Obituary: Trevor Lovatt (2023)

Obituary from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trevor Lovatt, a member of the World Socialist Party (NZ) for many years, passed away last October at the age of 85. He was a hard working socialist who would not under any circumstances compromise his knowledge of the Party’s case. Trevor was initially a Social Credit Party supporter. Upon meeting and discussing politics with Peter Furey (a member of the WSPNZ) in the 1980’s Trevor’s views were forever changed and he joined the WSPNZ. His contribution to promoting and expanding the idea of a ‘World of Free Access’ was relentless. Trevor would continually question, and supply his views on why the socialist alternative was not being taken onboard by society as a whole. As well as being a regular voice of the WSPNZ’s talkback programme on Access Community Radio Auckland (1990s) , he was also involved with the WSPNZ’s Radio Imagine, which operated for many years from the Party’s HQ in Auckland. Trevor was a keen weightlifter and loved country music.

World Socialist Party (NZ)

Editorial: Politicians all serve the one percent (2023)

Editorial from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the world today, the richest 1 percent now own almost half the world’s wealth, whilst the poorest half of the world’s population own between them less than 1 percent of the wealth: just 81 billionaires hold between them more wealth than 4 billion of the world’s population combined.. In Britain, the four richest individuals have more wealth than the poorest 20 million people combined. Perhaps most significantly, in recent years the richest 1 percent of people have accumulated nearly two thirds of all new wealth created around the world. A total of $42 trillion in new wealth was created since 2020, with $26 trillion, or 63 percent, of that being amassed by the top 1 percent, the ultra-rich. The remaining 99 percent of the global population collected just $16 trillion of all of that new wealth.

This goes to the heart of the social system we live within. You can be sure that the 99 percent making do with only a third of the produce we create includes all of the most productive and useful people in society: the nurses, builders, teachers, doctors, engineers, programmers, IT architects, transport workers, factory workers, miners, and so on. So we have an all-encompassing global social system in which there are two classes. One class, the vast majority, works to actually create wealth, but then is forced to survive on a fraction of what we have created. The majority of what we create, we are forced (by the current laws of society which we have collectively endorsed and accepted, implicitly) to hand over to a miniscule minority. They then use that wealth to increase their stranglehold over the whole process.

Returning to British politics in 2023, what are Sunak, Starmer or any other of the political leaders or parties on offer proposing to do about this? The core social system stands utterly unquestioned, unthreatened by them all. Jeremy Corbyn was seen by many as standing for a ‘socialist alternative’, but if you actually look at all of the policies he has ever endorsed, what they really consisted of was a reform, a modification of this capitalist system, in which more sectors would be state-controlled, and a more generous or comprehensive slate of social benefits might be attempted. But like all ‘left-wing’ regimes which have come to power in various parts of the world, that would also be doomed to fail in chaos. Furthermore, Corbyn never stood for real socialism, which means not state ownership but genuine and democratic community control of all resources. It would also entail the end of the market system and the beginning of production for need, for use, not for profit or sale.

Until we have a majority ready to implement that, by doing it themselves instead of trusting politicians, we are stuck with this rotten system where ninety-nine people do all the hard graft… and one person gets all the pleasure and benefit, week after week, without end.

Life and Times: Stray Cats and Gundog Rescue (2023)

The Life and Times column from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every month at least half-a-dozen letters from animal charities come through my letter box. They’re asking for donations in one form or another. It’s my own fault. I’m tempted to throw them in the bin but usually end up sending a small amount of money or buying a book of their raffle tickets.

Save the animals

As an example, for a long time I’ve been paying a few pounds a year to ‘adopt’ a pony from the Bolenowe Animal Sanctuary in Cornwall. I receive a new ‘Certificate of Adoption’ from them every year. Then I make a small monthly direct debit payment to Cats’ Protection and to the Donkey Sanctuary and I usually spend £10 buying a book of the raffle tickets I receive from other organisations such as the Dogs’ Trust, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In particular I give regularly to an organisation local to me called the Woodfield Animal Sanctuary. It was set up a number of years ago by a retired couple who put all their pension income into buying a piece of land on the Gower Peninsula to rescue and look after all types of stray animals – sheep, goats, cows, horses, dogs, cats and just about everything else. They’re supported in what they do by a dedicated team of volunteers and struggle against massive odds to cope with weather, building upkeep and the sheer volume of animals needing to be looked after. Some of their reports are heart-rending, but also heart-warming, and at the moment their Facebook page tells us they’re competing with dozens of other charities (Perthshire Gundog Rescue, Stray Cats Rescue Team West Midlands, Save Our Spaniels, Holly Edge Animal Sanctuary, Dogs4Rescue, etc) for a share in a £300,000 sum being dispensed by MyGivingCircle.org. The money is available to those charities that get the most votes from people as being most worth supporting. So Woodfield are sending regular messages to their own supporters encouraging them to vote in their favour so that they’ll get funding they’re desperate for.

Can’t pay, can’t have

Of course, animal charities are just a tiny proportion of the countless others that try their best to raise money for their causes. A short time ago this column focused on homelessness and the work of Shelter, an organisation set up in the 1960s with the avowed aim of solving the UK’s homeless problem within 10 years. In the event it’s still going strong today and in fact exists now side by side with other similar concerns, and competing for funds with them. Homelessness has remained endemic and that will almost certainly continue for as long as we have a system (ie, capitalism) whose accepted norm is ‘if you can’t pay you can’t have’. As everyone knows, for accommodation, as for other vital things, money is necessary or you go without. That is what is fundamental to the system we live under today, wherever in the world we happen to be.

And what is also fundamental is the need it throws up for charities seeking to mitigate the consequences of ‘can’t pay can’t have’. While it’s true that these charities can never do more than paper over the cracks produced at all levels by the inequality inherent in the buying and selling system, it’s also true that they undoubtedly help a lot of people – and a lot of animals – to survive rather than just go under. In this sense we can say that charities are necessary in an uncharitable society, which, by its very nature, is what capitalism is. At the same time charities do not actually solve the problems they engage with – nor can they ever hope to.

The best cause

But this will not stop me from giving amounts of money I feel I can afford to particular ‘good causes’ or from supporting them in other ways. But I’ll be doing so under no illusion that the problem they exist for can be solved by them. And I’ll also be doing it in the knowledge that the very best ‘cause’, the most worthwhile one, is the socialist cause. What I mean by this is that, only when the cause of establishing a cooperative world society of voluntary work and free access, without buying and selling and without money and wages, becomes the first priority of workers everywhere, will we see the only lasting solution to the manifold and never-ending problems that the current system throws up.

