining, their once self-sufficient lives and livelihoods are destroyed. In the name of environmental protection conservationists have participated in the expulsion and the attempted cultural extinction of indigenous peoples the world over.

In the words of one Indian tiger reserve guard justifying the need to relocate the locals:

'These Gujjars don't want to work. Gujjars are lazy. Their women work while they eat posht. They don't want to move out because they want everything for free. They would never agree to leave this place because they wouldn't find free fodder and income outside Sariska. Therefore they need to be evicted from the forest forcefully if this sanctuary has to be saved.'

ALJO

Anti-war (2008)

Book Review from the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Country Right or Wrong. By William Morris. Edited by Florence Boos. William Morris Society, 2008. 95 pages. £7.50.

Before he became a socialist in 1883, Morris had been a Liberal, towards the end on its Radical wing. As such he was in favour of trade unions, reforms to help the working class and a non-aggressive foreign policy. As this is the text of a talk given in January 1880 he was then still a Liberal, as can be seen from his praise of Gladstone as “a great statesman” and his raising of the Liberal slogan of the day of “Peace, Retrenchment and Reform” (“retrenchment” being what today would be called “cutting back on government spending”, a policy the modern Liberals have recently re-adopted).

Basically, this is a plea for opposing your country’s foreign policy if it is “wrong”. So, not “my country right or wrong”, but only “my country if it is right”, by which Morris understood anti-imperialist and anti-war. For him, Britain, under the then Tory government of Lord Beaconsfield (Disraeli), was wrong to support Turkey against Russia in the Balkans, to attack the Zulus in South Africa and to invade Afghanistan (which ended in disaster). Incidentally, in saying that Britain should oppose Turkey (because of its massacre of Christians) Morris was taking up the exact opposite position to that taken by Marx (who thought Turkey should be supported against Russia), not that Marx is a model to be followed here.

Later, after he had become a socialist (partly from disillusionment with the Gladstone Liberal government that came to power later in 1880), Morris argued that war and imperialist adventures could not be avoided by a change of foreign policy – a moral or ethical foreign policy was impossible under capitalism, a lesson the “Stop the War” movement of today has yet to learn.

Florence Boos, in her introduction (which is as long as the text), argues that Morris’s position at the time was influenced by the 19th century peace movement, whose origin and history she outlines. She seems to exaggerate the extent to which Morris could be regarded as a pacifist. After all, the chapter “How the Change Came” in News from Nowhere does envisage violence even if started by the ruling class. But she does quote from a lecture on “Communism” that Morris gave in 1893 in which he argues:

“The change effected by peaceful means would be done more completely and with less chance, indeed with no chance of counter-revolution . . . In short I do not believe in the possible success of revolt until the Socialist party has grown so powerful in numbers that it can gain its end by peaceful means, and that therefore what is called violence will never be needed.”

That’s not a bad way of putting it.

Adam Buick

Globalization (2001)

Book Review from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses. By Robert Went, London/Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2000.

Robert Went argues that though the world economy is nothing like as "globalised", nor corporations as "footloose" as many believe, there are far-reaching changes going on in the functioning of capitalism. It could be argued that while none of the factors which are seen to make up "globalisation" is new in itself the scale and ferocity of current economic restructuring and attacks on wages and conditions do make for a distinct epoch in the capitalist system. The effects, with which we are all too familiar, are spelled out by Went. These trends lead to:

"greater social inequality as the result of a dual polarisation process, both within countries and on a world scale among different countries; to progressive levelling down of wages, working conditions and social security; to extensive migratory flows; to life-threatening ecological deterioration and destruction; to a greater role for unaccountable international institutions and regional entities; and to further whittling-away of democracy."

This is all part and parcel of the profit system of course, but Went points to the relative world-wide intensification of these processes and the economic reasons for them.

