Pathfinders: The final frontier (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A row has blown up between the US Congress and Nasa over people-carriers. Congress is insisting that Nasa stick to its plan of developing a rocket capable of taking manned missions beyond low earth orbit by 2016, which Nasa sniffily says it can’t do (New Scientist, 22 Jan). Presumably Congress doesn’t want Richard Branson or SpaceX to corner the space tourism market but the warring parties seem to have overlooked what the US Air Force is up to. The military has just lobbed a highly classified 13 tonne satellite into space aboard a Delta IV rocket (BBC News, 21 Jan) and could presumably be modified to do the same thing for a crewed spacecraft. This is the second huge satellite sent up by a Delta rocket in the past three months on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office, which reports to the CIA and the Department of Defense. The NRO are of course keeping zipped about the payloads but surveillance is the most likely purpose.

Congress is also doubtless embarrassed that Uncle Sam is having to rely on Russian rockets to get its own and the European Space Agency’s astronauts up to the International Space Station (ISS), now that the space shuttle fleet has been all but mothballed. Once considered a lunatic folly and, at around $160bn, estimated to be the most expensive object ever constructed, the ISS has survived cuts, shuttle disasters, air leaks, meteorite punctures and bad press to acquire an almost iconic status. In space technology, anything that actually works for longer than 6 months tends to do that, like Hubble and the Mars Rover. The Italian astronauts currently cooped up in this flying garage are texting, twittering, Facebooking and doing live TV interviews, while some genuinely useful science is also being done in the microgravity conditions.

In defiance of the recession, the space business is booming, due largely to satellite broadcast services like BSkyB. UK space companies are reported to have a turnover of £7.5bn with a 15 percent annual rise in employment (BBC News Online, 8 November 2010). With this kind of growth potential the UK government has now decided to get in on the act and start to sever its highly expensive commitments to the European Space Agency, the French and German dominated group which co-manages the ISS. This April, the UK Space Agency will be inaugurated with its own £200m annual budget, around one fifth of the space budgets of France and Germany. Meanwhile the European Commission has announced that the Galileo project, a 30-satellite GPS system for the EU, will cost around ?5bn, just one day after a senior Galileo contractor was sacked for calling the whole project ‘a stupid idea’ (BBC Online, 18 January).

Why stupid? Well, the sky is getting pretty crowded these days, with approximately 3,000 satellites in orbit. That they don’t crash into each other too often is due to the vast ranges of these orbits, although two satellites the size of small cars did pile into each other at 27,000 miles per hour in February 2009. The US Space Surveillance Network is still trying to find all the pieces, on top of the 8,000 other pieces of junk they are tracking, all of them barrelling around the globe at 13 times the speed of a bullet.

The question a socialist would ask would be: do we need all these satellites, given that most of them do pretty much the same thing? Well, we don’t, but the various competing sections of the ruling class do. The Navstar satellites that make up America’s GPS system are controlled by the military, giving the US a huge advantage in any future power-plays as well as wars. First to break the GPS dependence was Russia, with its Glonass system, then the US tried to stop the EU developing Galileo. Now every country that can buy or borrow the technology is lofting its own satellites and GPS systems into space, for fear of being shut out by enemies or simply by trade competition. In January China announced development of its own Beidou Navigation System. India meanwhile has sent up 7 satellites and would have sent up another one last month but the rocket blew up. 52 countries currently have payloads in orbit and the rockets just can’t go up fast enough.

Of course the various countries are talking about making their GPS systems compatible so they can share, but that’s not what they’re up there for. Any future war without satellite navigation and surveillance is unwinnable, as Iraq found out twice. Even Belarus, Colombia and Iran have their own satellites. Ominously, both the USA and China have in recent years used surface missiles to shoot down their own satellites, but rockets will only reach so far. Those in medium to high earth orbit would require space-based technology, possibly lasers, which would have to be pretty hefty, possibly requiring a heavy lift rocket like the Delta IV.

On the positive side, a former SpaceX engineer has started a fund to buy a comms satellite from a bankrupt firm and plant it in geostationary orbit where developing countries can use it (New Scientist, 22 January). Buythissatellite.org argues that internet access is a human right, but more pragmatically points out that since India is now bringing out a $12 laptop there is no great reason why everybody can’t get online. So far the fund has raised $30,000, which wouldn’t pay for a rocket’s spark plug. Funny that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, now valued at $50bn, hasn’t thought of buying himself some popularity by putting up the cash. In socialism, it hardly needs saying, there would be no issue here. Press a button, move satellite, end of.

Paddy Shannon

Production Values: bottled water (2011)

The Production Values Column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

   A sideways glance at capitalism through some of its products.  This month: bottled water 

It may come as a surprise to younger readers to learn that water hasn’t always come from the supermarket in plastic bottles. There was apparently a time when you could drink it pretty much for free, straight out of the tap. Just as if it fell out of the sky!

But that was in the bad old days. Before consumers wised up and demanded that all those empty spaces waiting on supermarket shelves were filled with rows of different brands of bottled water. Petitions, campaigns and protests demanding new beverage “experiences” finally forced manufacturers and retailers in the 1980s to relent and meet consumer demands for water filtered through Corsican volcanic rock, carved from ancient arctic glaciers or condensed from mountain clouds in Fiji. (These high-end products are of course in the minority. Most products, despite the iceberg or mountain stream on the label come via a tap in an industrial estate, across from an abattoir, just off the M6).

To think that there was a time when we used to think there was just water! H2O our science teachers used to call it, which does scant justice to the range of minerals, fizz and flavourings that can now be pumped into this “pure” product. None of which appears to make much real difference, it has to be said. According to the Observer, one blind tasting panel praised a particular water’s ‘fresh, sweet, lemony aroma’ only to inform them it came from a tap in a Birmingham public toilet. Taking the piss surely.

Under capitalism there is nothing new under the sun. Not even rain. The market wasn’t of course responding to a real demand so much as completely creating that demand. Perrier and Evian are hardly even an example of capitalism’s supposed dynamic inventiveness, more a case of “old wine in new bottles”.

Humans need water. But capitalism doesn’t need humans – unless they can be employed or sold to. So because they are too poor, 3,000 children die each day from diseases caught through drinking tainted supplies. Their mistake? – to be born not as capitalists, nor even as consumers under the market system. In some regions wars are fought over which capitalist controls the water. Every time a borehole is dug a common resource is sucked up, enclosed and sold back to us. Does capitalism think we will swallow anything? Clear as.

