Who’s afraid of dialectics? (2019)

From the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the many reasons for the misinterpretation of Marx’s writings has its origins in the misunderstanding of his method. His mode of investigation was entirely dialectical. To many of his subsequent readers down the years this has made his work relatively inaccessible.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the analytical school of philosophy had almost entirely eclipsed the dialectical tradition because of the analytical school’s association with the ‘scientific method’. The dialectics of the so-called continental philosophical school were thus confined to the analysis of the ‘humanities’ if they were used at all. When the analytical method was used to create the separate disciplines of economics, politics, history and sociology etc., (something entirely alien to the holistic dialectical approach) its conclusions were, unsurprisingly, very different from those of Marx. Sometimes this was due to the ideological bias of the individuals involved but more usually it was because the nature of the method defines the results. Some have thought that the analytical method easily disposes itself to defending the status quo and so is inadequate for use in radical and revolutionary discourse. It has been conjectured that the empirical analytical approach is optimal for the study of the natural sciences and that the dialectical method is superior in cultural analysis. Liberated from its present arcane and semi-mystical status dialectics can resolve this false duality and become a common-sense approach to understanding the world and our place in it.

When many first attempt an understanding of the dialectical method they can be intimidated by what seems to be an investigation into an esoteric and alien intellectual tradition. But it can be a surprising revelation that this was, in part, how they had thought of the world long before reading a word of Marx or Hegel. The most obvious example of an ‘innate dialectic’ is the ease with which some can associate and locate their lives within the bigger political picture. The individual’s concerns, joys and sufferings can be understood alongside the identical emotions of fellow beings within, as is quickly discovered, not just a familial, local or even regional context but that of the human condition itself. The self is understood within an historical context that has inherited a social condition, a language and a set of values (together with the very concepts used to understand it all) from those who had gone before. Of course the dialectical philosophers had systematised these universal experiences into a coherent methodology which has accumulated, as all philosophical discourses do, a series of concepts and phrases that can seem very remote from everyday life. But at its heart it seeks to find a language that can simulate and thus render understandable the phenomena of the real world.

Language and ideas
Language is an abstraction of utterance and gesture. It seeks primarily to facilitate communication about the experience of existence. It is important to always remember that thought uses ideas (abstract representations of perception and experience) to create concepts (mental reconstructions of relationships between ideas) and as such they attempt to represent the objective world that we find ourselves within and are not those things in themselves. Language is so seductive that once it becomes inducted into thought itself it can be mistaken for that which it represents (idealism). We speak here of the Marxian version of the dialectical method which is used in the service of materialism rather than the idealism of Hegel (Marx famously subverted the Hegelian method) but the philosophical technique is fundamentally the same. The foremost discovery of any dialectical analysis is that any abstract (idea and concept) is in the process of change. This reflects the fact that all of the constituents of the world are becoming something other than they appear to be at any given time. Everything has to be understood in terms of what it once was, what it is now and what it will become. To study anything in isolation from this dynamic is misleading and ultimately futile. This continual change is due to not just external factors but also to the internal structure of the abstract concerned. This is what dialecticians call internal relations. The method seeks to comprehend four relationships between the elements within the idea (phenomena under consideration): identity and difference, the interpenetration of opposites, the transition from quantity to quality and the tension created by internal contradictions. These processes are universal and so reflect the whole within its parts but, as we shall see, the very distinction between ‘whole’ and ‘part’ quickly becomes philosophically redundant and is only retained as an expository expedient.

Let’s use the humble apple as a subject for a dialectical analysis. The colour, shape, taste and texture combine to define ‘an apple’. These qualities are in turn dependent on a process that has changed the fruit and brought it to ripeness. In dialectical terms we see the development of the apple in both its difference from other fruits as well as its connection with them as part of the definition of being a fruit. We see in the ripening the interpenetration of opposites in terms of sourness transforming into sweetness. The development from a single cell to a combination of many as it grows is an example of quantity becoming a quality and finally the continuation of the processes of ripening, if the apple is left unpicked, will cause it to rot and die and this represents an internal contradiction. The perspective or vantage point from which the apple is perceived will also emphasise or diminish aspects of this development. The owner of an apple orchard will see the apples purely as having commercial value and will seek to maximise this by selective breeding and pest control etc. The consumer and/or producer of the apple will be purely interested in what it represents in terms of taste, price and wages. The tree’s fruit exists to pass on its genetic code as widely and as efficiently as nature will allow. These three perspectives may operate in parallel but each can obviously act against the interest of the others. In terms of what dialecticians call an extension of generality we know that the apple is dependent on the tree and that the tree is dependent on the sun and that much of life itself is dependent on solar energy etc. In this way a thorough understanding of an apple has the potential to give you an understanding of everything.

Obviously the mind cannot embrace the universe as a whole so we are forced to abstract it into component parts to intellectually digest it at all; but this is always done with the aim of reconstructing the phenomena as representing the whole. With this in mind we are free to choose a point of view that we feel will be most revealing – rather than being restricted in our perspective by ideological conditioning. Marx was always aware that he had to explain his method and conclusions within a non-dialectical intellectual context. The dialectical method has come a long way since its origins of ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’ in the Ancient Greek discipline of rhetoric. It has been said that trying to comprehend the world without the aid of dialectics is like trying to board a moving train whilst blindfolded. Dialectics is a method we can use to investigate the past, present and the future.

Marx’s method
Of all of the dialectical tools available Marx considered the investigation of ‘internal contradictions’ to be the most productive when studying history. Unlike most historians Marx analyses history backwards – he seeks out the elements in the past that are preconditions for the present. This is because, as already stated, every concept of the present is rooted in the past and possesses potential for the future. The money in your purse (present) has its origins in the development of an exchange economy (past) and as such is extremely unlikely to remain in your purse for long (future). The preconditions for the development of capitalism were both economic and political – Marx was never purely an economic determinist as he is so often portrayed. One of the necessary preconditions for capitalism was the economic power of the merchants, capitalist farmers and financiers whose wealth enabled them to replace the feudal lords as the ruling class which in turn accelerated the economic exploitation of coal and iron that instigated the subsequent industrial revolution. In other words the merchant adventurers, pirates and slavers who flourished under monarchical rule (Elizabeth I and James I) were the very people who would help to overthrow it; late feudalism had nurtured the elements of its own destruction (internal contradiction). Industrial technology facilitated social production which produced one of the famous instances of ‘the negation of the negation’ (when change seems to end up where it starts) because it severed the link between producer and owner (an earlier form of property) and substituted it with the ownership of the producer’s labour power as well as his product (property as capital) – one form of private property had replaced another.

What, then, can be seen as the preconditions for the future within capitalism? If we look for the most obvious example of an internal contradiction within the contemporary world one stands out above all others, possibly the greatest in all of human history, and it is this individual (or state) ownership of the products of social production. That the majority are only allowed to produce for the profit of a tiny minority is as economically irrational in the twenty first century as was the political power and wealth of the aristocracy in seventeenth century England. The political recognition of this fact by the majority (the working class) necessitates its end. Just as social production had superseded the individual craftsmanship of the past so will social ownership (socialism) replace individual acquisition in the future. Dialectically we can then look back from this future to the present to seek out the preconditions for socialism within capitalism. We have achieved the necessary level of production and what we need is revolutionary socialist consciousness which, from the vantage point we have imagined from the future, necessitates the rejection of any reform or political compromise with capitalism. Of course we speak of the future in terms of the probabilities offered by the present but this is no crystal ball gazing because, as has been said, the use of the process of projection and regression is implicit in the conception of anything whether we are conscious of doing so or not. A pile of bricks is never just ‘a pile of bricks’; we interpret it either as the remnants of a building or as the potential for a new building; a baby is not just a baby but is hopefully the result of joy and a potential adult. Dialectics can help you understand the probable quality and value of either – a Taj Mahal or an Adolph Hitler.

