Poverty or Misery? (1957)

From the January 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his book Contemporary Capitalism, Mr. Strachey echoes Bernstein in asserting that Marx held that the economic laws of Capitalism are such as to not only keep the standard of living of the working class down to a bare subsistence level but owing to the downward pressure which these “laws” exert, force this subsistence level even lower. This leads Marx to conclude, says Mr. Strachey again echoing Bernstein, that vast overproduction, leading to a final economic collapse and violent revolution would inevitably follow. Like Bernstein Mr. Strachey never offers to really explain what these laws are, nor how they are supposed to operate.

Mr. Strachey hangs his misrepresentation of Marx on the slender thread of two quotations of a few lines and isolated from the context in which they occur. The first is from the Communist Manifesto. It reads: “The modern labourer . . . instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.”

But the Manifesto was largely a propagandist pamphlet written in highly generalised and scathing language, hardly the place a cull a few lines from as crucial proof of what Mr. Strachey deems the heart of Marxism, i.e., ever worsening poverty for the mass and ultimate economic collapse. Surely on “so vital a matter” Mr. Strachey had the whole of Marx’s detailed analysis from which to chose but he would not have found there what he so obviously wanted to find.

Actually what Marx and Engels were pointing out in the last but one paragraph in section one of the Manifesto from which Mr. Strachey quotes was that the industrial progress of Capitalism not only places the worker in economic jeopardy but one of its consequences is to deprive him of a livelihood and so compel him to live beneath the conditions of existence of his own class and as they add “instead of feeding the bourgeoisie he has to be fed by them.”

According to Mr. Strachey’s interpretation of this, Marx envisaged the end product of Capitalist development as the conversion of the mass of producers of surplus value, into idle consumers of surplus products that is if in such a state of affairs there was anything left to consume. Mr. Strachey cannot of course point to anything in Marx’s economic analysis of Capitalism which remotely suggests such a conclusion.

Marx in fact never speaks of a law of absolute poverty, nor does he make the growth of poverty a necessary outcome of Capitalist development. For Marx poverty is not something absolute and physical but something relative and social. That Marx left no room for doubt on this matter is seen in a work written incidentally before the Manifesto, Wage Labour and Capital. On (p 33) he states:

  “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small it satisfies all social requirements. But let there arise next to the little house, a palace and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position to maintain or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilisation, if the neighbouring palace rises in equal or greater measure the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.”

For Marx the social conditions of one class cannot be determined except by reference to some other class or classes. Thus he declares, “our wants and pleasures are measured in relation to society, not in the objects which serve their gratification.” In answer to the assertions in Mr. Strachey’s book (p. 101) that Marx held that Capitalism condemns the working class to a perpetual lowering of wages, Marx replies on (p. 33) in Wage Labour and Capital, by stating, that a rapid growth of productive capital involves an appreciable rise in wages. That he does not consider poverty an essential condition for Socialism is made quite clear on p. 39 of the same pamphlet when he declares, “the most rapid growth of capital however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the Capitalist.”

To Mr. Strachey’s unwarrantable assertion that Marx believed in an iron or fixed law of wages, Marx in the work, Value, Price and Profit, says, “the value of labour (power) itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the value of all other commodities to remain the same.”

On pages 87 and 88 of the same work, Marx, treating of the struggle between Capitalists and workers over the division of social wealth, states, although we can determine the minimum of wages i.e. the essentials necessary to maintain the worker physically, we cannot fix their maximum. The struggle between employers seeking to gain the greatest possible profit and workers striving for the highest possible wages, resolves itself, says Marx, “into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.”

To Mr. Strachey’s assertion that Marx held that workers’ wages represent bare subsistence, or to put alternatively are the cost of mere replacement of physical energies used up in the productive process, Mr. Strachey, if he cares to read Capital (p. 631), will find Marx stating the working class “can extend the circle of their enjoyments, can make some additions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc., and can lay by small reserve funds of money. But just as little do better clothes, food and a larger peculium do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage worker.”

Marx then made it crystal clear that the value of labour-power is determined by two elements; one merely physical and the other he calls, historical and moral. By the latter he meant that in different periods and in different countries—even in different localities, there is a traditional standard of life which workers feel is indispensable to their existence. Hence any attempt to lower it will provoke the strongest resistance. Thus, when workers combine in trade unions to maintain or increase wages, they are not fighting hopelessly against some iron law of wages, which must assert itself in the long run but are expressing the historical and moral element involved in the value of labour-power and so helping “to mould the traditional standards of the future.” Marx was aware of the tendency of wages to rise under the impact of capital accumulation. He certainly never believed, however, that wage increases would absorb the whole of profits, never reach a point “where the system itself is threatened.” (Capital, p. 632).

On the other hand, said Marx, there are tendencies in Capitalism which set up a strong counter resistance to rising wages. These tendencies include, the substitution of mechanical power for labour power, the recurring crises of the system and to a lesser degree the export of capital to places where cheaper sources of labour power are available. Thus increased unemployment will lead to increased competition for jobs and downward pressures on existing wage levels. While Marx believed that trade unions could have a retarding effect on these tendencies, he did not believe they could reverse their direction. (Value, Price and Profit, p. 93).

When Marx speaks in the same pamphlet (p. 92) of the general tendency in Capitalism to sink rather than raise wages it can be seen from the foregoing that such a tendency is a marked feature of Capitalism and inseparable from a wages system.

Marx, however, in spite of Mr. Strachey’s profound misunderstanding on the matter, never equates these tendencies to the totality of Capitalist social relations. Marx true to his own historic standpoint, reveals the powerful refracting effects on these tendencies by the social factor of the class struggle. For Marx there are no laws of motion of Capitalist society existing in isolation, there are only laws of motion as modified by human beings. Mr. Strachey not understanding this, does not understand the historical method of Marx.

Which brings us to Mr. Strachey’s other quotation, making a grand total of two. This quotation is from the Eden and Cedar Paul translation of Capital. Because Mr. Strachey has made his central point an assertion that Marx believed in some process of a growth of absolute poverty, he has good reasons for using this particular translation rather than the fourth German edition, translated by Samuel Moore and edited by Frederick Engels. In this last-named edition the quotation given by Mr. Strachey is: “Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, slavery, degradation, exploitation . . .” (Capital, p. 789 Swan Sonnenchein edition). In the Eden and Cedar Paul translation the word “misery” is altered to poverty. One might also point out that in this same edition, several words are arbitrarily and erroneously changed. The word misery it might also be mentioned is used in the Kerr edition and in the Allen and Unwin edition translated by Dona Torr. This edition was highly praised by Mr. Strachey himself. Also in Value, Price and Profit (p. 93) Marx speaks of the miseries imposed by Capitalism not the poverty, etc.

It may also be noted that the quotation given by Mr. Strachey is merely the briefest of passing references on the subject of Marx. One wonders why Mr. Strachey didn’t quote from Capital (p. 661, Swan Sonnenchein edition) where Marx clearly and explicitly states what he means by misery. But then Mr. Strachey would not have been able to prove what he wanted to prove.