Next month: We look at “the best a man can get”. A cure for cancer?! Of course not, we’re just looking at the razor blade.

Greasy Pole: Nothing New In Old And Sad (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oldham and Saddleworth – or, for those living in the wrong part of it, Old and Sad – is a parliamentary constituency in Manchester with an electoral history such that it has accrued a reputation – again, depending on where someone might live in it – of renown or notoriety. Even before the recent by-election the votes revealed acute political entanglement compounded of poverty, crime, racism, riots… All three major parties have won the seat during the last 20 years and it provided the first case in almost a century in which the campaigning was brutal enough to cause an elected MP – Phil Woolas – to be turfed out, leading to the recent by-election. In 1995 an authentic Socialist – a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain – stood. The 46 votes cast for him were a sensible measure of the electors’ readiness to misuse their political power by preferring the usual rag-bag of reformist sterility.

Poverty and Sickness

The constituency make-up is varied, from Saddleworth’s relative affluence to the social and racial mix of Oldham with its crowded terraces. Oldham is rated as 33rd among the country’s most deprived areas, with five of its wards among the worst 10 percent. The 1998 unemployment rate among ethnic minorities bore no relation to their proportionate presence. The grim link between poverty and sickness yields a death rate almost one third above the national average. From this noxious soil erupted the riots in May 2001 – the worst of their kind in the United Kingdom for fifteen years. In a history of consistently bitter electioneering 2010 was only the most recent example. Labour’s 1995 campaign was managed by Peter Mandelson, whose style was later excused by Woolas: “Peter may be a bastard but at least he’s our bastard.” The campaign of the then successful LibDem Chris Davies was guiltily excused by their future leader Charles Kennedy: “By-election hand-to hand electoral combat can throw up trenchant exchanges and tricky campaign behaviour. In days gone by I have experienced the occasional sharp intake of breath where some of my own side’s literature has been involved.”

Tory and LibDem

It might have been expected, as an opening to the Age of the New Politics, that the January by-election would have encouraged something fresh and novel from the candidates. Well, no. The Tory candidate, Oldham-born Kashif Ali, a “self-made” (however that is interpreted) local barrister signed a “clean politics” pledge but this excursion into stunning naiveté did not impress the other two principal candidates – or the electorate. His vote fell from 11773 in May, when he was a close third, to 4481, leaving him a long was behind the LibDem. There was a popular rumour that the Tory leadership had Ali running a quiet campaign, in case too high a vote for him would embarrass Nick Clegg: this was fiercely denied by the Tories, as if such back-stabbing would be foreign to all they stood for. LibDem Elwyn Watkins (whose polling day mail shot referred to him as just “Elwyn” without mentioning his party) presented himself to the people of Old and Sad as: “…unlike some career politicians (did he mean Cameron and Clegg?) I have worked in the real world…I was taught the value of hard work, discipline and sticking with it…I’ve been made redundant twice – I know what it’s like.” He had made enough money to bankroll his candidature – and the legal challenge to Woolas – in something called “turning factories round”, including four years as “business analyst and financial adviser” to a Saudi Arabian sheik. And what about the embarrassment of that pledge he signed to oppose the rise in tuition fees? “If I had been elected in May I too would have had to compromise. I would go with the coalition and vote for it.” Unable to benefit enough by Woolas’s fall, or perhaps to escape being tainted by his party’s reputation for broken promises, his vote in second place was down by some 3000.

Labour Choice 

The Labour Party chose Debbie Abrahams, who in the Colne Valley constituency in May came third with a vote falling from 17536 to 14589. She has had a career as a health professional, including five years as chair of the Oldham Primary Care Trust – a job she resigned from in 2006, in protest at what the Labour government were doing to the NHS: “I have seen a steady stream of national policies introduced…which threaten these values and the future of a NHS that is equitable and free at the point for need… ”  was how she announced this at a large Keep A NHS Public rally. But this does not mean she cannot “compromise” as dourly as any LibDems; now she blankets whatever doubts she has about her party and its policies by meaningless drivel about it being “…important that the real issues and concerns of people in the borough are not lost during this election campaign…” Asked about Woolas, she merely said she felt sorry for him, that he had “paid the price for what he had done”.

The voters seem to have agreed with this, as the Labour vote held firm and Abrahams won and to have been angered by hearing from the Tories and LibDems – as they once heard from the Labour government – that the current problems of British capitalism are rooted in their slacking in superfluous jobs for high wages or living in luxurious homes on welfare benefits. Even if some of them may be among the 2000 local authority workers who will be sacked as the local authority make their expenditure cuts. There is nothing new in this – nothing new in the stress with the deprivation nor in the victims’ misguided response to it all as they divide their support among an unremarkably hopeless coalition of wanglers.

Ivan

Witch side are you on? (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

It’s always strange when, after conversion from one religion to another, someone says “I was born a Christian” (or Muslim, or whatever), “but I’ve converted to Hinduism/Judaism/The Celestial Flying Teapot” or whatever it is. Of course, none of us is born Christian or Muslim or anything else. We’re born with no knowledge or beliefs in any god. In fact we’re all born into a state of atheism.

If someone ‘born’ into a religion – any religion – suddenly became aware of the fact that by some freak occurrence it was the wrong god they had been born with, and they had to convert to another one, surely God only has himself to blame. These gods certainly move in mysterious ways.

There’s been a bit of juggling from one deity to another in the news lately. The strangest case by far must be that of Christine O’Donnell the ‘Tea Party’ candidate for a seat in the US Senate. After apparently being brought up as a God-fearing Christian her faith in Jesus was shaken. “I dabbled into witchcraft,” she admitted. “One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar.” Maybe she once wrote to Santa but mistakenly sent the letter to Satan. We’ll never know.

However, by the time the midterm elections were under way she had found Jesus again. After reassuring the American public that “I’m not a witch” she went on to explain to them the truth about (amongst numerous other things) Evolution, Socialism and Masturbation.

“Evolution is a myth. Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

“America is now a Socialist economy. The definition of a Socialist economy is when 50% or more of your economy is dependent on the federal government”.

And her views on masturbation were numerous and detailed. Hardly the sort of thing sensitive readers of the ‘Standard’ want to hear. Well OK then, just one  – “Masturbation is a form of adultery.” Do you think she’s been doing it wrong?