Given what has been outlined here it becomes obvious why dialectical materialism is feared and derided by those who would have us believe that capitalism represents the best of all possible worlds. The fear is instinctive (ideological) because few ever really attempt to understand it. As Marx said: the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class – a world where everything is frozen in time (we were just as violent and greedy in the past as we are now and the future will be no different) and where the only possible form of knowledge illustrates dead matter imprisoned in its present form and devoid of any inner dynamic that will change it (bourgeois economics and pseudo-science). Marx chose the vantage point of the working class because he understood that only they can create fundamental progress. History chooses a class to exhibit the potential for change; all it has to do is recognise the power that human development has given it. The theory of internal relations (dialectics) stands as the primary theory that can tell us when and how human agency can bring about a revolutionary political transition. Dialectics are fun.

Wez

When the red flag flew over Glasgow (2019)

Glasgow 1919

From the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Engineers!…We want your demands to be more exacting, and more deep the principles you struggle for. Fight with your brothers of other industries for these bigger and nobler things as earnestly and solidly as you recently fought. Fight politically as well as industrially, then, with the principle of the class struggle to guide your fighting’ (Socialist Standard, June 1917).

The story of Red Clydeside is one of disappointment in that there was no ‘revolutionary’ movement. Willie Gallagher observed in his memoir, Revolt on the Clyde: ‘A rising was expected. A rising should have taken place. The workers were ready to effect it; the leadership had never thought of it.’ There is little evidence that any such revolt was expected.

The Clyde Workers Committee (CWC), an informal network of shop stewards, was formed in 1915 to defend workers’ interests, further their industrial demands, and for some of them, to oppose the war. Under pressure from the CWC, a general strike in pursuit of a 40-hour working week was called for 27 January, 1919. It led to ‘Bloody Friday’, when strikers clashed with police in George Square on 31 January amid ‘unprecedented scenes of violence and bloodshed’ as the Glasgow Herald put it.

Myths circulate and re-circulate, and new ‘facts’ add to the mix. The troops and tanks in George Square, Glasgow is an example of imaginary incidents. A riot happened. There is no doubt about that but it was a police riot, who launched a violent attack on the strikers. The police had anticipated that their baton charge would drive the crowd out of the square – not so. Not only did the strikers and their supporters stand their ground but drove the police back. There was a re-grouping and the workers marched to Glasgow Green. When they reached the Green the police were waiting, ready to charge again. Undaunted the strikers pulled up the park railings and chased off their attackers. For the rest of the day and into the night, sporadic fighting took place throughout the city.

The event has to be viewed in the context of the capitalist class’s paranoia about revolution that they saw occurring in Russia, Germany and other places. The Lord Provost of Glasgow wired to London portraying the strike as an unconstitutional threat and indicated that the strikers’ demand was an ultimatum. ‘It is a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike – this is a Bolshevist uprising’ were the words of hysteria from the Secretary of State for Scotland. The Lord Advocate later concluded that in the strike ‘every act of revolution was in progress.’ The over-reaction to a threat from the working class demonstrates the willingness of our rulers to suppress any challenge to their political and economic supremacy. Emanuel Shinwell described the 40-hour campaign as ‘not revolutionary in character … It was attributable solely to the fear of unemployment in the near future and the desire to make room for the men from the Army and the Navy.’

There are lots of myths, including that the government used tanks against protestors but they didn’t. 10,000 men and six tanks were dispatched to Glasgow, arriving after the rioting was over. No-one was shot, beaten up or forced back to work by the army. No rioters faced troops with fixed bayonets and there were no tanks in George Square.

For years a photograph of a tank making its way through crowds at Glasgow’s Trongate was wrongly identified as dating from January 1919 but the picture was taken in 1918 during a campaign to promote war bonds. The ‘all the troops were English’ myth can be dismissed as the press at the time listed and photographed men from Scottish regiments such as the Seaforths and the Gordon Highlanders plus the 1,600 men from two English regiments (one of them based, in 1919, at Bridge of Allan, near Stirling, the other in Co Durham). Glaswegian troops at Maryhill, however, were confined to barracks as a precautionary measure. The soldiers stood guard at railway stations, tram depots, power plants and gas-works, and, with the still fresh memory of the GPO in Dublin’s Easter Rising, the city’s main post office.

The other exaggeration was the revolutionary nature of Clydeside’s Independent Labour Party (ILP). This was a reformist left-wing party whose vast majority of leaders were far from Bolshevik revolutionaries. The ILP in 1922 returned several MPs, among them James Maxton, David Kirkwood, John Wheatley, Thomas Johnston, John McGovern and Shinwell. They were sent to Westminster in a wave of left-wing enthusiasm.

David Kirkwood would later reflect, ‘We were going to do big things. The people believed that. We believed that. At our onslaught, the grinding poverty which existed in the midst of plenty was to be wiped out. We were going to scare away the grim spectre of unemployment … Alas, that we were able to do so little!’

Clydeside was far more revolutionary in hindsight than it ever was in reality. Iain McLean in The Legend of the Red Clydeside asserted that what took place was neither a revolution nor ‘a class movement; it was an interest-group movement’, engineers defending their skilled status and their pay differentials.

ALJO

ILLUSION
“Had there been an experienced revolutionary leadership, instead of a march to Glasgow Green there would have been a march to the city’s Maryhill Barracks. There we could easily have persuaded the soldiers to come out, and Glasgow would have been in our hands.” (W. Gallagher, Communist Party)

REALITY
“This was a widely supported trade union dispute but it was a reformist not a revolutionary gathering and it turned into anarchy only because of political nervousness in London and maladroit policing.” Professor John Foster, University of West of Scotland (Observer, 6 January)

The Scramble for the Arctic (2007)

From the September 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

On August 3, the oceanographer and polar explorer Artur Chilingarov descended 14,000 feet in a mini-submarine and dropped a titanium capsule containing a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. “The Arctic is Russian,” he declared.

In fact, the Russian government is laying claim not to the whole Arctic, but “only” to the Lomonosov Ridge, a wedge about half the size of Western Europe that it considers an extension of Siberia’s continental shelf. According to the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea, the five states with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean – Russia, Norway, Denmark (through ownership of Greenland), Canada and the United States (Alaska) – are entitled to 200 miles of territorial waters, but can claim more distant chunks of Arctic seabed by demonstrating links to their continental shelves.

This, of course, is a game that not only Russia can play. All the other Arctic states have advanced counterclaims or are preparing to do so, all on the basis of the same vague legal provision.

Why now?

