Material World: Cain and Abel in Africa (2018)

The Material World Column from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March, the BBC’s website reported that more than a 100 people have been killed in the last three months in the Democratic Republic of Congo province of Ituri because of unrest between the Hema cattle herders and Lendu farmers fighting for control of land. In 2006, the BBC reported that as many as 60,000 people had died since 1998. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes, becoming refugees. Much of the animosity revolves around the 1973 land use law, which allows people to buy land they do not inhabit and, if their ownership is not contested for two years, evict any residents from the land. Some wealthy Hema used this law to force Lendu off their land, leading to a growing sense of resentment.

The conflict between herders and farmers isn’t an exclusively Congo problem. It’s prevalent in a number of countries across Central, East, North and West Africa, particularly in countries like Central African Republic, Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, Gambia, South Sudan, Mali, and Nigeria. At first glance, these conflicts seem to be fuelled by the quest for grazing land by Fulani herdsmen. The conflicts between herdsmen and farmers are often triggered by attempts to prevent the cattle of nomadic herdsmen from grazing on crop farms. In many parts of Africa there are on-going conflicts often described as tribal, ethnic or religious wars but on closer scrutiny revealed to be between communities of nomadic herders and sedentary farmers. For generations, farmers and pastoralists have been vying with one another in the scramble for resources such as water either to irrigate fields or pastures for feeding animals thus triggering many violent conflicts. Pastoralists-agriculturalists’ conflicts have grown, spread and intensified over recent years. People have been killed, communities destroyed. Almost every day, there are more reprisal killings making peaceful resolution ever more difficult.

In the past, there was usually some sort of balance but these days, more often than not, the recurring fights are a symptom of a bigger problem such as industrial plantation agriculture or mining interest or conservation projects. Yefred Myenzi, a researcher from Tanzania’s Land Rights Research and Resources Institute, said that most of the fighting over land was the indirect result of decisions and actions taken by the state through its various agencies. ‘We have seen the influx of investors who take swathes of land to start commercial farming, ranching or mining activities, in the process triggering conflicts with local people who are evicted from their land without due process,’ he added. He also blamed the existing land tenure system for sidelining pastoral communities, since no land has been set aside for them. ‘Although land laws require every village to have in place a land use plan, many villages are yet to implement this due to conflict,’ he said. Of Tanzania’s 42 million people, only 0.02 percent have traditional land ownership titles. Tanzania has approximately 21 million head of cattle, the third largest number in Africa. Tanzania’s small-scale farmers produce more than 90 percent of the country’s food. Of the country’s 94.5 million hectares, only half – 44 million hectares – is arable land. The disputes over land and water have also caused food insecurity among farmers, many of whom have been unable to harvest crops for fear of reprisals from enraged pastoralists.

Different modes of production, that is, how a society produces its necessities of life, create various cultures, lifestyles and customs. This is a key element in the Materialist Conception of History. By studying society we learn that humanity is not the result of some eternal logic or divine laws but is created through our own actions as we produce the things we need and use every day. Losing their land means losing the ability to sustain themselves but farming and herding are not just sources of income, they define people’s lives. They will no longer be independent but must rely on government hand-outs or foreign food aid.

Climate change is now bringing with it unpredictable and decreasing rainfall seasons which have led to living conditions of farmers and herders becoming more precarious and insecure. Pastoralists are compelled to move beyond their accepted boundaries in search of water and pasture and risk clashing with other populations unwilling to share resources. It is evident that gradual and sudden environmental changes are already resulting in substantial population movements. Further climate change will displace more people, exacerbating the factors that lead to conflict. Experts say that these resource-based conflicts are also fuelled by ethnic hatred, dwindling resources, and poor land management.

ALJO

Think – and act – for yourselves (2018)

From the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cult of leadership is essential for the preservation of capitalism. ‘Bad leadership’ is a convenient excuse that something other than capitalism caused a government’s failure to deliver, or a reform that doesn’t meet expectations. And always there are new leaders, promising the never-never land.

The market and other forces of the system are uncontrollable by any government; political leaders can’t stop depressions, wars or the arms race; the system cannot be humanised or controlled. All they can do is try to run the system in the interests of their masters, the dominant class. And in the process, betray their naive and trusting followers. The majority are capable of informing themselves and taking the necessary political action to establish common (not state) ownership and democratic control of the means for distributing wealth, by and in the interest of society as a whole. Every individual will then stand in equal relationship to the means of production. There will be no more use for the coercive state because division into classes of rulers and ruled will be ended. It will be replaced by social administration, predominantly local, but involving regional and global administration also. A war-less, wage-less, money-less system of conscious, voluntary co-operation and free access according to individually and democratically determined requirements.

The removal of the present artificial restrictions on production and the elimination of capitalism’s waste, combined with global materials and energy of which there is no real shortage, will make an abundant, harmonious and meaningful life for all.

Obituary: Hugh Armstrong (2018)

Obituary from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with sadness that we report the death of Hugh Armstrong at the age of 80. A member of Glasgow Branch for fifty two years, Hughie, as he was known to his fellow socialists, was born in the Gallowgate in Glasgow’s East End and grew up in the Gorbals. As a young man he was dragooned into the armed forces to do his National Service, an experience which left him with a lifetime contempt for authority, strengthened no doubt, by an incident where, after a ‘Disagreement’ with a bullying Sergeant Major – the Sergeant coming off second-best – Hughie was beaten senseless by Military Police thugs.

When demob finally arrived, his fellow squaddies decided for some perverse reason to have a whip-round to purchase a present for their Commanding Officer. Hughie not only refused to contribute a penny, but at the presentation he requested, and was granted permission to speak, upon which he emphatically stated that he had not contributed one penny to this travesty.

Hughie was a grafter, and found work as a labourer in the post-war building boom working in various towns and cities in England before returning to Glasgow where he secured permanent employment with the General Post Office.

On a visit to the ‘Barras’ in the early 60s Hughie chanced upon an outdoor meeting of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It was a turning point in his life, although hearing the socialist case for the first time he was understandably sceptical but curious enough to return, question, discuss and eventually to join in 1966. He became a tireless worker, attending meetings, selling literature and eventually becoming an outdoor speaker. I have vivid memories of Hughie on the platform; not one for fancy rhetoric but putting over the socialist case in a simple but effective way.

One of the less ‘Glamorous’ but necessary party activities was to stick up posters on walls and empty shop windows  to advertise upcoming indoor meetings. This necessitated a team of three people, one to paste, one to post, and most essential, one to act as lookout for the police, who would apprehend you, resulting in a fine. The area they had chosen also happened to be the favoured haunt of some, euphemistically named ‘ladies of the night’ who also had to be wary of the police. Midway through posting, Hughie spotted a couple of beat cops approaching and shouted: ‘Police!’, whereupon the other two members scarpered. The ladies however, assuming despite his diminutive stature that he was a plain-clothes officer, immediately set about him. Propagating the socialist case can sometimes be detrimental to your wellbeing!