As someone once pointed out. “The trouble with political jokes is that they sometimes get elected.” This one didn’t.

Back in the UK Lauren Booth, an English language Iranian TV channel journalist, and Tony Blair’s step-sister in law, spent most of October hogging the headlines with her conversion to Islam. “Almost unnoticed to me, when praying for the last year, I had been saying ‘Dear Allah’ instead of  ‘Dear God’, she informed readers of the Guardian while complaining about the ‘screams of faux horror’ from her fellow columnists. In fact they were mostly screams of laughter at the latest antics from Blair’s extended family.

Tony himself, of course, famously recently undertook a religious conversion when he decided to become a Roman Catholic and nipped off to Rome with Cherie for an audience with the Pope. Imagine being a fly on the wall at his first confession when he was asked about his role in the Iraq war.

It must be confusing now in the Blair household. “Hide the pork pies and the communion wine, Lauren’s coming round”. Fortunately Roman Catholicism and Islam do have one thing in common. Both are dominated by old men wearing long black dresses. Maybe that’s the attraction.

NW

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sofia Whitcombe began her day with the startling realization that she might not be exactly who she thought she was. “My whole life, I thought I was a Capricorn,” the 25-year-old New York publicist said. “Now I’m a Sagittarius? I don’t feel like a Sagittarius!” Countless people were astonished by the “news” in Monday’s Star Tribune in which Minneapolis astronomy instructor Parke Kunkle affirmed that the Earth’s “wobble” has shifted the zodiac signs.

The buzz has raced across the Web like a shooting star. Some people seemed angry. “I believe it’s a zodiac scam,” said Jose Arce, 38, from Fort Lee, N.J., who runs a body shop. “I’ve known myself to be a Sagittarius, I believe, since I was born. So to come up now with some new sign? It’s unacceptable!”

[Link.]

A bluefin tuna fetched a record 32.49m yen (£254,000) today at the first auction of the year at Tsukiji market in Tokyo, but the fish’s growing popularity across Asia has raised fears it will soon be fished into commercial extinction. The 342kg tuna easily beat the previous record, set exactly 10 years ago when a 202kg fish fetched 20.2m yen. Market officials are accustomed to seeing prices rise during the new year auction at Tsukiji, the world’s biggest fish market, but today’s winning bid was unexpected:

[Link.]

Catholics who receive communion at Sunday mass believe the sacred wafer they swallow contains the body of Christ. New York health officials have warned the parishioners of a Long Island church that the wafers they received on Christmas Day may have also contained hepatitis:

[Link.]

Everyone curses the taxman, but Romanian witches angry about having to pay up for the first time are planning to use cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government today. Also among Romania’s newest taxpayers are fortune tellers – but they probably should have seen it coming:

[Link.]

Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public. The BBC’s Mohamed Moalimuu in Mogadishu says the penalty would probably be a public flogging:

[Link.]

Using an expanded definition of poverty, the U.S. Census Bureau said it determined that 15.7 percent of Americans — 47.8 million — live in poverty:

[Link.]

An unrepentant banker (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Bankers’ bonuses: who’s to blame for the greed?

Bob Diamond, Barclays bank’s chief executive, and one of Europe’s highest-paid bosses, last month faced a grilling from the Treasury Select Committee, a cross-party body appointed by the House of Commons. Those expecting a replay of previous confrontations between MPs and bankers – in February 2009, for example, when the bankers said they were ‘profoundly sorry’ for their role in the financial crisis – were to be disappointed.

Diamond was unrepentant. In answer to questions from MPs, he said it was about time that unfair public criticism ‘moved on’ so bankers could stop apologising and get back to business as usual. MPs wanted to know if Diamond was going to show ‘restraint’ on bonuses this year (no), refuse his own bonus (probably not), act more responsibly and increase lending to business (impossible to do both), accept personal liability for the failing of institutions (no) and if he was ‘grateful’ to ‘the taxpayer’, ie, the state, for bailing out the financial system and keeping him and his whole industry in business (grudgingly, and after much evasion, yes. In other words, reading between the lines, no). 

Diamond’s performance added fuel to the fire of the ongoing bankers’ bonus controversy. Ministers in the present government, while campaigning for power, said they were determined to do something about the arrogance and excessive wealth of the bankers. And to be fair, they are doing something. In fact, as Will Hutton puts it in The Observer (16 January), compared with Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, business secretary Vince Cable and chancellor George Osborne are ‘fire-breathing radicals’, clamping down on tax avoidance, taxing bank profits, setting targets for bank lending, regulating hedge funds and contemplating more banking reform and regulation. But so far, they are being relatively timid about bankers’ bonuses. Why? Now that they have taken power, they, in common with all governments, accept the reality of capital accumulation and their role in it. And that means not doing anything that will frighten the financiers too much.

Capitalists united – and divided

That remains true even in the face of an increasingly numerous opposition. After all, as Hutton says, the issue of bankers’ bonuses is uniting everyone in outrage – ‘from captains of industry bewildered how top bankers can earn so much more than they do to the newly unemployed who wonder what they have done to deserve poverty and hardship while the moneymen pocket millions’. That the state bailouts have poured into the pockets of private individuals, and the poorest and most vulnerable will be left to pay the price in terms of job losses, benefit cuts, and reduced levels of social services and so on, we have already stated (see Socialist Standard, passim). But how come we are also seeing criticism from captains of industry and government ministers and the business press and so on? Not so long ago, bankers could rely on them being ‘intensely relaxed’ about such matters. Why now so increasingly angry and vocal?