Dealing with the effects of capital accumulation on the working class, Marx states:

  “They mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of the appendage of a machines destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hateful toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power. … It follows therefore in proportion as capital accumulates the lot of labourer, be his wages high or low, must grow worse. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, accumulation of misery, agony, toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.” (Italics ours.)

Marx then does not relate misery to the sum of wages a worker gets but to the social conditions of his existence. Engels in a letter to Bebel (March 1875) rebukes those people who falsify Marx by stating he believed in an iron law of wages. Engels also says that “Marx showed in Capital that the laws regulating wages are very complicated . . . they are in no sense iron but very elastic.”

Mr. Strachey did not always accept the view that Marx equated the value of labour power with a bare subsistence level, or the mere physical replacement of working energies. In his book, The Nature of Capitalist Crisis (p. 197) he associated himself with the following: “the value of labour-power is the sum of commodities, necessary to keep the worker in health and strength and enable him to keep his children in equal health and strength and technical ability.” Neither are we given the slightest hint in that work of one of the central assertions which Mr. Strachey makes in his latest book which is that Marx held that such would be the level of poverty of the workers that they would be unable to efficiently perform their working tasks.

Must we conclude that when Mr. Strachey was a “Marxist” he did not really understand Marxism and only understands it now he isn’t? Or could it be truly said that he has never really understood Marxism at any time?

Ted Wilmott

(In the next issue we shall deal with Mr. Strachey’s fantastic assertion that Marx was at bottom a Malthusian)

The Labour Party and the Suez Canal (1957)

From the January 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

In view of the attitude taken up by the Labour Party in the Suez dispute it is worthwhile casting the mind back to the attitude of Labour Governments in 1924 and 1929 on this matter. 

The Labour Magazine for August, 1929, under the heading “Labour and Egypt,” contains the following quotation from a dispatch sent by Ramsay McDonald in 1924, as Labour Foreign Secretary:

 “No British Government in the light of these experiences (meaning the war) can divest itself wholly even in favour of an ally, of its interest in guarding such a vital link in British negotiations (meaning, of course, the Suez Canal). Such a security must be a feature of any agreement come to between the two Governments, and I see no reason why accommodation is impossible, given goodwill. The effective co-operation of Great Britain and Egypt in protecting these negotiations, might, in my view, have been ensured by a treaty of close alliance. The presence of a British force in Egypt provided for by such a treaty, freely entered into by both parties on an equal footing, would in no way be incompatible with Egyptian independence. Whilst it would be an indication of the special close and intimate relations between the two countries, and their determination to co-operate in a matter of vital concern to both. It is not the wish of His Majesty’s Government that the force should in any way interfere with the functions of the Egyptian Government or encroach upon Egyptian sovereignty, and I emphatically said so.” (Pages 176-177.)

It will be noticed that this outlook is much the same as that put forward by the present Tory Government. However, negotiations fell through but the problem came up again during Labour’s 1929-1930 period of office. The Labour Magazine for September, 1929, contains the proposals made to Egypt by Henderson, the Labour Foreign Minister. Here is an extract from these proposals:

  “An undertaking on the part of Egypt that if she requires military instructors these shall be British; when the British military forces now in Egypt are removed and certain British forces are permitted by Egypt to be maintained on Egyptian territory in the vicinity of the Suez Canal for the protection of that waterway, the presence of these forces is not to prejudice in any way the sovereign rights of Egypt; an undertaking that the Egyptian Government will, as a rule, when engaging the services of foreign officials, engage British subjects” (page 211)

The summary of the proposals concludes with the following:

 “modification of any treaty based on the proposals to be admissible only after the treaty has been in force for a period of 25 years.”

The article adds that Mr. Henderson said that these proposals are “the extreme limit to which the Government is prepared to go.”

Thus the Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929 wanted British forces to remain on Egyptian territory to safeguard the Suez Canal, and the 1929 treaty was to secure that this was so for the following 25 years—and it also included only British military instructors and British officials! What are the “sovereign rights” of a country in the eyes of Imperialists?

The November, 1929 issue of the Labour Magazine had an article on “The Labour Government’s offer to Egypt” containing a typical piece of Imperialist hypocrisy:

  “Later, in the detailed working out of the proposals, we find that, while the occupation of Egypt is to end, the occupation of the banks of the Suez Canal is to continue. The Canal is indisputably Egyptian territory In fact, however, Egypt sees little, and thinks, less of it The Canal is in Egypt, but not of Egypt. The Egyptian life in the main goes on unheeding of the vast international traffic that traverses the waterway from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The grip of a country’s capital by foreign troops is one thing; the policing of a vastly important international highway is quite another. The former makes a mockery of national independence; the other—except on doctrinaire grounds—has but little relevancy to the question of national independence” (pages 303-304).

You see it all depends upon whether you look at the question from the point of view of Egyptian nationalism or British Imperialism. The Egyptians contend that as the canal is in Egypt it is in Egypt and consequently they have been trying to kick the British out since 1880. We have been taught that the Thames is an International highway, but if the Egyptians suggested sending a force here to protect it we very much doubt if the Labour Party would argue that the Thames is in England but not of England.

Finally, puzzle; find the difference between the outlook of the Labour and the Tory parties on the Suez Canal question; or, alternatively, which is the greatest humbug.

Gilmac.

Iran: again in the crosshairs (2019)

John Bolton

From the World Socialist Party of the United States website

An American war against Iran has appeared imminent on previous occasions. Eleven years ago we saw similar military and political preparations for a US attack on that country. Fortunately, it never came. Now Iran is again in the crosshairs. War may again be avoided. However, even establishment analysts acknowledge that the confrontation in and around the Persian Gulf could easily cross the line into war as a result of misunderstanding or miscalculation (for instance: vox.com, May 20).  

President Trump says that he does not want war. But even if he does not want war there are men in his entourage who do – above all, his national security adviser John Bolton. The proximity of these hawks to the president is dangerous because, as former insiders have revealed, Trump is much influenced by the last person with whom he happens to have spoken. Simon Tisdall, foreign affairs commentator for the British Guardian, exaggerates only slightly when he writes that the hawks ‘run foreign policy while the president tweets and plays golf’ (May 9). 

One highly provocative move was the deployment to the Gulf in early May of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. This enormous vessel, in its current location close to the Iranian coast, is very vulnerable: a single Iranian missile could sink it. Once Iranian leaders conclude that an American attack can no longer be averted, they will surely prefer to sink it before rather than after its planes take off to bomb targets in Iran. Perhaps it is even the intention of the hawks in the Trump Administration to have the USS Abraham Lincoln play the role of sitting duck in order to furnish a suitably impressive casus belli (justification for war).   

What are the underlying causes of the conflict between the United States and Iran? What is it really about? But first – a few things that it is not about. 

What it is not about

In the past the most prominent source of tension between Iran and the United States was the possibility of Iran producing nuclear weapons. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement of 2015, under which Iran accepted constraints on its nuclear power program that would have barred nuclear weapons development, suggests that this is no longer the crucial concern for the US (if indeed it ever was).