Why is this carve-up happening now? Apart from people concerned with the deployment of nuclear submarine forces, the native Inuit (Eskimos), and a few scientists and explorers, no one used to care much about the Arctic. Vast quantities of oil, gas and other minerals might lie under the frozen wastes (up to 10 billion barrels of oil under the Lomonosov Ridge, for instance), but extracting them was not a practical proposition. So it did not matter if borders and exploitation rights were not very clearly defined.

Now, however, it is starting to matter. In part this is due to advances in extraction technology, but the main reason is the rapid melting of the icecap under the impact of global warming. The extraction of all those underwater resources is no longer a pipedream, and the big oil and gas companies and the governments that back them are jockeying for position in the new arena.

Survival versus profit

From the perspective of survival of the planetary ecosystem, the rush to grab Arctic oil and gas is grotesque in the extreme. After all, it is largely the burning of oil and gas that is melting the ice, thereby opening up the prospect of extracting and burning yet more oil and gas and further accelerating global warming.

The capitalists, however, have a quite different perspective. For them the overriding imperative is to be sure of making every last cent, penny and kopeck of profit from selling hydrocarbons before finally proceeding to exploit the next source of profit – solar energy and other “alternative” energy sources. By then, unfortunately, it may well be too late to prevent runaway global warming from turning Earth into a second Venus. But that is something the capitalists do not want to know.

The melting of the ice will also have a huge impact on shipping. Over the next few years, expanding areas of the Arctic — and within a few decades all of it — will be navigable to commercial shipping throughout the year. The Northeast Passage through the Russian Arctic and the Bering Strait is expected to be open within eight years, greatly reducing the distance and cost of sea transport between Europe and the Far East. The Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic will provide another link between the Atlantic and the Pacific, competing with the Panama Canal. New deepwater ports are planned to support trans-Arctic trade. Finally, a continuing rapid growth in Arctic tourism is anticipated.

Not a new Cold War

The alarm with which the media have reacted to the Russian claim on the Lomonosov Ridge is reminiscent of the Cold War, especially in the context of other recent tensions between Russia and “the West.” Nevertheless, it is misleading to talk about a new Cold War or, indeed, about “the West.” We no longer live in a world of bipolar confrontation between “East” and “West.” We now live in a multipolar world of fluid alliances among a fairly large number of powers, some of them rising (e.g., China) and others in decline (e.g., the US). In certain ways the early 21st century resembles the first half of the 20th century much more closely than it does the second.

Nothing illustrates the new-old pattern of multipolarity more clearly than territorial disputes in the Arctic. Several important disputes do not involve Russia at all. They are between the other Arctic states, all of which are still formally allies, fellow members of NATO.

The potentially most serious disputes are, perhaps, those between Canada and the United States. One concerns the offshore Canada/Alaska boundary, which traverses an area thought to be rich in oil and gas. The other dispute is over the straits that separate Canada’s Arctic islands from one another and from the mainland. Last year the Canadian government declared that it regarded these straits, which together make up the Northwest Passage, as Canadian Internal Waters. The US government has made clear that it still regards the straits as international waters by sending its navy to patrol them.

Lord Palmerston is famous for his remark that “Britain has no permanent allies, only permanent interests.” Evidently the same is true of any capitalist state.

Canada flexes its muscles

The behaviour of the Arctic states also debunks the widely held idea that some states are inherently peace-loving and others inherently militaristic. Many people think of Canada as being in the first category. They might be perturbed to come across the following Guardian headline: “Canada flexes its muscles in scramble for the Arctic” (LINK).

As Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper observed in this connection, “the world is changing.” It is changing in ways that on the surface seem quite dramatic. But there is a deeper level at which, as the French saying has it, “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” The 21st-century scramble for the Arctic is a phenomenon of the same general kind as the 19th-century scramble for Africa. Both are cases of commercial and military rivalry between the capitalist classes of different countries to open up for plunder and exploitation a region that was previously closed to them.

True, these scrambles now entail dangers that were unknown in the past. The 19th century knew nothing of either nuclear weapons or global warming. It is high time to move on.

Stefan

Pathfinders: Taiga Taiga burning bright . . . (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fires are nothing new in the Russian boreal or northern forest. In fact 20 to 35 thousand wildfires annually affect between 0.5 and 2.5 million hectares of Russian forest (LINK). However the fires this August have been severe enough to reduce entire villages to ash and melt car engines, due to the worst heatwave for decades, with temperatures reaching 42ºC. Deaths from the fires were reported at 30 but there were also 2000 deaths from drowning due to people trying to cool off in rivers LINK.

Although careless humans are thought to be directly responsible for most Russian forest fires, it may be that careless humanity is indirectly responsible for the rest. The cause of the Russian heatwave is also the reason why August was a washout in the UK but catastrophically so in Pakistan, while the Japanese baked: there is something funny going on with the polar jet stream.

 Jet streams are fast-moving wind layers a few hundred miles across but only a couple of miles thick, circumnavigating the globe in meandering loops at the tropopause, the region at around 6 – 9 miles high which separates the dense troposphere from the stratosphere. Airliners save time and fuel by riding these streams and reducing drag in the thin atmosphere, but the streams are unpredictable, splitting, combining and even going back on themselves, and causing potentially fatal clear air turbulence. When a loop meanders south, cold wet air rushes down into the loop from the north, which is when the UK gets drenched. Where it loops upwards, hot dry air reaches northerly climes, giving Muscovites an excuse to get out the sun-lounger. All this is well understood and the explanations, to do with orbital velocity ratios and temperature, are straightforward. What is not understood at all, and which results in the UK being flooded in summer and frozen last winter while Siberia is incinerated, is why these meandering loops suddenly, and for weeks on end, come to a dead stop. Something is obstructing it, and nobody knows what.

It would be a truism to say that climatology is not a well-understood science. This is what makes the climate change debate so lively. But what is particularly alarming at the moment, in view of this level of uncertainty, is the amount of serious talk around about geoengineering.

On the face of it, there is a case for this. Capitalist ruling elites are never going to cooperate to reduce carbon emissions, that much is becoming painfully obvious. Even if they stopped all emissions today, the effects of what is already up there will be felt for centuries. The first ‘tipping point’ in a cascade of tipping points may have already been reached. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Maybe it’s time to call in the engineers.

There are two approaches to this, as outlined in the 2009 report of the Royal Society, Geoengineering the Climate: science, governance and uncertainty (LINK). The first involves carbon dioxide removal (CDR). This covers everything from carbon sequestration to ocean fertilisation with iron filings to encourage plankton blooms. Though CDR is seen as the preferable alternative, the techniques are expensive, not proven, largely untested (or where tested don’t work – plankton just don’t take carbon to the grave with them as was believed), and above all slow. There may not be enough time for these techniques to make any difference.

The second approach is solar radiation management (SRM). This is a fancy phrase for fast-acting tricks to stop the sun’s rays getting through, but which do nothing about the long-term carbon problem. Techniques range from the cheap and frankly silly – painting house rooftops white – to the hi-tech Heath Robinson – erecting mirrors in space.. One feasible suggestion receiving a lot of attention is the idea of chucking between one and five million tons of sulphur annually into the stratosphere in order to create atmospheric haze or ‘global dimming’, an effect known from volcanic case studies and from 20th century post-war industrial pollution. The irony of polluting the planet in order to avoid the consequences of polluting the planet can hardly need elaboration. And here we meet the jet stream again, for at the tropopause convection currents are horizontal, not vertical, thus it is supposed that all this sulphur, once up there, will stay permanently on top of what amounts to a set of impermeable tinted window tiles. But here’s the rub: climatology is an uncertain business. As the Royal Society report admits: ‘Indeed there is a range of so far unexplored feedback processes, which could become important with a permanently engineered sulphate layer’.