Partly it is a fear of social unrest and breakdown. It also reflects divisions within the capitalist class. As a class, the capitalists are united by the need to promote the conditions necessary for investment and business activity. For that, they need, for example, a supply of compliant and affordable labour, a state willing and able to provide socially necessary infrastructure, a financial system to facilitate the processes of capital accumulation, a vibrant consumer market, and so on. On issues such as these, capitalists stand united. But the capitalist also finds himself in competition with his comrades. Capitalists have differing needs and interests depending on exactly how they get their hands on the spoils of exploitation – whether as landlord, financier, industrialist, retailer or state official, for example. In the usual course of things, this is just the stuff of competition, of ‘business as usual’, the undertow of everyday life. But when crisis hits, everything breaks to the surface. As Marx puts it (in Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 15):

  ‘So long as things go well, competition effects an operating fraternity of the capitalist class […] so that each shares in the common loot in proportion to the size of his respective investment. But as soon as it is no longer a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off upon another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, ie, to what extent he must share in it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface…’

Who wins out in this struggle is not simply a reflection of factional power, as the Marxist academic David Harvey points out (The Limits To Capital, Chapter 7). The existence of surplus value (profit) in money form is ‘the most adequate form of capital’, which means that ‘the moneyed interest enriches itself at the cost of the industrial interest in the course of [a] crisis’ (Marx). This, then, helps us understand the row about bankers’ bonuses. It’s a row about which class, or which fraction of a class, is going to be landed with the costs of the crisis. We see, therefore, that Marxian theory is not esoteric mumbo-jumbo or outdated rubbish, as often claimed, but a powerful explanation for what is actually going on in the real world. If you understand Marxian theory, bankers’ multi-billion-pound bonuses and the row surrounding them no longer look so much like an insane aberration, but a logical consequence of social and economic structure. Bankers are enriching themselves at the expense of industry and workers? Well, OK, that’s what we would expect to happen…

What is to be done?

The question is what is to be done about it. As Harvey says, however the class struggle eventually plays out, however the losses of the crisis are finally distributed between factions of the capitalist class, and between the working and capitalist classes, and whatever the power struggle that ensues, the necessary result will be the destruction of value (closure of workplaces, the laying off of workers, destruction of surpluses, defaulting on debt, cutting of state services, and so on) so that a new round of capitalist accumulation can begin. This is totally irrational and insane from the point of view of human needs, but inevitable and logical from the point of view of capital accumulation.

The film-maker Charles Ferguson, whose investigative documentary Inside Job exposes the delusions and deeds of the bankers during the course of the crisis, says that, ‘Those responsible [for the crisis] blame the system. Or they blame the bubble caused by irresponsible borrowers.  Some of them blame low interest rates. In a grim way, it’s actually amusing to watch them blame anyone except themselves’ (Evening Standard, 17 January). The film-maker’s contempt for those who line their pockets and profit from social disaster is justified. But actually, in a sense, it’s the bankers who have got it right. It is the system that is to blame. And we should indeed ‘move on’ – from blaming capitalists who are as much at the mercy of the system as the rest of us, to an understanding of the world we live in and how it works. Politically, that means moving from a demand for ‘regime change’ to one for ‘system change’.

Stuart Watkins

Capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Capitalism’s current crisis is not just economic and financial.

The recent worldwide recession has led not only to an economic crisis, but also a crisis of political legitimacy for the global system of capitalism. In Britain the ruling elite and in particular the coalition government are attempting to side-step this fact by claiming that “we’re all in it together.” Of course in some ways we are, the impending state spending cuts and inevitable redundancies and reduction in public services to vulnerable people being imposed by these hard-boiled public schoolboys will obviously affect those of us in the working class far more than the small minority of capitalists. The narrative from central government is that swingeing cuts in borrowing and public spending need to be enacted, in order to restore profitability to UK Capitalism plc.

And so in this allegedly different political landscape, we hear new terminology and concepts such as ‘The Big Society’, ‘The New Localism’, an increased role for ‘Civil Society’, ‘Ethical Consumerism’ and of capitalism’s concern for the ‘The Environment’.

Are these recent, reformist style trends evidence of the state’s attempt to mask the realities of a class-divided society? Over the next few years, what other coping strategies will the capitalist class use to try to find some stability for their system? How can individuals and the working class as a whole respond to this in a way which will best reflect our interests? What sort of future do we want to see?

Possibly the most profound trend that is now emerging and rapidly advancing is not necessarily the recent decline in profitability of the wages system of production, but a decline rather in the confidence of the ruling class to convince us of the validity of their system. It seems the legitimisation crisis transcends the sphere of domestic capitalist politics and extends to the spheres of religion, nationhood and the state, liberal democracy and the most basic tenets of human liberty.

Thatcher’s mantras

When Thatcher was Prime Minister in the 1980s she endlessly repeated the slogan “There is no alternative” (shortened as TINA). In economics, politics and political economy, it came to mean that there was no alternative to the status quo of their economic system and economic liberalism. It is still the main slogan of economic liberalism, arguing that free markets, free trade, and capitalist globalisation are the only way in which modern societies can go, as any deviation from their doctrine is certain to lead to disaster. Thatcher’s affinity for the phrase led to the author Claire Berlinski choosing it as the title for her biography of the former Prime Minister.

In the early nineties, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book named The End of History and the Last Man, which in a similar strain argued that liberal democracy had triumphed over so-called communism, actually authoritarian state capitalism, and the historical struggle between competing political systems within capitalism was over, though apparently there could still be future events. This trend dovetailed into a political fashion for “Rugged Individualism”. Indeed, Thatcher in her third term of office regularly claimed “There is no such thing as society.”

Change of rhetoric

Today, far from Thatcher’s ‘There is No Alternative’ rhetoric, we now get an apologetic, “We’re All in this Together” from our so-called leaders.

We now have an offer from the state for us to be part of the “Big Society”. At first sight this apparently bold initiative at rolling back the state may seem appealing. But strip it to its core and one suspects other motives.

In a speech in Liverpool on 19 July to re-launch what critics say is a vague idea, the still newish Con-Dem Coalition Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that what he terms “the Big Society” is at the heart of his policy agenda:

  “We need to create communities with oomph! Neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them.”

And with one eye on the detailed government spending cuts that were to be announced in October, Cameron insisted his attempt to revive community action was driven by “great passion” rather than the need to save money:

  “It is not a cover for anything. This would be a great agenda whether we were having to cut public spending or whether we were increasing public spending.

“This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society.”

I wonder how many people really believe him.

And while all that and far more is going on, we as apparently individual, and certainly individuated, citizens are micro-managed keenly by armies of state officials in terms of our health, personal habits, children and domestic waste disposal. We are implored to consume ethically and to be mindful of our Environmental Impact and Carbon Footprints.

It seems capitalism in the coming decade is likely to be a miserabilist, reactionary affair in which personal responsibility and self-reliance is propounded as the dominant ethos within society. Is this the future we want?

This scenario could be so very different. How can we reach for the sort of world many people long to see, a world in which poverty, hunger, war and ruination of the quality of life for the majority of people can be abolished? That means going beyond capitalism to a society in which things like money, nation states, official government and production for profit are abolished.