Nor does the conflict with Iran have anything to do with terrorism. The main source of support for Islamist terrorism is Saudi Arabia. The operations on 9/11 were conducted mainly by Saudi nationals under the direct supervision of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the US. And yet Saudi Arabia is still regarded as a US ally. Counter-terrorism is a lower-order priority for US foreign policy.

Nor does the conflict with Iran have anything to do with human rights violations or persecution of religious minorities or the defense of ‘Western values.’ Again, the human rights situation is at least as bad in Saudi Arabia as it is in Iran.  

What it is about

One thing that the conflict is about is control over regional resources. The US seeks to restore and maintain control over the hydrocarbon resources of the Middle East, a region that contains 55% of the world’s oil and 40% of its natural gas.

The occupation of Iraq was a big step toward this goal. The petroleum law that the US imposed on Iraq gave foreign companies direct control of its oilfields through ‘production sharing agreements.’ Iran, with 10% of world oil and 16% of world gas, is the main remaining obstacle to US control over the resources of the Middle East.

Control over oil has various aspects. One is control over price – gaining leverage to ensure the continued flow of cheap oil to the American economy. Another is control over who buys the oil. The country that buys the most oil from Iran is now China – a fact that upsets American strategists for whom China is a rival for world power and a potential adversary. 

Arguably, however, the most important issue is which currency is used to price and sell oil. As the position of the dollar in relation to other currencies weakens, the dollar is ceasing to function as the world’s main reserve currency. Countries are shifting their foreign exchange reserves away from dollar assets toward assets denominated in other currencies, especially the euro. 

Similarly, oil producers increasingly prefer not to be paid in dollars for their oil. In late 2006 China began paying for Iranian oil in euros, while in September 2007 Japan’s Nippon Oil agreed to pay for Iranian oil in yen. Continuation of this trend will flood the US economy with petrodollars, fueling inflation and further weakening the dollar. It is feared that the result will be a deep recession.

Occupying oil-producing countries may seem like an obvious way to buck the trend, although the effect can only be temporary. In 2000 Iraq began selling oil for euros; subsequently it converted its reserves to euros. Since the US invasion it has gone back to using dollars. This too may be a motive for attacking Iran.

US concern with Iran also arises from the shifting geopolitical map. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union enabled the US to establish a temporary global predominance, though at the cost of huge military expenditures that exceed those of all other countries combined. Like the dominant position of the dollar, this cannot last much longer in view of the progressive economic decline of the US.

The geopolitical map of the world has begun to shift, and Iran occupies a central place in this process. The framework of a potential anti-US axis exists in the shape of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brings together Russia, China, and post-Soviet Central Asia. American strategists fear further consolidation and militarization of the SCO and its expansion to draw in other major Asian states – first of all, Iran, which already has close ties with both Russia and China. Attacking Iran may be seen as a way to avert a threat to US predominance.

Above all, American strategists seek to deprive Iran of its status as a regional power in West Asia. That means halting Iran’s development of ballistic (i.e., long-range) missiles, even armed with conventional warheads. It also means ending Iran’s support for political and military forces in other countries of the region – the Syrian government, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, etc. Here the US is fully in synch with its allies in the Middle East – Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States.

Nothing to do with working people

All these economic and geostrategic interests are the interests of competing groups of capitalists and of the states under their control. Working people have no stake in the game. Should matters come to war they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. As socialists we ask working people on both sides of the conflict, including those who happen to be enlisted in the armed forces, to reflect upon this and act accordingly.

Stefan

Ire of the Irate Itinerant (2008)

From the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime and the causes of crime (2008)

From the October issue of the Socialist Standard

Even the government accepts that crime will rise as economic conditions worsen, but is this the only reason for rising crime?

It’s a wonder any of us gets any sleep. It must be terrifying in the world today. Whenever Private Eye puts a spoof Daily Mail headline it its pages, such as “Criminal Yobbo Thugs give you Falling House Price CANCER!” no one laughs. It isn’t funny because it’s too similar to real Daily Mail headlines written for the terminally terrified. Where they are believed, it seems, the world is crawling with criminals with no more desire than to rip people’s hearts out and tear their corpse into indigestible shreds. After all, it is the fear of crime that politicians have sought for so many years to tackle, not the creature itself.

According to the statistics, crime in the UK has been rising steadilly since the mid-1950’s, although it certainly accelerated in the early 1980’s. It should be borne in mind, though, that the rate of reporting crimes has risen in that time, as has the number of crimes it is possible to commit, thanks to the governments (particularly the current one) creating endless new offences year in year out. Real crime, though, has certainly risen. The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1. In 1965 6.8 per million people were murdered. By 1997 this had risen to 14.1 per million. Over the last century, the number of police in the UK has risen by over 120,000 to stand at around 150,000.

Yet crime continues to grow, despite all the police. The former Mayor of London, before he was kicked out, Ken Livingstone, made great play over how his increase in the number of the police in the capital, from 25,000 to 31,000 police officers, had reduced crime. He was right that the Tories, for all their talk on being tough on crime, had held back spending on policing levels. In fact, that’s no surprise: policing accounts for around 52 percent of the criminal justice budget, and the Tories are first and foremost cheapskates. Plus, how can you be tough on crime if there isn’t any? For them it is a virtuous political circle: let crime run free, then be tough on it, on the cheap, and then ask for plaudits for being tough on yobbos. That is by the by, though. Despite Ken’s protestations, it wasn’t his police force that cut crime. It was economic conditions.

The “tough on crime” brigade are easy to refute. Some commentators blame the 60’s permissive society and its aftermath of sexual liberation for rising crime. They point to the end of the death penalty and penal reform measures. Yet, the number of prisoners in British cells were growing from the mid-forties onwards, before crime rates themselves began to rise. Now they stand at around 94,000 – and all the prisons are full. They’ve even had to start releasing prisoners early – in the back half of 2007 18,583 prisoners were given early release to relieve overcrowding. A staggering number, that has been replaced. All early release means is more people going through the prison system and being disciplined by it. After all, a great number of released prisoners re-offend and are convicted within two years.

This is all part of the trend. In 1941 there were only around 10,000 prisoners. Even as late as 1991 there were only about 40,000. If prison “worked” surely crime would have been around halved by doubling the prison population? Or at least, more drastically cut than by the modest falls we’ve seen over recent years. Now, the government wants to build extra capacity, three so called Titan Prisons each with a capacity of 7,500, which means they only see the rate of incarceration going up and up.

They have reason to believe that. A leaked draft letter this month told us that Home Office officials were warning ministers that the economic slow down would almost certinly lead to a rise in crime. The letter predicted property crime would rise by 7 percent in 2008 and a further 2 percent in 2009, if the current economic conditions continued. Home Office minister Tony McNulty said the letter was a “statement of the blindingly obvious”, which considering, to their credit, Labour actually formally linked crime rates to economic conditions in their analysis when they first came to power, isn’t a surprising view.

The BBC’s Economics Editor Mark Easton takes issue with whether it is so blindingly obvious that economic downturns promote the increase in crime. As part of this he proposes a different source of crime, citing a report that shows that for every rise of 1 percent in inflation, property crime rises by 0.026 percent; but that is just another name for poverty – when inflation lowers people’s incomes those who can’t easily compensate (for instance through pay rises) will be hard hit.

