Material World: Exercise in democracy? Not exactly (2020)

The Material World Column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month saw the election of the latest American president which was supposed to be an exercise in democracy. Yet there was the disenfranchisement of millions by the suppression of the vote of those eligible to vote, and this, despite the greatest number of votes cast to both candidates in decades.

It was not, as the Trump supporters tried to allege, a problem of voter fraud and deliberate miscounting of the ballots which led to the legal challenges and court battles. It is, as one political commentator, Ezra Klein, explained, ‘…the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic’ (Guardian, 1 November).

The problem is the way the American Constitution was constructed and then applied. The manner of the election of the president and other federal officers is not determined by federal law or national rules but by the power of individual states themselves. It has always been the aim of the right-leaning politicians to manipulate the vote by promoting ‘states-rights’ on who, where, when and how citizens can vote. The purpose is to acquire a partisan advantage by limiting the franchise. In all the Republican Party’s complaints about the conduct of the electoral process absolutely none involved making it easier to vote. On the contrary, their campaigns have been to raise more barriers to the participation of eligible voters.

The Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a key provision of the 1965 Civil Rights Act that required states to get ‘pre-clearance’ from the federal government for legislation affecting elections and voting processes. It made it easier for states to gerrymander voting districts, reduce or re-locate the number of polling places, and raise obstacles to the ability to vote. Local legislators could re-draw the voting districts to concentrate or dilute particular voting blocs.

Many media outlets have already reported upon the inconsistencies of the Electoral College which negates the popular vote. American citizens don’t vote for the president but are voting for 538 electors who meet in their respective states and it is they who vote for President. It was a procedure designed by the ‘Founding Fathers’ to stop the possibility of ‘peoples’ power’.

Another example is how the conservatism of particular rural states counter the influence of the more urban regions. 70 percent of America is represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30 percent of the country is represented by 70 senators. California, for example, has a a population of 40 million and is represented by two senators – as are the 570,000 people who live in the state of Wyoming.

Highlighted as well has been those citizens struck off the voting rolls for possessing criminal records, facilitated by the Democratic Party in its passing of legislation that criminalised a significant part of the African-American population. An estimated 5 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, with the disenfranchisement rate highest in Southern states, arising from ballot restrictions enacted during the Jim Crow era in order to prevent black men from voting and holding office. Despite a referendum giving ex-felons the right to vote, Florida continues to block them from voting unless they’ve repaid all fines and fees they owe.

Then there are the voter identification laws widely regarded to be discriminatory. No big deal if you have a driver’s licence, some form of state ID, or a passport — but a very big deal if you don’t. In July, Kentucky became the 19th state that requires voters to present a photo ID at the poll. The purpose is ostensibly to stop fraud at the ballot but merely adds to the costs of running an election

Lastly there are four million Americans living in US territories who can’t vote for any president. Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, US Virgin Islands and other US territories may send representatives to the US Congress who can introduce bills and push for the territory’s agenda at the congressional committee level, but they have no actual power to vote.

US Virgin Islands Delegate to the House of Representatives, Stacey Plaskett, pointed out, ‘This is a long-standing absurdity in our current legal system… Do you know what it’s like to see a bill related to your people, your constituents, and not be able to vote on it? This lack of equal representation and equal voting power has a direct correlation to persistent poverty across all of the US territories. Americans living in the territories are accustomed to being last in line.’

But it is not just citizens of US territories that are excluded from the democratic process but working-people all across America, from the Native American First Peoples to the old and infirm unable to access postal ballots without a complicated application procedure.

America prided itself that the right to vote was enshrined as the foundation of its democracy. But all the evidence suggests that it is not true. Working people are constantly engaged in a battle to protect and exercise their votes.

ALJO

Stalin and the rise of the Russian ruling class (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

On December 21 a hundred years ago was born in Gori, in Russian Georgia, the man who was to become the blood-thirsty dictator of All-Russia, Joseph Djugashvili, better known as Stalin. Like Trotsky, he became an anti-Tsarist revolutionary while still a teenager, being active mainly in his native Georgia and other parts of the Caucasus, and like Trotsky also served a number of prison sentences and terms of exile.

One fact distinguished Stalin from most of the others who were to become leaders of the Bolshevik Party: he came from a poor background—his father was a cobbler not from the intelligentsia, that social group peculiar to Russia composed of university-educated people working mainly for the Tsarist State at national and local level. This was the group from which most anti-Tsarist revolutionaries—Mensheviks and Populists as well as Bolsheviks—were recruited and which in the end carried out the task which the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and too dependent on Tsarism to carry out itself: the “bourgeois revolution” against absolutist rule and the restrictions it placed on the development of capitalism in Russia.

Although imagining themselves to be socialists and even, some of them, having a very good knowledge of Marx’s writings, the members of the revolutionary intelligentsia were in no doubt that it was they who should lead the coming anti-Tsarist revolution. Their disagreements were over who—the peasantry or the industrial working class—should provide the mass basis for this revolution. Lenin’s theory, that the working class left to themselves were incapable of reaching a revolutionary consciousness and that this would therefore have to be brought to them from outside, thus perfectly expressed their aspirations.

The Bolshevik Party, which was the most disciplined and the best organised of the various Russian revolutionary' organisations, was led from abroad by Lenin and others who cultivated close relations with the leaders of the Second International and who were able to discourse brilliantly on the finer points of Marxist theory. Inside Russia their organisation was run by men of a cruder type—like Stalin who seems for a while to have been in charge of a special section organising bank raids and hold-ups to help finance the Party’s activities.

Stalin was one of the editors of the Bolshevik paper Pravda when it first appeared in 1912, a post he resumed when the paper was allowed to appear again following the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917. He had also been a member of the Central Committee of the Party since 1912 and as such was one of the group which took the decision to seize power in November 1917. Stalin thus played a somewhat greater part in the Russian revolution than Trotsky and Trotskyist writers have been prepared to credit him with but less than he himself was later to claim (to read later eulogies you would think that the Bolshevik seizure of power was engineered by him and Lenin alone).

On the strength of a pre-war pamphlet on the national question. Stalin was appointed Commissar for Nationalities in the first Bolshevik government but later, after the Civil War was over, ensconced himself in the secretariat of the Bolshevik Party. This was a key post since the Bolshevik Party was the government of Russia, both effectively in practice and in Leninist theory. According to Lenin, not only was the working class left to itself incapable of acquiring a revolutionary consciousness but it was also incapable of running society on its own; this latter would have to be done for it by, once again, the vanguard party which was supposed to represent its interests.

By the time Stalin became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1922, not only had all other political parties been suppressed but organised groups within the Bolshevik party itself had been banned. As secretary of the sole and monolithic political organisation in Russia Stalin was well placed, following the death of Lenin in 1924, to ensure that it was he who would emerge as future dictator. By 1928, he had out-manoeuvred all his rivals—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamanev—even, in the end, Bukharin who had been his ally and who was the real author of the absurd theory of “socialism-in-one-country” which Trotsky attributed to Stalin. He was then in a position to turn on the only other social group in Russia that could represent a threat to the rule of the Bolshevik Party he controlled. This was the new private bourgeoisie of rich traders (nepmen) and peasants (kulaks) which had grown up under the New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1921 by Lenin and officially described by the Bolshevik Party as “the development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state”. The kulaks and nepmen as well as many not-so-rich peasants were to be brutally eliminated in the forced collectivisation and industrialisation that began in earnest after 1928.

Final evolution

By 1936 the position had been stabilised, a situation Stalin marked by proclaiming that “socialism” had now been achieved in Russia. In reality what had been achieved was the final evolution of the Bolshevik party and government into a stable class ruling on the basis of state capitalism.

