Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been unmasked as the mystery buyer of one of Washington, D.C.‘s most expensive properties: a $23 million mansion that he quietly paid for in an all-cash deal that was so secretive, the home vanished from view on Google Maps soon after it closed.

                                                                                                                               [Yahoo]

Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils, or soviets, in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated.

[Canadian Dimension]

A city divided by a 12-year gap in life expectancy… Sally Cartwright, the county’s director of public health at Cambridgeshire County Council, agrees that a lack of access to cheap, nutritious food, expensive gym memberships and insufficient exercise and community facilities in the area have all contributed to the gap in life expectancy…. Differences in wealth affect people’s health, she adds, as well as other triggers such as smoking, heavy drinking and poor diet. 

[BBC]

A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels. 

[Common Dreams]

Some argue that ecological change has historically posed great challenges to existing systems, and therefore, climate change must do the same to capitalism. This view overlooks a key fact: unlike previous modes of production, capitalism is fundamentally based on change. Then there is the assumption that climate change will create such severe problems — food shortages, infrastructure collapse, mass death — that capitalism simply can’t cope. But capitalism has always been adept at placing death in some corners of the world, so that life – and profits – can continue elsewhere. Mass death has never been a fundamental problem for capitalism; the system itself was built on colonialism, wars, and genocides. 

[Rebel]

A legal team representing Hamas pro bono — since it would be illegal to receive money from the group — claims in its own filing that while Hamas’s actions fit the definition of ‘terrorism’ in British law, so do those of the IDF, the Ukrainian army and even the British military. 

[The Times of Israel]

[These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view].

Lords of the Land (2025)

Book Review from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis. By Nick Bano. Verso £10.99.

The author is a tenants’ rights lawyer, and here he gives a thorough account of the rise of private landlordism in Britain, its consequences, and how he believes it can be done away with. A number of examples of cases illustrate how devastating tenants’ situations can become.

Back in the 1970s, council housing was much more widespread than now, and private landlordism appeared to be on the way out, with just seven percent of households renting privately. But under Thatcher and later governments, council housing declined and private landlordism grew. It is mainly small landlords (about 2.5 million of them) who rent homes to tenants, while corporate landlords primarily invest in commercial property. The poorest tenants may pay over half their income to landlords; as Bano puts it, poorer people transfer the bulk of their wages to better-off people for poor-quality housing.

The 1972 Housing Finance Act attacked low council rents, and more generally the state has facilitated and supported the raising of rents. Tenants find it hard, and even impossible, to resist a rent increase, rent strikes are illegal, and landlords have the legal right to make someone homeless (‘no fault’ evictions are still legal). Assured shorthold tenancies give power to the landlord, and increases in Universal Credit mean that tenants who received these benefits can pay more in rent. Some landlords even charge viewing fees so that would-be tenants can have a look at a property.

Bano supports Marx’s view that the interests of landlords are opposed to everyone else’s. Tenants want lower rents; capitalists want this too, as it means lower wages, and they also want lower commercial rent for offices etc. Residential property is an attractive form of investment, and the author refers to ‘a large petty-bourgeois rentier class’ who are ‘dependent on housing wealth’. But small landlords are not a separate class, as in most cases they still depend on wage labour to survive, even if their income is topped up by rent.

The real problem, the author says, is not the supply of housing, but its cost. Around seventy percent of housing is under-occupied (though it would have been good to have a bit more detail on this). He advocates ‘the decommodification of housing to ensure universal access and good conditions’. But this is not going to happen under capitalism, and what is needed is the ending of production for sale, not just for housing but for all goods and services, which is what socialism will mean.

Paul Bennett

The elderly – who cares? (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I had driven past the old mill owner’s mansion a number of times. I hadn’t really paid any heed to it other than as the marker of an obscured lane I drove down to deliver my granddaughter to her destination. This time, though, an approaching vehicle had me pulling into the sweep of its gateway. I had a moment to look up. What had once been the domicile of a very obvious capitalist had become a care home. A plaque on the gate post gave its original name below a larger, more prominent, name board. I read, therefore, ‘Saint Mary’s Residential Home’ and only then ‘The Ashes’. There’s a statement of reality, I thought.