Hughie came from a family who loved singing. His sister Patricia sings jazz in a city centre bar, his ex-wife also sang, and their son Raymond is a professional opera singer. Hughie favoured the Great American Song Book which he would perform at the tea-dances he attended, and in 1990 achieved his dream come true when he saw his idol Frank Sinatra perform live at Ibrox Stadium.

T. M.

One Law for the poor (2018)

Book Review from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Not a Crime to Be Poor: the Criminalization of Poverty in America’. By Peter Edelman (The New Press $26.95)

In 2010 sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder was charged with stealing a backpack. The judge set bail at $3000, but his family could not afford this. He refused to plead guilty to a crime he had not committed, and so was sent to the notorious Rikers Island jail in New York City. He spent three years there awaiting trial, eight hundred days of this in solitary confinement. He was eventually released (never having been tried, let alone found guilty), but now had severe mental health problems and committed suicide in 2015.

This horrendous example is one of many discussed in Peter Edelman’s enlightening book. In the US today it is often a crime to be poor, and particularly to be poor and black or homeless or mentally ill. Cuts in government funding since the Reagan era have led to courts relying on ‘users’ to pay for the legal system, which means the accused or just those arrested without being tried. People often plead guilty in order to avoid a long period in jail before a trial; otherwise they may be held in jail for a low-level offence for which the prescribed punishment is a fine. The size of fines has been increased, and people can be fined extra for not paying immediately.

Another consequence of reduced funding was an attempt in some areas to reduce the number of calls to 911 by requiring landlords to evict tenants who call the emergency number too often. This was even applied to women who rang to seek protection from domestic abuse.

At least 300,000 people in US jails and prisons have serious mental illness, and this includes one in three incarcerated women. The penal system has in many ways been used as a substitute for a proper system of mental hospitals and addiction centres. Corizon is a for-profit company that provides mental and medical care in prisons and has an annual revenue of around $1.5bn; but various scandals have led to it losing many of its contracts.

A criminal record can have enormous implications for the whole of a person’s life, and the links between poverty and imprisonment lead Edelman to refer to a ‘cradle-to-coffin pipeline’. People may serve multiple periods in jail for not paying fines and fees to the court. Poverty can be a cause of getting a criminal record, but also a consequence, as such a record can reduce a person’s chances of getting a decent job, and many laws prevent those with a criminal record from, for instance, obtaining a licence to cut hair.

In his final chapter, Edelman examines a number of attempts to reduce poverty and cut the links between poverty and crime. He has to admit, though, that their usefulness is limited: of one project in Minneapolis he notes that it ‘is making an identifiable difference in the lives of many poor people’ but it ‘has not yet been able to affect the overall poverty in the neighborhood as a whole.’

Paul Bennett

Rear View: Global misery (2018)

The Rear View Column from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global misery

‘There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery…’ This comment is as valid today, quite possibly more so, than when it first appeared as part of the introductory sentence to an article penned by Marx in the New York Daily Tribune of 16 September 1859. He observed that the ‘Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p.658). Back to the present: ‘global wealth increased by £7.3 trillion in the year up to June. More than 80 percent of this new prosperity was enjoyed by the top one per cent of the population. Meanwhile, the poorest half got no increase.’ And if that was not miserable enough newstatesman.com (22 January) adds ‘Oxfam has spoken to workers in US poultry factories who use nappies because they’re denied toilet breaks. In Bangladesh, a garment worker would have to work a lifetime to earn what the CEO of one of the top five fashion retailers makes in just four days.’

Down and out in London

Signs of class division were obvious in Marx’s time and remain so today. ‘Number of homeless people sleeping on streets in England hits highest level on record. More than 4,500 people were recorded as sleeping rough on any given night in autumn last year –a figure that has more than doubled since 2010’ (independent.co.uk, 24 January). The needs of the homeless are not met because they do not constitute a market. Thus we are told (theguardian.com, 4 February) ‘London councils have granted property developers planning permission to build more than 26,000 luxury flats priced at more than £1m each, despite fears that there are already too many half-empty posh ghost towers in the capital. Builders are currently constructing towers containing 7,749 homes priced between £1m and £10m, and have planning rights to build another 18,712 high-end apartments and townhouses, according to the Observer. Housing campaigners said the figures show councils are prioritising the needs of the super-rich over those of hardworking young Londoners.’ Existing without adequate shelter is a feature of capitalism worldwide.

Down and out in Calais

Luxury properties in London and elsewhere will remain empty, particularly if the market shrinks. ‘ Rich Folks Are Fleeing London and Lagos, Wealth Report Shows’ (bloomberg.com 31 January). Some of the 99 percent move in search of slightly better living conditions, trying to reach London after leaving Nigeria for example, but at risk of becoming stuck en route –perhaps in Calais or Libya. ‘ “One year ago, the Italian government, backed by their European counterparts, agreed on a dodgy deal with the Libyan government that has trapped thousands in misery. People are being forced to endure torture, arbitrary detention, extortion and unthinkable conditions in detention centres run by the Libyan government,”said Iverna McGowan, Director of the Amnesty International, European Institutions Office’ (amnesty.org 2 February). According to Indu Prakash Singh, Leader, ActionAid India’s Urban Knowledge Activist Hub, there are at least 3.7 million homeless in India. ‘We are now the 6th wealthiest nation in the world, and in terms of growth of wealth creation, we have beaten all wealthy countries including China, US and UK. Overall, India created a wealth of $8230 billion in 2017’ (track.in, 2 February). And who created all that wealth? India’s workers.

Weltsozialismus

The stateless Marx lived in London from 1850 until his death in 1883. ‘Britain on the eve of the EU referendum reached its wealthiest position in modern history, according to figures showing the vast gulf between the richest 1% and the poorest in society’ (guardian.com 1 February). This gulf between a small parasitical minority and the huge majority who own little more than their ability to work is to be found worldwide. ‘Income disparity has been a persistent problem in recent years for Indonesia, which has the sixth-worst inequality in the world, according to Oxfam. Indonesia’s four richest men have more wealth than 100 million of the country’s poorest people’ (forbes.com, 2 February). And Oxfam’s cure? More reformist platitudes: ‘What we’re saying in the report is that corporations shouldn’t be paying out massive dividends until they can show that everyone in their supply chain is getting a living wage… We shouldn’t have a situation where countries and companies are able to reduce their margins by employing slave labor.’ Marx’s solution: the abolition of the wages system.

Material World: Dying Younger (2018)

The Material World Column from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life expectancy is usually calculated from birth, the average number of years a new-born baby can expect to live if the mortality rates pertaining at the time of their birth apply throughout their life. After decades of progress, there has been a turnaround.