Since volcanic sulphur emissions are associated with ozone depletion, and since ozone is thought to be instrumental in the lateral convection processes in the stratosphere, it does not seem beyond the bounds of possibility that a depletion in one could result in a collapse in the other. If all this sulphur ended up crashing through into the troposphere and the cloud layer, it would give us a global dose of sulphuric acid rain the like of which we have never seen. Then we would be fried whatever the weather.

Whether for CDR or SRM, most advocates of geoengineering emphasise that this is not an ‘instead of’ emissions reduction’ option, it’s an ‘as well as’, but opponents have pointed out that prominent advocates of this approach belong to those same conservative think-tanks which have all along been climate change deniers. The fear is that geoengineering is being touted as a cheap fix in order to avoid doing anything worthwhile (ie expensive) to solve the problem of carbon emissions. The deepest fear, of course, is not that geoengineering wouldn’t work, but that it would, and that it would do something catastrophic. It’s like setting about neurosurgery with a trowel and a lump hammer, while wearing a blindfold.

It is entirely of a piece with capitalism’s modus operandi that it sleepwalks into a problem and then guessworks its way out of it, while arguing bitterly about whose fault it is and who’s going to pick up the bill. But there is one other interesting fact about the jet stream which, if the world gets a lucky break and the bickering capitalists get booted off the planning committees, socialists may well be able to turn to good account: “According to one estimate, of the potential wind energy in the jet stream, only 1 percent would be needed to meet the world’s current energy needs. The required technology would reportedly take 10–20 years to develop” (Wikipedia). Now that would be one hell of a windmill.

Paddy Shannon

Rear View: Return to hell (2016)

The Rear View Column from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Return to hell

We the 99 percent suffer worldwide, but in some areas more than others. Haiti could reasonably be described as hell on Earth. 2010’s earthquake and tsunami killed more than 160,000 and displaced up to 1.5 million people. More recently, the UN-caused cholera outbreak killed thousands and hospitalised hundreds of thousands. During this time hundreds of women and underage girls traded themselves for food and medicine. The Red Cross avoided killing anyone but after raising half a billion dollars built just six homes – about as effective as using a Band Aid on a tumour. Last month, over 900 lives were lost when a hurricane struck. So why is Haiti so prone to such disasters, UNnatural or otherwise? ‘More than half of Haiti’s city-dwellers live in overcrowded shantytowns that take the full force of any earthquake, hurricane, or disease outbreak… Massive deforestation has also led to soil erosion, leaving hillside huts and poorly-built houses in the capital, Port-au-Prince, dangerously exposed. In rural areas, topsoil used for agriculture is often washed away. Political instability and corruption have been a factor. Without effective government for decades, Haiti currently ranks 163rd out of the 188 countries on the UN Human Development Index. It spends little on storm defences’ (bbc.com, 7 October).

Mighty Pillock

‘An Egyptian MP has called for women to be forced to undergo virginity tests before being admitted to university, it has been reported. Parliamentary member Elhamy Agina called on the Minister of Higher Education to issue a mandate requiring him or his officials to enforce the virginity tests, Egyptian Streets reports. He has suggested that university cards could only been issued to female students on completion of a virginity test. In an interview with local media, he said: “Any girl who enters university, we have to check her medical examination to prove that she is a Miss. Therefore, each girl must present an official document upon being admitted to university stating she’s a Miss.” The term “Miss” in Egyptian culture is often used to refer euphemistically to whether a woman is a virgin’ (theindependent.co.uk, 1 October). In a socialist world, education will replace schooling and have nothing to do with whether one is a virgin, can pay, possess a certain skin colour or caste origin. Such ideas will be thrown into the dustbin of history, along with degrees in conflict studies, economics, homeopathy, political geography, theology, etc.

Breaking down the profit system

‘In his 93 years, Bob Wallace has seen some product-pricing doozies over the decades, but the nonstop national furore over the stratospheric price hikes for EpiPens — now retailing above $700 for a two-pack — was the final shot . . .  So in time-honored Silicon Valley tradition — and piqued by the EpiPen-maker Mylan’s corporate tagline Seeing Is Believing — Wallace and Roland Krevitt, a veteran Scotts Valley manufacturing and tooling consultant, set out to demystify the cost to produce the EpiPen, piece by piece. The auto-injector delivers a lifesaving dose of adrenaline to treat serious allergic reactions to everything from bee stings to food. Hunched over his vintage Shopsmith table saw in his garage, Wallace sliced open the plastic injector to begin reverse-engineering the device. Then it was Krevitt’s turn to break out his gram scale and caliper to crunch the costs for molding and manufacturing the nozzle, needle, syringe, springs, safety cap — and 0.3 mg of epinephrine. Their startling estimate of the cost for a two-pack of EpiPens: $8.02 ‘ (mercurynews.com, 1 October).

$ick of the $ystem

Whether or not life-saving drugs are made is first a question of profit. Their use is not determined by need, as Dr Francisco Olea-Popelka, from the Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, confirmed recently. He said zoonotic tuberculosis is far more common than previously recognised, with over 120,000 new cases of animal TB each year. The figure is dwarfed by tuberculosis and HIV, with each accounting for between 1.1 million and 1.2 million unnecessary deaths in 2014. But Dr Olea-Popelka thinks we should care, adding ‘this is a well-known problem and has been neglected for decades, it is a disease that is preventable, treatable and curable and yet still today we have hundreds of thousands of people suffering from it’ (bbc.com, 1 October).

50 Years Ago: Insult to Injury (2016)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make no mistake about it. The Labour government is out to cut our standard of living. To be sure, they claim this is necessary so that standards can rise in the future. But we need take no notice of this. After all we’ve heard it so many times before from Labour and Tory alike. First it was Cripps, then Gaitskell, then Butler, then Thorneycroft, then Selwyn Lloyd and now Wilson. But the promised prosperous futures with steadily rising living standards have never appeared and, of course, they never will. You don’t have to be a Socialist to be sceptical on this point.

What the government is trying to do is to freeze wages and salaries at July 20 levels and allow prices to rise to offset “tax increases and import price rises”. If this works, our standard of living will have been cut and more of the wealth we produce will be available for profitable investment.

It’s bad enough to have this attack on our living standards and to be intimidated by the “reserve powers” of the Prices and Incomes Act. But we have also to take Minister of Labour Gunter telling us that this is what we deserve as we have been “dishonest and thriftless” and clever Dick Crossman and the New Statesman telling us that this is a step towards Socialism.

It is surprising that there are still people who think that trade unionists and workers generally have something to gain from backing Labour.

(Editorial, Socialist Standard, November 1966)

Beyond protest (2016)

Book Review from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The End of Protest. A New Playbook for Revolution’. By Micah White. Alfred A Knopf. Canada. 2016.