One of the undoubted benefits of capitalism has been a general prolongation of life, at least in its heartlands. It is undeniable that more people live to a greater age than ever they did even in fairly recent history. This is an unintentional consequence of the way society has developed due to the scientific and technological advances capitalism has made, had to make, to protect and advance profitability. A growing elderly population is itself a source of profit. Age brings with it a multitude of longer-term conditions and ailments that is an expanding market for the pharmaceutical industry. And when the point is reached that medicine itself cannot sustain those with failing health, then there is another market, social care.

Capitalism is an exemplary system in providing commodities to meet people’s needs. However, there is a caveat. All commodities are available to all, just as long as they are paid for. This is not callousness, but the very essence of capitalism.

Care as a commodity

There are basically two types of social care; external, carers coming to the person’s own home, and internal, with the person accommodated in a care home. On average, external care costs between £20 and £25 an hour. Internal home care averages at £1,000 plus per week.

Care as a commodity must realise both the monetary value of those actually giving the care, care workers, and surplus value for the providers. The providers own the means for care-giving, the actual buildings and all the paraphernalia required to adequately cater for their residents’ needs. Once these expenditures have been met by the care providers – who may be individual business owners or, increasingly, care providing companies – whatever monies remain constitute the profits. This model is classical capitalism. Therefore there is always the tension between the cost of labour and the requirements for material expenditure and financial returns for owners/shareholders. Careworkers are skilled labour and yet their salaries hardly reflect this, often being on or close to the minimum wage.

The minimum wage has become the determining factor for these salaries. When that rises to accommodate cost of living increases, so do the salaries. This is, therefore, an increased cost to the providers. Also, a cost of living increase will affect other elements vital for the care of residents, food, energy and such like. These costs could be taken away from financial returns, but an increasingly less profitable business loses viability, perhaps even ends in bankruptcy.

The alternative is to increase fees, so the plus part of the aforementioned £1,000 per week gets ever larger, moving towards £2,000 per week. This becomes a growing drain on individual means to pay, more rapidly diminishing whatever assets were accumulated throughout a working life. This may lead to families contributing to elderly relatives’ care, which then becomes a strain on those families’ financial resources at a time when living costs are rising. A need to increase those family resources becomes pressing, so higher remuneration is sought. In this way some of the care costs are shifted, indirectly, to other sectors of the capitalist economy.

State funding

Perhaps the state, either directly or through local authorities, takes up the shortfall. This may be done directly through funding in part or whole, an individual’s care needs, following assessment via means testing. Further expenditure will then be incurred through the requirement to employ administrators to carry out the assessments. As the state and local authorities do not have any income other than what is raised through direct or indirect taxation, taking on a significant extra financial responsibility requires extra funding. Any subsequent tax increase, direct or indirect, initially reduces the incomes of workers who pay it.

This has a political consequence for the party imposing the tax increase. Vitriolic elements of the media will make great play of the avaricious state picking the pockets of hard-working families. Come an election, local or national, and the ‘low-tax’ party wins the vote. However, once in power, that administration is immediately faced with the same financial dilemma. The closure of underfunded care homes, with residents put out into the streets, is not a vote winner. Demanding greater contributions from individual assets would also be unpopular as prospective inheritances are reduced.

If the administrating party manages to survive the tax rises, workers whose salaries have been reduced actively seek salary increases, or perhaps reduce spending, or both. The result is the tax increase is ultimately transferred, yet again, to other sectors of the capitalist economy.

Not a drain

When a person retires from employment they do not retire from capitalism. Those, the majority, not requiring care, though receiving pensions, do not constitute a drain on the economy because they are not economically idle. They are providers of unpaid childcare. All the financial factors set out above for social care of the elderly, apply to the care of children to enable their parent(s) to work. Capitalism depends on a constant supply of labour power, so provision of childcare is crucial.

Then there is volunteering. The argument often levelled against socialists that people would not work unpaid is given the lie by the ‘retired’. An often-voiced trope amongst those no longer in paid employment is they don’t know now how they ever had time enough to go to work.

Those who take advantage of out-of-season holidays are redirecting some of their assets to businesses whose commodity is leisure. Pensions being deferred parts of wages/salaries are being spent in much the same way as parts of wages previously saved in bank accounts and such like.

Capitalism has evolved to become a highly complex organism in which each part affects other parts. The elderly requiring care, the retired, like the very young, are as much a part of that organism as any other. However, the avaricious nature of capitalism, ever trying to reduce its costs, can lead to a perception of some members of society being almost parasitic. Only a society not obsessed with money and costs can truly fully value all its citizens and willingly strive to meet their needs, whatever they are. In a word, socialism.