Before 1914, Trotsky was virtually alone in suggesting that, if they ever got power in the course of the anti-Tsarist revolution, they should hold on to it and try to develop “socialism”. Which, during and after 1917, is precisely what the Bolshevik Party tried to do. But at that time Russia, backward and isolated from industrialised Europe and North America, was not ripe for socialism. Only capitalism, in one form or another, was possible there. In maintaining themselves in power after overthrowing Tsarism the Bolshevik Party now assumed the role of the capitalist class not only in the bourgeois revolution but also in the subsequent development of capitalism. But capitalism can’t exist without a capitalist class and, the traditional Russian bourgeoisie having been eliminated, it was from the ranks of the Bolshevik Party itself that the replacement capitalist class was to evolve.

This evolution was not a smooth process, especially as the ideology of the Bolshevik Party committed it to working class interests and to social equality. All those who had qualms about the evolution of the Party into a stable ruling class had first to be cleared away, a task Stalin probably enjoyed carrying out as a means of avenging himself on those who had looked down on him as a non-intellectual and mere organisation man. There is evidence from Lenin’s last articles that he had begun to realise just before he died that the Bolshevik Party was beginning to evolve in this direction. The others—with Trotsky at their head—were cleared away over the next few years.

Stalin, in putting the consolidation of the situation in Russia ahead of foreign adventures, perfectly expressed the wishes of the newly emerging ruling class. By 1934 he, on behalf of this class, was in a strong enough position to publicly repudiate the earlier Bolshevik ideal of social equality. Describing those who continued to preach equality as “leftist blockheads” he went on to tell the 17th Congress of the Bolshevik Party:

  These people evidently think that Socialism calls for equality, for levelling the requirements and the personal lives of the members of society. Needless to say, such an assumption has nothing in common with Marxism, with Leninism. By equality Marxism means, not equality in personal requirements and personal life, but the abolition of class (quoted in the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, 1936, p 702).

This is what the new privileged—with their bloated salaries, their exclusive shops and their special housing—wanted to hear. They wanted to keep their privileges and had no desire to be levelled down to the wage of an average worker as had once been Bolshevik theory.

Since under Stalin’s supposed “socialism” all the features of capitalism continued to exist—wages, profits, commodity production, banks, bonds, the state, social inequality—“Marxist” theory had to be revised. This can be said to have been Stalin’s main contribution to the Leninist distortion of Marxism, one that has been inherited by Communist Parties everywhere, Peking or Moscow line. None now has any idea what socialism means and originally meant (even for the Bolsheviks—see the extract we publish elsewhere in this issue from an article Stalin wrote in 1906): a moneyless, wageless, stateless society.

Dictator

After 1936 Stalin continued to pursue the interests of the new state capitalist ruling class of Russia—even if many of them were to be the victims of his whims as he sought to consolidate his personal position as dictator. He built up a powerful and effective police state which, if only for the reason that it lasted longer, tortured and eliminated many more people than Hitler’s in Germany. He turned the Communist Parties in other countries into simple tools of Russian foreign policy ready to zig and zag as dictated from Moscow.

Stalin died on 5 March 1953, but the state capitalist dictatorship he had built up continued intact even if some of the rougher edges were smoothed away in the interests of industrial and military efficiency, not to mention the personal security of the leading members of the ruling class. The worst thing about Stalin was that, though clearly to be classed amongst history’s many cruel and bloodthirsty despots, he should have been considered a socialist. The immense harm this has done to the cause of socialism will never be able to be calculated, but must certainly be listed as one of the more important factors that has delayed the emergence of a genuine socialist understanding among the working class of the world.

Adam Buick

Future society by Joseph Stalin (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The following article first appeared in 1906 in Akhali Tckhovroba, an obscure Social Democratic journal published in Georgia, and was part of a series on "anarchism or socialism". We have many disagreements with this article but we republish it not only because it gives a definition of socialism as a society without buying and selling, the wages system or a coercive government machine, but also because its author was the man who was later to become the dictator of Russia — Joseph Stalin. In comparing what Stalin wrote in 1906 with what he later claimed was "socialism” it can be seen to what  extent the so-called Communist Parties everywhere have distorted the original meaning of the word. In view of certain  observations in the article, we must add that it is our view that  the means of production are now sufficiently developed to  permit the implementation of the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” with the establishment of socialism.

Editorial Committee

Future society will be socialist society. This means, primarily, that there will be no classes in that society; there will be neither capitalists nor proletarians and, consequently, there will be no exploitation. In that society there will be only workers engaged in collective labour.

Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed there will be only free workers.

Future society will be socialist society. This means, lastly, that in that society the abolition of wage labour will be accompanied by the complete abolition of the private ownership of the instruments and means of production; there will be neither poor proletarians nor rich capitalists—there will be only workers who collectively own all the land and minerals, all the forests, all the factories and mills, all the railways, etc.

As you see, the main object of production in the future will be directly to satisfy the needs of society and not to produce goods for sale in order to increase the profits of the capitalists. Here there will be no room for commodity production, struggle for profits, etc.

It is also clear that future production will be socialistically organised, highly developed production, which will take into account the needs of society and will produce as much as society needs. Here there will be no room either for disintegrated production, competition, crises or unemployment.

Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power.

That is why Karl Marx said as far back as 1846:

  The working class in the course of its development will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so- called . . . (see The Poverty of Philosophy).

That is why Engels said in 1884:

  The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no conception of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity . . .We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe. (See The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.)

At the same time, it is self-evident that for the purpose of administrating public affairs there will have to be in socialist society, in addition to local offices which will collect all sorts of information, a central statistical bureau, which will collect information about the needs of the whole of society, and then distribute the various. kinds of work among the working people accordingly. It will also be necessary to hold conferences and particularly congresses, the decisions of which will certainly be binding upon the comrades who are in the minority until the next congress is held.

Lastly, it is obvious that free and comradely labour should result in an equally comradely and complete, satisfaction of all needs in the future socialist society. This means that if future society will demand from each of its members as much labour as he can perform, it, in its turn, must provide each member with as much products as he needs. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! —such is the basis upon which the future collectivist system must be created. It goes without saying that in the initial stage of Socialism, when elements which have not yet grown accustomed to work are being drawn into the new way of life, when the productive forces also will not yet have been sufficiently developed and there will still be “dirty" and “clean” work to do, the application of the principle: “to each according to his needs”, will undoubtedly be greatly hindered and, as a consequence, society will be obliged temporarily to take some other path, a middle path. But it is also clear that when future society runs into its groove, when the survivals of capitalism will have been eradicated, the only principle that will conform to socialist society will be the one we have pointed to above.

That is why Marx said in 1875:

  In a higher phase of communist (i.e. socialist) society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual. . . only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.” (See Critique of the Gotha Program.)

Such, in general, is the picture of future socialist society according to the theory of Marx.

Political Notebook: Boo, Hiss (1979)

The Political Notebook Column from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Boo, Hiss.

In politics it is like panto time the whole year round, with all the capitalist parties having their demon king for the others to boo and hiss.

Tony Benn, for example, is guaranteed to cause nervous Tory ladies to have more nightmares than The Exorcist. Rhodes Boyson has the ability to reduce keen Labour supporters to a small cloud of indignant steam.

Each of these demons plays the part; Benn has a formidable stare, to convince all the spinsters of Bournemouth that he will have them raped under their beds. Boyson’s high dome and jungle of side- whiskers are straight out of Dotheboy’s Hall; quite clearly, he is plotting to starve all schoolchildren and to bring back hanging for theft of a hankerchief.