"In the mid-1970s," he points out, "an end came to the expansive period throughout the capitalist world." Basically, around this time growth expressed as a percentage increase in Gross National Product slowed up and with this process the rate of profit also began to drop. The priority for the capitalist class was to salvage the rate of profit. First and foremost this meant attacking the working class and increasing exploitation—pushing down wages and curtailing working-class organisation. Accommodating our aspirations to a half-decent life was no longer a price they could pay. Went claims that since around the mid-1980s the rate of profit has been steadily rising so "perhaps for the first time in history, increasing profit rates do not lead to more economic growth". While growth falls, profits rise and this has only been possible through upping the tempo of class robbery—getting "leaner and meaner". In short then, "globalisation" has been a symptom of, and a response to, a period of crisis in the capitalist system. The boom in currency speculation and weird financial wheeler-dealing is another symptom of this depressive period.

It is probably too obvious to comment that capitalism has always been a globalising system, seeking out possibilities for profit in every nook and cranny on the planet. But it is this period of crisis that has compelled the system to attempt to fully extend its laws and relations into every aspect of human life and experience. As Went states:

"money can be made by turning more and more things into commodities; patents on animals, plants and human genes; leisure time (television, shopping expeditions, amusement parks for day trippers, casinos); culture (media commercialisation, corporate sponsorship of museums, exhibits and cultural events); sex (sex tourism, pornography, sex lines) and human organs".

Once again, none of this is entirely new, but the scope and ferocity of the never-ending pursuit of profit by the capitalist class grows by the day. Above all, this surely points to a system which is decadent, destructive and poisonous to humanity. That it continues in a world in which we have long been able to produce an abundance for all points to the only solution there can possibly be to the situation described and analysed in this book—capitalism as a world system must be ended by working-class socialist revolution.

Though it sort of hints at it, nowhere in this book is it stated explicitly that the root cause of poverty and exploitation is the minority class ownership and control of the means of production and distribution and production for the market. This is what we've got to sort out and it is therefore disappointing that the author issues a rallying call for the creation of a movement to achieve things such as "reregulation of the financial sector", "control over the labour process" and "redistribution of income", especially when elsewhere he accepts that such things will never again be possible. This is basically a call for renegotiating our conditions of exploitation under capitalism when the book itself is stuffed full of evidence of the need for the long overdue abolition of the system and its whole stinking edifice.

Ben Malcolm

Cooking the Books: Islamist Gold (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Islamic State reveals new gold coins in bid to break the “enslavement” of capitalism’ was the headline of a Yahoo! News (tinyurl.com/oo3e9gn) report on a propaganda video IS released at the end of August. Entitled The Rise of the Khalifah and the Return to the Gold Dinar, the video announced the Islamic State’s plan to introduce a new currency in the areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, or, rather, to reintroduce the currency that had circulated there over 1300 years ago. The gold dinar will weigh the same as then, about 4.25 gm, and according to the video will be worth about $139, or £91. As this will be of no use for everyday transactions there will also be a silver dirham, worth $1, and various small denomination copper coins.

The video wasn’t just about returning to the past. It also contained a criticism of the financial system that has developed over the past three or four hundred years in the West and elsewhere. By all accounts, this criticism echoes familiar currency crank objections to ‘money as debt’, fractional reserve banking and the US Federal Reserve, which the video denounced as ‘satanic’. It is this system that it describes as ‘capitalist’ and ‘enslaving’ people and depriving them ‘of their due’.

In short, it echoes the currency crank theory that we are exploited today by banks by having to earn money to pay interest to them. The Islamic State is ‘anti-capitalist’ only in this limited and misleading sense. They are not opposed to capitalism in the more meaningful sense of production for profit based on the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value. Far from it. Sharia Law accepts the private ownership of means of production and permits and encourages profit-making, and has developed various convoluted ways of paying the equivalent of interest.

Nor is capitalism incompatible with the circulation of gold and silver coins. Until WW1 this was generally the case. And there are open supporters of capitalism – Ron Paul springs to mind – who, while not wanting to go back as far as 713, still want to go back to 1913.

Meanwhile in another part of Syria something quite different is reported to be happening. In the mountains in the North controlled by the YPG, an affiliate of the Kurdish Nationalist PKK, they are said to be implementing ideas developed latterly by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and introducing a system there where ‘the concept of money is internally redundant’. An enthusiastic supporter writes (tinyurl.com/obnyq6m):

‘The economic needs of the inhabitants of the KCK [Union of Communities in Kurdistan] system are internally supplied through a communal management of resources. 