“Capitalism is only unbeatable as long as everybody thinks it is. As soon as everybody thinks it is finished, then it will be finished. We therefore need to keep in touch with what other people are really thinking. And we need to explain, tirelessly, where the only viable future for the Human race lies – in that post-capitalist society of common ownership of the world. It is impossible to be neutral in this struggle.” (Ron Cook, Yes, Utopia!)

Andy P Davies

Correction (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In our review of Michael Lebowitz’s book, The Path to Human Development: capitalism or socialism?, in last month’s Socialist Standard, we attributed to him the passage “it is important that we live the revolutionary process as a great organism and not as a vanguard atop a complacent mass”. In drawing our attention to the fact that he did not write this, Michael Lebowitz said that “the phrase itself doesn’t embarrass me as I reject the vanguard party (but not leadership as such) as it is understood”. He added: “Incidentally, let me recommend to you and your comrades my new book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (Monthly Review, 2010), which explores much more deeply the themes posed in The Path. As for the vanguard question, I’m taking that up right now in the book I’m working on (The Conductor and the Conducted), which explores what I call ‘vanguard relations of production.’”

In fact the passage was a quote from a review of his book by Ivan Drury in the Canadian Trotskyist paper Socialist Voice. We apologise to him and are pleased to make this correction.

Proper Gander: Know Your Onions (2011)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Tonight on In The Know: “The recession which has left thousands of American home-owners destitute for the first time may be giving rise to a new form of bigotry. Are traditionally-poor Americans being unfairly prejudiced against the Nouveau Poor?” Also, “A recent poll finds that many … lobbyists are fed up with politicians accepting their money and then not coming through with promised legislation. Are politicians failing our lobbyists?”

In these exasperating times, it’s often hard to tell what’s satire and what’s real, but, yes, the above were fake. Both were introductions to parodies of news programmes made by The Onion, the bratty little brother to America’s media giants like USA Today, CNN and Fox. The Onion began as a satirical newspaper in 1988 and has since expanded into spoof television shows, among other media. From 2007 (or “since 1896” according to the title sequence) these were only broadcast through the internet. However, last month saw the debuts of the Onion News Network and the Onion Sportsdome on American cable television. These series are expanded versions of the sketches accessible through theonion.com.

As well as spoof news and sports reports, The Onion produces In The Know, a panel discussion show for its overconfident and misinformed pundits. And Today Now’s breakfast television presenters keep everything light and frothy, whether they’re unveiling the new batch of child stars “grown in the Disney genetic engineering lab” or giving tips to help you “pretend you give a shit about the election”.

Not many gags make direct political points; examples here include “Bush tours America to survey damage caused by his presidency” and “Gap unveils new ‘For Kids By Kids’ clothing line”. Instead, most sketches highlight how the media sensationalise events, such as “Horrific crash a sad reminder of Princess Diana”. So, the jokes often come through the fake journalists missing the real issues and trying to give stories a heart-warming or empowering spin, such as “anonymous hero donates hospital 200 human kidneys” or “first female dictator hailed as step forward for women”. And in that way, The Onion’s perception of how television works is spot-on.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: The Strike in Belgium (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Belgian strike is an attempt on the part of some of the Belgian workers to force the Government to resign or change its method of dealing with the economic crisis. The Government, a coalition of Christian Democrats and Liberals, has precipitated this situation by its austerity measures. These consist of cuts in the social services such as the Belgian equivalent of the National Health Service, in the education programme, in unemployment pay, and in coal subsidies, along with the introduction of a Means Test and what is called “additional temporary taxation.” The Belgian local authorities are also to be empowered to impose additional income taxes of their own. (…)

Socialists feel deep sympathy for the Belgian workers on strike. But they realise that their action is futile as a means to achieve anything but temporary respite from the encroachments of their masters on their standard of living, and that they are jeopardising their chances of achieving even that by using the strike weapon against the State, instead of using it to back up wage demands with which to offset the effect of the Government’s policy.(…)

Governments do not develop reforms or pruning schemes because their attitude to the working class is necessarily either sympathetic or antagonistic. Governments administer the affairs of a capitalist economy in the interests of the national capitalist class. The Belgian workers would be well advised to consider this fact in relation to the present situation, recognising that a change of government is merely a change of label.

A more fundamental change is needed. Austerity, in a world of potential plenty, is always the lot of the working class under capitalism. It is not enough to demonstrate against one type of capitalist government. The workers must organise consciously to abolish the present economic system and establish in its place their own system of society—Socialism.

(Editorial, Socialist Standard, February 1961)

Green reformist (2021)

Book Review from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein (Penguin £10.99)

Klein has written previously on climate change; in This Changes Everything from 2014, she described it as ‘a battle between capitalism and the planet’. Here, in a series of articles and talks dating from 2010 to 2019, she discusses various events (such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 and the ‘summer of fire’ in 2017). She emphasises the interconnectedness of many issues (‘climate, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny’) and puts forward the idea of a Green New Deal as a way to solve the problems.

There is much useful material here. Oceans are warming 40 percent faster than the UN predicted in 2014. Hotter, drier weather creates the conditions for wildfires, and there is a feedback loop, whereby burning carbon leads to warmer temperatures and less rain, hence more fires, which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Climate change hits the poor worst, whether in Africa or New Orleans or the refugees who flee war and drought. The factors destroying the planet are also destroying people’s quality of life. We are experiencing ‘the dawn of climate barbarism’, and individual action is simply inadequate.

But there is also quite a bit that is less impressive. A disappointing (to put it mildly) speech to the 2017 Labour Party Conference suggests that Klein has uncritically swallowed Labour’s reformism and plans for nationalisation. She views incrementalism and moderation as problems, yet does not in fact go beyond these. Her own plan is for the Green New Deal: this is seen as similar in some ways to the New Deal of the 1930s in the US, though as less top-down and not consumption-oriented. It is intended to address ‘the triple crises of our time’: ecological problems, economic inequality and white supremacy. It envisages investment in renewable energy and a minimum global corporate tax rate, so combining the reduction of pollution with improving the conditions of the most vulnerable. (For a UK version, see greennewdealgroup.org.)