But the pantomime tradition has a habit of undermining itself, as the political bogey men become respectable — even loved — and sometimes in power, Churchill, for example, was once hated by many committed Tories. Aneurin Bevan, as he died, had almost cast off the diabolical image and seemed about to mellow into Gaitskell’s compliant right hand man. And Wilson, who was once thought to have ambitions to serve notice to quit on the fiddling business men of British capitalism, ended up by giving many of them honours, at the same time as he took one himself.

One of the uses of the demon kings is to draw the opposition’s fire and to become a personalisation of the popular misconceptions of their party’s policies. And if they are very clever, they can judge correctly when to stop being the demon king and start being the good fairy.

The danger in all this is that, like the panto, it is a diversion: it attracts attention away from the real political issues. Whatever the guise of the people who get into power over capitalism at any time, their basic function is the same—to try to run the system and survive politically. The workers who vote for or against them because they are entranced or frightened by the spectacle are living a fairy tale—and one with no happy ending.

Teddy Bares His Soul.

Edward Kennedy has everything—or almost everything. He is rich, famous, handsome, atheletic; and now, in a dramatic baring of his soul, he has revealed that he has the added quality of generosity.

For years he has been resisting the efforts of his friends who want him to take over running American capitalism. At one time Kennedy protested that, with a glut of fatherless nephews and nieces, his family commitments were too pressing. It was also hinted that, not surprisingly, he was reluctant to end up being assassinated like his two brothers.

But now the pressure has proved too strong; Kennedy has relented and will contest the Democratic nomination— and he is doing it all for the good of the American people. Having originally supported Carter for the presidency, Kennedy has suddenly found out that American capitalism is in an awful mess—and he has decided that Carter is to blame.

Even more, he is persuaded that only he can sort the mess out, although it is unusual, to say the least, for a sitting President to have to fight for re-nomination. At times, Kennedy’s enthusiasm seems to be getting the better of him; on a recent campaign tour in Carter country in the Deep South he was rash enough to promise that he would “roll back” rising prices (how many politicians have lived to regret that one?)

And, even more enthusiastic, Kennedy has persuaded his wife, who was driven to alcoholism by the stress of his life style, to totter to the platform to support his candidacy.

If such open cynicism succeeds, it will be because the Carter administration is so thoroughly discredited; even the media have stopped showing him to be a nimble, active man and have begun to put out pictures of him stumbling and falling to the ground, just like they used to with Gerry Ford.

None of this promises that it will be a dignified, analytical election campaign. Carter’s government has had no more success in doing the impossible—controlling capitalism so that it works in the interests of the American working class than has any other. The Kennedys are famous now as ruthless operators of a political ambitions machine—and Edward Kennedy is perhaps the most ruthless, ambitious and unsavoury of them all.

So it seems the campaign will be a savage, cynical affair. The best man may or may not win (if there is a best man) but in any case it will not matter—the victor will carry on trying to do the impossible and capitalism will come out on top.

Stormy Front.

Like some malignant tumour, the National Front took root and flourished through a sort of cellular subdivision among other racialist organisations in this country. For some years, it has led the field in this particular brand of anti-working class propaganda, trumpeting its object of making racism respectable. It has had some ominously successful election campaigns.

But behind this facade—and behind the dramatic, flag-forested parades, the strutting leaders, the hooligan rank and file all has not been well with the NF. It has gone through a succession of leadership crises and has seen its votes fall away.

Now the Front is experiencing yet another schism from which, perhaps, another equally obnoxious party will emerge. This schism is reported to revolve around the objectionable personality of the NF propaganda specialist Martin Webster, who has indeed never gone out of his way to cultivate a reputation as a sensitive artist in human relations.

There is a certain irony in this struggle. If the Front were in power it is likely that the losers of the battle within its ranks would suffer a consequence a lot less gentle—and a lot more final—than that of simply being expelled from the organisation. So perhaps they have something to be thankful for, in those poor election results.

If there should be an open split in the Front, there will probably be rejoicing among such bodies as the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers Party, who will see this as a triumph over racism. In fact, the pernicious ideas put out by the NF and the like will always find a receptive audience among workers who are degraded, exploited, poverty-laden and confused about the reasons for their condition.

Racism is the nomination of a scapegoat for the evils which capitalism brings. The most effective weapon against it is not in violence or repression but in a clear, consistent analysis of capitalism and of how it causes workers’ problems. No banners are waved in that but it is more enduring—because it answers to reality—than any parade.

Islam and banking (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Koran—which is supposed to be the literal word of God as dictated to Mohamet by the Archangel Gabriel — bans the taking of interest. Or at least that is how it is being interpreted by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Persia and by the Moslem fundamentalists who advise the military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia.

The trick of course is in the definition of interest. It can be admitted that, from the point of view of economic theory, there are two kinds of interest, depending on what the loan is granted for: consumption or production. Before capitalism most loans were not investments in production but were to people to spend on consumption, the luxuries of the rich or the necessities of the poor as the case may be. When such loans are made to the poor the moneylender can exploit his client’s dire need to extract a very high rate of interest and can eventually reduce him to a state of virtual slavery, as occurred on numerous occasions in pre-capitalist times. Mohamet wrote the Koran, of course, well before capitalism evolved, about 1300 years ago in what is now Saudi Arabia and its ban on interest was designed to prevent the social structure of the then tribal society being undermined by debt-slavery.

Interest under capitalism is something different. It is a share in the profits extracted from the exploitation of wage-labour. The lender loans his money to an entrepreneur who invests it in production and who pays the interest out of the profits he makes. This means that under capitalism there is a limit to the rate of interest: it cannot be greater than the rate of profit.

Banks are specialised financial institutions which gather together money which people want to lend and pass it on to capitalists to invest in production. They realise their profits out of the difference between the rates of interest they pay their depositors and the rates of interest they charge their customers. Banks play an important intermediary role under capitalism and without them the accumulation of capital out of profits — which is the be-all and end-all of capitalism — would proceed, and would have proceeded, at a much slower pace.

Capitalism has only been going for about two hundred or so years but it has now spread all over the world, including Moslem countries. In such countries too it finds banks essential as financial intermediaries channelling money for productive investment; and of course banks, charging and taking interest, exist in all Moslem countries including both Khomeini’s Persia and Zia's Pakistan.

Moslem theologians have overcome this problem by interpreting the Koran’s ban on interest to apply only to the taking and paying of amounts of interest fixed in advance. From here on it is easy: the interest, both that paid to depositors and that charged to borrowers, comes to be called “a share in profits”. This is how the Amman correspondent of the Financial Times (21/3/79) describes the operation of the Jordan Islamic Bank:

  A depositor places his money in a savings account in an Islamic bank without being guaranteed any fixed return every year. Instead he is promised a share of the profits of the projects the bank is financing. When the bank lends money to finance a new industrial plant, the borrower does not pay a fixed interest rate every year, but rather promises to give the bank a share of the profits the plant generates after it starts production. If the plant makes a quick and large profit, the bank and the depositors share in the bonanza. If the plant makes only a small profit, they get less. The bank always maintains a reserve fund from which it will pay its depositors and shareholders a dividend during any particularly unprofitable years.

Another way out is, instead of demanding a share of the borrower’s profits, to charge him a “commission” or “fee” for arranging the loan.

Actually, this solution — of calling “interest” a “share in profits”— conforms very well with the nature of interest under capitalism which, as we saw, is precisely a share of profits — though it is another matter whether the foregoing of the administrative convenience of paying fixed interest just to respect the letter of the Koran is a rational banking practice.

What is interesting in this is the confirmation it brings of the materialist conception of history that the ideology of a particular society its morality, its religion,—is a reflection of its economic basis and changes as that basis does. As capitalism has come to Moslem countries so the Koran's ban on interest has been re-interpreted so as to fit in with the system's need for the financial intermediaries that are banks.