Although money is utilised in economic dealings with external systems, internally the concept of money is inconceivable. No person or community within the KCK system feels the need to build a surplus of goods or resources. Surpluses are constantly redistributed, therefore, viably consumed. Reminiscent of pre-hierarchical and pre-exploitative societies, the KCK system adopts a culture of gifting, rather than a culture of exchange. The communal organisation of agriculture ensures a self-sufficient production and consumption of resources, therefore deeming surplus, exchange value and the commodification of goods irrelevant.’

We don’t know if this really is happening but it sounds better. Rather forward, on a world scale and in conditions of abundance, to a society where money is redundant than backward to a time when gold and silver used to circulate as money.

Between the Lines: Parsons, Baker & Quayle (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Culture and Chips

"The trouble with the working class today is that they're such peasants."

So began Tony Parsons's thirty-minute moan about lager louts, football stadiums and dogs called Tyson. (The Tattooed Jungle, C4, Monday, 5 October, 9.30pm). The same night, before watching this poor man's Matthew Arnold vent his frustration against the karaoke culture which he lacked the intelligence to connect with the cash-and-flog-it standards of capitalism, I watched Noel Edmonds present that hateful half-hour of working class self-abasement, Telly Addicts (BBC1, 7pm).

In this quiz for couch potatoes, families with scholarships in TV drivel compete to prove who can remember the most inanities, banalities and famous names. It is knowledge diluted to the purest spectacle: you don't need to have been anywhere or read anything to win Telly Addicts, but you need to have a fine-tuned memory for what imaginary one-dimensional TV stars have done, said or hummed as their theme tunes. The proles as peasants? A case could be made.

Tony Parsons makes the case very poorly. Parsons is the essential Essex Man. He romanticizes "the good old working class" who loved Churchill, went in for (k)nobbly knees contests in holiday camps and passed away the time scrubbing doorsteps and working diligently. Parsons bemoans the rise of the lager-lout patriots and the boneheads with tattoos who never read books. He is too stupid to realize that nationalism thrives upon the irrational callousness which he deplores; the two go together. And perhaps the lack of book reading is a result of half the libraries being shut and schools having only one book between five pupils.

In fact, in Britain today far more workers visit museums every year than go to football matches - and the vast majority of football spectators are neither drunk nor violent. Modern Britain is not filled with workers who never read: despite the overwhelming financial advantage of the film and video industry, it is still the case that millions of workers regularly read books, journals and newspapers which are not tabloids; only a minority of wage slaves read the Sun and get off on Rambo movies.  

Could it just be possible that, like the vicars whose bleak view of human life is derived from the nasty circles they mix in, Parsons's conception of the proletarian peasant is derived from spending too much time staring angrily into the mirror and seeing what Basildon has done to him? Like a black lackey supporting slavery, Parsons the Conservative called in Auberon Waugh (the voice of the modern slave owners) to add his sneers to Parsons's vitriol.

Waugh hates the working class for not knowing their place. Our place, in case anyone wants to know, is trembling in fear at the innate superiority of the inherited privilege of Waugh and his indolent, mind-stunted class of legalized thieves, but at least Waugh's hatred is against a class which is a real potential threat to him. (Stated plainly, a socialist majority will have no time to entertain the snobbery of old Auberon - we shall undoubtedly declare war on Waugh).

Tony Parsons's nostalgia for 1950s' conservatism is not only without taste or sense, but is the moronic cry of a slave for his chains to be tightened. And when he stated of workers that "If you treat them like animals they act like animals, if you treat them like humans they still act like animals" what is that but an inelegant chant of the stale old human nature myth? Danny Baker, who earns a fortune pretending to be a good old cockney lad, explained violence on the football terraces as coming from the same source that causes wars; healthy young hetero males like a good old punch-up, don't they John? Tony Parsons has reason to feel anguish, for when he looks to the future the prospect of a TV peasantry with Danny Boy Baker as the Pearly King and himself as the proley court jester-cum-philosopher is a nightmare worse than being in an Indian restaurant in Basildon on a Friday night after closing time.