In England and Wales, 1991 saw women living to 79 years and men to 73.  By 2011, women were living to 83 years and men to 79 years. Since then little improvement has occurred. Figures for the period 2014 to 2016 were published in September 2017. Women can now expect to live to 83.06 and men to 79.40.

Looking ahead, one million earlier deaths are now projected to happen across the UK in the next 40 years by 2058.  To calculate the figure of a million lives lost you have to subtract all the future deaths now predicted in the 2017 report, which was based on data from 2016, from those projected two years ago, based on a 2014 projection. By 2041, women will live to 86.2 years and men 83.4 years, projections by the Office for National Statistics showed. In both cases, that’s almost a whole year less than had been projected just two years earlier.

If you are in your forties or fifties and live in the UK this is mostly about you, the 411,000 women and 404,000 men aged between 40 and 60.  Already in the 12 months between July 2016 and June 2017, it is calculated that 39,307 more people have died than were expected to die under the previous projections. The ONS project that there will be more than an extra 25,000 deaths between July 2017 and June 2018. Then an extra 27,000 deaths in the 12 months after that, more than an extra 28,000 deaths the year after that, and on and on and on

The projection of these extra deaths by 2058 is not due to the fact that there will simply be more people living in the UK in the future. The ONS projects less inward migration, nor will the extra early deaths be due to more expected births: the ONS projects lower birth rates. The extra million early deaths are simply the result of mortality rates either having risen or stalled in recent years. The UK’s lowly position compared to other European nations means that the stalling in life expectancy improvements has nothing to do with a limit being reached. As yet, nowhere has reached a limit, and many countries are now far ahead of the UK. There is no biological reason why life expectancy should be so low in the UK.

The usual culprits to an earlier death, obesity, alcohol, and smoking can largely be ruled out as contributory factors, according to Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Oxford.  Rates of smoking and drinking alcohol have fallen in recent years so that cannot be blamed. Between 2009 and 2017 there has been no serious influenza outbreak. Whatever has happened it is not a sudden deterioration in the healthy behaviour of people in the UK.

Experts are pointing to austerity cuts to welfare services. In November 2017, an article in the British Medical Journal Open found that severe public spending cuts in the UK were associated with 120,000 deaths between 2010 and 2017. Last summer, Michael Marmot’s Institute of Health Equity was linking health services cuts to the rise in dementia deaths and the faltering national life expectancy. Marmot said it was ‘entirely possible’ austerity was affecting how long people live.

For capitalism, there is often a silver lining in bad news. During recent years, the issue of raising the retirement age as far as 70 gained ground as people were living longer than they once did but with the average age of death now levelling off at 79 for men and 83 for women, actuaries say it will bring a welcome respite for businesses. An updated financial assessment to reflect the diminishing life prospects of retired UK employees would cut the aggregate liabilities of FTSE 350 companies by about £10bn.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has highlighted that ‘In large parts of the country, the state pension age will be higher than healthy life expectancy.’

A radical change in society is needed if we really want people to live long and prosper.

ALJO

For Whom the Carillion Tolls (2018)

From the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The collapse of Carillion has brought the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) into the headlines once more, much to the delight of the Corbynite crowd in the Labour Party.  PFI was, essentially, outsourcing state facilities and services to the private sector, delivering the same outcomes for the public but under private for-profit management.

For politicians there were advantages: at certain times, under accounting rules, PFI arrangements would not add to state debt, since the private firms would have to borrow to finance the project (build the prison, school, hospital, etc.).  Further, the ongoing liabilities for maintaining the building would fall on the private company, and not add to the government estate.  The wider benefit would be that it would also keep the headcount of state employees down, and create a downward pressure on wages as workers would be divided between firms.

From an ideological point of view, it was about asserting that private sector management techniques are more efficient and capable of delivering services than the public sector, where employers are subject to political pressure as well as market pressure.  Further, from a capitalist point of view, the state is inherently unproductive, even where it provides useful services.  From this perspective, all expenditure by the state is a barrier to the accumulation of capital and the growth of the capitalist economy.

Profit funding initiative
PFI raised the option of making profits out of these services, and adding to the gross profits of the economy.  For New Labour politicians, this raised the fantasy of ending the antagonism between state and private sector, making serving public needs profitable.  That it expanded the options for the soft corruption of what Private Eye calls the ‘Westminster revolving door’ would have helped.

Giving ex-politicians seats on the boards of firms has long been a way of ensuring compliance from MPs and Ministers: it doesn’t need to be a direct quid-pro-quo of corruption proper, but a generalised reward for services to being pro-business.  With outside firms bidding for state contracts, the possibility arose for ex-Ministers to become ‘advisors’ to the firms that had serviced their departments, added to the feather nest.

There have been obvious problems with PFI: unlike directly employed staff, corporate entities work strictly to contract, and there have been a rash of instances where the precise terms of the contract turn out to be poorly drafted, and the firm has refused to take on work or costs that would normally reasonably be associated with the service they are providing.  Schools in Edinburgh basically fell down, as the builders had cut corners in order to boost their profit margins.  PFIs have turned out to be more expensive in many instances than if the government had borrowed the money directly.

The fantasy of reconciliation has hit the rocks in Carillion: not because the firm was incompetent or specifically venal, but, rather, because of the crisis-prone nature of capitalist markets themselves. Carillion is a construction company that has specialised in winning Government contracts, or buying up firms with Government contracts.

As Jonathon Ford wrote for the Financial Times:

  ‘Carillion’s balance sheet shows the extent of its dependence on these ethereal assets. At the end of 2016, things that could be sold in a crisis (i.e fixed assets and stocks) accounted for just 5 per cent of the total. Its solvency thus depended on the valuation of intangibles accounting for nearly 40 per cent of the balance sheet. Almost all of those were goodwill — acquired with the many companies Carillion acquired over the 18 years of its existence.’ [LINK.]

The company existed as something of a phantom based on the income derived from government projects, sub-contracting the actual work of owning machinery and tools to smaller firms.  This was fine, so long as the contracts kept rolling in.  Carillion will have been one of the big losers from the Tory governments’ long-term austerity drive, such as when they cancelled the schools building programme.  As the blogger Michael Roberts notes:

  ‘it seems that it had taken on too many projects from the UK public sector at prices that delivered very narrow margins.  So, as debt issuance rose and profitability disappeared, cash began to haemorrhage.  Carillion ran up a huge debt pile of £900m.  But this did not stop the Carillion board lying about their financial state, continuing to pay themselves large salaries and bonuses and fat dividends to their shareholders.  In contrast, the company did little to reduce a mounting deficit on the pensions fund of their 40,000 global staff, putting their pensions in jeopardy. Indeed, Carillion raised its dividends every year for 16 years while running up a pensions deficit of £587m.  It paid out nearly £200m in dividends in the last two years alone.  The recently sacked CEO took home £660,000 a year plus bonuses.’ [LINK.]