There is a precedent for this. The Bible too used to ban interest and this had to be changed when capitalism evolved in Christian countries. It seems, according to R.H.Tawney in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, that by the end of the Middle Ages the Christian theologians had reached exactly the same conclusions as today’s Moslem theologians — that anything goes except the giving and taking of payments fixed in advance (indeed there would seem to be one or two subtleties here that may not yet have occurred to the Ayatollah Khomeini):

   No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man. He may demand compensation — interesse — if he is not repaid the principal at a time stipulated. He may ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he foregoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain . . .What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern economic text-books as ‘pure interest’ — interest as a fixed payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender. . .The essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, which has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they are reasonable — for is not everyone in a small way a profit-maker? — has no mercy for the debenture holder. His crime is that he takes a payment for money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury. (Pelican edition, pp 54-5).

How long will it be before the Archangel Gabriel appears again to dictate an amendment to the Koran permitting fixed interest payments?

Adam Buick

Capitalism and democracy (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a notion in certain circles that something called “democratic socialism” is a contradiction in terms, that state ownership and centralised planning is incompatible with freedom. Such an assertion is intended as a smart rap over the knuckles of left wing gurus such as Tony Benn or Eric Heffer who like to see themselves as “democratic socialists”. They confidently assert its vital difference from the stale and discredited “social democracy” of the Labour Party stick-in-the-muds; and yet argue that it offers a democratic “humanistic” alternative to the tyrannical political system of places like Russia whose economy is predominantly under state ownership.

Unfortunately for Benn, Heffer and the like, theirs is a herculean task. Not, one must hasten to add, in convincing critics of their ideological separateness from a socially acceptable “social democracy” (what would the establishment press do, without a Red Scare in the guise of harmless-looking Wedgie to provoke good old Col Twrphitt-Plunkett into bristling indignation over tea and the Telegraph?) No, the real problem for them is to persuade their critics and an electorate which provides them with the votes they want, that they are not the Red Scare they are made out to be (hence the stress on “democracy”). And, of course, they’re not: sheep in sheep’s clothing would be nearer the mark.

For one thing, the qualification “democratic” gives rise to the suspicion that those who make use of the phrase “democratic socialism” allow for the possibility of there being something called “undemocratic socialism”. If democracy is not a necessary concomitant of “socialism”, it then becomes possible to envisage a situation in which “democratic socialists” would choose “socialism” at the expense of “democracy”.

For another, critics of “democratic socialism” would say that full-blooded state ownership of the economy—the washed-out worthless ideal of “democratic socialists” obtains in decidedly undemocratic Russia. It sounds nice in theory, they would say, but look how it turns out in practice. For did not Lenin argue in 1918—not unlike our “democratic socialists” today—for a state that would be “democratic for the proletariat and propertyless in general and dictatorial against the bourgeoisie only” (section added to the 2nd edition of The State and Revolution). Further, is there not a significant correlation to be discovered if we look at the world around us, between dictatorial government and state involvement in the economy?

“Democratic socialists” would respond to this criticism by pointing out, with justification, that an undeveloped, predominantly feudal, economy such as existed in Russia in 1917, is an altogether different matter from that of an industrially advanced capitalist economy. They would locate in the backward nature of the chaotic, war-stricken economy of pre-revolution Russia the essential reason for the emergence of a new political dictatorship to replace that of the tsar and to preside over the birth-pangs of capitalism. Indeed, the liberalising tendencies that appear to go hand in hand with industrial development in all economics, state capitalist or private enterprise, would seem to support this argument. Expensive modern wage slaves, who produce and operate all the sophisticated machinery of modern industry to submit indefinitely to naked, brutal coercion.

Thus “democratic socialists” would reaffirm their faith in state capitalism, although many have wavered in it and some have renounced it altogether as in the fifties. Then, the emerging picture of the stalinist nightmare provoked first disbelief then waves of disillusionment. Nevertheless, the basic argument is still adhered to: state ownership does not present a threat to, but on the contrary is a necessary basis for the extension of political democracy. To quote Ramsay MacDonald:

  The nationalisation of production is just as necessary to democracy and is just as inevitable if democracy is to mature into fullness — as the nationalisation of the sovereign authority by the suppression of the personal right of kings to rule. (Socialism 1907.)

The justification for this belief was spelled out many years later by another Labour leader:

  Political democracy, moreover, in a regime of capitalism and great social inequality, is only half alive. Political forms are twisted by economic forces. Citizens legally equal, wield unequal power. Political democracy will only be fully alive when married to economic democracy in a society of equals. (Practical Socialism for Britain by Hugh Dalton, 1935.)

A left wing assumption is that nationalisation brings the “economic democracy” necessary for the full and vital functioning of political democracy. If ownership of property is the basis of power, the argument goes, then an extension of public ownership to encompass the entire “public” (“economic democracy”), must correspondingly result in an extension of political democracy itself.

Curiously, laissez faire apologists attack egalitarianism precisely because they feel a “society of equals” would

   “. . . require a political system in which the state is able to hold in check those social and occupational groups, which by virtue of their skills or education . . . might otherwise attempt to stake share of society’s rewards. The most effective way of holding such groups in check is by denying them the right to organise politically” from Class Inequality and Political Order 1972 by Frank Parkin, quoted in The Free Nation 16 February - 1 March.

Further, they see in state capitalism not the extension, but the abolition of property ownership as far as the “public” is concerned: which calls into question the nature of “property ownership”. Tory MP Stephen Hastings summed up what he saw as the consequences of this, in a diatribe under the heading “Time to unite against Marxism” in the Daily Telegraph some years ago. His argument, stated simply, was that “democracy only has meaning if it is based on individual liberty” and “liberty can only exist if it is rooted in the concept of property and the rule of law” and that should “Marxism” — by which he meant state capitalism — prevail, this would result in the erosion of liberty and therefore democracy. But since when have the “concept of property and the rule of law” been exorcised from the domain of state capitalist dictatorships? If they have, then perhaps Hastings would care to provide some explanation to account for — and to comfort — some poor wretch of a Russian worker up before the law for stealing “public” property which he might have been forgiven for thinking he was entitled to as a member of the “public”? The “rule of law” is a product of property relationships and its application implies the existence of a property set-up which it seeks to protect.

The fact is that both the left and its laissez faire critics are wrong. Nationalisation no more entails the extension of property ownership to the public than it does the elimination of property relationships. For a start there are just too many uncomfortable facts which neither viewpoint can account for, such as the immense inequality of power and income in all state capitalist regimes. Tins could not exist if nationalisation brought about “economic democracy" or abolished property ownership. Such inequality makes the Free Nation view that egalitarianism gives rise to dictatorship completely irrelevant as an explanation for state capitalist dictatorship.

State property is effectively the collective private property of a small minority who, through their control of the state, exercise ownership and control of the economy. If dictatorial government is a tendency in state capitalism this may be due partly to the fact that access to the “commanding heights” of the economy depends on political criteria — the Party has the say in the selection of top state officials. It is is hardly surprising, then, that this arrangement should tend to reinforce political conformity and stifle dissent.

But this cannot be explained by the absence of class or property relations in places like Russia; on the contrary, it is precisely because of class division in society that the possibility for political dictatorship arises in the first place. As Marx put it, with the end of class division that will come with the establishment of socialism, “there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society” (The Poverty of Philosophy). No political power means no government, liberal or dictatorial.

In a recent lecture, Professor F. A. Hayek remarked:

  If a free society is to continue to exist, no monopoly can be allowed to use physical force to maintain its position and to threaten to deprive the public of essential services others are capable and willing of rendering. (The Listener 17 August 1978.)