He is right, though, to note that while the rise in crime generally does not map directly onto the graph of economic up and downs, it does bear a resemblance to the growth in relative poverty. According to the report Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968-2005 from the Joseph Rowntree Foundtion so-called bread line poor, i.e. those who are excluded from normal participation in society due to their lack of wealth, grew to around 27 percent of households in 2005, up from 17 percent in 1980. More strikingly, the non-wealthy/non-poor fell by a dramatic 16 percent in the same period. The proportion of society in the very rich catageory also fell.

This ties in with a graph Easton produces:

The two scales are inverted, the left scale (consumer spending) ascends while the right scale (theft and burglary rates) descends. The match is pretty precise. Whilst it may not be enough to say that one causes another, it is enough to suggest that they are heavily linked. Poverty doesn’t make criminals, it just gives people more chances and incentives to be criminals. Put another way, the decline in social bonds caused by consumerism and rising inequality fuels a dog-eat- dog world which can turn nasty.

Of the 302,000 people sentenced for indictable offences in 2006, 160,100 of them were for property related crimes (theft, criminal damage, etc.). That is, over half of crimes. In 2006/7 some 75 percent of reported crimes were crimes relating to property. Poverty does not just push the creation of crime. It’s well known that the poor are much more likely to be the victims of crime, with the bottom 40 percent of society being way ahead of the top on every measure of crime victimhood. Lone parent and unemployed households are twice as likely to be burgled than the average household; and burglary rates are greater in densely populated and often poor London than in the rest of the south east.

Women in the sex industry are particularly prone to being victims of crime. A report by the Poppy Project, called The Big Brothel found staggering quantities of women working in the sex trade and being treated as little more than shoddy goods by their exploiters. They state that during ‘120 hours of telephone calls, we established the following: at least 1,933 women are currently at work in London’s brothels; ages range from 18 to 55 (with a number of premises offering “very, very young girls”); prices for full sex start at £15, and go up to £250’ The pimps offered two for one deals, discount vouchers, happy hours – the whole marketing gamut as they made between £86 million to £205 million per year with a brothel. This isn’t a normal business transaction though – the women are often beaten and raped. Turned into a commodity themselves, all social bonds utterly severed between them and their clients. In it’s own way, another form of property crime.

There is other evidence for alienation being the motor of crime. A recent report on the BBC revealed that 1 in 11 prisoners in a British gaol is a former member of the armed services, that is, approximately 8,500. The probation officers association NAPO recounts stories of strung out soldiers turning violent after returning from war. That is, those whose social bonds have been deliberately shorn in order to make them into fit killing machines, or whose bonds have been shattered by the experience of killing and conflict, are highly like to fall into crime, and find themselves on the prison scrap heap.

The Home Office report also deals with the rise of policital extremism, another form of expressing alienation. It warns of attacks on immigrants and the growth of racist parties, should Britain slide into recession. Of course, the terrorism obsessed government also considers how this rise in the far-right might lead to more terrorism in retaliation. This should serve as a warning to those who figure that simple economic catastrophism will lead mechanically to socialist revolution. The growth of socialism can only come from the working class consciously deciding that changing the economic system will save them from the woes of crime and violence extremism bred by the current one, and acting on that decision.

Pik Smeet

Production for profit (2008)

From the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The motive for production under capitalism is making a profit. In order for goods to be manufactured or services to be provided, they must result in a reasonable amount of profit, otherwise they won’t be produced. Even ‘loss leaders’ serve the goal of profit, by enticing customers into a shop.

In contrast, socialism will be based on production for use. The whole issue of profit will be meaningless in a socialist society, with no money or buying and selling. Items will be made because they are useful, because they satisfy people’s needs for food, housing, transport, clothes, leisure interests, or whatever.

Now, some supporters of capitalism will argue that production for profit implies production for use. No company, for instance, will make a profit by producing goods that nobody will want to use. There is therefore, so the argument goes, a requirement for capitalist concerns to produce useful things. Many objects that were once found in people’s homes (mangles, for instance) are not produced nowadays, because technological progress has meant they are no longer wanted.

There is a tiny bit of truth in this, in that people won’t on the whole buy what they don’t want or need. But there is far more to be said on this matter, and looking at it more closely reveals what’s wrong with production for profit, and indeed with capitalism more generally.

For a start, the other side of the coin of production for profit is ‘no profit, no production’. This applies not just to outdated fashions and technology, but to any good or service, no matter how badly it is needed. Take housing, for instance. In the current credit crunch, the number of new houses being built has been drastically reduced, even though there is clearly a need for more houses, given the increasing population and the amount of people homeless or living in sub-standard accommodation. But building houses is now not so profitable as it was a year or so ago, hence the cut in housebuilders’ profits and decline in new housing starts. Hence too the many blocks of flats that are half-built but will not be finished because there is no prospect of selling them at a profit.

And of course it’s not just housing. Whenever you hear of post offices being shut or rural bus services being axed, it’s because they don’t pay, not because nobody wants or needs them. About four pubs a day close; not enough people are spending money in them, but it’s not that they fail to meet some need or are of no use.

We referred above to the homeless or people in bad housing. These are likely to be the very poorest, who are unable to afford a mortgage or the rent for a decent home. But under capitalism they are not part of the possible market for new houses, owing to their destitution. What they lack is not the need for a good place to live but effective demand: they can’t pay so are of no interest to housebuilders. What capitalism fulfils, then, is not human need, but need that can be paid for. There is no point from a business perspective in producing goods if people, whatever their needs, cannot pay for them.

Effective demand further affects the quality of what is produced. It’s no good producing only the best whatever if they are unaffordable. The size of workers’ wages means there is a demand for cheap goods, though it can hardly be said that there is a need for shoddy and dangerous commodities. The current economic downturn has led to more people shopping in cheaper supermarkets, but hardly out of choice. Again, production for profit is in no way identical — or even similar — to production for use.

The same logic underlies the paradox of millions starving in a world where enough food can be produced to feed everyone. The starving in Africa and Asia barely form a market and cannot be sold to at a profit. This simple point by itself should be enough to condemn the domination of the profit motive.

And is it really the case that people only buy what they want? This view ignores the impact of advertising, which can lead people to purchase stuff to keep up with the Joneses or make their children happy or enable their teenagers to respond to peer pressure. Capitalism has to advertise its wares, both to encourage customers to buy new products and to keep them buying existing ones. In so doing, it necessarily promotes new ‘needs’ that are really no such thing.

Moreover, the imperative for companies to make a profit implies that they seek to lower costs, including the cost of labour power, the mental and physical energies of their workers. That’s what wages are: the price of our ability to work. Profits are realised when commodities are sold, but they are arise in the course of production. Workers produce more in the value of what they output than in what they are paid. Profits, or surplus value, come from this difference.

By driving down wages, or making workers labour for longer hours on the same pay, employers can increase their profits. The drive for profit also leads them to reduce spending on health and safety, as this cuts into profits. Whenever you hear about unsafe working practices, it’s a good bet that it’s due not to individual carelessness but to the need for profit.