So while the humanity, dedication and sheer well-meaningness of the volunteers of the Woodfield Animal Sanctuary, Shelter and many other charities is to be applauded and respected, their efforts can never achieve a remedy to the problems they exist to address. That’s because a social and economic system dedicated to producing profit for the tiny minority is simply not designed to cater for the needs of the majority, let alone for the most deprived members of that majority or for the welfare of animals. Think of the difference it would make if only a small part of all the time, energy and resources people throw into charitable work to try and make a small difference within this system were directed into achieving a society where charity was no longer necessary. How much closer that would bring us to establishing such a society.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: They shoot grouse, don’t they? (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sometimes, when you’ve had all you can take of class war and capitalist bullshit, it’s great to escape to the great outdoors and walk around in the countryside. Although relatively small, the UK has a lot of large empty spaces, from rolling southern downs to immense glaciated northern landscapes, where there’s hardly a soul or a sign of habitation. You can almost imagine you’re in a different country, a different era, even a different social system. In places like that, the frantic pettifogging trivia of modern capitalist life look small indeed.

If you’re doing it properly, like a seasoned all-weather pro, you’ll get rigged out with the right boots, clothing, backpacks and accessories, and be willing to devote years to acquiring an impressive knowledge of local geography, geology, social history, botany and zoology.

But you can also cheat, using your smartphone to find your position and display a route, check the weather, find the nearest open pub, book a campsite, or phone for a helicopter rescue. Best of all, instead of saying ‘Oh look, some interesting flora and fauna, I wonder what that is?’, you can Shazam it.

Music fans will know Shazam, a free phone app that identifies that cool tune you’re listening to in the boozer. You point your phone at the sound source, the app records it, and then matches it against its billion-song database in order to tell you what the song is and who it’s by. Shazam has been around for years, but is still a living demonstration of that Arthur C Clarke remark about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

Most people understand how to use search engines, but this is an example of a ‘reverse search’. Instead of entering a song title to get the song, you ‘enter’ the song to get the title. You can do this with images too. On a desktop, to identify a picture, painting or whatever, you would drag it into Google Images, which will compare it to its own databank of uploaded images, and hopefully give you the title and artist.

Now, with phone apps like Google Lens, CamFind or Veracity, you can simply point the phone at an unknown plant or crawling insect, take a snap, and let the AI figure out what it is, and then point you to a dozen botanical websites or a Wikipedia page about it. The accuracy is somewhat variable, because not all plants and species are photographed and uploaded equally by users, so there is a built-in AI bias. But it’s still pretty good, and of course there are Shazam-like recognition apps for bird calls too.

All this modern AI technology is great fun for us ignorant townies discovering the wilds and learning titbits and vocabulary terms for the first time, while perhaps reflecting philosophically on that vast and ancient lore known to generations of our forebears and now forgotten by most of us.

The trouble is, you almost can’t avoid diving a little too deep into the AI well of infinity, and discovering things you probably didn’t want to know, that cast something of a black cloud over your fine day out.

For instance, the fact that you are hiking ‘over mountains, moorland, heath, downland and common land, without having to stay on the paths’ is not some de-facto given, as it would be in socialism, it’s a legal concession that was only established in 2000, after extended legal battles dating from 1884 over the ‘right to roam’, which involved mass trespasses and mass arrests. Suddenly the world of private property rears its ugly head. Even when you can’t see a single road or farm building, you know that somebody owns all this land, and once fought like hell to keep the likes of you off it (more details here).

The fact that, in the UK, there is an unusual degree of freedom to roam is testament to generations of workers who simply refused to take no for an answer, facing off against landowners who gradually caved in under the pressure. It’s not socialism but it is the way socialism will be won.

Then there’s the vanishing bird problem. With capitalist profit as the goal, pesticide-rich intensive farming displaced traditional mixed farming, and in the process destroyed hedgerows and habitats, leading to a drop in bird populations of 38 million in the last 50 years. Meanwhile intensive battery farming has generated bird flu epidemics, most recently leading to 50,000 UK bird deaths since 2021 (bit.ly/3BzHvec).

But accidents like these are part of the law of unintended capitalist consequences. It’s even harder to take when you know it’s deliberate.

Take grouse moors. Why do they shoot grouse? Because you can eat them, and because skylarks are small, fast and bloody hard to hit. Grouse are big, slow and lumbering birds which the idle fox-hunting rich love to massacre from every Glorious Twelfth of August. Know what else eats grouse? Raptors, like hen harriers and falcons. So, to protect the supply of fat grouse for the weekend Bertie Wooster set, the groundskeepers regularly shoot all the raptors out of the sky, even though all raptor species are ‘protected’. Because this is illegal, they typically hide the evidence from investigators (bit.ly/3o99XQU).

Raptors have been persecuted for centuries, but capitalism adds its own extinction accelerator effect. The rarer the birds get, the more their eggs are worth to collectors, thus speeding them over the edge. 5 raptor species were wiped out this way, and all the rest are endangered or critically endangered.

All this just for the amusement of a few self-indulgent rich slobs on their weekends away from exploiting the rest of us. And to make matters worse, grouse moors are regularly burned of old growth, destroying ground-nesting fauna and degrading the underlying carbon-storing peat, to make way for new heather shoots which grouse prefer to eat. So, species depletion and carbon release in one glorious double whammy.

The upshot is, even in the wilds of nature, you can never really escape the class war and capitalist bullshit, because it’s everywhere, in the air and water and land and inside your head, cascading like an invisible neutrino storm through all time and space. And it always will be until we collectively abolish it, and extend the ‘right to roam’ to the more general principle of global common ownership and democratic control, with no idle rich calling the shots.

Paddy Shannon

Adam Smith on the origin of profits (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year is the centenary of two of the pioneers in the study of what is now called the capitalist economy. Sir William Petty was born 400 years ago in May and Adam Smith 300 years ago this month. Smith is by far the better known but Petty deserves credit for succinctly expressing a key part of the Labour Theory of Value: ‘labour is the Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother’. In other words, wealth is produced by humans exercising their physical and mental energies to transform materials that originally came from nature into useful things.

This was so obvious that Smith took it for granted, as in the opening lines of The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776:

‘The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes…’

This is not yet a labour theory of ‘value’ (a theory of what lies behind the price of goods when they are produced for sale) but modern economics textbooks refuse to acknowledge that only ‘labour’ — humans working on materials from nature — creates new wealth. They want a role for ‘entrepreneurs’, as they call capitalists. What they are trying to do is to provide a justification for profits. They could do this, as in fact Smith does, without denying that wealth is only created by humans working on materials from nature, but they are not prepared to accept even this because of its possible anti-capitalist implications.

Smith does in fact go on to put forward a labour theory of value. But, even on the basis that only human work produces wealth, Smith can be shown as accepting that profits derive from what wage-workers produce.

He argues that, in an early stage of economic development, producers did receive the full product of their labour, but once a stock of wealth, in the form of instruments of production and means of subsistence, had come to be owned by individuals, the position changed. The producers had to cede a portion of what they produced to their employer:

‘As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in setting to work industrious people, whom they will supply with materials and subsistence, in order to make a profit by the sale of their work, or by what their labour adds to the value of the materials. In exchanging the complete manufacture either for money, for labour, or for other goods, over and above what may be sufficient to pay the price of the materials, and the wages of the workmen, something must be given for the profits of the undertaker of the work who hazards his stock in this adventure. The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced. He could have no interest to employ them, unless he expected from the sale of their work something more than what was sufficient to replace his stock to him; and he could have no interest to employ a great stock rather than a small one, unless his profits were to bear some proportion to the extent of his stock’ (p. 37, chapter VI of Book I, italics added).