THE POLITICIAN WHO WAS DEFEATED BY A FICTITIOUS CHARACTER

By the time that you read this you will know whether Dan Quayle has been re-elected as American Vice-President, White House dope and speller-in-chief of very short words. If he is defeated it will have no small relationship to the attack made on him on the networked US sit-com, Murphy Brown. To be precise, the first attack was made by Quayle when he made a speech appealing to the Christian loonies calling for imaginary TV characters to act more responsibly and set the nation a better moral example. The example he gave was Murphy Brown who decided to go ahead with a pregnancy even though she was not married. Quayle's attack backfired when the show's makers broadcast an episode in which the fictitious character, watched on TV the Quayle speech attacking her conduct and them proceeded to tear to pieces his moral self-righteousness.

The episode of the show drew the biggest audience on US TV since the episode of Dallas in which J.R. was shot. So now elections are won and lost in America by TV-style politicians debating with non-existent TV characters - and the invisible debaters win! All they need  to do now is to have a fictitious TV audience (paid extras to fill a vast Oprah Winfrey studio, perhaps?) and the whole election could be run on TV without real life having to intervene at all.

Steve Coleman

John Berger (1964)

Book Review from the June 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Corker's Freedom by John Berger. Methuen 21/-

In the post-war world we have become accustomed to the oft-repeated story of working class prosperity. The term "the Affluent Society" has now become an overworked joke, but not so very long ago it was taken most seriously. Cosy articles in newspapers and magazines, and cynical adverts on the television screen, have painted a picture of workers leading lives of unparalleled richness and variety.

Even the outbursts of brutish stupidity and violence which have hit the headlines from time to time, far from destroying this image, are presented as offshoots of this same prosperity. Pleasant indeed us the lot of the fortunate worker in this charming dream world. It is therefore refreshing in the extreme to read descriptions of life as it is really lived by the vast mass of the people. Description that we know, only too well, to be true.

John Berger, who is well known as an art critic with the New Statesman, and for his excellent book of essays Permanent Red, is a writer with the ability to sum of the contemporary scene with a crisp economy of words. Berger claims to be a Marxist, although nothing very much appears in his works to justify such a claim. He is also described on the dustjacket of one of his books as a Revolutionary Moralist, whatever that may mean. There is however no doubt about his ability to put a mirror up to the world in which he lives.

His latest novel, Corker's Freedom, describes a day on the lives of two people who run a dingy employment bureau in South London. They are the elderly proprietor—the Corker of the title—and his youthful assistant, and linked with their story are the people who come to see them.

The novel is a short one, and many of the scenes are amusing, but the overall picture is one of drabness and futility. Even the crooks are small-time and poor, like so many of the lesser criminals. The stakes for which they play seem hardly worth the trouble. But it is in its description that the book really comes to life, as in the description of Clapham seen through the eyes of a man fresh from the country.

Outside the window it is the acres of roofs that interest him. The hundreds of chimneys, serving old fireplaces with black grates and rook for only three lumps of coal, are like stumps of trees in a forest long since cut down. He is able to see end to it. He is in London.

The final scene, of a speaker in Hyde Park subjected to moronic interruptions, is one which will appeal to anyone with a knowledge of Speaker's Corner.

Les Dale

Pathfinders: Robots of the World - You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Blockchains (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bosses own the means of production – that's what makes them bosses. So what will happen when the means of production own themselves? Er, come again? Yes, we are talking about automated intelligent production and distribution systems, managing themselves, recycling their income back into their own maintenance programmes, entirely without human agency. You call a cab, the cab turns up and it takes you (yes, it's driverless) where you want to go, debits your online account, and uses that income to buy its next 10 gallons of fuel and pay its automated garage cleaning and servicing subscription.