It’s worth noting that, when we say socialism will be based on production for use, this does not mean that everybody will live in the lap of luxury. It does mean that there will be no squalid housing or a choice between eating and heating or children who go to bed hungry. They key criterion in production will be not ‘is it profitable?’ but ‘is it needed?’. And the process of production will be safe as it can be, and the goods produced will also be safe rather than harmful. Due care will be taken of the impact on the environment too. Production for profit will have been confined to a barely-understandable and barbaric past.

Paul Bennett

Pieces Together: Profits before health (2008)

The Pieces Together column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Profits before health

“The drug industry is overpricing vital new medicines to boost its profits, the chair of the health watchdog Nice warns today in an explosive intervention into the debate over NHS rationing. Professor Sir Michael Rawlins spoke out after critics last week accused the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) of `barbarism` for refusing to approve expensive new kidney drugs for NHS use, on the grounds that they were not cost-effective. In an outspoken interview with the Observer, he warned of `perverse incentives` to hike the prices of new drugs – including linking the pay of pharmaceutical company executives to their firm’s share price, which in turn relied on keeping profits healthy. Traditionally some companies charged what they thought they could get away with,” (Observer, 17 August)

Capitalism kills

“People are dying “on a grand scale” around the world because of social injustice brought about by a “toxic” combination of bad policies, politics and economics, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday. Avoidable health problems caused by social factors – as opposed to biology and genetics – are causing large-scale health inequalities in the UK, the WHO’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health has found after a three-year study. Evidence showed that a boy born in the relatively deprived Calton area of Glasgow was likely to live on average 28 years fewer than one born a few miles away in Lenzie, a village by the Glasgow-Edinburgh railway. Life expectancy at birth for men in the fashionable north London suburb of Hampstead was found on average to be 11 years longer than for men born in the vicinity of nearby St Pancras station. Adult death rates were generally 2.5 times higher in the most deprived parts of the UK than in the wealthiest areas.” (Independent 29 August)

Capitalism is awful

“There is a lot more poverty in the world than previously thought. The World Bank reported in August that in 2005, there were 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line — that is, living on less than $1.25 a day. That is more than a quarter of the developing world’s population and 430 million more people living in extreme poverty than previously estimated. The World Bank warned that the number is unlikely to drop below one billion before 2015. The poverty estimate soared after a careful study of the prices people in developing countries pay for goods and services revealed that the World Bank had been grossly underestimating the cost of living in the poorest nations for decades. As a result, it was grossly overestimating the ability of people to buy things. And the new research doesn’t account for the soaring prices of energy and food in the past two years.” (New York Times, 2 September)

Modern Times 

“Over the past five years alone, the average earnings of chief executives of FTSE-100 companies have doubled to £3.2m. Their pay has been rising five times faster than their employees’. The top 1 per cent of the population now enjoy 23 per cent of national wealth, while the poorest half share a mere 6 per cent. For most of the 20th century, Britain became steadily more equal. For the past three decades the movement has been in the opposite direction and it is estimated that Britain’s wealthiest person, Lakshmi Mittal, is worth more than twice as much as anybody in the past 150 years.” (New Statesman, 11 September) 

Chavism (2008)

Book Review from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st century. By Michael Lebowitz. Monthly Review

One criticism often levelled at books written by advocates of socialism is that they are over-theoretical, emphasizing in minute detail elements of capitalism that first have to be understood in order to grasp the essentials of the alternative but that they don’t get to the nitty-gritty of the practical elements required in order to reach the goal. This leaves readers suspended, in agreement about all the negatives of capitalism, but wondering how on earth this behemoth can be overturned, how anti-capitalism can be turned into socialism.

Lebowitz approaches the topic from a different angle, explaining the ethos of socialism at every opportunity and points out, reflecting Marx’s words, that socialism is actually not the goal but simply the means to an end – the end being the full development of human potential. He refers frequently to the three elements crucial to this overall human development – economic, political and social transformation – arguing that this has to be a work in progress; that there cannot be only one route when taking into account the diverse economic, political and cultural situations around the world.

Some of the chapters were originally speeches he gave to workers’ organisations in Venezuela where, in 2004, he was an adviser in the Ministry for the Social Economy. There is a discussion of lessons learned from Yugoslavia’s experiences in self-management in the mid-1900s; some analysis of neoclassical and neoliberal economics (he is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver); his judgement of why social democracy failed to deliver on its early promises (he was provincial policy chair of Canada’s social democratic Party, the NDP, 1972-5); plus his views on socialism as a process.

As socialists we recognize that as socialism requires a majority mandate the first task is human development, the “education” of the masses to the logic of socialism. It is also the case that, as there is no blueprint for socialism as such, we can imagine that the detailed structures of socialism in the different parts of the world (which won’t have to be exactly the same) will become clearer the nearer we approach it. But Lebowitz envisages a transition when there will still be a government which would still have much work to do convincing hard and fast capitalist supporters, changing attitudes that will persist (patriarchy, racism, discrimination), and removing barriers (in health, education, living standards) which currently prevent the reaching of an equitable society.

His criticism of social democracy is that, when in government, it has been unwilling to mobilize people on behalf of such policies: “the central flaw in social democracy  proposals for endogenous development is that they break neither ideologically nor politically with dependence upon capital” because to do so would necessitate “incorporating the mass of population that has so far been excluded from their share of the achievements of modern civilisation” and at the same time would unleash a host of enemies in the form of the international monetary institutions, imperial power and their forces of subversion plus those who monopolize the wealth and the land. Social  Democracy’s greatest failing, he says, was its core belief that the only practicable policy was that tinkering with details, reforming piecemeal in the hope of putting a more humane face on capitalism, its failure to offer an alternative logic based on human beings to the logic of capital.

The logic of capital versus the need for human development is a thread that winds through each of the chapters which culminate with his observations on how the “Bolivarian revolution” (which he sees as the beginning of a possible transition to socialism) is developing, warts and all. His conclusion is that “there is nothing inevitable about whether the Bolivarian Revolution will succeed in building that new society or whether it will lapse into a new variety of capitalism with populist characteristics. Only struggle will determine this.”

“A new variety of capitalism with populist characteristics” would seem to be an apt description of Venezuela under Chavez, even if Lebowitz presents the best case that can be for the opposite view.

Janet Surman

Letter: Green capitalism? (2008)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Green capitalism?

Thanks very much for your email of July 15 (with the article “Capitalism versus Nature“, July Socialist Standard). Excellent article!

And I certainly agree with the broad thrust of your analysis, though I guess I would distinguish between capitalism as some monolithic entity incapable of any change, and the kind of capitalism which might (just!) be able to avoid coming into conflict with nature. Touch and go, I have to admit, but I guess that’s what I’m still working away at trying to test out.

Jonathon Porritt

Reply: 

Reforming capitalism to serve the common interest has been tried before and has never worked. Our view is that it never will.– Editors.