This is Smith explicitly saying that profits come from the value added to capital by the work of those employed, even if he considers this justified by the risk taken by the employer.

He repeats this later when discussing productive and unproductive labour (where he is using the word ‘manufacturer’ in its original and logical sense of someone who makes something with their hands, not its current distorted meaning of ’employer’):

‘There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he, in reality, costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed. But the maintenance of a menial servant never is restored. A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor, by maintaining a multitude of menial servants’ (p. 253-4, chapter III of Book II, italics added).

Smith was no socialist and he did advocate laissez-faire capitalism, but this doesn’t detract from the fact that he accepted a theory of wealth which showed that profits derive from what wage-workers produce.

Adam Buick

Adam Smith versus the Adam Smith Institute (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Adam Smith has a bad reputation amongst socialists it is not his fault. Marx himself had a high regard for Smith and discussed his views in great detail. It’s the fault of people like those who set up the Adam Smith Institute in 1977 to campaign for governments to give capitalist corporations a free hand to pursue profits as they think fit.

Writing in the middle of the 18th century — he was born in 300 years ago in 1723, published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, and died in 1790 — Smith was a witness to the beginnings of industrial capitalism in Britain. His book was written as a criticism of the policy (known as ‘mercantilism’), pursued by governments in his day, of trying to encourage exports by subsidies and restrict imports by tariffs with a view to building up the amount of gold in the home country. He wanted such government intervention to be ended and advocated instead laissez-faire, with governments letting the market function freely, as the best way to increase a country’s wealth.

Smith believed that he was discovering the natural laws of ‘political economy’ and adopted an objective, scientific approach to the subject. This was what Marx admired in him. He realised that Smith was genuinely trying to understand how capitalism worked, unlike the ‘vulgar economists’ of his own day who were merely ideological apologists for capitalism. His criticism was that Smith thought he was discovering natural laws whereas he was studying those only of one particular, transitory economic system. This was in fact Marx ‘s criticism of the whole school of economic thought that Smith’s book gave rise to, his ‘critique of political economy’ (the sub-title of Capital).

The Wealth of Nations famously begins with Smith’s analysis of the division of labour and how this allows more wealth to be produced, using a pin-making factory as an example (incidentally, a sign of the low level of industrial development in his day). He goes on to examine the concept of ‘value’, distinguishing between ‘value-in-use’ and ‘value-in-exchange’. It is the latter that interests him as a student of economic phenomena. His conclusion as to what measures the exchange-value, or price, of a commodity will come as a shock to some of his modern-day admirers:

‘The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’ (Book I, chapter V).

This was too much for the Adam Smith Institute and has led Eamonn Butler, the Institute’s Director, in his The Condensed Wealth of Nations on their website, to virtually repudiate it:

‘For many commentators, this looks uncomfortably like a crude labour theory of value, which focuses on production costs and overlooks demand. Some argue that it led Karl Marx into his appalling errors about labour. One could defend Smith as just trying to simplify things by talking about an age before land or capital ownership, where labour was the sole production cost, and temporarily ignoring other factors such as land and capital, and also ignoring demand, all of which he goes into later. At best his words are misleading, at worst they are mistaken: but then he was breaking new ground’ (www.adamsmith.org/the-wealth-of-nations).

The ‘defence’ that Smith was writing of a time before there was ‘land and capital ownership’ does not stand up, as Smith explicitly stated that he was writing of a situation when ‘stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons’. That the Adam Smith Institute should find Smith’s ideas here ‘uncomfortable’ is easy to understand.

Smith can certainly be called an advocate of capitalism, though not of the corporate capitalism we know today and for which the Adam Smith Institute stands. In Smith’s day, if you were a capitalist employer you risked everything should your business fail, as today’s generalised limited liability did not exist. You were personally responsible for all your business debts, so that if your business failed disastrously you could end up in a debtor’s prison. Capitalists take no such risk today; with limited liability, they are only liable for the amount they have invested.

Such companies did exist in Smith’s day but they had to be set up by Royal Charter or Act of Parliament, such as the East India Company. The irony is — at least for those who try to project Smith as a defender of capitalist corporations — that he didn’t like these, for the same reason that the Adam Smith Institute and other free-marketeers don’t like government-run industries: that the people in charge were managing other people’s money and not their own and so wouldn’t be so concerned about avoiding waste and inefficiency; the famous invisible hand would not necessarily move them to act in the general interest.

The only activities in which Smith accepted that ‘a joint stock company’ was justified were banking, insurance, canals and water supply. This is another sign of how undeveloped capitalism was in his day, as the limited liability company is now the predominant form of business enterprise and essential to modern capitalism. The amount of capital required to run a capitalist enterprise is now too large to be raised by a single person (just as canals were in Smith’s day). Which shows that the era of individual capitalist ownership (where most ideological defenders of capitalism seem to be stuck) is a thing of the past, making the individual capitalist owner economically and socially redundant.

It shows that while in Smith’s day individual, private enterprise was viable this has long since ceased to be the case. Today production is too big for that; it is already socialised from a technological point of view in the sense of involving a vast network of producers to produce something. The problem is that control of production is not. This contradiction between socialised production and non-social ownership and control is the cause of today’s economic and social problems. The corporate ownership that has evolved to replace individual ownership is not the answer; in many ways it makes things worse. Nor is state ownership the answer. Both are still forms of sectional ownership. The contradiction can only be resolved by socialism where the means for producing wealth becomes the common property of society as a whole, under democratic control.

Adam Buick

Turkey’s ambivalent elections (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Turkey’s modern political history is one of genocides, state-sponsored political assassinations, demonstrators machine-gunned by unknown actors or tear-gassed by police and army, and the Left arrested, executed, imprisoned en masse, or forced to flee: all under the ever-present threat of army intervention, with its military intelligence heavily exposed to the CIA.

And elections, such as this one.

Turkish political dynamics express themselves through a multiplicity of parties which then form coalitions to fight elections, which are essentially bipolar. The names of the parties shift as they fracture or are suppressed by the state: compared to European politics there is a bewildering turnover. Since 1982 Turkish courts have suppressed 19 political parties, violating the ECHR’s Convention on Human Rights in almost all cases it has reviewed, mainly for expressing Kurdish political interests. The two main reasons given are that the party is in conflict with ‘the indivisible integrity of the State with its territory and nation’, or ‘the principles of the democratic and secular republic’. This is a fair summary of the vague limits of Turkish political activity, though democracy gets shot on the court steps.

Deep state

Then there is the ‘Deep state’, a term which Turkey originated and Trump merely co-opted. This was exposed to the public in the Susurluk scandal, where a Turkish mafia assassin, his model girlfriend, the Istanbul chief of police, and a Turkish MP, were involved in a car crash (only the MP survived). But it was and presumably is a constant feature of Turkish political life: an unaccountable (except perhaps to the CIA) association of military intelligence, the criminal underworld, and enabling fascist political figures, originating as part of Operation Gladio but with its own autonomy. Its relative strength is demonstrated by its ability to slay those investigating them, including most probably a former prime minister, Turgut Özal, and avoid punishment. Its control of the Turkish heroin trade, worth more than the entire Turkish state budget at the time ($50 billion to $48 billion) accounted for much of their power, as well as their American allies in the shadows.