This is the world of the blockchain, an automated self-management security system which has been crucial so far to the success of Bitcoins (New Scientist, 12 September). By keeping track of every single transaction within the Bitcoin economy, the blockchain is able to prevent anyone conjuring up new 'money' out of nothing (as banks are alleged to do by currency cranks), thus avoiding financial melt-down. Cynics would point to the very large thefts of Bitcoins which have in the past almost sunk the system, but blaming the blockchain for what criminals do would be like blaming the bank for sponsoring bank robbers. Now new applications are being developed to apply blockchains to other fields of endeavour, with the utopian idea that ultimately the bosses will be abolished and the world will run itself.

Except that it's not the bosses – the owners - who will be abolished, only their managers. Sitting above the entire global production factory of human-termites overseen by machine-gangers and cyber-foremen will be that same class of obscenely-privileged fat fucks which already exists today, only with even more wealth and even less to do to keep it.

There's been much paranoia recently about the dangers of runaway AI and breathless speculation about Terminator-like scenarios where the robots take over and kill us all. Much of this was caused by Professor Stephen Hawking who seems overly fond of giving the greedy press tasty soundbites in the manner of Dad's Army's lugubrious Private Frazer grunting 'We're all doomed'. But robots would only do what we told them to do, and it seems hard to imagine why we'd build ones that didn't. Even if out of sheer laziness we built ones that made all our decisions for us (like politicians?), it seems equally hard to see what possible motive they might have in wanting to kill us off, unless we unintentionally designed them with the psychopathic tendencies of an average multinational corporation. What's much more likely is that we are the ones who are dooming ourselves by behaving like the very robots we're so afraid of. From this perspective, devising a way to lock ourselves permanently into a future of automated robotic slavery, where the real robots are us and not the machines, seems quite a plausible way forward for capitalism. Let's see, what does 'robot' mean again? Oh yeah, that's right. 'Worker.'

Sex and a cigarette

But if we're putting robots out of jobs by doing the jobs ourselves, does that make the robots redundant? Apparently it's not game over for them while they can still resort to the oldest game. There is a burgeoning industry in sex robot design and manufacture. Some prototypes are in development and some primitive models, costing around £5,000 each, are already reaching the market, though more as a proof of principle than in the expectation of any serious sales.

It may sound like science fiction, but this has been looming for years. Henrik Christensen of the European Robotics Research Network announced to a surprised Sunday Times reporter in June 2006 that 'people are going to be having sex with robots within five years' (source: Wikipedia). As it turned out this was a somewhat premature ejaculation on his part, but nonetheless things have moved on to the point where now two academics are calling for the banning of sex robots (BBC News, 15 September).

The argument boils down to a fear that the machines will objectify women, which is to say further objectify women. Underneath this rather vague claim lurks a darker implication, that the ability to do vile and unspeakable things to a robot will foreshadow a desire to do those things to real women. This idea, not unfamiliar from video game debates, is further sensationalised by the inclusion of children in the argument. Since no known child sex robots are under development, the obvious intention is to bury rational debate under a mountain of moral outrage.

What are the real grounds for such fears? Would users of these devices be more or less likely to see women or children in a dehumanised way? Might it make no difference, or indeed might it go the other way, with women and children finding themselves freed from potential sexual predators and thus enjoying greater net safety in society?

It's impossible to say because the robots don't exist yet. In the circumstances, demanding a ban seems perverse, and it's hard not to suspect a moral 'Yuk' factor at work, trumping every other consideration. Such people don't care what the facts are, and don't care about millions of lonely inadequate men and women who might benefit, they just know that sex robots are 'wrong'.

An oddly parallel argument is raging right now over e-cigarettes. The British Medical Association and the World Health Organisation have come out against them, arguing that there is no good evidence that they result in reduction or cessation of cigarette smoking (and conversely may even encourage it). Following their lead, many countries and organisations are banning them from public places, and all sorts of restrictions on sales are being imposed. On the other side, the 'vapers' are furious at what they see as victimisation. They are trying to give up the demon weed, as they see it, by using something incontestably less dangerous than tobacco, and instead of lending support the BMA and others are absurdly trying to create difficulties for them. There is no good evidence of benefit in the case of coffee, or chocolate, or weekends in Cornwall. Society doesn't and shouldn't automatically ban things on the basis of some dubious 'precautionary principle'. If it did that we'd never have climbed out of the trees in the first place.