Renewables are seen as job creators, so there would still be jobs (and taxes). And Klein is not against capitalism as such, only its supposed ‘unregulated’ variety. She says that ‘autocratic industrial socialism’ has been an environmental disaster, and she clearly equates socialism with the Soviet Union and Venezuela. This is a shame, as she acknowledges that climate science constitutes a powerful argument against capitalism, and discusses the view of some right-wing climate change deniers that the issue is some kind of plot to shackle or even abolish capitalism. They’re wrong, of course, but the climate and other ecological issues do provide yet another reason for doing away with the wages-prices-profits system.

Paul Bennett

Material World: Bandh Against The 'Black Laws' (2021)

The Material World column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Farming supports half of India’s 1.3 billion population, many farms being small and marginal. But farmers are losing their economic influence which once accounted for a third of India’s gross domestic product but now only 15 percent of the country’s $2.9 trillion economy. Farmers frequently complain about being ignored and neglected and have repeatedly staged large demonstrations in past years, accusing the authorities of failing to support their livelihood and demanding state help. However, none of those have matched the numbers and variety of organisations involved in the present protests. On 26 November India’s farmers plus many other workers took part in a general strike (bandh). If the strikers were a country, they would have been the fifth largest in the world after China, India, the United States and Indonesia. 250 million people across India participated, making it the largest strike in world history. Ten trade union federations offered their ‘wholehearted support to the ongoing united struggles of the farmers in demanding the scrapping of draconian agri-laws…[and] welcome[d] the firm resolve and determination of the united platform of farmer organisations to intensify the struggles countrywide…’

At the time of writing, the resistance of many Indian farmers to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s government and its new agricultural laws remains on-going. Indian farmers continue to protest in and around New Delhi, blockading the main highways. Farmers reject the laws, which were passed in September, as in their view these would cause the government to stop buying grain at guaranteed prices and permit private corporations to buy their crops at low prices. This dominance of big business interests and removal of safeguards would lead to increasing difficulties for small farmers and family farms. More than 86 percent of India’s farmland is controlled by smallholder farmers who own less than two hectares (five acres) of land each.

The new laws are seen as contributing to higher costs, more debts for farmers and facilitating the corporations to manipulate policies in such a way as to benefit from the government’s farming budget and schemes. Small farmers fear that they will not possess enough bargaining strength, when they negotiate to sell their produce to larger companies, to achieve the prices which meet their need for a decent standard of living.

Darshan Pal of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) and Punjab president of Krantikari Kisan Union, said ‘They [the government] have actually opened the markets, opened the land and opened the commodities of the farmers for the big corporate houses. They will form the mandis (agricultural markets), they will get the contract farming done and control the agribusiness. Our basic demand is to scrap all these anti-farm laws and assure the Minimum Support Price (MSP) [the price at which the government buys farm produce] as recommended for all the crops and assured marketing guarantee for all the crops.’

Sukhdev Singh, Punjab’s general secretary of the Bhartiya Kisan Union Ekta, accused the government of passing the laws ‘to benefit the big corporates… The government didn’t find it worthy or important taking us onboard before bringing these black laws.’

The farmers are not Luddites and acknowledge that the agriculture sector needs reforms but they say the laws passed by the government leave them at the mercy of the private sector as they relax the rules around sale, pricing, storage – rules which have helped protect Indian farmers from the fluctuations of the free-market for decades. This is why the farmers want guaranteed assurance.

The history of the pillaging and plundering of the Raj and the British East India Company has not been totally forgotten although today the target is the government’s corporate-friendly authoritarianism. Already Prime Minister Modi has privatised many nationalised industries. India’s inequality is deeper than just its agrarian problems. The top 10 percent of the Indian population today holds 77 percent of the total national wealth with 73 percent of all wealth generated in 2017 going to the richest 1 percent. India’s wealthiest person, Mukesh Ambani, saw his fortune surge $18.3bn to $76.9bn in 2020.

This mass struggle perhaps commenced as a sectional farmers strike but it has transformed into a class battle which demonstrates the power of solidarity and proclaims our slogan, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’ Contrary to the claims of our leftist critics, the World Socialist Movement accepts general strikes as a useful weapon, but best used sparingly to acquire particular and specific gains from the government or employers. The WSM cautions that the strategy of general strikes is no short-cut towards socialism. Today’s strikes and protests are the sparks of resistance. That said, there is nothing special about being anti-capitalist. In fact, confronting capitalism is the everyday story of working people. What is more vital is understanding our goals and the means of accomplishing them.

ALJO

Proper Gander: Fame And Fortune (2021)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

BBC Two’s recent documentary series Celebrity: A 21st Century Story is thankfully more than just a bunch of talking heads reminiscing about the singers and models who dipped in and out of the spotlight over the last couple of decades. Running for four hours in total, the series has plenty of time to consider the place that ‘celebrity culture’ has in our society, and what shapes its changing trends. Commendably, the programme’s focus is on economics, and how celebrities contribute to the revenue of profit-hungry mass media giants. A famous person will draw in viewers to a TV show, readers to a magazine or newspaper, or subscribers to a social media account, as well as making money through sales of any music or other commodities they directly contribute to. Advertisers are particularly keen to latch on to celebrities, hoping to leech on their popularity to find customers for whatever tat they’re marketing. All of this is linked in with whatever technology is currently in vogue across the media, technology which itself is driven by what is profitable.

Narrating Celebrity: A 21st Century Story is Diane Morgan (otherwise known for her mockumentaries in the guise of Philomena Cunk), and alongside the archive footage are interviews with journalists, paparazzi and (now-faded) stars reflecting on the highs and lows of their time in the public eye.

The series begins with what could be described as an expansion in the market. When the first set of contestants walked into the Big Brother house and onto our screens in 2000, they also marked a shift in what we mean by a ‘celebrity’. Celebrity status was no longer just reserved for a distant few, but could also be for ‘ordinary people’. The exploits of the Big Brother housemates (especially when they found their own pantomime villain in ‘Nasty Nick’) were soon all over the tabloids and in office water cooler chats. Not long afterwards, the talent show format was revived, with Pop Idol and its ilk feeding on the aspirations of any of us proles to sell out Wembley and top the charts. The new breed of talent shows emphasised the contestants’ emotional journeys, and then let the public decide whose dreams would be crushed. The phone-in vote, also used for Big Brother, was less an exercise in democracy than a way of increasing revenue for the programme-makers; income from the cost of calls soon generated over £3 million for Pop Idol. More money came in from CD sales; combined, runner-up and winner Gareth Gates and Will Young’s first singles sold three million copies. Big Brother brought in a quarter of Channel 4’s advertising revenue in its early years due to its popularity. ‘Ordinary people’ being elevated to star status had become another source of profit.