In thus attacking trade unions, Hayek inadvertently provided a description of capitalism which is based on a class monopoly of the means of production backed up by the armed might of the state. It is by Hayek’s own yardstick an unfree, undemocratic society. Despite the fact that the workers produce all the wealth in society they have very little, if any, say in the process of producing this wealth because they do not own the means of production. When the profit motive dictates that the public should be deprived of essential services which workers are capable and willing of rendering, as is the case in capitalism’s periodic slumps, what better evidence can there be of the way in which capitalism undemocratically places the interests of the few before the interests and wishes of the majority?

In contrast, the entire community will own the means of production in a socialist society, with the necessary consequence that the process of production will be democratically organised by and in the interests of society as a whole. This will not be the sham democracy of the people electing governments to run society against their interests, but direct, democratic control by people over the conditions of their existence.

And the phrase “common ownership” is not used here as a shibboleth or empty slogan after a leftist fashion. It means precisely what it says — that everyone will own all the means of production and will therefore have unrestricted, free access to the fruits of production and all the information necessary for the fullest democratic discussion and participation in decision-making. Next to this, what more is there to be said for the “democracy” of the marketplace; if pound notes spent are votes cast, then the great majority everywhere languish under the iron heel of minority dictatorship.

Robin Cox

Merry Christmas? (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is your stocking hung upon the wall? Are you all pepped up waiting for your fraction of a family (depending on the apparatchiks latest government edict) to arrive and share the festive fun with you? Or will they be deterred from coming by the incessant government propaganda pouring out of the telescreens – Obey! Disarray! Dismay! Rule of Two Four Six Eight! Or will they be dissuaded by the militarised police cruising up the street on the lookout for unessential food purchases such as Christmas pud? ‘Police will enter homes and break up Christmas dinners if families break lockdown rules – and there will be riots, predicts police commissioner’ (Mail Online, 28 October). Or will they decide to celebrate the event now known as Super Spreader on their own?

Santa’s reindeers exceed the rule of six so some two at least are going to lose their jobs, seasonal as they are. They’re going to be in company with many many workers whose jobs and industries have been destroyed in less than twelve months. It’s still a capitalist society. Until the majority decide to choose socialism, a moneyless society where goods are made for use, not for profit, workers have no choice but to continue to sell their labour power, physical and mental. If you give your heart to capitalism it will break it over and over. With Santa in the sleigh they’re pulling they would still be over the limit , so it looks like the Gang of Four will be pulling the sleigh this year. It’s not bad news for everyone though: ‘Billionaires’ wealth rises to 10.2 trillion amid Covid crises’ (Guardian headline, MSN.com, 7 October).

Put the Third Man in the Moscow Mule and the Streetcar in the fridge. Tis the season to be merry, stuff it, Ma let’s hit the sherry! All our troubles we can bury. Let’s stay drunk till February! A reliable source provides information that in New Zealand the seasons partying begins on December first and continues happily for eight weeks after that. The Antipodeans may well be harking back to early Germanic peoples whose midwinter festival, Yule, took place around a similar period. For the sensible many not of a religious bent there are many party alternatives to help lift the Winter mood. There’s Saturnalia, a Roman festival; Koliada, a Slav winter festival or the Iranian Shab-e Yalda.

Some where in the world, whether they know it’s Christmas time or not, someone is getting slayed. Even Madame Arcati’s crystal ball couldn’t reasonably predict this future. At the time of writing the outcome of events which assume significance for many are unknown. The USA presidential election, Brexit, Covid84, what further level of incompetence the global governments can sink to, the result of Strictly Come Dancing (shudder). Given the negative state of the world it’s not surprising if many decide to emulate the supposed behaviour of the ostrich and ‘bury their heads in the sand’. When Rip Van Winkle awoke the American Revolution had occurred. As with most revolutions the net result was a change in the folks telling you what is good for you and a more intrusive state interference in people’s lives. Being woke in 2020 means feeling the warm glow that Christmas always used to claim for itself. Now, it’s the virtuous satisfaction that comes from unthinkingly subscribing to the latest ‘progressive’ shibboleth which dissuades independent thinking.

Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol, In Prose, Being A Ghost Story Of Christmas,’ 1843 (and a progenitor of awful ‘feel good’ television films that play on a loop once October arrives) set many of the traditions for a post-Victorian Christmas. Despite Scrooge’s apparent change of demeanour from a mean, grasping, exploitative loan shark he still remained a member of the capitalist class underpaying Bob Cratchit (a wage slave selling his labour power to Scrooge) even after the wage rise he was given. Upon reading this insight into the plight of the poor (all deserving) did the Victorian middle classes cry, thank god it’s them not me? Worth noting still is the warning of ‘Christmas Present’ when showing off two of Man’s children named Want and Ignorance. ‘Christmas Present’ admonishes his audience to beware of Ignorance the most. Ignorance needs to be converted to education so that chaotic capitalism can be replaced by a sane socialist society as soon as possible for everyone’s sake.

‘Eat, drink’ depends on whether the supply chains are still intact and irrational locust behaviour hasn’t swept the shelves cleaner than vultures on a wildebeest carcass in the Serengeti. Be merry? The human spirit is always able to find something positive in the most dire of circumstances. Acceptance of a bad situation while saying, gosh it’s terrible but there’s nothing we can do about it, is not acceptable however. After one of the most dramatic years which continuing on may have profound negative societal changes in global society it is no longer good enough to complainingly accept what is being implemented. Contrary to what a Tory leader once said, there is an alternative.

A 1961 British film, ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’, has the planet heading toward the Sun following some drastic efforts caused by USA and Soviet nuclear testing. Awaiting the result of alleviative action, the newspaper, around which the film revolves, has to prepare its headlines for two possibilities: ‘World Saved’ and ‘World Doomed’. Spoiler alert. World saved. Probably. Merry Christmas?

DC

Obituary: Fred Allen (2020)

Obituary from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sadly we report the death on 11 September of comrade Fred Allen, aged 91 years. 

He joined the Socialist Party when aged 17 having decided ‘there was no god and the SPGB was the best thing he knew of’.

In later years he was a member of East London Branch and then for some years an active member of the East Anglian Regional Branch. He served a short time on the Executive Committee and was an assistant to the Treasurer, taking seriously the collection of dues.

Fred was an enthusiastic supporter of the annual Summer School held in Birmingham probably enjoying the social side as much as the meetings. He was ready to help out wherever he could. A member recalls how a couple of years ago he helped her with the catering for a conference carrying the heavy shopping and spending the day in the kitchen rather than at the delegate meeting saying he was ‘not interested in the chit chat, I prefer to get things done’.

Fred would have been at HO for the Conference in April – he rang to arrange that we travel by cab – but sadly the lockdown meant that it did not take place.

We extend our condolences to his wife Barbara and family.

Cooking the Books: Why capitalists are ‘greedy’ (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Attenborough: Curb capitalism to save Earth’ was how the Times (8 October) reported a podcast interview with David Attenborough on Radio 5 Live in which he said:

  ‘The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. That doesn’t mean to say that capitalism is dead. I’m not an economist and I don’t know but I believe the nations of the world, the ordinary people worldwide, are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy.’

That’s a start. Capitalism has got something to do with it. It certainly encourages behaviour on the part of those in charge of capitalist production which comes across as ‘greed’ but is this an ‘excess’?

Marx devoted a section of chapter 24 of Capital to the question. Entitled ‘Separation of Surplus Value into Capital and Revenue: the Abstinence Theory’, it’s an amusing read as it mocks the theory that the capitalists are entitled to a profit on their capital because they abstain from consuming all their profits but re-invest most as new capital.

‘Except as personified capital,’ Marx wrote, ‘the capitalist has no historical value’ and went on:

  ‘But, so far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle’.