Micah White says he was one of those who thought up the idea of occupying Wall Street in September 2011. His proposed aim for this was to demand that Big Money be taken out of American politics, but the Occupiers’ demands soon went beyond this. According to him, he and others really believed that the occupation could topple Wall Street in the same way that demonstrations and occupations earlier in the year had toppled dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. This book is his explanation of why this didn’t happen, why it was never likely to, and why capitalism is not going to be overthrown in this way. Hence ‘the end of protest’, or at least of this kind of protest with this aim.

We could have told him that minority direct action of this sort is not the way to overthrow capitalism – as he himself points out, the state has the power and the majority-backed (even if manipulated) legitimacy to deal with such protests – but it is good to see someone who once believed this to be the way come to realise that it isn’t.

So what is he now advocating? On the surface, something surprisingly similar to how we have envisaged revolution. He calls for a ‘leaderless world revolution’ in which, among other things, a ‘World Party’ will win political power in one country ‘sparking an electoral insurrection in one place after another’, meaning ‘the electoral social movement would hop around the world from victory to victory’. The people, he says, ‘must capture legislative and executive control constitutionally and legitimately’ because this will assure mainstream support for the revolution. He compares his change of mind to Engels changing his about barricades and also advocating elections in place of an out-dated tactic.

That’s as far as it goes as White envisages that the ‘electoral social movement’ should start by aiming to win control of ‘sparsely populated towns and cities’, declaring them liberated and running them without leaders. He himself is practising what he preaches, standing for mayor of Nehalem (population 291) in this month’s US elections (we can report next month how he fared). He does not say on what platform he thinks elections should be contested. Since he still believes that a conscious minority can express ‘the people’s will’ independently of what a majority of people at one time might think or want, it could well be something other than a full revolutionary programme, just democratic reforms.

He has also gone mystical. At college he provocatively formed an atheist society but he now looks to divine or supernatural intervention to play a part in the revolution. This could lead to his other views not being taken seriously.

Adam Buick

Election result

In our review of Micah White’s book The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution we said we would say how he did in his bid to become mayor of Nehalem in rural Oregon in the election there in November. He got 36 votes (20%). The election was won by his Republican Party rival with 138 votes)

Changing climate (2016)

Book Review from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic’. By Peter Wadhams. Penguin Books, 2016.

Peter Wadhams is a professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge and former director of its Scott Polar Research Institute. Over 47 years as a polar researcher he has been on many expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic.

His book straddles three literary genres. Part of it is a scientific exposition of the properties and structure of ice and how it forms under various conditions (quite differently in the Antarctic from in the Arctic, for instance). Other passages are a prose poem on the beauty of icy landscapes that only a few hundred people have ever seen. Above all, it is a warning of the gathering speed and momentum of climate change, culminating in a ‘call to arms.’

The author explains all the positive feedbacks that are accelerating global heating. The most alarming new development, he argues, is the release of methane – a very powerful greenhouse gas – from shallow Arctic seas whose warming is starting to melt long-frozen seabed sediments. In his opinion, the seriousness of the situation is understated not only by those who deny the reality of human-made climate change but also by many of his fellow specialists in the field, such as climate modellers who stubbornly stick to the predictions generated by their models even when the latter conflict with recent field observations.

Although most of the book focuses on the Arctic, there is a very valuable chapter on the Antarctic. The Antarctic is rather isolated from the rest of the planet in geographical and meteorological terms, although if global heating continues it will eventually suffer the same fate as the Arctic.

Professor Wadhams takes the view that it is now too late to avert disaster without resort to geoengineering – that is, ‘engineering’ the earth in ways that will reduce incoming solar radiation, increase the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth’s surface or remove greenhouse gases from the air. (For more on geoengineering, see Pathfinders in the September 2010 and January 2011 issues of the Socialist Standard.)

The author’s clear scientific explanations contrast with rather muddled treatment of economic and political matters. But credit where credit is due: there is one paragraph in Chapter 13 where he does penetrate to the core of the problem facing our species:

  ‘The world’s rickety financial structure still requires perpetual growth in order to retain stability … Within the present capitalist system, as practiced by everyone including China, there is no way that a sustainable equilibrium society can be tolerated. Everyone knows that exponential growth … cannot continue and will lead only to disaster, yet every finance minister seeks to encourage economic growth …’

Unfortunately, this is a flash in the pan. Wadhams does not develop this insight or explore its implications. Instead he reverts to blaming the situation on superficial factors like the greed that makes people buy SUVs and the fact that most political leaders have no scientific training (a noted exception being Margaret Thatcher, with whom Wadhams was in direct contact).

It is all very well to call for ‘colossal programs on an international scale’ – but there is no real world community to consider and undertake such programs. Who can imagine the rival capitalist powers pooling their efforts to bring back the Arctic ice? The same powers that right now are ‘scrambling for the Arctic’ – salivating over the profit-making opportunities opened up by the retreat of the ice and manoeuvring to control the region’s newly accessible resources (see ‘Scramble for the Arctic,’ Material World, September 2007)?

The crucial problem is not how to devise programmes to save our planet but how to create the world community.

Stefan

Proper Gander: Soap Gets In Your Eyes (2016)

The Proper Gander Column from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you’re watching EastEnders and your mind starts to wander away from its latest round of tragedies, you start noticing the odd little conventions of soap operas. Why do characters in soaps never sit down to watch soap operas, for example? How do they find the time to go to the pub several times a day? Why do so few families have washing machines and instead air their dirty linen in the launderette? Why does every conversation end with one person looking pensively into the distance?

Since it began in 1985, EastEnders has clocked up over 5,300 episodes, and attracts audiences of around ten million viewers when there’s a big shock storyline. It’s more dour than rivals Coronation Street and Emmerdale usually are, and right from its inception was intended to reflect everyday issues facing Londoners.

So does EastEnders really represent ‘working class life’? We rarely see characters at work, except when they’re behind a bar or a shop counter and chatting. Having a job would get in the way of their complicated, convoluted relationships. Issues like debt, loss of employment etc are frequent sources of struggle, but the characters never talk about politics. Phil and Grant Mitchell didn’t have a discussion about which way they would vote in the EU referendum, for example. In fact, the referendum wasn’t even mentioned. Albert Square doesn’t get affected by real-world concerns like elections, wars and The Great British Bake Off.

But do we expect soap operas to be realistic, and mirror life within the sound of Bow bells? If Albert Square was a real place, no-one would want to live there, given the number of murders and disasters which happen, especially every Christmas. Thankfully, real life tends to be more humdrum, and if EastEnders really was realistic, hardly anyone would bother tuning in.

Or should we say that soaps are realistic to the extent that the characters behave authentically in an unrealistically constant succession of calamities and other life-changing events? As writer Steve Neale described, soap storylines are shaped by coincidences, chance meetings, revelations and last-minute rescues, far more than real lives are. Recently, EastEnders’ characters have faced alcohol addiction, miscarriage, homophobia, murder and redundancy, among other issues. The producers often consult with specialists about how the most emotive subjects should be approached, partly to shape our perceptions of them. A storyline about domestic abuse, for instance, would be carefully planned to raise awareness among viewers of the hurt and damage it causes and the support available. Soap operas therefore have some value and influence in highlighting social issues, even if they don’t relate them to a wider social context. This means that soap characters don’t necessarily behave in ‘realistic’ ways, but in ways which reflect what the programme-makers want to say. All drama is, by definition, contrived and even something improvised can’t reflect the ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty of real life. So it’s too much to expect soap operas to copy real life.