In other words, a classic case of a capitalist firm expanding as fast as it could, irrespective of the eventual constraints on the size of the market.  That the board kept paying out dividends (huge firms, like Apple, occasionally choose not to pay dividends, in order to help develop asset growth), suggests that the firm had become very much a money-go-round, sucking in investment to win more contracts to pay dividends to suck in investment and contracts.  This could have gone on, had the economy generally, and the government spending, kept on expanding.

As ‘Socialist Economic Bulletin’ notes:

  ‘revenues were barely changed between 2010 and 2016 at just over £5 billion and net assets actually shrank, even before the latest collapse to zero…The model came crashing down because of austerity. The main reason revenues are flat between 2010 and 2016 is that the Tories (and the Coalition before them) slashed public sector investment in roads, rail, ports and housing, and took an axe to real current spending, in areas such as education services, the NHS, the justice system, and so on. The pace of new privatisations and PFI since 2010 was not enough to top up the bucket with a big hole marked austerity.’ [LINK.]

We have pointed out in these pages before that the only way in which PFI can be made profitable is often by ‘sweating’ the workforce, and driving down wages: the structural inability to be able to do this (due to legal and trade union constraints) means that the profit margins for these sort of deals are tight; and many firms end up handing the contract back (or selling it on to another firm).

Interest charges
Labour will make hay over the questions of how the government could keep awarding contracts (and, indeed, anyone who has ever been anywhere near public sector procurement could tell you that checks and guarantees of financial health are an essential part of the process).  But, venality, political expediency and outright corruption have always gone hand in hand with the market system.  This is especially so, as PFI-style deals are subject to commercial confidentiality (and the firms running the contracts are themselves exempt from freedom of information laws).

The National Audit office has produced a report on PFI deals, which points out:

  ‘There are currently over 700 operational PFI and PF2 deals, with a capital value of around £60 billion. Annual charges for these deals amounted to £10.3 billion in 2016-17. Even if no new deals are entered into, future charges which continue until the 2040s amount to £199 billion. [LINK.]

Further, there remain accounting and structural reasons, other than value for money, which may drive public bodies into considering PFI deals, even if Corbyn and McDonnell manage to clamp down on the practice (should they ever form a government).

The debates around PFI, though, are essentially about differing methods of borrowing money: McDonnell has committed himself to a version of Brown’s rules about only borrowing to invest in capital structures not current spending, and the last Labour manifesto promised to expand certain benefits and spending areas.  So they will have to borrow, which means giving interest payments to the same capitalist robbers who invest in Carillion.  In either case, the need to go and ask the owners of wealth for funds on their terms is a way of disciplining the state: its only other option is to tax directly to fund all its activity, but that would inevitably cut into profits and the accumulation of capital: with the most likely response being a capital strike as fund holders refuse to invest and try and hold their assets where the tax man cannot find them.

The real debate is not about the actual contractual structures by which the government persuades the owners of the world to let them fund services, but about us being able to directly control our own efforts and labour to attend to our own needs.  Any notion that ending PFI is a strike against capitalist fat cats is illusory.

Pik Smeet

Turkey: What’s Going On? (2018)

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

From the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

 ‘What on earth is going on in Turkey these days?’ It’s a good question. What indeed is going on in Turkey.

There are no simple answers because there is usually no clear grasp of the complexities of the socio-political-cultural anachronisms that make up Turks and Turkey. A ‘riddle inside a mystery inside an enigma’ comes to mind and yet Russia is an open book when compared with Turkey.

Turkey is a one-man dictatorship, a police state.

On the day following the failed coup of 15 July, 2016 the recently elected president declared a state of emergency. This was illegal on two counts: first, the presidency does not assume executive authority until after the general election in 2019; second, constitutional law states that, ‘Extraordinary regimes (state of emergency) can be declared only in the case of widespread violence that cannot be contained.’The coup attempt of 15 July unfolded only in Ankara and Istanbul and was overturned within six hours at most.

What followed the declaration of the state of emergency and its renewal every three months since has had a profound effect upon the lives of every Turk. Over the past eighteen months the number of people sacked from the bureaucracy (armed services, police, judiciary, doctors, administrators, schools and universities, etc.) stands at approx. 125,300. 50,500 have been arrested, 169,000 are subject to legal proceedings. These people are not just without jobs, they are now unemployable. They have families who depend on them. Six news agencies, 50 newspapers, 18 television channels, 29 publishing houses, 20 magazines, 22 radio stations and 1,528 associations have been banned. 145 journalists have been arrested, and 2,500 journalists have been left jobless because of the closure of media outlets. Ten members of parliament have been arrested and are held in prison. Many elected mayors from the HDP and CHP political opposition parties have been removed from office and ‘administrators’have replaced them.

Dissent or disagreement is dangerous and can lead to assault, imprisonment and death. Illegal, armed militias such as Halk Özel Harekatı (People’s Special Security) and the Osmanlı Ocakları 1453 (Ottoman Hearths 1453) which are aligned with the ruling party are seen on the streets, dressed in similar style to ISIS and other Takfiri groups, ready to attack any protesters often in collusion with the police. This is their slogan: ‘Erdoğan means the nation. One dies for Erdoğan, one kills for Erdoğan. Those who tried to test this on 15 July saw it for themselves.’

Social media is patrolled by paid trolls looking for deviants. A wrong word on Facebook or Twitter can result in a midnight raid by police and internment for months awaiting a hearing in a system purged of non-believers. Social media platforms are monitored nationally and controlled via regional throttling or ‘off switches’. Regardless of your ISP everything passes through just one state-controlled portal. The list of banned or censored websites is massive –from the atheistic views of Richard Dawkins to Wikipedia. A single word in a blog-post can see a site blocked.  The levels of control are what Big Brother’s wet dreams were about. Virtual Private Networks are the only way of avoiding censorship. Self-censorship is the most common way to avoid the all-seeing eye.

So, if Erdoğan and the AK Party divide the country almost exactly in half, as they do –what unites it? Nationalism and the symbols of nationalism. Turkey is a young country born out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Back then there was no real concept of what a ‘Turk’ might be or a Syrian or Kurd for that matter. Within the empire there were only Ottomans and as Ataturk set about creating the Turkish state (founded 1923) he was faced by a largely uneducated and indifferent population. His tool to weld these disparate peoples into one entity was his own brand of ultra-nationalism and personality cult as the saviour of the Turks. It served him and his successors well but as time has shown it is an explosive force on a very short fuse.