50 Years Ago: Behind the Race Riots (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent disturbances in Nottingham and London have brought up the question of the attitude between people of different colour; as if there must always be a fundamental difference in outlook and conduct between people with differently coloured skins. Although on the surface the feeling associated with the recent disturbances is anti-white and anti-colour, and the rougher elements on both sides have taken the opportunity to turn this feeling into an occasion for rioting, the origin of the feeling has a deeper cause than just anti-colour. The origin of the conflicting attitudes is fundamentally economic. Out of economic relationships arise emotions that take many forms which do not appear to have any connection with the relationships and are transformed into a variety of beliefs; for example, the false belief in the mental and moral superiority of people with white skins. The conditions of capitalism produce a mental, or intellectual, atmosphere in which many conflicting attitudes flourish and older attitudes are modified. For instance, a pro-war and anti-war, a pro-religious and anti-religious, a pro-nationalist and anti-nationalist, and so on. When the West Indians and Nigerians first came here in force there was no particular antipathy to them; there was only some amusement and admiration of their liveliness and colourful clothing, as well as the customary patronising attitude that is generally displayed towards any “foreigner,” whatever his skin colour. Labour was scarce then and unemployment was practically non-existent. However, when unemployment began to grow and the housing question remained acute, sufferers, and prospective sufferers, looked around for something to blame their troubles on and newcomers, as always, appeared to them to be an obvious part cause of their sufferings. In these circumstances the general attitude towards coloured people began to change and they became scapegoats for a failure of capitalism to meet society’s needs. 

[From front page article by Gilmac, Socialist Standard, October 1958]

The Review Column: Target Hanoi (1967)

The Review Column from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Target Hanoi

The start of this year was considerably dampened by the flood of crocodile tears provoked by the admitted bombing of civilians in Hanoi.

The tears flowed strongly as the eye witness accounts came in, especially those from Harrison Salisbury, assistant managing editor of the New York Times. Harrison’s reports also provoked a slight, but distinct, surprise that an American newspaper man should actually tell the truth about the results of his countrymen’s military exploits.

It is difficult to imagine anyone really believing the Pentagon’s assurances that only military targets were being bombed. This is a well worn fiction of modern war; even the RAF tried it in the last war. until the evidence to the contrary became overwhelming.

In any case, why the indignation about civilian deaths in wartime? The “advance” of capitalism's war-making machine has brought everyone into the front line.

War is now very much a social business, with many civilians playing a more important part in the war effort than many men in uniform. It is also important for a side to break the morale of the other’s civilians—usually by bombing or blockade.

The people of Hanoi, then—its children, its old people, its hospital patients—are all legitimate targets.

Does this sound callous? War is never an agreeable business and those who complain about its effects while they support the system which produces it, or those who demonstrate about the military activities of only one side, they are the callous ones.

As long as capitalism lasts there will be no end to war and we may expect it to become more and more fearsome.

The solution is not to wave banners about one incident or one aspect of war. It is to build a new society in which the cause of war no longer exists.

The Sinking Press

The once proud ships of the British newspaper industry are in dire trouble.

Many of them—the Daily Sketch (circulation 849,000), the Daily Mail (2,380,000)—are taking water fast and do not seem able to last much longer.

Almost certainly, the Sun (1,250,000) will be scuttled by the International Publishing Corporation when its obligation to keep it afloat runs out in 1968.

The Guardian (283,000) is fighting desperately but is badly holed—they are thinking about paying off a lot of the crew and one of their most distinguished officers— Gerard Fay—has actually jumped overboard to leave more room for everyone else.

Even the Times (273,000) is floundering, its only chance of salvation apparently being the sort of emergency repairs promised in the take over by Admiral of the Fleet Lord Thompson.

A lot of people—even the Prime Minister—profess to be unhappy about this situation.

But why are the papers sinking? Circulation is no longer of itself enough to pay a paper’s way. In the face of competition from other media like television, the newspapers have to fight harder for advertisers’ custom — and this, of course, goes in the main only to the papers with the really big readership.

What this means is that the advertisers say whether a paper makes a profit—sinks or floats—and that a paper must do everything it can to attract advertisements.

Now all the papers have always devoted a lot of their space to applauding the capitalist principle that profit is a glorious thing and that if something cannot be sold at a profit it has no business being made.

This principle is now being applied to the newspaper industry. And the press does not like it. But, as they have so often told other industries, there is nothing they can do about it.

Treatment at a Price

Last December a New York hospital was in trouble; $16,000 in arrears with the rent. Their bank foreclosed the mortgage and only the action of the doctors and nurses, who barricaded the entrances, prevented the patients being turned out onto the streets.

Last month in Houston, Texas, a father took his six month old baby to hospital for treatment. But he did not have enough cash on him to pay for it and the insurance policy he offered was not of a great enough value. The hospital turned him away and the baby died.

This is capitalism in the raw, where even medical attention is openly carried on on a ready cash basis.

In this country, as we all know, they organise things rather differently. A long time ago the British capitalist class appreciated the economy of spreading over the cost of a medical service, and of making the employers pay for some of it, so that all workers are kept pretty well in a constant state of fitness to work.

It seems inevitable that this will also come to America, although there is powerful opposition to it from the doctors, who think they can do better under the present hit and miss system.

If state medicine does come to America, no hospital will close over owing the rent and no parent will have to slap down ready cash before his children can be treated. The priorities of capitalism will still be working, but in a different way.

Everything will be nicely organised by the government —the drugs, the pills, the stimulants. Propped up by this, the American worker will stagger back to the factory. He may even think it is a good idea.

But in reality he will have exchanged one symptom of his poverty, ghastly though it is, for another.

Jailbreaks Galore

One thing which can be said in favour of the glut of escaping prisoners and that is that it gave the press a lot of entertaining stories at a time when news was distinctly short.

As the escape stories went on day after day. many people almost became convinced that Home Secretary Roy Jenkins was personally going around unlocking the prison gates. Time, and the fact that Jenkins is as determined as any other capitalist administrator that those who break capitalism’s laws shall suffer for it, may teach them differently.

What was forgotten was that in 1964 there were more escapes under “strict” Home Secretary Henry Brooke than in 1966 under “liberal” Roy Jenkins.

Indignation ran riot. Nobody seemed to have time to think that escapes are an unavoidable result of imprisonment. and that the prisoner and his helpers have the advantage of a lot of time and chance for observation and planning.

It was not the time to remind anyone that, as the celebrated Frank Mitchell has proved, imprisonment and violent punishment are not the answers to crime.

That was the tragedy—and the scandal, if you like.

Workers who are in their own little prison of wage slavery, of subservience to their employer, of mortgaged living, were loudly demanding harsher methods of restriction for other members of their class who had chosen to lake a chance on another sort of prison.

At no time did anyone ask about the cause of it all. and why human beings are satisfied with a social system which so defiles them and which, in one way or another, makes prisoner or gaoler of them all.