We gawp at soaps partly for schadenfreude – watching the characters live through each misery. When a prominent character is about to get killed off, this is often ghoulishly advertised with trailers and on TV guide magazine covers. But we wouldn’t keep tuning in if we didn’t find the characters engaging. Characters in soap operas are, to some extent, vicarious friends and families. We can snoop on their dodgy deals, affairs, lies and rows, because their lives tend to be more eventful than our own. Soaps also give us a vicarious sense of community. How many of us know as many of our neighbours as the residents of Albert Square do? Or in other words, how many of us know Dot Branning or Ian Beale better than we know some of our neighbours or colleagues?

Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why they’re called ‘soap operas’, it’s because these dramas originally tended to be sponsored by soap manufacturers. This term is appropriate, given that the characters and settings are set in a soapy bubble, away from everyday life.

Mike Foster

Marxism: Inclusive or Reductive? (2016)

From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Upon reading Karl Marx’s Capital for the first time many are surprised by its inclusive nature. Instead of the anticipated focus on economics the reader finds themselves immersed in philosophy, history and literature together with many other references. This is not only a reflection of the author’s well-known reputation as a polymath but it also reminds us that all disciplines are dependent, to a lesser or greater degree, on each other. But how can we reconcile this with the received notion of Marxism as a reductive political theory; that in the final analysis all social relations are dependent on the mode of production?

This may well be one of the reasons that Karl himself was sure that he was not a Marxist. But if a philosopher or historian was to exhaustively give you an account of a social phenomenon without reference to the relevant contemporary economic structure (as some still attempt to do) many of us would feel it to be incomplete at best and misleading at worst. This is primarily what socialists mean when we say we’re Marxists or that we’re using a Marxist analysis; the attempt to see through prevailing ideology and expose the underlying economic relationships that create such intellectual superstructures. This seemingly reductive technique has alienated many intellectuals who like to defend their own sectarian esoteric disciplines by reference to the intellectual division of labour. They reject any attempt to suggest that the multiplicity of theories and philosophies can have a common origin. So is there a contradiction inherent within Marxism between inclusiveness and reductionism?  

When a Marxist speaks of ideology they mean something much more extensive than merely a set of explicit ideas. We refer to the ‘normalisation’ of political and moral values. For instance most people accept the principal of production for profit as a ‘normal’ relationship between people engaged in industry. Socialists point to the ‘abnormality’ of a relationship based on the exploitation of one human by another. Because it has become an unquestioned relationship most economists fail to see its underlying exploitative nature. Without the benefit of a Marxist perspective they can never fully understand economics. Some propagandists are aware of this and for them the infamous phrase of Dr Goebbels that: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it’ seems as true as it ever was. This is not to say that all studies in economics since Marx have been pointless but they are incomplete without his contributions.

Another feature of the relationship of exploitation within capitalism is called alienation. This occurs because of the lack of control the individual feels during their productive life. The great joy of creative production is replaced by a monotonous set of increasing targets and goals presided over by a ‘boss’ who makes the decisions in the name of profit. The resulting depression and emotional exhaustion will be presented to a doctor who will fail to see or fail to act on the basic underlying inhuman relationships that create such alienation. So again, in the absence of a Marxist analysis psychology and medicine must inevitably fail the individual in terms of their mental and physical health.

We can see that in the absence of a penetrating political analysis both the disciplines of economics and psychology are impotent. We can make a similar case for history, philosophy, sociology etc. (probably all of the ‘humanities’ within which, this author at least, includes the ‘social sciences’). Having made the case that many disciplines are incomplete without the insights available via the Marxist perspective, can we also say that Marxism itself would be weakened without the inclusion of at least some of the discoveries made by these other disciplines?

Could it be that rather than providing alternative explanations for social development they are, in fact, complementary parts of the same whole – at least potentially, once they’re stripped of ideological prejudice. The intellectual division of labour has served to disguise the real focus of study. This division, in its turn, serves the ideological purpose of preventing access to the truth. It is not that Marxism is reductive but that philosophy, economics, psychology, history, anthropology etc. are unaware that their goal is the same as Marxism – the understanding of, and the liberation from, the causes of human suffering. Many of humanity’s intellectual pursuits have this political nature and Marxism represents the first structural understanding of this simple fact. Seen in this light the intellectual sectarianism and inter-discipline competition we perceive today is utterly absurd.

This may seem to most people to be an unduly idealistic view of the motivation for intellectual endeavour but Marxists reject the idea that the belief in human potential is rooted in delusional ideals. We are well aware that many are motivated by greed, status and sometimes by pure curiosity alone but this is rarely the whole story of those who make the significant discoveries. To look at it another way, as said earlier, it is apparent that all disciplines are dependent on each other. How could it be otherwise since global human culture represents an integrated whole? Any attempt to compartmentalise knowledge entirely must inevitably end with error and confusion.

Marx may well have rejected the label ‘Marxism’ for the reasons outlined above. It seemed absurd to him that the interdisciplinary study of human development should be compartmentalised into a sectarian ideology bearing his name. We only use the phrase today to emphasise the contrast it represents to contemporary approaches in the study of politics. It is one of the great ironies of history that through the political ignorance of many of those who have proclaimed his name during moments of political turmoil it has become identified with absolutism and dogmatic reductionism. 

Wez

Where is Everybody? (2016)

From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you go out into the country at night, you might find a spot far enough away from our glaring towns and cities to allow you to see the apparently innumerable twinkling points of light which remind us that our sun is only a minor star in a minor star system. Scientists tell us that even in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, there must be at least a hundred billion stars. The Milky Way is just a small and unimportant galaxy. Altogether, the astronomers say, there are probably something like ten trillion galaxies in the universe. That is, in the universe which we are able to observe; there may be a lot more galaxies out beyond the edge of our knowledge. To write out the number of stars in the observable universe you would need a one, followed by twenty-four noughts – that is, a million million million million stars. And very many of those stars are now believed to have habitable planets circling round them. So some, in fact a vast number of those planets might have developed intelligent life. Scientists have been trying for years to pick up any signals from alien civilizations, but have drawn a complete blank.

This situation has puzzled scientists for a long time, and as long ago as the 1950s the physicist Enrico Fermi demanded – where is everybody? In such a fantastically enormous universe, it’s just not possible that we should be alone. Now two physics professors, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, have written a new book, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos, which offers an explanation. When they get to a certain point of development, the authors write, all civilizations probably produce both extraordinarily powerful weapons, and also destructive greenhouse gases. But (so the theory goes) they do not produce a political or social system which can handle these things. And so, either by ruining their own atmosphere by pollution from industry and transport, or by engaging in mutually destructive warfare, each civilisation destroys itself. So that’s why we on the Earth, in defiance of all rational expectation, are on our own. All other developing civilisations either have not got to the point of trying to communicate, or have destroyed themselves.

 According to the Daily Mail (9 October) Professor Cox said:

 ‘One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that. It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.’