Has the BMA overstepped its authority? Vapers, at least those with a sense of social responsibility, are not demanding the right to vape in public places if it's going to annoy other people. But equally they feel affronted at being the subject of a ban imposed without any substantive evidence of harm. People are not banned from wearing suffocatingly bad perfume despite its known harm to asthmatics. People are not banned from Tube trains if they have excessive BO. People are not banned from farting in lifts. Or from driving diesel cars. The BMA's position seems to be that, regardless of the facts, smoking or vaping is just 'wrong'.

A society that bans things first and ask questions later, or perhaps never, is not a society aiming to encourage open-mindedness in its citizens and in its debates. For socialists, the prospects for rational debate about socialism thereby diminish, and that's something that should have everyone fuming.

PJS

Life Without Money (2012)

From the Life Without Money blog

Adam Buick on a life without money

Adam Buick's script from our panel discussion on Life Without Money at Bolivar Hall (London) on 30 May 2012 follows. Well over half of the discussion involved the around 40 participants who attended and it was quite lively.I [Anitra Nelson] spoke about why and how we came to write the book and Derek Wall talked more generally about the power of money and contemplating radical social change while the first question that Adam addressed was: What might a 'life without money' mean?

It’s an ambiguous idea. It can mean trying to survive without using money within or at the margins of existing money-dominated society. Or it can mean a change of society to one in which money would be redundant. Both points of view are represented in this book.

Then there is the question of what is meant by “money”. There are those who want to replace notes and coins, cheques and electronic transfers by labour credits or consumption vouchers. They too are represented in this book, even though some might regard them as only wanting a different form of money. But then, Karl Marx, a famous critic and opponent of money, envisaged using “labour-time vouchers” instead of money in the early stages of socialism pending it becoming possible to go over to full free distribution and full free access.

None of the contributors argue that all that needs to be done is to abolish money and leave everything else unchanged. That would be madness and would lead to a breakdown of production and distribution. If you’ve got a system based on producing goods and services for sale on a market with a view to profit, you’ve got to have money. So, no, we don’t want to go back to barter.

As a Socialist, I’m one of the contributors who wants to replace the present capitalist system with a new system based on common ownership instead of ownership by the few and with production directly to meet people’s needs instead of production for sale on a market with a view to profits. In such a socialist (or communist) society – the two words mean the same – money would be redundant. So I don’t want to “abolish money”. I want a change to a society with a system of production and distribution in which money would be redundant and so would disappear.

For me, the case against money is the case against capitalism.

Capitalism is the system which now dominates the world. No country escapes or can escape from its influence and effects. It is essentially an economic system where the means for producing useful goods and services take the form of “capital”, or wealth used to produce more wealth with a view to profit, and where the goods and services produced take the form of “exchange value”, they all have a price and have to be exchanged for money.

The farms, factories, offices and other places where wealth is produced are owned and controlled by rich individuals, capitalist corporations and states. Under the pressure of competition, those in charge of these “units of capital” are driven to seek as much profit as they can, not so much for the personal benefit of the owners (though this does come into it) as to get funds to reinvest in cost-cutting innovations so as to be able to compete with, and outcompete, their rivals. One consequence of this is that more and more capital is accumulated. This in fact is what capitalism is all about: the accumulation of more and more capital out of profits.

So, over time the means of production and their productive power have built up and society has now become able, in theory, to produce enough useful goods and services to meet people’s needs. But the economic mechanism of capitalism does not let this happen. Making profits and re-investing them as more capital always comes first.

It’s an irrational system of “production for production’s sake”, of “growth for growth’s sake”. There are other anti-social results of capitalism. Such as the recurring economic crises and slumps like the one we’re in now. Such as the wars and preparation for war that occur as capitalist states compete over sources of raw material, trade routes, markets and investment outlets. Such as putting short-term cost and profit considerations before protecting the environment and respecting a balance of nature. But the one I want to concentrate on is that it does not allow production to be geared to meeting the needs of people for food, clothes, housing, healthcare, education an the other amenities for an enjoyable life.