Closely linked with the military, and formed with its aid, are the ultra-right/fascist party, the MHP, and their youth/terror wing, the ‘Grey Wolves’. Opposing them is a strong ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ tradition, often fragmented, often suppressed, often imprisoned. Their parties form new initials as quickly as the courts suppress the old ones. Not content to merely imprison them, in 2000-2001 the authorities forced them out of dormitory prison blocks, where they practised actually existing prison communism, into small three-person cells. There were mass protests, hunger strikes and deaths.

Always there is the issue of religion, though the matter is more complex than it appears: one is reminded of the fable of the Wind and the Sun. The state was aggressively secular, and aggressively against minorities, most of whose identity was in part religious. Politically speaking, expression of religious identity was and is thus in part a matter of cultural rather than religious fervour. Also, secularism is associated with wealth, the middle class, and the western cities of Turkey. As the poor agricultural workers of the Turkish heartland migrated to the cities, religion became a defining, comforting feature of their mutual character as they lived in the spaces left to them, in gecekondus (shacks built overnight) or other poor housing.

Then there are the Kurds, Alevi and Sunni. A genocide in the 1930s killed or displaced many Alevis from their home in Dersim, which was renamed, on maps at least, to Tunceli: the very name, ‘Bronze Fist’, of the genocide operation. And there is the ongoing war against Sunni Kurds in the South East. These remain politically relevant. There are many other nationalities in Turkey, but they were brutalised long ago.

Failed coup

Recent history, since the election of Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Progress Party) in 2002, has seen several changes within this continuity. Corruption has moved to private industry, where new corporate players have emerged: especially in the construction industry, largely responsible for the Eastern earthquake calamity where their cheap and profitable buildings fell down. The army has been suppressed, with mass show trials in the Ergenekon scandal and others, more so since the failed 2016 coup. From a situation where the Army had the standing power via the National Security Council to suppress civil politics, essentially a permanent coup option, now Erdoğan, their victim in the past and now rid of them, has adopted a similar bullying role as president in lieu of restoring civil society. Fethullah Gülen, master of a ‘parallel state’, a network of civil servants and army officers, once Erdoğan’s ally in the shadow war for the deep state, is now an enemy of the state exiled in the US.

In 2017 Erdoğan strengthened the presidency in a constitutional referendum, granting him powers to appoint and sack ministers and issue executive decrees. And in 2018 the last election was carried out still under the ‘state of emergency’ declared 5 days after the coup attempt. All in the context of war at home and abroad, mainly against Kurdish aspirations but also seeking to gain from Syria’s woes. Turkey has a seat at the table in NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, and its restive place in NATO is a matter for constant Western scrutiny and cajoling, especially over the Syrian war, and purchasing Russian arms. All in the context of economically bizarre policies that have seen inflation wipe out savings and drive the population to penury. But the most important recent event is the catastrophic earthquakes of February this year, killing 50,000 and leaving 1.5 million homeless. This last was thought to set the context for the election, making Erdoğan’s general misrule an electoral focus in itself that might attract the disaffected/dispossessed right and harden support among the newly homeless in the South East.

Secular opposition

And so to 14 May 2023. There are three main electoral alliances, two standing for the presidency as well, the candidates being Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (AKP) and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (CHP). The ruling right-wing ‘People’s Alliance’ of the AKP and the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), versus the ‘Nation Alliance’ of the CHP (Republican People’s Party) and five other parties, with support from most other parties from centre-right to ultra-left. There are tensions in both camps – the MHP for example is both virulently opposed to any compromise with the Kurds, such as the current peace process, and also its Turkic ultra-nationalism clashes with Erdoğan’s Islamic dreams. As always though the right is far more cohesive than the centre and left, strange bedfellows united only in opposition: the CHP is the original party of the Turkish state, of Ataturk, and still professes the secularism, nationalism and capitalism that most of its bedfellows in some way disagree with.

The second and only other substantial party in their alliance, the İYİ Parti (Good Party) is a splinter from the MHP, professing to be civic nationalists instead of Turkic nationalists, and good followers of Atatürk: their voter base consists largely of the right wing who are disillusioned with the existing right wing, in other words a classic populist party. This ability of a fragment of the MHP to thus realign leftwards gives some idea of the complexity of Turkish politics, even though most voters will have an imperative which eventually dictates their political choice. The third alliance is the Labour and Freedom Alliance, egalitarian progressives, but almost entirely composed of HDP (Democratic Party of the Peoples) candidates expecting the state closure of their party and so standing as Yeşil Sol (Green Left) candidates. (In the aftermath of the failed 2016 coup more than 10,000 HDP members were imprisoned, including their leaders, on vague accusations of being supporters of terrorism). They are backing Kılıçdaroğlu for president rather than splitting the vote. But while wishing to see the back of the AKP and MHP, they have no reason to love or trust the CHP who when in power suppressed them just as savagely, and so are merely advising their supporters to vote for cholera instead of typhoid in the presidential election.

And the result? In parliamentary terms, Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance has a clear majority, of 322 seats against the Nation Alliance’s 212 and the Labour and Freedom Alliance’s 64. Presidentially also, it would seem that Erdoğan has survived. Neither candidate having 50 percent, the presidency goes to a second round: but with 49.51 percent of the vote to Kilicdaroglu’s 44.88 percent in the first round, the presidency seems all but his to keep. (There was a third candidate, Oğan, with 5 percent, a former contender for the MHP leadership).

The last act will be bruising. Erdoğan used his post-election speech to label his opponents as terrorists, setting the tone. And the earthquake survivors? They have to vote from their registered homes. That means that in order to vote they will have to travel back once more to those ruins from wherever they are billeted in Turkey, at no mean expense of money or time. Exhaustion, as always, tends to work for the incumbent. Time and fate is on Erdoğan’s side.

SJW

Bird’s Eye View: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me (2023)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me

1865: ‘Instead of the conservative motto, A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wage system’ (Value, Price, and Profit, Marx).

1928: ‘Earning a wage is a prison occupation’ (Wages, DH Lawrence).

1965: Workers still ‘…don’t realise that they can abolish the wages system’ (What are your wages?, Socialist Standard).

1 April 1999: Britain gets first legally binding minimum wage of £3 if 21 or under, £3.60 for those over.

1 April 2023: ‘Today’s minimum wage rise by the UK Government will still leave thousands of Scots in poverty, say opposition parties’ (Daily Record, tinyurl.com/ajapsnxh ).

Rich stay rich poor stay poor

‘For more than a dozen years now, Wall Street and corporate lobbyists have blocked both financial executive pay restrictions and a federal minimum wage increase. This speaks volumes about who has influence in Washington — and who does not’ (Common Dreams, 1 April).