Does it sound familiar? It would not need much imagination to see our planet going the same way. We should at least ask ourselves whether the devastating power which the human race now possesses is already beyond the control of humanity’s poor efforts at statesmanship. The countries which have already had their industrial revolution are trying to limit, sometimes not very successfully, their pollution of the atmosphere; countries which are now going through an industrial revolution feel they should be allowed to emit the same amount of pollution that other countries did years ago. As for the other way in which these authors think all other civilizations have probably killed themselves, the world has potentially reached that stage as well. As each capitalist state fights to preserve its territory, its trade, its position in the world, each armed with hydrogen bombs and other fearsome weapons, it is unfortunately quite possible that some hot-headed maniac (and there are plenty of those who have manoeuvred themselves into power in various countries round the world – can you imagine what a ‘President Trump’ might decide to do?) could plunge us all into nuclear hostilities which could destroy or cripple the entire human race. So we desperately need ‘global collaborative solutions’ and ‘political expertise’ to avoid disaster. If you look at it this way, socialism – which would end the pollution of our atmosphere, and also extinguish the competitive hostility which capitalism inevitably entails – is not only a desirable alternative, but the only one.

Alwyn Edgar

Ditch These Ugly Gargoyles (2016)

From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing, the presidential campaign of Donald Trump is veering between tragedy and farce. His contempt for women, Mexicans, Muslims and all those outside his own white, male, billionaire peer group is twisting defiantly into an ugly parody, more grotesque than any fiction. Yet his screaming unelectability still carries tens of millions of Americans feeling sufficient affinity with his prejudices to continue supporting him. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, whose own hideous record of militarism and single-minded dedication to supporting the parasites of Wall Street in their exploitation of the 99 percent of the population who are excluded from their club might otherwise have been spotlighted, is allowed to pose alongside Trump as the humane alternative.

Have you ever heard any voter saying, in any election, in any country ever, what a hard time they were having choosing between the candidates because they were all so amazing, appealing and attractive in what their programmes and policies offered? Of course not. The uneasy and uncomfortable feeling which pervades much of the population prior to an election stems from just the opposite of that. Many people hesitate over which of the options to vote for, as they are struggling to select the ‘lesser evil’. This is because virtually all political candidates, world-wide, in all elections, are currently standing on a programme which is simply one or other variant of the ridiculous social system we already have. The ‘acceptable’ limits for change on offer have been pre-conditioned into a population which has absorbed the assumption that the fundamentals of current society are ultimately both normal and unchangeable.

It has become fashionable recently for social trends to be described on a per-second or per-day basis. A certain type of crime is recorded on average ‘once every two days’. A famous supermarket sells a Christmas hamper ‘once every three seconds’. But the most shocking and important revelation of this kind is rarely discussed. Across the world today, on average, a child dies of starvation roughly once every second. Even the most conservative of economists and agricultural experts have long conceded that the natural resources of the planet make that fact totally unnecessary. It is something caused one hundred percent by social, not natural causes. Even in the case of specific localised famines or natural disasters, it is purely a social and political barrier which prevents huge quantities of suitable food being simply flown in within the hour.

That barrier to bringing resources to where they are needed, whether houses for poorly housed Londoners, or food to starving children in less developed parts of the world, or life-saving operations to people currently forced to stare at their calendars and wonder if their place on the long waiting-list will arrive before they die anyway, that barrier is the same in all cases. It is that we currently live under a social regime in which all of the key social resources are owned, controlled and monopolised by a tiny minority of the population. Those multi-millionaire investors, or fund controllers, or state bureaucrats who are in that position of power over the world’s wealth, are caught in a battle with each other for expansion which creates an imperative that, whatever their wishes, they are compelled to increase their profits at all times regardless of the cost to human life.

The social machinery, of which this description is merely a cursory sketch, has evolved through the past several hundred years of global human history. However, social change and evolution has never and will never stand still. Those millions of people who find it hard to see any appeal in any of the political candidates on offer are in fact feeling a deep distaste for the socially insane system which all of those politicians, of every banner, represent and embody. Those millions of people who are not happy with this current social regime are surely the seed of huge social change, which may be unfolding in the coming months and years. It is in our very nature as human beings to be social, to use complex co-operation to solve our problems and meet our needs. John Donne wrote that ‘no man is an island’ in the 17th century and it is so much more evident today, when one product we enjoy has often been manufactured with components from several different continents and has involved input from any number of our fellow humans in its conception, design and delivery.

In the changes to come, those who have recognised this key significance of that conflict between the vast and relentlessly pursued profits of the one percent (or less) and the needs of the rest of us, can accelerate the arrival of a society which would meet the needs of all. The 99 percent whose lives are indirectly devoted to serving those investors and providing their riches whilst we struggle with various degrees of relative poverty, have a great weapon. Awareness, consciousness, self-education, mutual education in the realities of the current state of society can only lead to a final withdrawal of our consent to this social insanity. The political charade of which Trump versus Clinton was just the latest circus side-show masks the fact that the power of the few ultimately rests entirely on the acquiescence and support of the many. Their system noisily creaks towards Armageddon, with its rapidly worsening environmental crisis, of which climate change is a manifestation, its terrifying wars born of the power and profit struggles between rival power blocs, and its prosaic but tragic suffering of a million forms of poverty. Our only hope is to work relentlessly to build a movement which withdraws its support for that system in its entirety, which ceases to vote for any of its political figurehead gargoyles, and instead constructs a democratic political movement devoted to dispossessing that minority and using the world’s resources to meet the world’s needs.

Clifford Slapper

Material World: The US Voting System – Not So Democratic (2016)

The Material World Column from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who founded the United States and drafted its Constitution did not trust the vast majority of its citizens to vote. They left voting questions up to the states and established the Electoral College – rather than a majority vote of the people – to elect the president and vice president. It is government of the people, certainly, but not government bythe people and definitely not for the people.

In reality, there is not one election, but 51 separate elections that are held simultaneously in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each state – not the federal government – sets its own voting hours, lays down the rules for registration and early voting, and decides what sort of voting machines and ballot forms it should use. And each state, not the federal government, decides what ID a voter must produce before casting a ballot.

For the presidency of the most powerful state in the world it is a choice of Clinton or Trump, Tweedledum or Tweedledummer. Not much of a choice.  However, there will be other parties’ candidates standing. Vying to be the main third party are the Green Party with Jill Stein, or the Libertarian Party and Gary Johnson but there will also be a plethora of other independent and ‘write-in’ candidates. There is the Constitution Party, then the Socialist Workers Party’s Alyson Kennedy, Party of Socialism and Liberation’s Gloria LaRiva, America’s Party/American Independent Party, Peace and Freedom Party, Prohibition Party, Reform Party USA, Socialist Party USA, Socialist Equality Party, Workers World Party, and the Veterans Party of America. Under state laws, political parties must ‘qualify’ for their candidates to be listed on the ballots and counted. The two major parties are qualified in every state but in this election both the Greens and the Libertarians have managed to get on the ballot more than ever before.