TV production companies, record labels, advertisers and agents weren’t the only ones keen to make money from this new trend. Celeb-focused journals saw a boost in sales, with Heat magazine’s circulation doubling thanks to it tapping into the popularity of Pop Idol in particular. A gossipy article about any celeb needs to be accompanied by eye-catching photos, and the mid ‘00s was a lucrative time for the paparazzi. Candid shots of Fern Britton on the beach or Charlotte Church in Tesco were sold for thousands of pounds to glossy mags such as OK!, Hello! and Heat. Their online equivalents were the even trashier websites like Holy Moly! and Pop Bitch, which had the advantage of being able to share snaps and titbits with their voyeuristic viewers straight away. The push for more brazen and irreverent content led to many women celebrities being victim to body shaming and upskirting. Even a celebrity’s mental health problems and substance misuse (usually fuelled by being in the limelight) have been turned into a spectacle by websites and print. One of the most severe examples was in 2007 when singer Britney Spears (struggling in her personal life) confronted one of the photographers stalking her, and attacked his car with an umbrella. This turned out to be another goldmine for the paparazzi who sold pictures of the incident for $400,000.

A consequence of the profitability of celebrity gossip magazines and blogs was a decline in newspaper sales, with tabloids losing millions of readers in the mid ‘00s. One way they responded was by branching out online. A newspaper’s website, unlike its printed version, can be used to find out how many people read each article, just by measuring how many clicks they attract. This data, along with statistics on the demographics of those who clicked, can then determine the interests of readers so that adverts can be targeted to their most receptive audience. This advertising then, of course, provides revenue for the newspaper and the products being flogged. These websites are really just marketing platforms, with articles to draw the punters in. Other tactics used by newspapers have been far more surreptitious and cynical. Journalists found material for stories by digging into the tax and medical records of celebs and their families, and hacking potentially thousands of peoples’ phones, most notoriously for The News of the World.

Celebrities had lost control of what details of their lives were made public. Some, like Britney Spears, suffered under the pressure of being constantly scrutinised and used. Others turned this to their own advantage, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, who both became famous through ‘sex tapes’ being leaked onto the internet. This exposure gave them hundreds of millions of fans, who became the audiences for their newly commissioned reality TV shows. Having a fly-on-the-wall documentary is a tried-and-tested way for celebs to keep on delivering new content to fans; model Katie ‘Jordan’ Price and the Osbournes had discovered this by 2002. And when broadcasting their usual routines becomes stale, there would be the option of reinventing themselves by signing up for Celebrity Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing or I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!.

Capitalism turns us all into commodities, things to be bought and sold, but celebrities take this to an extreme by commodifying everything about their lives, and turning themselves into a brand. And this brand has to both stand out and be malleable to what the public supposedly wants. Around 2010, this approach morphed into the new genre of ‘structured reality’ TV programmes like The Only Way Is Essex and Made In Chelsea. These shows stuck to the template of having cameras follow people round, but with the twists that these are ‘real people’ and that their lives have been made more watchable by producers giving them scenarios to improvise, such as ‘x dumps y after being told y was flirting with z’. The participants’ public profiles were raised not just by the shows, but also by their social media accounts, which have become an increasingly important way for celebrities to manage their image, or have it managed for them. When pop band One Direction were manufactured from X-Factor contestants, each member had their own social media profiles to gauge the views of their fanbase. A Facebook page or Twitter account became a valuable combination of instant market research, an advert which distributes itself and, especially importantly, a means to sell endorsed products. Viewers of matchmaking show Love Island use an app not only to vote for contestants but also to buy whichever design of bikinis are being worn on that week’s episode. The app has generated £12 million in sales for ITV and its brands. Stars have been endorsing products for decades, but what was emerging was the ‘influencer’, who uses social media to tie together their fame and what they market. The biggest influencers have had enough clout to shape trends, and not just in what clothes or jewellery people buy. For example, Kylie Jenner rose to prominence by being part of the Kardashian family on their TV show. By the age of 20, she had over 100 million followers on social media app Instagram. Because of her influence, one message she posted criticising Instagram’s rival Snapchat apparently took £1 billion off the latter’s stock market value.

Social media isn’t just used by influencers, it also helps create them. Bedroom broadcasters became a new type of celebrity from around 2012, when 4G technology had spread enough to enable more people to make their own videos and upload them to YouTube. A gaming or make-up vlogger whose videos get hundreds of millions of views a month represents hundreds of millions of potential customers to target with adverts and endorsements. By 2015, ‘YouTube creators’ had become more popular and influential than ‘traditional entertainment stars’, according to a survey carried out by Variety.

Social media has become the main way for anyone with a public image to stay relevant. The Royal family, who a few years earlier would have thought that such things were beneath one, also jumped on the bandwagon, led by Meghan Markle. Before she married into The Firm she had already used her acting roles to attract readers to her lifestyle blog, which brought her tens of thousands in sponsorship and endorsements. Now, she and Harry have their ‘Sussex Royal’ Instagram account to promote themselves, while other Windsors also have profiles on Twitter and Facebook. This allows them to shape whatever pronouncements they make, without needing to go through traditional intermediaries like the press. Politicians have done the same, and Donald Trump took full advantage of this, using his Twitter feed to criticise much of the mainstream media and inflict his many deranged thoughts on us.

The rise to power of both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson can be attributed in part to how they celebrified themselves by building their brands through the media. Johnson came from a journalistic background, and Trump was the star of The Apprentice USA, so they were both aware of the need for media presence. Before Trump started presenting The Apprentice in 2003, his business had been in the doldrums, and the show made his companies and therefore him look bigger than they had really been. As the documentary says, Trump then ‘used the tools of reality TV not only to win viewers, but to win votes’. Boris Johnson was keen to use any and every publicity stunt to further his career, including appearances on Have I Got News For You and EastEnders. It’s nothing new for politicians to use TV to talk at the public, but recent years have seen them using the medium to try and make themselves more relatable. Johnson himself once quipped during a speech ‘if Parliament were a reality TV show, then the whole lot of us, I’m afraid, would have been voted out of the jungle by now’. Politicians have seen how celebrities use TV to gain a following and want to ape this for themselves. Jeremy Corbyn went on Gogglebox, Ann Widdecombe and Ed Balls rhumbaed on Strictly Come Dancing, George Galloway pretended to be a cat on Celebrity Big Brother, and even Boris Johnson’s family have got in on the act, with his father and sister slumming it on I’m A Celebrity… Interviewed for the documentary, ex-Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Balls says that being a politician put a ‘thick prism of glass’ between him and other people, and his appearance on Strictly broke down this barrier so people could see the real him. He adds that doing Gangnam Style meant that ‘I’d done my bit to make the country feel a little bit better’.