Sarah Anderson is being quoted here. She directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, is a co-editor of Inequality.org, and champions several measures including a ban on stock options at Wall Street banks. These measures can only be considered revolutionary in that they represent yet another spin on the reformist misery-go-round. As Eugene Debs said in 1913 ‘What the poor need is that the rich shall get off their backs’ (The Oppressed Need Justice, Not Charity).

None so blind

Helen Keller, one year earlier (1912) in an essay titled How I Became a Socialist, wrote of the hypocrisy of self-styled philanthropic elites who assailed working-class radicalism: ‘I like newspapermen. I have known many, and two or three editors have been among my most intimate friends. Moreover, the newspapers have been of great assistance in the work which we have been trying to do for the blind. It costs them nothing to give their aid to work for the blind and to other superficial charities. But socialism — ah, that is a different matter ! That goes to the root of all poverty and all charity. The money power behind the newspapers is against socialism, and the editors, obedient to the hand that feeds them, will go to any length to put down socialism and undermine the influence of socialists’.

‘Who was Karl Marx and What is Communism? . . .'

"Let’s start with where it came from, because ’the roots’ are always connected to ’the fruits’. Communism grew out of the haunted life of Karl Marx (1813-1881), a German philosopher whose life seemed to be shadowed by something dark. Several of his children died before reaching adulthood, he had extremely poor hygiene, he was often covered in painful boils and he could barely keep a job. Marx lived on the generosity of his friend Friedrich Engels. Ironically, Engels got his money from the same capitalist factories that Marx came to criticise. Marx was also known for his infatuation with the prince of darkness himself. In many of his writings he openly expressed admiration for Satan. People around him sensed he was troubled. Even his own father-in-law, worried that the “demon” that pestered Marx would kill his own daughter" (The Stream, 1 April). 

This bad biographical sketch would have Marx spinning in his grave – two years before he died in 1883. And what follows is even worse! Our A to Z of Marxism is concise, fact-based and provides suggestions for further reading.

Pie in the sky

‘Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei earlier threatened to prosecute “without mercy” women who appear in public unveiled, Iranian media reported… Describing the veil as “one of the civilisational foundations of the Iranian nation” and “one of the practical principles of the Islamic Republic,” an Interior Ministry statement on Thursday said there would be no “retreat or tolerance” on the issue’ (Raisi says hijab is the law in Iran as unveiled women face ‘yoghurt attack,’ Yahoo. 1 April).

Religion is the badge of the mentally enslaved. It uses a cloak of mystification to reinforce its authority by promising a mythical afterlife as a reward for blind obedience and by making threats of eternal punishment, backed up by intimidation and persecution for those who do not submit. It has been a useful tool in the hands of the ruling classes to keep their subjects subservient.

Keller again:

‘This great republic is a mockery of freedom as long as you are doomed to dig and sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil. What have you to fight for? National independence? That means the masters’ independence. The laws that send you to jail when you demand better living conditions? The flag? Does it wave over a country where you are free and have a home, or does it rather symbolise a country that meets you with clenched fists when you strike for better wages and shorter hours? Will you fight for your masters’ religion which teaches you to obey them even when they tell you to kill one another? Why don’t you make a junk heap of your masters’ religion, his civilisation, his kings and his customs that tend to reduce a man to a brute and God to a monster? Let there go forth a clarion call for liberty. Let the workers form one great world-wide union, and let there be a globe-encircling revolt to gain for the workers true liberty and happiness’ (Menace of the Militarist Program).

'Wild Isles' (2023)

TV Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Attenborough had, among his no doubt many friends, the Queen, so this and his advanced years, which cast him of another generation with all the expectations that brings, might excuse him from being too reactionary. I have to confess that he is, to me, the Bruce Forsyth of television nature programmes – a safe bet and someone the BBC can place before the viewing public in the knowledge that he is not going to ‘say it as it is’ and upset anyone.

I must also confess that I do not have a television and have not ever felt the need to own one; of course if you mention this people are quick to tell you how you are missing out on ‘all the wonderful documentaries’… maybe, but I take the view that I like to do things myself all the time I am physically able and not sit back eating a pizza with a remote in one hand watching someone else even if it is to see a wildebeest getting ripped to bits by a lion with the commentator telling you that ‘the wildebeest is getting ripped to bits by a lion’. It was, therefore, with some effort that I managed to find a friend who was happy for me to go over to his house and watch the ‘controversial sixth episode’ of the latest of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentary series. Despite not having looked at the media or listened to the news for the last nine months it was physically impossible not to have heard of ‘Wild Isles’ – his latest series in which he looks at nature ‘at home’. I suppose even the legendary Mr Attenborough can’t carry on lying around among a harem of gorillas forever, particularly in his mid-nineties.

Episode 6 was not shown on mainstream television and the word had it that it was ‘too controversial’. This, of course, fired up my interest; at last! Sir David was going to put things straight and he was going to catch me, King Charles and the BBC totally unprepared and whilst lying in some long grass in Epping Forest, hugging a badger, would say ‘The capitalist system is both dangerous to wildlife and to people. The wealthy are becoming more wealthy and the only way we can ensure that wildlife on our planet will thrive is to end the profit system now and smash the capitalists…. Workers of the World Unite!’

This sadly was absolutely not the case. I sat down as my friend fiddled with iPlayer and as the programme began I tensed up waiting for a purple-faced Attenborough railing against the system but on came the beautifully shot dolphins, flowers, eagles and ancient oak trees. The photography was, as always, absolutely stunning but no even slightly ‘edgy’ comment. It was like a balloon that you find behind the sofa 10 months after the New Year’s Eve party….

I am baffled as to why this episode was not shown… a little research suggested that the BBC had only ever intended five episodes, odd… then why make six? Others say that they could not be seen to show an episode linked to charities. Apparently the WWF, National Trust and Greenpeace were involved. Well, I suppose the National Trust do have some very revolutionary coffee cakes, perhaps that’s why? While the viewer was entertained with wonderful camera work Sir David spoke in short simple statements: ‘The Cairngorms are a wonderful place’…. (20 second dramatic pause)…’Just enough of the natural world remains to recover’… (20 second pause)…’It starts with us’…. (20 second pause) … ‘Vast swathes of countryside are now silent’… (20 second pause). Rachel Carson was saying that over 60 years ago, I wanted to shout, and nothing’s bloody changed…! And so it went on, tame, totally dumbed down – nothing that could be considered a rallying call or reason to do anything other than scoff the pizza and call for another lager.

I’d like to say more but what can you say… ? Okay, perhaps I should try… the programme left me feeling the same old way, once again here we are faced with a person who has nothing to lose (at his age) and who is in a prime position to get a message over, to really say some hard-hitting truths but instead, like so many people who really could exploit their privileged platform, squanders the chance with some meaningless platitudes.

Am I being unreasonable? Can capitalism really be made to work in the interests of nature and wildlife? Surely the answer is staring us in the face – everywhere I look, everything I hear, ALL the evidence points to the profit motive coming before the environment, so, clearly, no!

I have no doubt that Sir David cares for the life he has so deeply involved himself with over all those years but why is it that such an obvious answer to the plight of all the animals he has talked about and seen during his long life has not occurred to him? Like so many others he believes that reforms are the answer.