Many states have write-in laws concerning candidates where with varying rules the electorate can nominate their own candidate and, in theory, such write-in candidates can win the presidency. If the establishment refuses to work for the will of the people, the people may have to force their hand and maybe reach the point in history where the write-in vote can move the political process forward. Voting for a write-in contender is much more complicated than scribbling whatever name you please on the dotted line at the bottom of the ballot. Thirty-five states require that a write-in candidate must submit some form of affidavit and, sometimes, a filing fee at least one month before the election. 43 of the 50 states allow write-in candidates for president, but this starts the potential write-in candidate at a disadvantage. Assuming that hurdle can be cleared, the Electoral College is the problem. The write-in candidate would have to scramble to get slates of electors ready for all of the 43 states, so that those electors can vote for the write-in candidate when the Electoral College meets in December. If the write-in candidate did happen to win the popular vote, there would be a problem. When people vote, they vote for electors, and not for the presidential candidates. 43 states, representing 494 electoral votes.  While a president has never been elected by write-in, at least one current United States Senator has been.

When it comes to elections where there are no socialists standing socialists urge fellow-workers to learn more about capitalism and exploitation.  And because we think that, in future, the election system could be used in a constructive way we exercise our right to vote. We cast a write-in vote by writing “SOCIALISM” or “WORLD SOCIALISM” across the ballot paper. What’s the alternative? To not vote at all? More and more people are doing this, and it’s not as bad as voting for one or other of the parties that stand for keeping capitalism going. But it’s a bit of a cop-out. The anarchists like it, because they don’t believe in electoral political action. We don’t agree with their view. Our ancestors were right to struggle for the vote. The fact that up to now it hasn’t been used properly is no reason for rejecting it as ineffectual.

We say in this 2016 US presidential election, the working class should write-in for ‘WORLD SOCIALISM’.

ALJO

How to Oppose Religion (2016)

From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The christian and the socialist put two radically different messages to workers. One is that this life ‘down here’ is only important as a preparation for the next life after death which, depending on whether or not you adhered to the precepts of Christianity, would either be eternal bliss or eternal hell-fire. The other is that this was the only life we are going to have and that workers should therefore concentrate on making it the best possible; which can only, be lastingly done on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living. This – socialism –  is what workers should be striving for rather than preparing themselves for some non-existent future life.

There are two ways of opposing religion. One is to refute it as untrue, to show that there are no rational grounds, because there is no convincing evidence, for believing either in the persistence of life after death or in the existence of supernatural beings. This is the approach of the secularists and freethinkers and of course what they say is true, but this leaves the impression that religion is merely an erroneous belief. It leads to concentrating on refuting religious beliefs as such in a purely ideological battle while leaving everything else, including class society and capitalist relations of production, unchanged.

The second way to oppose religion is to explain its origins, development and role in materialist terms as an ideological product of the changing material economic and social conditions under which people have lived. This approach reveals religion to be a reflection of people’s lack of control over the conditions governing the production of their material means of survival and that it survives precisely because people lack this control.

On this analysis, opposition to religion cannot be separated from opposition to the  economic and social conditions that give rise to it. Religion won’t disappear simply because secularists and freethinkers, or for that matter socialists, refute it as untrue. It will only disappear when people are in a position to control the production of their means of life. This requires the end of the class ownership of the means of production and the end of production for the market with a view to profit and their replacement  by common ownership and production directly and exclusively for use.

In other words, religion cannot disappear until the conditions of which it is an ideological reflection disappear. Criticism of religion leads, or ought logically to lead, to criticism of society. As Marx put it in the famous passage in the Introduction to his 1844 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Religion is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to  give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.”

Letters: A Workers’ Declaration (2016)

Letters to the Editors from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Workers’ Declaration

Dear Editors

I hope one day there is a workers’ declaration that goes something like this: We the workers of the world declare all the raw-materials of Earth, the means of production and distribution, the means to a good life, to be ours.

The world is no longer owned by the non-producing class. The Earth no longer belongs to the one percent. Today the world belongs to all the human race. The fruits of the labours we the producers of goods produce are ours.

We the workers understand that capitalism doesn’t work for us. And all the reforms in the world are not going to make it work for us.

We the producing class, the workers of the world, the 99 percent, understand a World Without Money is the system that is best for us. And for all the animals, the oceans, the atmosphere, the earth.

We are now the owners of planet Earth. We are the masters of this world.

So much of our labour yesterday was wasted. We put a stop to that nonsense—in a non violent, peaceful, radical, intelligent way. We will never again waste our raw-materials. No more will we waste our labour, our lives, our time, our genius, our industry, our potential, our love.

In everything we produce for ourselves we will produce nothing but what our best endeavours can produce. Everyone of us will have the means to enjoy a good life.

We the workers of the world with the right ideas have conquered the capitalist system.

We have dismantled and abolished capitalism. And have established a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the best interest of the human race.

We the workers of the world build every building. Lay every railway track. Bake every pie. This world is ours by right. Because we make it.

We the workers of the world hereby declare that from this day forth our labour will turn the raw materials of Earth into the things we need and want for a civilized system of society. For all of us to enjoy. And our children to enjoy. And their children. And their children. And their children. Until Earth’s raw-materials—which belong to humankind—can sustain humankind no more. And we live on Earth no more.

Until that day comes, we, the workers of the world will make Earth if not paradise then as near as makes no difference.

Lee Heath, 

Manchester.

More Brexit

Dear Editors

Is your socialist idea different from that horrible globalisation Britain has courageously escaped from – can you imagine thousands and thousands of Brits turning up in, say, Poland, wanting jobs, housing, schooling, medical care, etc? Don’t you think they would say, how big do you think this country is . . ? You could fit Britain into one US State.

Have you read America Rules by Tom Hana? Then let me know if you think the EU has been good for any of the citizens of the 28 member states. I said citizens, not politicians. They are a different species.

Ireland is a member, and this numpty lot have refused a tax refund! I’d still like to know how the EU can make Ireland charge its citizens for water when they levied it on the car tax in 2003. They must not have told the EU.

I think a good percentage of Out voters did so instinctively. They knew it wasn’t fair.

Mrs L. McKenna, 

Co Donegal, Eire.

Reply

First of all, let’s be clear. The Socialist Party is opposed to all forms of capitalism whether it is organised according to a free enterprise or state capitalist model, whether it is nationally or globally structured or whether it is administered by left wing or right wing governments. But socialism will be a global society (of course with as much local devolution as people want) where people will be free to move from one part of the planet to another. This is clearly incompatible with capitalism but will be possible under socialism.

We have not read the book you mention although we tried to search for it on the internet. Whether the EU has been good for the citizens of the member states is obviously a matter of opinion. Europhiles in each country can point to many positives, Eurosceptics can do the opposite. It’s like having an argument as to which of Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in Ireland or the Conservative or Labour parties in Britain is better. In that sense it’s a political debate within capitalism and while we understand the importance such issues have to some people, we don’t adjudicate on these matters. The issues at stake – if they are really issues at all – are tiny.

Taxation is a contentious issue in most countries; what is taxed and who is taxed and who gets to decide these things and who enforces taxation. In many countries there is anger about the very low effective taxation rate levied on multinational companies who can use both their economic clout and employ legal trickery to get away with derisory levels of payments. Also, as in the case of water charges in Ireland, nobody likes fresh taxation especially on such a basic human resource such as drinkable water. However, most of these controversies miss the point about the fundamental nature of taxation within capitalism; that ultimately it is a charge on capital, and some sections of the owners of capital (the capitalist class) are keen to transfer the burden to other sections.

Only when we collectively realize that what are presented as contentious issues such as immigration, taxation, etc. are not the real defining issues of our lives, can we plan a much better society. 

Editorial Committee.