Hence his conclusion that ‘so far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital — endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation.’

In other words, the capitalists’ ‘greed’ for accumulating profits is not a personal choice or a character defect but is performing an essential social role within the capitalist economic system.

In Marx’s day that role was filled by an individual person. Today it is filled by a fictitious legal person – mainly, the limited company or corporation – but which still has to carry out what being a personification of capital involves.

It should be clear, then, that ‘greed’ for making and accumulating profits as more capital – also called ‘growth’ – is built into capitalism. It is not an excess but rather the essence of capitalism. Those in charge of capitalist production cannot help being ‘greedy’.

This means that capitalism cannot be ‘curbed’ and, if attempted, would disrupt the system and cause mass unemployment (rather like the measures governments have taken to deal with the coronavirus pandemic). To save the Earth, capitalism will have to be culled not curbed.

Fortunately, the historical role of the capitalist has been completed as the material basis has long since been created for ‘a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.’ To save the Earth we need to move on to this next stage in the evolution of human society.

Happiness, Happiness? (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many aspects of a person’s life can be expressed in numbers: height, weight, income, savings. But what about how happy they are? Can this really be expressed by a score out of ten and compared with how others in the same country felt a year ago or how people living elsewhere feel? That is precisely what is done in the World Happiness Report for 2020, the eighth in the series (online at worldhappiness.report). The period covered is 2017–19, and the main source of data is the Gallup World Poll (www.gallup.com). Typically, a thousand people are asked a set of questions in each country each year, and this smallish number is claimed to give reliable estimates, though no evidence for this is provided.

Let’s look at some of the findings. Countries are ranked in terms of inhabitants’ happiness, from Finland and Denmark at the top to South Sudan and Afghanistan at the bottom; the UK is in thirteenth place. There have been changes in happiness scores since 2008–12: most positively in Benin and Togo, most negatively in Afghanistan and Venezuela. More generally, in connection with the 2008 financial turmoil, it is noted that ‘life evaluations fell sharply during the financial crisis, recovered almost completely by 2011, and then fell fairly steadily to a 2019 value about the same level as its post-crisis low’.

Cities were ranked as well, from Helsinki at the top to Kabul at the bottom, with cities in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand receiving high scores. On average, urban populations are happier than rural ones, though this is not always the case in the developed Western world. And ‘the urban happiness advantage is considerably larger for higher educated people than for lower educated people’.

The variables used to explain scores include GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy. But perhaps more interesting are some of the other factors seen as leading to increasing happiness. What is termed ‘well-being inequality’ is of great importance: happiness scores are higher in countries and regions where well-being is more equal, suggesting that people do care about the well-being of others. Also important is the social environment, which involves having someone to count on, trust (as measured by the absence of corruption), a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, and generosity. Strong social environments help protect people against the consequences of adverse events, and reduce well-being inequality.

In general, people are aware of the importance of the natural environment and of the threat posed by climate change. In London, people greatly appreciate green spaces and also blue spaces such as rivers and ponds. Sustainable development has on the whole a positive relationship with measures of well-being. This relates to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs.un.org), such as eliminating poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, providing clean water and ensuring clean and affordable energy. But two of the goals (climate action, and responsible consumption and production) were negatively correlated with well-being measures, suggesting that action here may not be so straightforward.

A final chapter asks why the Nordic countries are consistently among the happiest, in spite of the long cold winters. These countries have relatively low income inequality, but this is claimed to have in general no clear link with feelings of well-being. Here’s the conclusion: ‘The Nordic countries are characterized by a virtuous cycle in which various key institutional and cultural indicators of good society feed into each other including well-functioning democracy, generous and effective social welfare benefits, low levels of crime and corruption, and satisfied citizens who feel free and trust each other and governmental institutions’.

The report can make no claims about the coronavirus pandemic, but the site’s FAQs do note that in the past major disasters have sometimes led to increases in happiness: ‘The most frequent explanation seems to be that people are pleasantly surprised by the willingness of their neighbours and their institutions to work in harness to help each other.’

What should we make of all this? What does it show about the way the world is and the lives that people lead? For one thing, it is clear that how rich a country is has no simple relation with how happy its inhabitants are. It is true that countries ranked near the bottom are very poor, many of them in Africa, though this also includes India and Myanmar. But wealth does not explain everything, as the US is only eighteenth, just above the Czech Republic, while South Korea and Japan are 61st and 62nd respectively.

It is also interesting to compare this work with that of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level and The Inner Level. They emphasised the crucial role of inequality: the higher the level of income inequality in a country, the more problems such as shorter life expectancy, higher rates of mental illness, more obese people and less social mobility. The level of trust was another aspect studied, based on how many people agreed with the statement ‘Most people can be trusted’; higher levels of inequality caused lower levels of trust.

Trust is also covered in the World Happiness Report, though perhaps measured in a rather different way. And, as noted above, it is part of the social environment, the strength of which can help protect against difficulties in people’s lives, make them feel more secure, reduce the extent of well-being inequality and so increase scores for happiness. The sense of community could be another way of expressing this.

So in plenty of countries the present social system does not deliver reasonable rates of happiness to many, many people. In others, folk fare rather better, but this is more in spite of the competitive and inequality-based system than because of it. Health matters, but also people’s relationships with others and their sense of freedom. Many factors combine to make an individual happy, and a person’s ability to choose how they live and their relations to other people play an important role, and capitalism reduces people’s freedom in this, as in so many other areas.

Paul Bennett

Not a LOTO Fun (2020)

Book Review from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Left Out by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire. (Bodley Head 2020. £18.99)

This is billed as the ‘inside story of Labour under Corbyn’, which says exactly what’s inside the proverbial tin. It is at times insightful, gossipy and scandalous – and as such is hugely entertaining. That the Corbyn project was something of a train wreck by well before the 2019 General Election is now received wisdom and this book shows why. Always an uneasy amalgam of leftist forces (from quasi-Stalinists like Seamus Milne to Bennites, Trotskyists and single-issue campaigners), the surprise was more that the unique circumstances of the 2017 election had enabled them to do so well against the odds. But as one commentator put it, the soufflé never rises twice.

Much of it centres on the machinations of the Leader Of The Opposition’s Office (referred to internally as LOTO) and the internal factionalism that developed there enveloping all else, and their parallel and persistently difficult relationship with the official Labour HQ at Southside, still jam-packed with Blairites and Brownites. To say that policy-making and strategic decisions were made on-the-hoof (when they were made at all) is an understatement. What strategy did emerge – including Labour’s eventual and painful drift towards Remain – was often at the behest of the ‘grandfather’ of the Corbyn project, namely former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, but this was frequently in the face of opposition from other faction-fighters, including Corbyn’s Chief of Staff Katie Murphy, Unite chief Len McCluskey, and Milne.

Over time, Corbyn himself cut an increasingly sad figure in many respects, exhausted and irritated by the job in almost equal measure, and especially unable to understand the furore over anti-semitism in the Party. A backbench campaigner at heart, this attitude never really left him. It was an irony that the backbenchers in the Parliamentary Labour Party, some of whom were to defect to Change UK and/or the Liberal Democrats, ended up being as much a thorn in his side as he had been to Blair and Brown under New Labour – if not more so.

The book also covers the plotting and dynamics behind the succession of Keir Starmer as leader over Rebecca Long-Bailey in the wake of Corbyn’s 2019 election defeat and is telling in its analysis:

‘… on no subject was [Corbyn] more stubborn that his own sense of identity. The painful compromises inherent in the unusual lives of holders of high office – the encroached privacy, the punishing schedules, the relentless demand for executive decision-making and swift judgement – never felt within his command… Unable to rewrite the rules of the game as he had promised, he preferred to ignore them… By 2019, Corbyn had created a vacuum for others to fill. Keir Starmer in particular has reason to be grateful for Corbyn’s squeamishness with power. The Project not only squandered its inheritance from the membership, but left its children without any meaningful bequest’ (p.357).