I decided to look a bit deeper and see if he really had not considered how the system itself was the cause of the decline wildlife. A quick search reveals that, indeed, he has expressed thoughts on the system and, indeed on capitalism itself, so here are a few:

‘Human beings have overrun the world’

‘Greed does not lead to joy’

‘Our system is based on profit but capitalism is not dead’

Make of these what you will. Furthermore, and in the series itself, he does, as is often the case in the media, resort to the ‘guilt trip’ approach. I have to admit that this is one of my pet hates and I have railed against it before; he says things like ‘Do we really not care for nature’ or ‘Our blind assault’ (on nature) or ‘We have just enough nature (left) to save our wildlife’ and ‘Real success can only come if there is change in our societies (note the plural here – he is not saying society as a whole) and in our economics and in our politics’.

The latter says both all and nothing and still begs the question – well what do you want to replace it with? The former do the usual thing of turning the problem to the sort of abstract ‘we’ or ‘our’ as if we as individuals are personally responsible for albatrosses choking to death on plastic or ancient woodlands being cut down to shave 5 minutes off a train journey to Birmingham… Maybe Sir David really does want to explain the real problem but has his wings clipped… just as he is straightening his tie and the makeup artist dabs on the last of the greasepaint the producer says ‘steady on with the socialist stuff Dave, we don’t want a bloody revolution, just give them the cuddly take, and remember the series is running a hefty profit so stay off the red, eh?’

It really doesn’t take a naturalist to tell us that nature is endangered but it will take socialism to put it right.

Glenn Morris

Human history as economic growth (2023)

Book Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Someone has described Oded Galor’s The Journey of Humanity. The Origins of Wealth and Inequality as ‘a powerful mixture of fact, theory and interpretation’. And that’s just about right. It’s basically an attempt at an economic history of humankind, seeking to explain the complex forces behind economic development from when groups of modern human beings first began spreading from their original homeland of Africa to other parts of the planet. The author presents us with a multi-faceted narrative of ‘long-term’ history that seeks to explain why different social, technological and economic developments have taken place in different parts of the world at different times in the whole span of the 2-300,000 year ‘journey’ of homo sapiens. Much, he argues, can be explained by the environmental conditions prevailing in the earliest times whose influence on ‘the fundamental forces that have swept humanity across its voyage’ have been and remain seminal. This is the basis of the method of interpreting history he calls ‘Unified Growth Theory’.

Industrial development

In attempting to identify and trace the forces that have governed the process of human economic development, he differentiates between what he calls ‘the Malthusian epoch’ (i.e., pre-industrial revolution) and the period since (ie, the development of modern capitalist production). The distinction he makes is as follows. Before the nineteenth century the productive forces and hence the wealth of society and its ability to support more people were ever developing, but, as they did so, this progress was offset by increasing population growth, so confirming the argument of late 18th century economist Thomas Malthus in his ‘Essay on the Principles of Population’ (1798) that the human population will tend to grow more rapidly than the food supply causing poverty for the majority to remain inevitable. However, continues Galor, the industrial production of the last two centuries has allowed the human species to escape from the Malthusian ‘poverty trap’ by ushering in an ongoing era of sustained economic growth. In this era the growing need for and emphasis on what he calls ‘human capital’ (ie, education) has meant that human beings have increasingly developed the knowledge and consciousness necessary to put a relative brake on population growth and so not to fall back into a situation of increased production exceeded by the number of mouths to feed, creating, he tells us, ‘a long-term rise in human prosperity’. It is this development of ‘human capital’ in the last 200 years and the fertility decline that has gone with it that the author sees as most ‘revolutionary’ in driving the overwhelming changes that have taken place in the way human society has organised itself.

He then seeks to explain why these changes have taken root more or less quickly and profoundly in certain parts of the world than in others and to do this he uses his theory to examine early but in his view deep-rooted, almost ‘ingrained’ factors causing these differentiations. These are factors such as landscape fragmentation, soil types, population diversity, family size and cultural institutions, which, though they may at first glance seem minor or secondary, he sees as intrinsic and long acting. Emphasis on these factors may at first sight not seem to sit easily with the Marxist materialist view that it is the development of the forces of the production that drives the historical development of human societies. Yet there can nevertheless be perceived an implicit recognition that what underlies all this development are in fact the productive forces and that the other factors on which he lays emphasis are part of the superstructure which is perpetually interacting with those forces – as per materialist theory.

In other ways too Galor’s narrative seems compatible with the materialist view of history, in particular in its account of the gradual and stuttering move from hunter-gatherer society to settled agriculture (the ‘Agricultural Revolution’). This confirms that, though this change enabled increases in production, population and goods available, it did so at the cost of subservience of the majority of populations to small ruling castes and probably shorter lives and lower living standards than before for that majority. The author synthesises it most effectively: ‘As societies … grew larger, it became essential for individuals to collaborate on a regional basis outside their kinship group. To facilitate wide-scale cooperation, these more complex societies were characterised by persistent and often hereditary political leadership, social stratification and centralised decision-making. With significant disparities in wealth, authority and status came class divisions and a ruling class, consisting of a hereditary nobility, whose interest lay in maintaining the social hierarchy and unequal distribution of wealth. The distinctions in status were reinforced and maintained by cultural norms, beliefs and practices, often religious in nature.’

But no class struggle

But if we can perceive a broadly materialist thrust to his Unified Growth Theory, Galor is to say the least equivocal towards the founder of the materialist conception of history, Karl Marx. Though referring to Marx at one stage as a ‘great thinker’, he writes off his key concept of the class struggle on the grounds that the idea that ‘ever intensifying competition among capitalists could only result in a reduction in their profits, inducing them to deepen the exploitation of workers’ has not come to pass. In fact, however, Marx never argued that intensifying competition would result in a reduction in profits, but rather that it would more likely lead to the ruin of the less competitive and to the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands (which has in fact happened). Galor also rejects what he calls ‘the central pillar of the Marxist thesis … the unavoidable power struggle between capitalists and workers that would lead ultimately to a revolution and the shattering of the class-based society’, on the grounds that ‘the communist revolution Marx and Engels foresaw happened in 1917 in Russia of all places’, ie, not in the industrialised nations they saw as fertile ground for revolution. It will of course be clear to anyone who has read Marx attentively that the Leninist revolution in Russia bore no relation, except in the label falsely attributed to it, to the kind of democratic revolution of a class-conscious majority of workers that Marx advocated and foresaw. So the author is, to say the least, mixed up about Marx, and his ‘vulgar’ Marxism is all the more surprising given the exceptional scholarship and erudition which characterises this book as a whole. Perhaps it is instructive in this regard that nowhere does Marx’s name appear in the book’s extensive bibliography.