Turks have been raised on a diet of nationalism, first via their parents, then at school, the national football and basketball teams, flags everywhere—flying from flagpoles and houses, carved into the mountainsides along with Ataturk’s words in letters a mile high, ‘Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyene’ or ‘Happy Is He Who Calls Himself A Turk’. Then, for young men, comes conscription and ‘serving the nation’ and the chance to become a ‘martyr’ with a full military funeral and a flag flying over their grave. Conscientious objection has no status in the legal code. Money can buy the more affluent a reduced term at a ‘cushy’ posting.

For the vast majority national pride is not an option—they have mostly been offered no other way of thinking. Turks are some of the kindest, most warm-hearted and generous of people. Self-deprecating, they are masters of making fun of themselves and yet if you insult their country or their flag, something they would never do, then you could well be facing your worst nightmare.

It is this characteristic that politicians like Erdoğan foster and exploit when the need arises. At the height of his popularity he began a truly constructive process of reconciliation with the Kurds. ‘Secret’negotiations were happening with Abdullah Öcalan from his prison cell. Whilst things were moving ahead on that front behind the scenes there were problems with the credit-bubble powered economy and deep levels of corruption within the regime, with their cronies and by Erdoğan personally. As the reality began to dawn on people he and the AK Party began to dip seriously in the polls –something had to give and that something was rapprochement with the Kurds.

A series of, probably, false-flag bomb attacks occurred including in Ankara. In what amounted to a civil war in the south-eastern provinces the army and paramilitary police were unleashed complete with tanks and helicopter gunships. Kurdish towns and enclaves were obliterated. Unknown numbers were killed and displaced before ‘peace’ was achieved. The flags waved, the media cheered and every political party except the predominantly Kurdish HDP applauded the strength of Erdoğan. Then came another astute move. He invited into the administration the far-right National Action Party/MHP and thus cemented his nationalist credentials and shored up his falling popularity.

Finally, like a gift from the gods, on 15 June 2016 came the attempted coup followed by the declaration of a (permanent?) state of emergency and rule by presidential decree. This will probably extend beyond the upcoming election period and ensure that countless thousands of opposition ballot papers that disappear into rubbish tips at each election will not be the subject of any recounts. The rest, as they say, is history.

What does the future hold for this country? Whilst Erdoğan lives, he rules. That said there are persistent rumours about his health and there is no successor in sight who has his metal and political cunning. Many Turks speak of civil war, but not openly, of course.

A.N.

Peter McDouall: Scottish Chartist (2018)

From the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The third and final part of our series of prominent individuals in the Chartist movement.

We are indebted to the late Raymond Challinor for his biography of Peter McDouall but which endeavours to make McDouall out to be yet another in the long run of ‘Scottish Lenins’. 

George Julian Harney was to recall, 'No man in the Chartist movement was better known than Dr McDouall’.  Peter McDouall (M’Douall) was a significant figure in Chartism. Imprisoned twice, dying at a relatively young age, it is not an exaggeration to say that McDouall gave his life for Chartism.

Peter McDouall was born in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, and served as an apprentice to a surgeon in his home town, then studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh. He subsequently moved to Lancashire, first to a Burnley practice and then to the small cotton town of Ramsbottom. He came to Chartism radicalised by his exposure to the bleak factory conditions in industrial Lancashire and was a campaigner for factory reforms, becoming involved in the ten-hour day agitation. Following the arrest of Joseph Rayner Stephens, McDouall took his place in the forthcoming Chartist convention as a delegate for Ashton under Lyne, a militant Chartist centre with which McDouall was to be closely associated for the rest of his life. In the first convention in 1839, McDouall was a foremost advocate of physical force and, later, of the ‘sacred month’, the Grand National Holiday (or General Strike). He was ‘an advocate for the arming of the people, in defence of their constitutional rights, and although he deprecates the idea of turning any deadly weapon against the lives and property of any portion of the community, he boldly avows that he would take his place with the people to resist any unconstitutional aggression that might be attempted upon their few existing rights and liberties’, according to The Charter portraits of delegates, in 1839.

He also became a staunch advocate of the power of the ordinary worker. He explained:

  ‘The Trades are equal to the middle class in talent, far more powerful in means and much more united in action’ and again ‘The agitation for the Charter has afforded one of the greatest examples in modern history of the real might of the labourers. In the conflict millions have appeared on the stage and the mind of the masses has burst from its shell and begun to flourish and expand.’

In August, he was sentenced at Chester to twelve months’ imprisonment for sedition. On his release in August 1840, McDouall toured the north of England and Scotland and while in Glasgow, he married the daughter of a warder at Chester Castle, where he had served his sentence.

In Scotland, an estimated 200,000 people assembled to hear speeches from White, Collins and McDouall. The huge procession marched on to Glasgow Green and The Scots Times reported ‘the old radical spirit’ had been revived and that ‘Chartism is supreme in Glasgow’.

McDouall spoke at many other meetings around Scotland. The massive demonstrations and expressions of democratic sentiment revealed the existence among working people of a common aim and purpose. The question of what was to be the next step forward was posed with great urgency and on this issue, the Chartists were deeply divided. Supporters of moral force refused to sponsor McDouall’s meetings where he combined an exposition of Chartist principles with a denunciation of the moderates who clamoured for an alliance with the middle class. McDouall, however, no longer believed in making impassioned speeches urging the use of force. Wild revolutionary rhetoric had led to rash actions in England and Wales, with disastrous consequences, which had been largely avoided in Scotland. As he told Edinburgh Chartists:

  ‘We gave our passions the rein; but you have been more cautious, you have suffered less – you gave the reins to reason.’

This did not mean that he had renounced the use of force. What he now appeared to advocate was the possession of weapons for defensive purposes. If the authorities resorted to violence in an attempt to crush Chartism, he thought the moral force men would be the first to desert. McDouall understood the need to avoid riots and premature uprisings which culminated in defeat and demoralisation. For this reason, he was highly critical of the Newport uprising that occurred in November 1839. In a letter from prison, he argues it had been an ‘ill-managed, foolish and quixotic adventure’. Such setbacks interfered with the Chartist Movement which would grow due to ‘The financial disarrangement, the foreign difficulties, the domestic insurrection, will all merge in the end into a grand revolutionary outbreak. No power on earth can prevent it.’

In 1841 and 1842 McDouall played a prominent role in the recently formed National Charter Association and headed the poll for the executive in both years. He also published his own Chartist and Republican Journal in 1841. Past defeats, he judged, could all be attributed to this cause:

  ‘Our associations were hastily got up, composed of prodigious numbers, a false idea of strength was wrought up to the highest pitch, thence originated a sense of security which subsequent events proved to be false, and why? Because no real union existed at the bottom.’

McDouall’s answer to the problem was to turn to the newly-forming working class; only it had the necessary potential strength. He believed Chartists should be active in the trade unions, win them over for the cause and use them as a basis for Chartist agitation.