There is a fair chance Starmer will lead Labour to their next election victory, despite his Trotskyist origins, but clearly more as a latter-day Brown from the Party’s ‘soft left’ than as a Bennite like Corbyn. Plus la change…?

DAP

Labour’s Internal Conflicts (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The suspension from the Labour Party of its erstwhile leader Jeremy Corbyn initially appears to be of little note for socialists. There can be sympathy for the hounding of an apparently decent man, , but hey-ho that’s capitalist politics for you.

But actually, this is a little more serious. While Corbyn does not in any sense meet the criteria set out in our principles of what is required to be a socialist, he is identified throughout the media and in the popular consciousness as just that. Indeed he probably self-identifies as a socialist.

During the lead up to the 2019 general election, in a number of BBC Radio 4 vox pops he was frequently cited as the reason for Labour voters of many years standing insisting they would not vote for the Labour Party. Corbyn was too extreme, to the point of being denounced as a ‘communist’. As socialists who state that socialism and communism are synonyms, that the Labour Party never was, is not and never will be a socialist party, such prevalent sentiments as expressed in those vox pops are of concern.

Capitalism’s defenders are none too discerning when it comes to identifying perceived socialist threats. The faintest whiff of red smoke and any vaguely smouldering embers are to be stamped on. If possible the word socialist, never mind the concept, is to be anathema.

Socialist understanding of the Soviet Union from its inception is that it was state capitalist and not socialist/communist in any sense. Yet there can be little doubt that Lenin, who thought himself a socialist, found himself through circumstance as head of a ruling regime that had no way of pursuing socialism.

Thus the compromise of state capitalism proved to be no pre-emptor of socialism as perhaps Lenin hoped. However, it did allow for an ideological claim of communism in the making, an iron curtain indeed behind which the ruling nomenclature became the capitalist class spawning the oligarchs of Putin’s non-Soviet Russia.

By posing as communist for over 70 years, the Soviet regime has been responsible for considerable ideological damage that actual socialists have to deal with. Present-day inheritors of Lenin’s legacy continue to serve to obscure the ubiquity of capitalism throughout the world, be it ‘free market’ or state capitalism.

This serves ‘free market’ capitalism particularly well politically as those state capitalist countries who continue to don the communist mask tend to the brutally authoritarian, thereby confirming the popular conception.

There is, though, a risk in all this for capitalism in that the concept of socialism may be traduced, but it continues to exist and where that may lead is unpredictable. For example, while the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 could not of itself have led to socialism, had the idea inspired the working class around the world to seriously consider what was possible for it to achieve, then capitalism would have had a problem.

Therefore, any hint of socialism succeeding, however erroneous, must be pilloried and, where possible, crushed. Even politicians who are merely trying to ameliorate the worst effects of capitalism without challenging capitalism itself must be thwarted and shown to fail. All the better if those politicians self-identify, or failing that can be branded, as socialists/communists/Marxists.

Thus the case of Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party takes on a significance of sorts for socialists. On his being elected leader a whole machinery of vilification was slipped into gear. It was his declared support for a beleaguered Arabic people, Palestinians, which ultimately led to his downfall, branded a denier of anti-Semitism.

As a case study in character assassination, it should serve as a warning as to the opprobrium that will be manufactured and freely distributed to the public should anyone appear to be gaining influence contrary to capitalism’s well-being. The synthetic outrage produced through blending anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has proved to be powerful. It has placed a brand of aggressive ultra-nationalism beyond criticism and forged a potent political weapon to strike down opponents, leaving them apparently morally, as well politically, compromised.

The wider impact is to identify anti-Semitism with socialism. It doesn’t matter that Corbyn really isn’t a socialist, just another would-be reformer of capitalism. If this is indicative of action that can be so vigorously pursued against a reformer, what can people expect who do wish to replace capitalism with socialism through the agency of a self-aware working class acting on its own behalf?

Once the working class is so motivated, then such a political weapon will be blunted. But until then, those who have accepted the task of propagating socialist ideas need to take heed of what could be the personal consequences of becoming more influential.

There is the further, perhaps more important, point concerning democracy. Socialists do not advocate the suppression of ideas, rather they should be brought out into the open and subjected to scrutiny. Through debate erroneous notions can be exposed and correct ones clearly identified. This does not preclude individuals continuing to expound erroneous ideas, the safeguard being their dismissal by the majority. That is democracy.

This most definitely applies to socialists. If some, or even all, we advocate can be demonstrated objectively to be wrong, then so it must be. It would be utterly pointless finding some mechanism whereby such a demonstration could be suppressed. This applies to all bodies of ideas and ideologies. Any agency working to frustrate this for self-serving purposes is opposed to democracy.

The Socialist Party was vigorously opposed to Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party. However well meaning, his ideas would not have brought the benefit of socialism to the working class. This for the very good reason that socialism is not something that can be conferred, it must be achieved by the working class itself.

This opposition was open and political, not personal. His subsequent vilification though the media, and by many of his own backbenchers, has most definitely served the interests of capitalism by casting guilt by association, however vague and erroneous that association may be, with socialism. The juicier story is proving to be the ongoing, and rather laboured (pun intended) anti-Semitism row. If there is a strand of anti-Semitism running through the Labour Party it would be one of the threads of racism sown into all societies based around national identities.

Zionism is but one manifestation of this and it is quite possible that those who take a specifically anti-Zionist stand slip into expressions of anti-Semitism without recognising they are doing so. While the world continues to be divided by national boundaries, so will the curse of casual, as well as intentional, racist comments and behaviour.

Suspending Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party not only won’t cure the problem, in a sense it deflects from the root cause. It would well serve those who are celebrating Corbyn’s predicament to examine their own attitudes as to whether they can honestly acquit themselves of ever having had a racist thought. To quote a statement attributed to a Jewish teacher, ‘Let he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone’.

Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn will now take stock and come to realise that the best interests of society are to be served through pursuing actual socialism, not some reformist parody. In which case he may come to realise suspension, perhaps expulsion, from the Labour Party is a blessing, even if initiated by dark deeds.

Dave Alton

Cooking the Books: Capitalism with Chinese characteristics (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month a pro-Beijing think-tank, Anbound, sent us (and others) an op-ed on ‘China’s state capitalism in the Eyes of the West’. Although the words ‘state capitalism’ were sometimes in inverted commas, sometimes they weren’t suggesting that they had no real objection to the term.

The article was in response to one that had appeared in the Economist on 15 August entitled ‘The new state capitalism: Xi Jinping is trying to remake the Chinese economy’. This argued that the head of the Chinese dictatorship, Chairman Xi, ‘is presiding over what he hopes will be the creation of a more muscular form of state capitalism. The idea is for state-owned companies to get more market discipline and private enterprises to get more party discipline, the better to achieve China’s great collective mission.’

The Chinese think-tank summarised the Economist article:

  ‘China is gradually establishing a commercial legal system, and its response to enterprises is more sensitive. The formulation of bankruptcy and patent regulations has increased fivefold since 2012. Predictable rules make the market run more smoothly as well as increase economic production. Finally, the last element is to blur the boundary between state and private firms. State-owned enterprises are forced to increase financial returns to attract private investors’.

This sounds like the sort of ‘mixed economy’ that exists in the West, so why is it called ‘state capitalism’ and not just ‘capitalism’? The answer seems to lie in the sentence that followed:

 ‘At the same time, the state has also strengthened the implementation of strategic control over private enterprises’.