People’s needs are met but only to an extent – to the extent that they have money to pay for them. There are various ways an individual can get money. They can inherit it (be born with it). They can steal it. They can beg for it. Or they can work for it – which is what most people do.

I don’t criticise those who try to avoid this by establishing rural communes or by living off what they find in skips. That’s a lifestyle choice but not an attractive one for most people. I don’t even criticise those who chose to steal money, at least not as long as they steal from the rich.

But what sort of society is it where most people have to fend for themselves to get money so they can access what they need to live – and where, even in a developed country like Britain, 10-15 percent can’t keep up and are forced to rely on more or less meagre handouts from the state? This, when, from the point of view of technology, society could produce enough for all, especially if we get rid of capitalism’s artificial scarcity (the need to make a profit holds back producing enough to meet people’s needs) and its organised scarcity (not just of wars and preparation for war, but also all of the resources devoted to the counting and transfer of money).

As a Socialist, I say capitalism must go if we’re going to be able to provide a decent living for every man, woman and child on the planet. 

What is needed in place of capitalism is for the Earth’s resources to become the common heritage of all. Then, they could be geared to satisfying people’s needs. If productive resources were commonly owned, then so would what they produced. The issue to be dealt with would be, not how to sell to people what had been produced (how could you when they’re already the joint owners of it?) It’s how to share-out/distribute what’s been produced. In other words, exchange (buying and selling) is replaced by distribution (sharing-out and taking). For this, money is not needed.

It’s possible – right at the beginning or as a result of some major natural disaster – that some useful things might be temporarily unavailable in sufficient quantities. In which case there would have to be a temporary rationing of them till supplies were increased or restored. But, given modern technology and capacity to produce, the general rule (and certainly the aim to be reached as rapidly as possible) would be free distribution and free access, the implementation of the old communist principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. With free public transport, healthcare, education, gas, water, electricity, telephone, internet access, and other public services and amenities. And people free to take from the stores and distribution centres according to their needs. As I said, there would be no need for money. It would be redundant. The notes and coins we now use would find their proper place in museums.

Why not? Would it work? And how would  – or, rather, could – it work?

The main objection is a popular version of the basic dogma of modern conventional economics: that resources are scarce because people’s wants are infinite. Or, in its popular (populist) form, because people are greedy, so they would take too much and the whole system would collapse in chaos.

But are people’s wants really infinite? “Infinite” is the word they actually use in the textbooks. If literally interpreted, it would mean that everybody desires to obtain the whole universe. Which is absurd. People’s needs are not infinite. But are people “greedy”? In today’s society, where you can’t be sure of the future, it makes sense to make hay or gather nuts while you can in case things go wrong and your future money income is reduced (if, for instance, you lose your job or your employer or the government freezes your pay).

But even today within capitalism, when some things are free at the time of use and people know they will continue to be freely available they only take what they need. I’ve got a Freedom Pass that allows me to travel free on public transport in London. So have hundreds of thousands  of others. Do we spend all our time going from one end of the line to another or round and round the Circle Line? Of course not. We only travel when we need to. Maybe more than we would if we had to pay, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It only shows how having to pay means that some needs have to go unmet.

So, overconsumption is not going to be a problem. The problem will be organising so that the stores and distribution centres are always stocked with what people are likely to need. Here we can go again to the textbooks of conventional economics. They say that production is geared to meeting paying consumer demand. This isn’t the case, but let’s assume that it is. The theory is that consumers determine what is produced by the way they spend their money. What they buy over a given period is a signal as to what to produce. If stocks run short, that’s a signal to produce more. If stocks build up, that’s a signal to produce less.

This system of signals via stock levels can work just as easily irrespective of whether the stocks run short or build up as a result of what people buy or as a result of what they take freely. So the sort of central planning involving planners deciding in advance all that’s needed – which some people see as the only way to organise the production and distribution of useful things without money – is not necessary. In a moneyless society too, production and distribution could be largely self-regulating.

Anyway, this is not a blueprint, just an illustration of how organising the production and distribution of wealth without money is feasible.

The session was taped and will be posted on You Tube in about month's time.