While politicians have tried to tap into the world of celebrity to get support, celebrities have also used their status to make a political stand. Kim Kardashian was influential enough to encourage Donald Trump to pardon and release Alice Marie Johnson, who had been convicted of drug trafficking. And actresses attending the 2018 Grammy and Golden Globe award ceremonies wore black and brought Me Too and Time’s Up activists with them to the red carpet in support of the movements, given impetus when film producer Harvey Weinstein was revealed as a sex offender.

Celebrity status now carries some political power, as well as economic power. How this has been expressed has changed over the years, alongside the developments in media technology, from print journalism and TV through to the internet and, especially, social media. And as technology has become more sophisticated, it has led to more precise ways of analysing us as consumers and pushing us to follow celebrity trends and buy more. Watching reality TV, or flicking through a copy of Heat, or subscribing to a YouTube influencer is often just a ‘guilty pleasure’, a brief escape from our own humdrum, stressful lives. But as Celebrity: A 21st Century Story illustrates, celebrity culture has been shaped by what the media industry finds to be most profitable for its owners, and so manipulates and exploits both celebs and ourselves.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: The paradox of cash (2021)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 4 December the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a report which accused the Bank of England of not knowing where £50 billion’s worth of its bank notes were or what they were being used for. This, despite declining cash transactions as ‘cash was used in six out of 10 transactions a decade ago but in 2019 it was less than three in 10’.

The Committee put forward some possible explanations for what it called ‘the missing £50 billion’: overseas transactions and savings; undeclared domestic savings (as under the bed); and ‘use in the shadow economy’. This suggests that some at least of the notes were in circulation and used in buying transactions not counted by the Bank.

Commentators suggested that many of them would be being used in ‘the shadow economy’ (as to avoid paying VAT). According to David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times:

  ‘Research by HM Revenue & Customs in 2017 suggested that roughly 5 per cent of people were operating in the hidden economy. The Institute of Economic Affairs suggests something larger, between 9 per cent and 12 per cent of gross domestic product, or roughly £200 billion. Quite a bit of that missing £50 billion of cash is in the black economy’ (Times, 9 December).

It’s the same in Germany where €6 billion worth of old money (the Deutschmark) have still not been converted into euros, some of which the tax authorities think could be being used to ‘wipe away traces of illicit deals’ (Times, 18 December).

To avoid the state keeping tabs on how you spend – or obtain – your money is an obvious advantage of cash for those who don’t want the state to know this. With electronic transactions, on the other hand, it is possible to tell how money got into the hands of the seller as there will be an electronic record of the sale somewhere. It was for this reason that some anti-state ‘libertarians’ thought up Bitcoin as an electronic equivalent of cash. As the mysterious Satoshi Nakomoto put in the original 2007 paper outlining the proposal:

  ‘A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution’.

After it was launched in 2009 it worked but involved complicated computing using large amounts of electricity. In the event bitcoins have been used more as a crypto-asset (held to gamble on its price rising – at the end of last year the price of one bitcoin had risen to a then record £25,000 and it’s now been higher – than a crypto-currency (means of payment), though undoubtedly it has been used for various illicit transactions, not that these are entirely untraceable if they involve conversions into and out of state currencies. Only bitcoins that are ‘mined’ (those behind the idea wanted to invent not just electronic cash but the equivalent of metallic commodity money) are truly anonymous, electronic cash.

Economists speak of the decline in cash transactions alongside a rise in the amounts of notes and coins as the ‘cash paradox’. Socialists can think of another paradox: the existence of computing power capable of helping solve the logistical problem of ensuring that physical goods are available where they are needed for people to take and use, alongside the use of this power to record zillions of individual payments and other monetary transactions. This scandalous misuse of computing power can only be ended in a world of common ownership and democratic control of productive resources where useful things will no longer be produced for sale on a market with a view to profit and where, therefore, money, whether physical or electronic, will have no place.

Editorial: A danger light on the horizon (1944)

Editorial from the February 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

After each major war there has been a period of discontent and upheaval. In the wake of the last war there came a spark that travelled round the world— Bolshevism. From whence will the spark come after this war? For assuredly there will be a centre of extreme foment. The possibilities appear to be France, Spain, the Balkans and India.

Austria is unlikely to be the source of immediate explosions as it is too closely bound up with Germany. Poland is suffering from expectancy and is not sufficiently closely knit. Italy has been suppressed and dragooned too long to provide any important uprising in a hurry. Russia is at present satisfied. Finland, Norway, Denmark and Holland are too small to give birth to anything world-shaking. England and America are unlikely, as victors, to breed immediate trouble on a large scale as turmoil comes first from the vanquished and suffering where the pressure quickens the mind and incites the emotions to the verge of explosion.

Of the four possibles, the Balkans are so split up with internecine strife that they do not appear capable of setting on foot anything important. India is likely to be both victorious and vanquished. It has possibilities, it is true, but its backwardness may be a hindrance. Spain, like the Balkans, has serious internal strife that was shown up clearly during the Spanish Civil War. It hardly seems capable at present of developing a unified movement though it may produce turmoil. There remains France, which, on many grounds, seems the most likely to produce the spark with international reflections. It is populous, advanced, widespread, vanquished, has suffered much and its emotions have been stirred by underground movements whose fighting content have been workers. It is seething with trouble, and the attempt of an emigre government to fasten the old conditions on the country will probably lead to explosions, the resort to force, and another chimerical panacea for the troubles of the world's workers.

If the workers would escape the futile and time-wasting expenditure of energy that brought so much bitterness And disillusion after the last war, they must be wary this time and give no uncritical support to leader sponsored emotional upsurges that have already cost them so much and put back the clock of working-class emancipation.