Even this is not that different from what some governments of traditional capitalist states aspire to, though in China’s case it is being done more systematically and by a state controlled by a single dictatorial party.

In any event, it is not the same as the state capitalism that used to exist under Mao where most of the industrial means of production were owned by the state, itself monopolised by a bureaucracy whose top members effectively owned them collectively and benefited from this in terms of a privileged lifestyle. When referring to the USSR, which was the same, Maoists called the privileged ruling group a ‘red bourgeoisie’. A case of people in glasshouses throwing stones.

What exists today is more akin to the New Economic Policy that the Bolsheviks were forced to adopt in 1921 and which Lenin described as the development of capitalism under the control of ‘the proletarian state’, by which he meant a state controlled by a vanguard party (falsely) claiming to represent the working class. For Lenin this was to be a temporary expedient to help overcome Russia’s economic backwardness, and the capitalists it generated were small fry. In China it is seen as a permanent situation in which the one-party state controls and directs the activity of large shareholder-owned capitalist corporations, many export-oriented.

Is it a viable alternative way of running capitalism to the multi-party political system that exists in the capitalist countries of the West? It is certainly working at the moment. The new class of private capitalists seem content with the situation and are not campaigning for the end of one-party rule. They probably prefer the stability this brings, just as their counterparts in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did.

In fact, like them, China is seeking to control and direct private capitalism to achieve the same ‘great collective mission’ of winning a place in the sun at the expense of the older, more established capitalist states that dominate the world.

Capitalism vs the Environment (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution, capitalism has had a relentless impact on the environment, causing devastating climate change. With production motivated by making money rather than safeguarding the environment or satisfying people’s, needs wasteful and polluting methods will be used if they minimise costs and maximise profits. Any legislation which aims to curb environmental damage still has to fit into this framework. We in the Socialist Party do not shout for minimum reforms or minor changes to current worldwide production methods in an attempt to mitigate or offset the damage already done. Instead we believe that the only real solution is an end to the root cause of the problem, that is capitalism itself – nothing more, nothing less

We believe that it is the workers of the world who do all the producing and wealth creation, yet we are the last to realise the benefits when profits are growing. And the first to experience the hardships of downturns, recession and austerity.

The Socialist Party, which is part of the World Socialist Movement, is like no other organisation, insofar as we are the only group calling for an end to capitalism, and for it to be replaced by global socialism. This would be a world based on a revolutionary change of the means of production, from being owned by a tiny minority to being held in common ownership with free access to goods and services according to individual and self-defined needs.

The Socialist Party has been advocating revolutionary change since its inception in 1904. If you would like to learn more, then please visit spgb.net where you will find all the information you need, including details of points of contact in your local area.

Covid and capitalism’s unnecessary dilemma (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The crisis provoked by the coronavirus pandemic has brought out clearly the nature of capitalism as a system where most people depend on the income they get as wages from employment. They are in this position because they are excluded from ownership and control of the places where they work and where wealth is produced. These are in the hands of a minority, generally through joint-stock companies, who use them, in fact only allow them to be used, to produce goods and services for sale with a view to profit.

To obtain the money to buy what they need, the excluded majority has to go out on to the labour market and successfully sell their ability to work in return for a money wage (sometimes called a salary). Some, who have a long-term job and so a regular income, are able to convince a bank or a building society to grant them a long-term loan to buy a house or flat, which will be theirs if they keep up repayments and interest for 25 years or so. Others work in precarious, low-paid jobs and have to rely between jobs on state hand-outs or the informal economy to survive. Those who are unemployable, through long-term sickness or disability, have to rely entirely on meagre hand-outs from the state.

When wages stop

One of the measures taken by the government to try to slow down and limit the spread of the virus has been to close down all but ‘essential’ businesses, defined mainly as those engaged in producing, transporting or selling food and other everyday household essentials. Over ten million workers – some 35 percent of the employed workforce – have been affected. If the government had not stepped in, all these would have been without resources within a few months, if not before. Such is the precarity in the end of all those dependent on working for a wage. They can’t stop working for much more than a month or so without having to beg for a handout from the state to survive.

A fall in living standards affecting so many people was something that the government could not let happen, if only to maintain public order and avoid widespread civil unrest. The scheme it came up with to avoid this was ‘furlough’ – enabling employers to keep workers on their books without them working but with the government paying 80 percent of their previous earnings. On 8 May, 8.9 million workers were furloughed. Some 1.6 million more were not so lucky. They lost their job and had to rely on means-tested Universal Credit, the number claiming this surging from 2.6 million in February to 4.2 million in May. Since Universal Credit only brings your income up to the official poverty line these suffered a drop in income of considerably more than 20 percent.

The government was prepared to fork out the money – obtained by borrowing it – but only on a temporary basis on the assumption that the business closures would only need to last a few months. Since a government has no resources of its own, it can get money to spend only by borrowing it from capitalists or from taxes that will ultimately fall on capitalists. No government can go on compensating workers for any lengthy period for being deprived of their usual source of income – the wages paid by their employers for the use of their working skills to produce some good or provide some service for profit. It’s just not sustainable.

The government has to aim to get the economy – production for profit – going again as soon as possible, with workers producing sufficient amounts of new value to provide a profit for their employer and to cover their own consumption. The government did try to do this after a few months but this proved to be too soon and the virus began to spread again, threatening once more to overwhelm the health service, though epidemiologists had been warning that this was likely to happen anyway.

Hence the government’s dilemma – which to give priority to: profit-making or public health? Hence, too, a particular problem for the present Tory government under pressure to prioritise the economy from the small businesses, which mainly cater for workers’ consumption and many of which risk going under, whose owners are an important support base for that party. In the end, as long as no effective vaccine is widely available and if the virus continues to spread, that is what the government will have to do.

They won’t have a choice. Despite the inevitable public outcry and political consequences, the government would be forced to sacrifice the health of the old who, in any event from a capitalist point of view, are a burden as they no longer work to produce the profits that capitalism is all about. It might not come to this –vaccination might become widespread or else the virus might peter out – but if neither of these happen within a year or so this is what would have to happen.

As it might be

In a socialist society a pandemic like the present one could be dealt with rationally without the complications that occur under capitalism due to its production for profit and working for wages. Where the means of wealth production are the common property of society these will be used to produce solely and directly to satisfy people’s needs and not for sale with a view to profit.

Even in such a society a pandemic of the kind we are currently experiencing could occur and the measures to be taken to contain it – basically, social distancing while a vaccine is developed – would be the same. However, these measures would be being implemented within a quite different framework. Everybody would already have access to what they need simply by virtue of being a member of society, without having to pay for it out of money wages obtained by working for an employer. Those able to contribute in terms of work would cooperate to produce what was needed, while everyone would have free access to what they required to meet their needs. In short, the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ would apply.

This would be a much better framework within which to deal with any pandemic. To reduce contact between people, some production units and distribution centres might have to be closed and most people expected to stay at home except to collect food and other essentials as now. However, this would not be accompanied by the problems that result from doing this under capitalism. No production unit would ‘go out of business’ and not re-open; productive units would simply be temporarily closed. No-one would suffer a reduction in what they needed; free access for all, whether at work or not, to food and everyday essentials would continue. It would be inconceivable, indeed incomprehensible, that some children would have to go without a meal outside of term time.

If there was a longish delay in finding an effective vaccine or if the virus continued to spread for a couple of years or more, this would amount to a ‘natural disaster’ situation and some temporary rationing of non-essentials might have to be introduced. Once again, this would be done rationally, without the complications of maintaining production for profit and workers’ incomes, as the context would be a world of common ownership and production directly to satisfy everybody’s needs.

Adam Buick