However, some Chartists saw the trade unions not as possible allies but as rivals. A number of Yorkshire Chartist branches had a rule that members should take part ‘in no agitation but for The Charter.’ They regarded union activity as a diversion, side-tracking people from the real struggle. Sometimes this suspicion was reciprocated. In North East England for example, some trade unionists had actually struck at the beginning of the ‘sacred month’ but since it had turned out to be such a fiasco, some of them severed their Chartist connections.

On another issue, McDouall was opposed to the growing British Empire.

   ‘Let all who have possessions in India, or all who profit by what you call ‘our Indian possessions’ be off to India, and fight a thousand battles for them as they like… but let them not mock our degradation by asking us, working people to fight alongside them, either for our ‘possessions’ in India, or anywhere else, seeing that we do not possess a single acre of ground, or any other description of property in our own country, much less colonies, or ‘possessions’ in any other, having been robbed of everything we ever earned by the middle and upper classes… On the contrary, we have an interest in prospective loss or ruin of all such ‘possessions’, seeing they are but instruments of power in the hands of our domestic oppressors.’

He stood for parliament at Northampton in June 1841 but came bottom of the poll. After representing Ashton in the convention of April 1842, he was the principal supporter of the general strike movement in August and it was he who drafted the executive’s very forceful address to the people. The government offered a £100 reward for his apprehension, but he escaped to France, where he lived for the next two years. He was able to return to Britain without prosecution during 1844 and resumed his life as a Chartist agitator, publishing The Charter: What It Means! The Chartists: What They Want! in 1845.

1848 was Europe’s Year of Revolutions. He spoke at numerous rallies spurring masses of people into self-activity. After he spoke at Glasgow in March a riot occurred, followed by another in Edinburgh, where there were shouts of ‘Vive la Republique’ and ‘Bread and Revolution’. Although McDouall’s presence led the authorities to link him with the disturbances, it seems that those responsible were destitute Irish and unemployed Scots.

He then again unsuccessfully contested the parliamentary seat of Carlisle. He was a member of the Chartists national assembly and, once more elected to the executive, was at the heart of another insurrectionary conspiracy where he ended up doing two years’ hard-labour gaol for his part in the abortive Ashton-under-Lyne rising. His family suffered badly during this time, and a daughter, aged 10, died. After his release and after a failed attempt to re-start his medical career, McDouall took his family and emigrated to Australia in 1854, but died soon after arriving. His family returned to England to an impoverished future. The Northern Star wrote in 1848:

  ‘When he came among you, he had good property in Scotland, a profession and a practice, which realised him several hundred pounds annually, besides a large sum of accumulated money in the bank. All of which has been spent long ago in the advocacy of the rights of the people.’

ALJO

Proper Gander: Delicious Chips For Their Tea (2018)

The Proper Gander Column from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Co-op has recently announced that it will open a hundred new food stores across the UK, although you won’t be able to shop in one of these unless you’re a fictional character. That’s because it’s going to open on Coronation Street, as part of ITV’s biggest product placement deal to date. The plans also include a branch of Costa Coffee appearing in Weatherfield for Gail and Ken to buy their skinny lattes from. Soaps have always had an association with sponsorship – the term ‘soap opera’ comes from how early serial dramas used to be funded by soap manufacturers.

Product placement, or embedded marketing, is when a company pays for its commodity or brand to be included within a medium, especially a TV programme, film and, these days, YouTube video. This marketing strategy has been around since the 19th century, with rumours that works by Jules Verne and Eduoard Manet of all people featured real-life brands they had been paid to include. American movies and television shows have incorporated paid-for promotion of products for as long as the media have been around. For example, the characters in One Tree Hill often have cans of Sunkist soft drinks in their fridges, courtesy of a marketing deal. Historically, product placement has been illegal in Britain, although this didn’t stop advertisers getting their brands within programmes, such as coverage of sponsored sports events.

The law changed in 2011, and the first deal involved Nestle paying for a coffee machine to appear in ITV’s magazine show This Morning. The regulations were probably relaxed to keep commercial television more attractive to advertisers who might otherwise turn their attention to the ever-expanding marketing opportunity that is the internet. By late 2015, ITV alone had broadcast over 4,000 hours of programmes featuring product placement, including viewer-magnets like The Only Way Is Essex, The X-Factor and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, as well as soap operas. ITV Media’s website contains a wealth of vomit-inducing corporate-speak: 

  ‘Add to basket offers a truly unique marketing opportunity as products are showcased within natural settings more relatable to viewers and in turn, providing inspiration or in some cases, validation for purchase choices’.

The website helpfully gives some examples: 

  ‘Emmerdale residents were thrilled to discover that David’s shop had now begun stocking McCain’s frozen foods, and on-screen families were soon seen tucking into delicious chips for their tea’. And it proudly boasts about the first instance of ‘behaviour placement’ in a deal between Visa and Corrie: ‘the action of contactless payment was … threaded through into the storylines, with completely natural interactions; impacting even the most resistant non-users. Not only did Visa show characters using the card machine (complete with the beep sound you’d hear in real life!), but they also placed stickers in key locations. What could make the action seem more everyday than Norris using Contactless to buy his milk from Dev’s shop?’.

Telecommunications regulator Ofcom has set guidelines for how product placement can be practiced in the UK. Some products (such as alcohol, tobacco, baby milk and medicine) and programmes (like the news, children’s shows or any on the BBC) can’t be used in this way, and broadcasters must display a ‘PP’ logo on-screen for a few seconds in relevant shows. A placement must be ‘editorially justified’ and not give ‘undue prominence’ to the product, although these terms could be open to interpretation. And the rules don’t apply to films or programmes made elsewhere and if no payment or deal involves the broadcaster, which is why, for instance, the BBC can transmit the film Cast Away, despite it prominently including the FedEx brand. It’s also why all the mentions of the Co-op, Visa, McCain’s etc in this article don’t count as product placement, as these firms haven’t coughed up to the SPGB to promote their wares (and aren’t likely to).

When product placement is too noticeable, then it jars. The 1988 film Mac and Me wasn’t received well partly because its placed products were so blatant, with Coca-Cola, Sears, Skittles or McDonald’s featuring in what seems like every scene. More recently, advertisers have been a bit more sophisticated in their approaches. The American sitcom Black-ish has had a plotline paid for by Procter & Gamble, in which the characters are inspired by P&G’s own real-world campaign to raise awareness of racism. The show has often discussed social issues, and so it should, but there’s something odd with a debate about racism being commercialised in this way. Ofcom’s guidelines wouldn’t allow something to be made in Britain with the levels of product placement seen in Mac and Me or Black-ish (yet), but when the tactic is more subtle, then it’s arguably more insidious. When Rita in Corrie gets back home from shopping and unpacks a Co-op bag while she’s chatting with Gemma, the advertising is almost subliminal. It’s one thing to know you’re being enticed to buy a product, it’s another to be unaware you’re being manipulated.