British Capital in India (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class divisions are international. Nowhere is this better shown than in India. Surplus value extracted from the workers in this sub-continent finds its way to the capitalists of a dozen or more countries. The last official assessment of private foreign investment in India put the total at $1.29 billion; of this, British capital accounted for 80 per cent. But — since the calculation did not include banking capital, or capital engaged in construction and some other sectors of the economy — various economists have indicated that foreign-controlled assets are probably between 2-3 times greater than this figure implies. Michael Kidron in his Foreign Investments in India (1965) tentatively suggests that Rs. 1,400 crores [1] would be a more realistic estimate.

When the Reserve Bank of India published its breakdown of foreign investments in 1955 this showed that roughly one half was concentrated in manufacturing, plantation and mining companies and perhaps a further 30 per cent in trading and financial firms. British capital generally follows this pattern as well. The jute, tea and coal industries are are still dominated by British companies. Thus, in the early nineteen-sixties, about 70 per cent of the total acreage planted with tea was owned by English capitalists. Two U.K. organisations — Lipton (a Unilever concern) and Brooke Bond (Finlay) — handled 85 per cent of the retail distribution within India, while the export trade is largely a British monopoly. British capital also controls some of the largest cotton mills in the country — such as the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills of Madras, Kohinoor Mills of Bombay and Madura Mills of Madura. As might be expected, the motor-car industry is organised jointly with foreign manufacturers. Indian firms such as the Tatas and Birlas have agreements with British, American and European companies — Standard, Morris, Leyland, Studebaker and Fiat to name a few. A glance down the list of joint-stock companies operating in India shows that Indian workers are contributing to the profits of some of the really big names of world capitalism. For example Unilever, I.C.I. and Imperial Tobacco have all established plants or factories there.

Although the investments of the British capitalist class in India may soon be twice as large as they were at independence in 1947 this does not mean that the local bourgeoisie has not benefited from the exploitation of the country’s millions of workers. In just eight years, between 1948-1955, profits totalling Rs. 4,170 million were realized by foreign controlled enterprises; but this figure was dwarfed by the Rs. 12,460 million picked up by the Indian ruling class. There have, in fact, been some prominent transfers of control from British to Indian hands. For example, the Dalmia family took over from Bennett. Coleman and Co. of Bombay (owners of the Times of India newspaper) and from Govan Brothers of Delhi, while a whole group of British trading enterprises in Madras has been acquired by S. Anantharamakrishnan. In addition Indian capitalists now have a controlling interest in a number of nominally British enterprises. Thus, in Calcutta, the Goenkas, Bangurs and Kanorias have come to dominate agencies like Shaw Wallace, Octavius Steel, Kettlewell Bullen and Anderson Wright. Cases such as this have given much satisfaction to the ruling Congress party. This is understandable, since that party represents the interests of a majority of Indian capital. What is ludicrous is when it suggests that the workers, who continue to sweat in the factories, should be thankful for the change in ownership.

The American capitalist class also has a sizeable stake in the Indian economy; about $237 million from private investment sources at the last count. Commenting on these investments, the Economist said they left little scope for complaint in their profitability — the return in manufacturing industries being as high as 20.6 per cent in 1962. With profits running at this level, it is no wonder that India now lies second only to Britain in the amount of American capital it has absorbed. At the same time, capitalists in Holland, Japan, Italy, Belgium and so on find the Indian worker a no less attractive quarry.

Apart from this, something needs to be said about “foreign aid” to India. A large percentage of this takes the form of loans repayable at normal, commercial interest rates. As B. Ward pointed out in his book India and The West, “they do not constitute aid in any direct sense. They are either profitable loans or export credits for the donor country. To call them ‘aid’ stretches the word until it is almost deprived of meaning.” This has been well illustrated by some fierce competition to finance various “aid” projects. One such case was that of the Bokaro steel plant. An Anglo-American consortium offered to back the scheme by means of long-term credits totalling $368 million. This group was led in America by Mr. Vance Brand, head of an international investment company, and in Britain by Mr. W. S. Hindson of Wellman Smith Owen. It had support from a variety of powerful companies, such as Koppers, Blaw Knox and General Electric in the U.S. and Davy United and Woodal-Duckam in Britain. At about the same time as this group was negotiating, a high-ranking official from the West German combine of Krupp visited New Delhi to put proposals to India’s steel minister, and a French federation — backed by the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas — had been in the running earlier. As it happened, however, it was the Russians who pulled off the deal. The Economist reported that Soviet capital to the tune of £110 million was to be involved in the first stage of the project, at the relatively “soft” terms of 2½ per cent spread over twelve years.

This is only one of many examples. When the American General Electric Company was discussing investment terms for an electrical plant in India, the Economist again pointed out that international rivalry was becoming sharper: “The first such plant was built with the help of Britain’s Associated Electrical Industries, but the next three were picked up for financing by the Russians and Czechs — which underlines the need for fresh western initiative in this field.” In fact, by the beginning of 1963, east European countries (excluding Yugoslavia) had authorized a total of Rs. 437 crores for “aid” to India. The majority of “foreign aid” finds its way to the nationalized industries, but there are numerous cases of financing privately owned firms. Nor have the “Communist” countries been backward in this sphere. Even if we leave Russia out of the picture, we find that there had been well over sixty agreements of this type by the end of 1964. (East Germany — 38; Czechoslovakia — 14; Poland — 14; Hungary — 9; Yugoslavia — 5). There have also been reports that Hungary is prepared to set up aluminium plants in the private sector of the economy — in Kerala and at Koyna, Maharashtra.

Naturally, a number of lame attempts have been made to defend the imperialism of Russia and her allies. Thus K. M. Kurian in his Impact of Foreign Capital on Indian Economy argues that:

  In general, it is possible to differentiate between aid from capitalist and aid from countries in the socialist system on the basis of the differences in their repayment and servicing terms and conditions. The terms and conditions attached to loans and credits from the socialist countries, on the other hand, have generally been extended on more favourable terms.

In the same spirit, V. I. Pavlov whines:

  It is impermissible to draw a common balance between the hard-earned savings set aside by the peoples of the socialist countries to help their friends, and the capital of imperialist monopolies which they expect, sooner or later, to bring them profit. (India: Economic Freedom versus Imperialism).

Obviously both of these writers are dishonest. However much they squirm away from the facts, it is clear that interest and profits from India are flowing back to Moscow, Prague and Warsaw — just as they do to London, Washington and Paris. The Russian ruling class has sunk its claws into part of the surplus value wrung out of the Indian working class. It is true that the scale of Russian involvement nowhere near matches that of Britain. But this is only because Russia was such a late starter. The first Russian “aid” did not come until 1955, after Bulganin and Krushchev had visited India in that year. Even so. in the current Fourth Five-Year Plan (1966-71), it is thought that the supply of Soviet capital will be in the region of one billion roubles.

India also represents an important market for the manufacturers of many advanced industrial countries. However, the share of the market monopolised by British capitalists has been dwindling — as rivals in the United States and the .Soviet Union forge ahead.

Once again, in the struggle for markets, the fiercest competition is coming from Russia and her allies. In January, 1966 it was reported that the Soviet Union now supplied 12 per cent of India’s imports, compared to 4 per cent in 1960/61. In fact, taken over the last decade, Indian imports from the state capitalist countries of east Europe have built up from Rs. 5.70 crores (in 1954) to Rs. 123.74 crores (in 1963/64). On top of that, an agreement has been signed to double trade with Russia by 1970. Bearing these sort of figures in mind, how daft does it make the “Communist” parties look when they claim that production in Russia is not geared to the world markets?