Nevertheless, the author’s description of capitalism (though he never uses the word) as ‘splendour and misery’ is strikingly apt. His thrust is that developments of all kinds must be weighed in the balance and even the worst tragedies have ‘limited long-term impact on the grand arc of human development’. So he owns that there have been massive humanitarian crises – wars, genocides, depressions, pandemics, atrocities, mass exoduses of refugees – in the last 200 years but at the same time points to continually increased prosperity or at least less poverty for billions and the hope that this will continue ‘to create, promote equality of opportunity, reduce human misery and build a better world’. He also however mentions – if briefly – global warming and climate crisis and wonders whether this will be a ‘short-lived’ phenomenon resolvable via ‘revolutionary technologies’ or whether it will be ‘the single historical event that derails humanity from its journey thus far, bringing the most catastrophic long-lasting consequences of all’.

The author’s intentions are clearly laudable. He states the need ‘to decipher the Mystery of Inequality and foster global prosperity’ and to address ‘the misery and injustice that continue to affect a large portion of humanity’. He writes that ‘education, tolerance and greater gender equality hold the keys to our species’ flourishing in the decades and centuries to come’. But none of this contemplates or allows for the obvious way out of the strife and suffering he recognises or a solution to the very incomplete flourishing of human development that the profit system, with all its splendour and technology, has proved capable of offering. None of this contemplates either an end to that strife or the complete human flourishing that a leaderless, stateless, classless society of voluntary cooperation and free access can offer once the majority of the world’s workers choose to establish it peacefully and democratically.

Howard Moss

The dark religion of bourgeois economics (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

After acquiring political dominance in England during the revolutions of the 17th century in the name of the Jesus Myth, the capitalist class would come to nurture an even more malevolent ideology centred on an equally fictitious myth called ‘the free market’. With the help of that luminary of the Enlightenment, Adam Smith, the economics of exploitation were elevated to a force of nature which rivalled Christianity in its malignancy and the suffering it would sanction. His infamous remark concerning ‘the invisible hand’ implied a kind of transcendental force that was superior to mere human judgement and that directly contradicted the Enlightenment project of subjecting all knowledge to human reason thus casting aside all such superstition. The Enlightenment would, in terms of science, help guide humanity out of the darkness of religion only to, in the hands of bourgeois economic propagandists, replace it with the cult of worshipping at the altar of the free market. Like Napoleon the English bourgeoisie were not interested in reason, science or logic but only in an ideology that would serve their never-ending hunger for wealth and power.

This mystical force is a manifestation of the bourgeois need for an ultimate source of authority. In the absence of a deity they substituted another non-human entity to reinforce the ‘truth’ of their ideology. In their defence of the capitalist system against any perceived threat from ‘socialism’ its defenders give the impression that their preferred economic mechanism was conceived and created with a meticulous precision that was motivated purely by the health of society. In fact, historically speaking, this ruling class had no idea of the shape and evolution of capitalism once they freed it from feudal shackles. Like a monstrous juggernaut its momentum was unstoppable as it covered the planet with pollution, war, economic depressions and shattered the lives of all those who were enslaved by its overwhelming need for profit. Those who worshipped at its altar explained the failures and disasters in terms of government betrayal of free market principles or the immoral activities of renegade monopolists and financial pirates etc. Indeed, how could anyone criticise such a powerhouse of technical innovation and wealth creation?

But those who created the wealth were beginning to become sullen and bitter about their lack of a share of it all. The politically more astute among the bourgeois intelligentsia recognised that the system was unable to provide even the most basic necessities of life for workers and so decided to create an infrastructure and welfare system that would forestall any revolutionary inclinations among the masses. It was not only the fear of insurrection but also the need to maintain a healthy workforce together with a dread of the creation of monopolies, which might hold them all to ransom, in transport, raw materials and power etc that brought into being the nationalised or ‘public’ sector. This arrangement, in its turn, created further problems because, as it was financed by taxation, it was always strapped for cash due to that other commandment of capitalist religion: ‘Thou shall not financially burden the wealthy’. Although this ‘mixed economy’ has been the model for most advanced capitalist states ever since whenever things go wrong, as the inevitable instability of production for profit always does, the political and economic debate is invariably split between those who blame too much state interference (the Right) and those who claim that free market deregulation is at the heart of the problem (the Left). We still live with a stalemate produced by the failure of both.

Marx had proved that profit was nothing more than theft. The value of labour power as incarnated in its price (wages) is considerably less than the value it produces. Since the capitalist can sell the products of labour at their full value he could pocket the difference as ‘profit’. This is the inevitable logic of the labour theory of value that was embraced by the ‘classical economics’ of Smith and others. This unpalatable moral and political truth did not fit the needs of the ideology, and bourgeois economists have desperately tried to disprove it ever since the publication of Marx’s Capital. Almost the whole body of contemporary economics is an attempt to justify exploitation in various and ingenious ways and so discredit Marx’s definitive theory. It is the height of irony to try and dismiss the Marxian model as an anachronistic Victorian economic theory when those who oppose it have nothing more to offer as an alternative than a version of ‘laissez-faire’ which predates Marx by a hundred years and more!

With the denial of Marx’s discoveries it would seem that economics as a science has not progressed like the other disciplines dignified by that title. For all the power generated by the latest computer programs available to the City and other financial institutions the system continues to crash and burn periodically, and even when it does ‘work’ the exploitation of the many by the few produces endless industrial struggle and alienation. The programmers are still directed to search for ever better ways to increase profit margins and the shiny modern computer interfaces and endless economic double-talk cannot disguise the ancient inhuman God of greed that motivates it all and so disfigures our species.

Wez.

Letter: Philosophical debate (2023)

Letter to the Editors from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

There is a world beyond the senses, SJW informs us (May Socialist Standard) (true!) but ‘we are only ever speaking of our experience of it’. This is pure empiricism, the phenomenalism of Kant, the logical positivists (Mach, Carnap) and the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida et al) Karl Marx was not a phenomenalist but a dialectical materialist who embraced a ratio-empiricist epistemology (a critical realism or science) that sought to understand the reality of the material world (including capitalism) by going beyond immediate experience of appearances (phenomena). Nobody has ever experienced a dinosaur, or photosynthesis.

Brian Morris, 

Lewes

PS. In my Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism (Black Rose 2022) I defend philosophical materialism as a metaphysic against its current detractors, especially the postmodernists and phenomenalists like Latour.

SJW writes: 

Marx was a skeptic by confession – his motto was ‘Doubt everything’. He was ‘no Marxist’, but criticised the entire edifice of philosophy that defends the brutal experience of private property with bewildering flights of fancy. The ‘Marxists’ that followed bewailed the fact that Marx did not leave them a philosophy. Engels and Kautsky provided their thoughts as substitute, and the entire edifice of dialectical and other materialisms is based on their works and later the likes of Lukacs and Bukharin. It is my argument that dialectical materialism and other ‘isms’ sometimes mangle the position that Marx took. I don’t claim to know Marx’s mind, as Brian Morris does, or to install him in the pantheon of capitalist thinkers: only to think clearly, as a worker in capitalism, and come to similar conclusions to Marx in the present day. We should expect to do our own thinking, as workers, simple yet profoundly different from capitalist teachings, being more daring than complex.