We’ve got used to the commercial breaks which interrupt what we watch on most channels, but they don’t invade the programmes in the same way as product placement does. We pay a visit to Coronation Street for the characters, plots and ideas, and expect it to somehow be ‘above’ being cheapened by advertising. But TV shows and films aren’t made in a bubble away from market forces, they have to get funding, attract viewers and make money. The market system reaches into anywhere there’s a buck to be made, even into places that aren’t real.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: Labour and the Health Charges (2018)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anthony Greenwood, now a Cabinet Minister, told Labour’s 1963 Conference, on behalf of the Executive:

  “I repeat . . . the pledge we have given you before this, that we shall remove the existing charges in the National Health Service.”

Again, for the 1964 election The New Britain read:

  “The most serious attack on the Health Service made by Conservative Ministers has been the increasing burden of prescription charges imposed by them on those least able to pay. These charges will be abolished. Labour emphatically rejects recent proposals to introduce new charges for General Practitioner services; our aim is to restore as rapidly as possible a completely free Health Service.”

This time they were lucky. Wilson became Prime Minister and Kenneth Robinson Minister of Health. Sure enough, in a few months Labour redeemed part of its pledge. On 17 December Robinson announced the ending of prescription charges “which, since 1952, have created a financial barrier between the patient and the treatment he needs”. He went on to state that in time they would also redeem the other part of their pledge:

   “There will remain charges for dental treatment and appliances and those for spectacles. It is our aim to abolish these charges also.”

He did not say that for teeth and spectacles the financial barrier had existed since Gaitskell erected it in 1951.

In 1966, with Time For Decision, Labour faced the electorate, with the declaration that there were some principles they would not jettison “whatever the pressures”. One of those principles was that “even in times of economic crisis those in need should be helped by the state”. They brought forward their abolition of prescription charges as proof.

Less than two years later this principle is jettisoned. Wilson announced the restoration of prescription charges for many people at a rate of 2/6 an item. Far from abolishing the dental treatment charges, as Robinson promised, Labour raises them by 10/-. Charges for teeth and spectacles remain.

(from Socialist Standard, March 1968)

Breakdown theory (2018)

Book Review from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Capitalism’s Contradictions. Studies in economic theory before and after Marx’. By Henryk Grossman (Haymarket Paperbacks. Chicago)

For a long while it was only by reputation that Grossman was known in the English-speaking world as a collapse of capitalism theorist, as his 1929 book The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System was not available in English translation until 1992, though Paul Mattick had publicised his theory in the 1930s. Grossman was an admirer of state capitalist Russia even under Stalin and died in 1950 in East Germany.

This collection of articles lives up to its subtitle, with a useful article on some of those before Marx who put forward the view that societies differed depending on their particular system of production and changed when this changed, and another on post-Marx bourgeois economists and their theories of marginal utility arguing that left free of government interference capitalism tended towards full-employment equilibrium. Strangely there is no mention of Keynes.

Grossman took it as axiomatic that Marx held a breakdown theory of capitalism, writing in a contribution on Marxism for an encyclopaedia, reprinted here, in a matter of fact way about ‘the fundamental idea of Capital of an absolute limit to the development of the capitalist mode of production’ and of ‘Marx’s theory of the final breakdown of the capitalist system of production.’ In fact he was only promoting his own theory of this since no such theory can be found in Marx.

As exposed here at the end of this contribution, ‘it holds that once a nation’s capital exceeds a definite scale, its accumulation finds no further profitable opportunities for investment and consequently either lies idle or has to be exported.’ Grossman based his theory not so much on the falling rate of profit but on the mass of surplus value in relation to the total social capital becoming insufficient to continue capital accumulation:

   ‘…at high levels of accumulation the part of surplus value required for additional accumulation [as constant capital] will be so large that it finally absorbs almost all the surplus value.’

He seems to have thought that this stage had nearly been reached in the developed capitalist countries.

One reason why he (and Rosa Luxemburg too, though her breakdown theory was different) believed that a breakdown theory was essential was that, without it, the case for socialism would be weakened and just become a matter of moral choice, a view associated with the revisionists and reformists within the German and Austrian Social Democratic movement.  One such reformist was Rudolf Hilferding, the author of Finance Capital, who after the war became German Finance Minister on a couple of occasions. Grossman writes of him:

  ‘After the war (1927) Hilferding declared that he had always “repudiated every theory of economic breakdown”. Marx had also considered them to be false. The overthrow of the capitalist system would “not happen because of internal laws of this system” but had to be the conscious will of the working class”.’

Despite his reformism, Hilferding was right here. But it wasn’t just reformists who held this view. Anton Pannekoek, whose anti-reformist credentials are impeccable, wrote a pamphlet in 1934 refuting breakdown theories in general and Grossman’s in detail, expressing a similar point of view. It is also the view expressed in our 1932 pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse and in our articles on this subject ever since.

Adam Buick

In Place of Capitalism (2018)

From the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the word ‘capitalism’ seems to be on everyone’s lips. The main reason for this is probably that capitalism – also known as ‘the economy’ or ‘the market system’ – has been going through a bad patch. Gordon Brown’s claim to have ended the cycle of boom and bust has proved disastrously wrong. The last boom, during which food, energy, house and stock market prices rose at unsustainably high rates, gave way to bust.

As usual, workers have been the main victims. Many of us lost our jobs, can’t get new ones or can’t enter the labour force for the first time. We have seen our outgoings soar, our incomes squeezed, even our homes repossessed. Even if we have so far personally avoided the worst of these fates, the worry that we may not continue to do so can be very stressful.

Who or what is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? More constructively, how can it be put right? Only the pitifully small socialist media insist that we need to replace capitalism with socialism. All the other media, which shout so much louder than we can, say things like “We’ve got the wrong kind of capitalism” or “Some people (bankers) have been too greedy.”

There is a widespread and heavily promoted belief that ‘capitalism is the only game in town.’ Anyone who disputes this, for example by advocating that all goods and services should be available on the basis of need, not ability to pay, is dismissed as idealistic or Utopian. It is a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy: support (or at least acquiesce in) the way things are organised today and tomorrow will be more or less the same. But it doesn’t have to be.

Socialists urge that it is futile to try to reform capitalism – the whole system needs to be scrapped and replaced by something better.

The world could be run on different lines which could get it out of the mess it is in. People could organise their affairs so that everyone has free access to the things they need to lead a decent and satisfying life.