Time and again the Indian leaders have asserted that their aim is to establish a “socialist pattern of society” in the country. They have now had twenty years of independence to put this into effect. Yet today, more than at any time in the past, the working class in India finds itself the prey of international capital. This should cause no surprise to any thinking worker. He has only to recall some of the definitions of “Indian socialism” which have been put forward. (For example: “The ‘socialism’ contemplated in India . . . is a system under which private enterprise has and will continue to have a vital role to play; it is a system which respects private property . . .” — H.V.R. Ienger, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India). Divided by religious and nationalist prejudices, the Indian worker is easy meat for his masters in London, Moscow and New Delhi.

S. C.

Note:

[1] *Rs. 1 crore = £750,000 = £2,100,000.

Finance and Industry: Was Lenin an O. & M. Man? (1967)

The Finance and Industry column from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Was Lenin an O. & M. Man?

The Russian governors have got themselves into the position of having to justify everything they do by what Lenin said. Thus a recent pamphlet put out by the Novosti Press Agency called Material and Moral Incentives under Socialism by Mikhail Laptin attacks “wage-levelling” with quotes from Lenin. The problem the Russian propaganda machine faces here is the vague link in many people’s minds between Socialism and equality while in Russia inequality flourishes.

The titles of some of the chapters of this pamphlet are revealing enough: Wage Levelling or Material Incentive? Improving the Wage System; Differentiation of Wages; Rate Fixing; Bonuses for the Best. But let Laptin speak for himself.

  Wage levelling is incompatible with scientific progress and the wellbeing of all members of society. Should an honest worker and an idler receive the same wages, this would frustrate personal interest in raising labour productivity. in expanding and improving social production. Wage levelling would hamper the workers’ initiative, encourage passive attitudes and adversely affect production.
  The wage-rate policy of the first years of Soviet power resulted in unwarranted restrictions on the earnings of certain workers, thus creating artificial barriers to raising labour productivity. Wage rates were brought so close that most workers had no desire to improve their skill or to do complicated or physically difficult work. On the contrary, workers sought to get a quiet job, such as factory watchman, or leave the factory altogether.
  Lenin wrote that it was necessary to study scientific achievements in analyzing mechanical motions during work, so as to eliminate superfluous and awkward movements, find the most efficient ways of doing the work and introduce the best system of control and recording of results.

If these passages show nothing else they show that the Russian employers look on their workers in the same way as our employers look on us: as lazy and greedy people who will only work when forced or enticed to. Time and motion, speed-up, Taylorism and the like have always been looked on with suspicion — and rightly — by workers. Laptin says this suspicion is not justified in Russia as the means of production there belong to the people. But if this were so, why don't Russian workers recognise it? Why do they have to be convinced of it? Why do they need “material incentives” to work for themselves? Of course the answer is that this is not so. The worker in Russia does not own the means of production; he is a wage-worker selling his labour power to live. Where labour power is a commodity its price is governed by definite economic laws. Over a hundred years ago. in an address to the International Working Men's Association (later published as Value, Price and Profit), Marx explained this on the very point we are discussing:

  . . . as the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality differ, so must differ the values of the labouring powers employed in different trades. The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake, is an insane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they must fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for equal or even equitable redistribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?

Given the wages system equality of wages (or wage levelling) is impossible. The early utopian experiments of the Bolsheviks failed as the economic laws of capitalism asserted themselves. Lenin admitted that this was a retreat. His successors have made a virtue of necessity. For Laptin is not one of those Marx was getting at. He thinks that it is equality of wages that is not “just and equitable”! He likes the wages system as it is, inequalities and all!

Marx was not for equal or for unequal wages. He was against the whole wages system and ended his address with this appeal to the working class:

  Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day's wage for a fair days work!“ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword. “Abolition of the wages system!"

What is Money?

The recent White Paper on decimal currency means that by 1971 the money tokens, inherited in a simplified form from feudal times, will be replaced by tokens based on a decimal system (They’re still arguing over which). The government will merely be changing the face-values and names of the paper notes and metallic coins that circulate as money. This it can do as these values and, names are matters of convention.

It is impossible to understand the role of money tokens today without realising the origin of money as a commodity. Out of the simple exchange of commodities one commodity became money, that is, the prices of the other commodities came to be expressed in terms of this money-commodity which could be exchanged for any of them. Various things, including cattle and even human beings, have functioned as money. But the most convenient in the end have always been the precious metals silver and gold. These can express a high value with a little weight and are easily divisible. The price of other commodities was at first expressed directly as a weight of the precious metal, as with shekels in the bible. This too is the origin of the name “pound”. Later the metals were coined by being stamped with the mark of the state that issued them. From this point on exists the possibility of a divergence between the face-value and the real value of the metal. This happened both as the coin lost weight through wear and tear and through deliberate debasement by the state. So that, over the years, the names like pound, crown, florin, shilling and penny ceased to signify actual measures of weight and became the names given to certain weights of the metal in coinage as fixed by the state.

The next step in the evolution of money is the substitution in circulation of tokens for the money-commodity. First underweight coins circulated for the full-weight coins and then subsidiary metals like copper and finally almost worthless paper. This is so at present where as tokens for gold, the international money-commodity, paper notes and metallic coins circulate. In Britain the basic coin metal is copper alloyed with zinc, tin or nickel.

It would be wrong to think of money as merely a medium of exchange. The tokens can do this well enough on their own. Another function of money is that of being a standard of price. This, however, since they are almost worthless, the tokens cannot do. It is only because they are tokens for gold that they perform this function. Gold of course is by no means worthless. It is a commodity having a value of its own independent of human will. The value of gold is fixed in the same way as that of other commodities by the amount of socially-necessary labour embodied in it and exchanges with them on this basis.

To say that the paper notes and metallic coins that circulate at present are tokens for gold is not to say that there is the equivalent in gold of their face-values lying in the vaults of the Bank of England. This is not, nor need it be, so. However, the law of value can no more be defied than the law of gravity. If the face-value of the tokens is more than the amount of gold needed to circulate what commodities there are, then the tokens will come to represent a smaller amount of gold. Which means that prices will rise, or, as they say today, the “purchasing power of money” will decline. This in fact is one of the reasons for the rise in internal prices that has been going on in Britain since the beginning of the last war. The pound note of today is not equivalent to the pound note of 1947 or 1957 or even 1966.

The recent craze for gold memorial medals well shows what the money-commodity is. Until the government put a stop to it these gold metals were sold as an “investment”. Apart from speculation about a possible rise in the price of gold, capitalists know that gold can be expected to keep its value while its tokens can not. It is the same in France. Over Christmas there was heavy buying of gold. One of the reasons was a fear that the Gaullists might lose the coming election for, as one paper put it, “gold remains the traditional hedge against political uncertainty in this country”. If they have to hold their wealth idle as money capitalists prefer the real stuff.

Adam Buick