Fake History (2023)

Book Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fake History: Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped The World. By Otto English, Wellbeck, 2022

Anyone who has seen a big enough expanse of water will be able to see the curvature of the Earth on the horizon. The bizarre notion that pre-Colombian people thought the earth was flat was started by Washington Irving, author of Sleepy Hollow, the Rip Van Winkle stories and a biography of Columbus published in 1828. According to Irving, Columbus sailed west from Spain to prove that the Earth was spherical and ‘discovered’ America in the process. However, there is no evidence that Columbus had that intention and there were already, in 1492, some 60 million people living in America. The founding myth of America and many other states is that of ‘exceptionalism’, the belief that they are a special people and, by inference, that others are inferior.

Abraham Lincoln did not believe that all men were created equal. In 1861 Lincoln became the first Republican Party President. Shortly afterwards a Civil War began which killed an estimated 618,000 people (a greater number than British dead, military and civilian, in the Second World War). In his Gettysburg Address of 1863 Lincoln declared that the American nation was founded on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’. What he meant was ‘all white men’. In a debate in 1858 Lincoln said that he was ‘not, nor have ever been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races’. He was opposed to ‘mixed race’ marriages but he was strongly in favour of ‘repatriating’ black people to Africa. He didn’t believe black people should have the vote, though he did eventually agree to extending suffrage to black Americans who had served on the Union side in the Civil War. But not to other black Americans.

Queen Victoria married a German, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, in 1840. They continued with that family name, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, until the First World War with Germany, when overnight it became the House of Windsor. The insinuation has long been held that the royal family is German. This is rather like Donald Trump’s accusation that Barack Obama couldn’t be a ‘real American’ because he wasn’t born in America and his father was born in Kenya. Barack was born in America and his father was born in Kenya, but that didn’t matter to the racist meme. The arch-opponent of immigration Nigel Farage is the great-great grandson of German refugees in the 1860s. He may be a hypocrite, but it would be absurd to claim that he is really a German.

There was never a realistic prospect of Nazi Germany invading Britain during the Second World War. Although their air forces were more or less evenly matched, the Kriegsmarine was massively outgunned by the Royal Navy. That alone made invasion extremely unlikely. German General Alfred Jodl said that an invasion would be like ‘sending troops into a mincing machine’. And Field Marshal von Rundstedt later claimed that Hitler never had a serious plan to invade. But that doesn’t stop the relentless propaganda being pumped out that Britain could have lost the war if not for those who gave their lives in its defence.

Many falsehoods have been told by and about Churchill, some of which have been repeated by his biographer and wannabe Churchillian PM, Andrew Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Among the many things Churchill never actually said: ‘If you’re not a Liberal by 25 you don’t have a heart’ and that ‘if you’re not a Conservative by 35, you don’t have a brain’ (he was a Conservative MP at 25 and a Liberal MP at 35). Born into the ruling class, Churchill’s reputation was forged when he became Prime Minister of the wartime coalition in 1940. Like Abraham Lincoln, he has acquired a cult status, seemingly beyond criticism. But his defence of Empire is less well known. For instance, writing in the 1930s of aborigines in Australia: ‘I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’. How much longer will his statue remain in Parliament Square? Upon hearing of a suggestion to remove the statue, Boris Johnson said that he would ‘fight with every breath in his body’ to keep the statue up. A more likely scenario would be — taking a cue from his hero — that he would give the order for others to do the fighting.

And there’s much more fake history exposed in this recommended book by Otto English. Some hostile reviewers have gleefully seized upon the fact that this name is fake. His real name is Andrew Scott, which is also the name of an actor. To avoid confusion, and possible legal consequences, he adopted a pen name. Nothing unusual about that for authors.

Lew Higgins

Missing Class (2023)

Book Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Politics But Class Politics. By Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. Edited by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora. Eris £20.

This volume consists of a number of essays written individually by the two authors over the period from 1997 to 2020, together with a foreword by the editors and a conclusion by the authors. There are also four interviews of the authors, conducted by the editors.

The main argument presented is that focus on inequality in terms of ‘race’ distracts attention from the more general inequality that exists. As economic inequality in general increases, so (it seems) does the enthusiasm for addressing every non-economic kind of inequality. The US is less racist, sexist and homophobic than it was several decades ago, but it is also more unequal. Neoliberalism, the dominant capitalist ideology, is opposed to discrimination but perfectly happy with economic inequality. Equality of opportunity, while good for business, justifies inequality. Equality of race and gender is in no way contradictory to inequality of class.

Most white people are badly off, with sixty million white Americans having basically no wealth at all. Would it really benefit black people if roughly one in eight of the top one per cent were black, in keeping with the proportion of black people in the whole population? Gains for a few do not help the many, but are part of a system that hurts the many. Universities have become more diverse as far as students are concerned, though Latinos and Latinas are underrepresented, and poorer students struggle to get accepted. Professors are also more diversified, but increasingly teaching is being done by people who do not have full-time or ‘permanent’ contracts (adjunct faculty, as they are known). Adjunct staff are not so diversified, but the problem lies really in their low pay and poor working conditions.

The authors are of course not against resistance to discrimination in terms of ‘race’ or gender, and they give a good account of racism; rather, they see this as less fundamental than struggle against inequality and for a world where nobody lives below the poverty line. The problem with the book, however, is that not much at all is said about the class politics mentioned in the title, in terms of what the classes are or what its aim should be. There are a number of vague references to particular classes, such as ‘the black professional-managerial class’, an ‘upper-class professor’ and an ‘upper middle class’, and to the one percent. It is all very well saying that ‘class matters more than race or sex’ (in the context of personal care aides, who are very badly paid and are mostly women of colour), but more needs to be said in terms of how class is defined and what classes exist under capitalism. As is said, fighting exploitation is a way of fighting the effects of discrimination, but fighting discrimination is not a way of fighting exploitation: ‘if nobody were the victim of racism or sexism, lots of people would still be poor’. A reference to Marx’s solution of abolishing (private) property is not enough to show the kind of system the authors stand for.

So an interesting text, though it does not quite deliver what might be expected.

Paul Bennett

Obituary: John Lee (2023)

Obituary from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Lee, an active member of the Party for many decades, died in April at the age of 92. He joined the old Tottenham branch in 1949 as a teenager and was involved in its various successor branches. He worked as a clerical officer in Customs and Excise, his only job and it was whilst working there that he heard our speakers at Tower Hill. He managed to avoid National Service about this time because of defective eyesight.

In the ‘60s he was active on our Executive and Publicity Committees. He was a very regular attendee at branch meetings, apart from during a period when he was in hospital for a detached retina operation, and later, in 1980, when he took himself off for a week’s touring holiday in Italy.

In the Party, after retirement, he picked up the basics of computer work, and for years he dealt with general enquiries and requests for the Socialist Standard, working at our Head Office on a weekly basis until a few years ago. He was always ready to leaflet demonstrations or help out at a branch street stall. A quiet but thoughtful man, he was well read. He admitted that he was somewhat terrified of getting up to address an audience, which he sometimes had to do when answering questions about a Committee report to Party Conference. Never a speaker nor a writer, he would only chip in on a discussion if he felt he had something relevant to contribute, and then typically only briefly. The Party has lost a long-serving and hard-working stalwart.