This is the alternative society that socialists advocate. For over a hundred years the cause of socialism has been dominated by the machinations of two statist creeds, Social Democracy and Leninism. These have fed off the discontent and aspirations of the working class to become alternative managers of capitalism. Their heydays are long past. The Labourites have long abandoned any pretence to ‘reforming capitalism’ in favour of simply managing it; after the end of ‘Communism’ the Leninists have been reduced to mini-sects which replicate within their own structures the regimes of the old Stalinist States in a homage to Marx’s dictum, ‘first as tragedy, now as farce’.

Their aspirations have shrunk with their horizons, whilst they grandly imagine storming the winter palace and fantasise about bloody revolutions, in reality they have little or no belief in the working class ever rallying to their ‘proletarian leadership’, and even less in the ability of the working class to emancipate itself.

They hide themselves in front campaigns for partial reforms, and embrace and promote a succession of ‘Saviours from high’ who they are sure will deliver us, until the inevitable betrayal, when they move on to the next.

All previous revolutions have been the overthrow of one minority ruling class and the victory of a new one. Such revolutions have needed abstract slogans and ideals (Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité; Peace, Land, Bread,) in order to enlist the support of the masses. They have needed heroes and demagogues to inspire the majority to give their lives for the victory of new masters.

The socialist revolution can only take place when the majority of the working class not only understand that it is possible, but also desirable. It needs no abstract ideals to mask it’s true purpose, no demagogues to beguile the masses.

It needs no heroes.

50 Years Ago: Black Power in the United States (2018)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The American black power movement is a child of frustration. Thousands of civil rights supporters, having long since absorbed the few sops that capitalism can afford to give them, are running squarely into a sociological brick-wall—a wall they have termed the “white power structure.” Their response, the concept of black power, indicates that they have learned many lessons.

They have learned, for example, that “integration” as such is an empty issue when the integrated population still remains without any basic economic control over their own lives. They have learned that white liberals can do almost nothing for them. And they have learned that the Federal Government is not their friend; in the last analysis, it can never be anything but their implacable enemy. Anti-poverty and civil rights legislation masked for a time the nature of government, but last summer the mask was dropped. The spectacle of thousands of American troops, tanks, trucks, and jeeps being called out to crush rebellions on the part of other Americans, finally and fully revealed what governments exist for: to maintain the power of the ruling class by violent force. And they can never, of their own free will, enact any reform that will interfere with this function.(…)

It is difficult for the Marxian socialist to explain his position to a black nationalist. The socialist rejects capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist ideology, and sympathizes deeply with all of capitalism’s victims. It is his outrage at being victimised, in most cases, that originally led him to become a socialist. He recognises, too, that certain sections of the working class take more punishment than other sections, and at the present time the black worker in America generally suffers more than his white counterpart. This is an obvious fact to anyone who has lived in the U.S. with his eyes open. Yet the socialist, because of what he knows about capitalism, must reject the black power concept as a hopelessly inadequate solution.

(from Socialist Standard, February 1968)

Rear View: Is it Nestlé that is the enemy? (2018)

The Rear View Column from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is it Nestlé that is the enemy?
Listverse.com (3 January) detail ’10 Outrageous Nestlé Scandals’. Before the list even starts, Nestlé’s use of child labour is mentioned along with a plea not to turn a blind eye and ‘continue poking for Nestlé to be better’. Anyone reading about Nestlé’s nefarious activities for the first time will likely be shocked, but socialists not so much. We have long known breast is best, but for Nestlé, like any other company, profit comes first. ‘During a campaign that has stretched over several decades’ it is alleged that the world’s largest food company bribed medical practitioners to provide mothers in hospitals with formula milk which, with their natural lactation declining as a result, left them reliant on Nestlé’s products.


Water, water, everywhere
In many areas of the world, from America to Zimbabwe, our class lack access to safe water,  something which can be fatal, particularly for infants being nursed with reconstituted formula milk. And that safe water is quite possibly owned by Nestlé. At the World Water Forum in 2000, the then Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe was quoted as saying, ‘access to water should not be a public right.’ There was some consequent clarification about this remark, but not the ethical progress reformist groups are always clamouring for.


Nestlé Newspeak
In October 2008 Nestlé stated ‘bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world’ That very month Taiwan banned the importation of milk products, including Nestlé’s, from China as a result of them being contaminated. Was this an industrial accident or deliberate? ‘Melamine can easily be mistaken for protein. Thus, Chinese dairy manufacturers illegally claimed higher levels of protein in their products through the use of cheaper melamine. In baby formulas, where protein amounts are so important, this led to severe deficiencies.’


Modern day slavery
Nestlé’s tentacles reach out for our babies and cats. Yes, feeding Tibbles Purina ‘may have also helped to support Nestlé’s use of slave labor in Thailand . . . Usually, the workers are immigrants, brought in from Thailand’s even poorer neighbors Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia. For the privilege of a Thai job, they are charged an illegal fee and trapped into working within the fishing industry to pay off heavy debt. A Burmese worker describes their working conditions: “Sometimes, the net is too heavy and workers get pulled into the water and just disappear. When someone dies, he gets thrown into the water.” ‘

The sickly sweet smell of profit
Nestlé also profits from our class labouring in the chocolate industry —  ‘an ugly affair, littered with allegations of malfeasance.’ We are told that the deforestation crisis in Ghana and the Ivory Coast continues and that cocoa beans are grown illegally in protected forests. Numbers of chimpanzees and elephants have also decreased dramatically. Both countries plan to stop all new deforestation after theguardian.com report (8 November, 2017) found that the cocoa industry was responsible.


A world without Nestlé
Reformists cannot see the wood for the trees. Nestlé ignoring European Union and American sanctions against Zimbabwe by buying milk from an expropriated farm given to Grace Mugabe, mislabelling the source of bottled water as Poland Spring, apparently being part of the price fixing of chocolate, and chasing the Ethiopian regime for losses of around $6 million during one of the region’s unnecessary famines, all these are of great interest to reformists who champion all sorts of quack cures, temporary measures and moral crusades for such issues yet only serve to delay meaningful change. Anti-slavery traders ignore wage slavery, fair trade & free trade advocates fail to envision a world without trade, and arms controllers want peace in a capitalist world where war is endemic. The list goes on and on.


A practical wants list
A socialist world of production for use and allocation according to self-defined need will end, reduce or eliminate many of today’s ‘problems’. Agriculture feeds everyone with far less environmental impact than seen today. War ends in a world without states competing over areas of domination, resources and trade routes. Slums and homelessness are eliminated when housing is built to meet need. Many diseases have cures but not all sufferers constitute a market – only a world of free access ends this ‘problem’. Education for life replaces schooling. Work and play are likely to be indistinguishable with monotony and unnecessary risk reduced. Crime and punishment, economics, harmful cultural practices, lack of access to clean water, religion and even the Socialist Party are subjects of historical curiosity.