Dave Alton

Is kindness enough? (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Various publications have come into being in recent times focusing on the idea that we humans are a fundamentally kind and considerate species. I myself subscribe to a quarterly magazine called Positive News, which aims to produce ‘constructive journalism’ and stories ‘about what’s going right’. The current issue carries well-produced and illustrated articles on, for example, a ‘safe house’ in Ghana that rescues and rehabilitates trafficked child slaves, a community energy project in South-East London, and a holiday company that offers ‘sustainable walking holidays at a reasonable price’. It also has a 15-page section of short what it calls ‘energising’ pieces of ‘good news’.

Then in the city I live in, you can pick up The Swansea Positive free of charge, with the stated purpose of highlighting ‘the very many positive and encouraging activities that are happening in Swansea’s diverse communities’. It describes its contents as ‘good news stories which are not printed in currently available media and so go unnoticed’, providing, it says, ‘a healthy alternative to the many negative and depressing headlines’. Its most recent editions have carried articles on topics and events such as a local community farm, the Swansea Chinese community, an Air Ambulance fundraiser and the regular Saturday morning park run.

It’s certainly true that what’s most likely to ‘make news’ more widely are negative, uncooperative and, especially, violent forms of behaviour, while caring, cooperative activities tend to get taken for granted and often go unmentioned. And this can reinforce in many people’s eyes the common idea that human beings are by nature selfish, uncooperative and even cruel and violent, and so any attempt at establishing a world of social harmony and free of conflict is doomed to failure.

This is an idea that has been expressed or implied in much that has been said and written over the years, both in commentary on human behaviour and in writings of fiction. As far back as the sixteenth century, Machiavelli in The Prince insisted that ‘all men are evil’, an idea taken up again in the following century by Thomas Hobbes who argued in his Leviathan that human beings are greedy by nature and human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’, and then by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, where private interest or ‘self-love’ is seen as the primary mover of human action. This view of humanity was later echoed in the twentieth century by writers with more ‘scientific’ pretentions such as Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape). And it seemed to receive confirmation in widely read works of fiction such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and, according to how you interpret it, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

However, in more recent times the tide does seem to have turned. Opinions have moved far more towards support for Albert Einstein’s statement of over 80 years ago that ‘human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate’. This has been reinforced since by a slew of studies with titles like A Cooperative Species. Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, Survival of the Friendliest, Team Human and Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. These have drawn the conclusion that not only are human beings capable of manifesting peaceful and cooperative behaviour rather than being hostile and competitive with one another but are overwhelmingly likely to behave in that way if conditions allow it. According to these findings humans are eminently flexible beings who will prefer to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless they are driven into doing otherwise by conditioning or situation. And they will behave in a cooperative way both because it is likely to benefit them in a practical way (ie, one good turn is likely to deserve another) and also because it is natural for human beings to derive satisfaction out of being of assistance to others and to enjoy the approbation this is likely to bring from their fellow creatures.

A survey via online questionnaires called The Kindness Test, commissioned in 2021-22 by the BBC in conjunction with psychology researchers from the University of Sussex, came up with similar findings. It concluded that human beings are a kind species generally prepared to cooperate with and help one another in their daily lives and activities and that, if we consider all the interactions we have with other people on a regular basis and over a period of time, the vast majority are likely to be of a kind and collaborative nature, even if we do not necessarily notice this or register them as such.

More recently the Vegetarian Society magazine, The Pod, carried a feature entitled ‘How to Live Kindfully’, an interview with ‘wellbeing expert’ Anna Black about her book A Year of Living Kindfully. She quoted an Oxford University study which found that ‘seven days of kindness activities significantly boosted people’s levels of happiness’ and then went on to suggest 10 ways of being kind in your everyday life. These included being less judgmental of others, cleaning up litter outside your home, volunteering in the community, listening closely to others and being ‘kind to the environment’.

It’s easy of course to be critical of attempts to encourage ideas on behaviour and activities which are socially and humanly desirable. It might be said that, in the context of the massive problems the society we live in throws up such as inequality, insecurity, war, poverty and racial prejudice, such steps are surely no more than small beer, which can’t even touch the edges of those problems. On the other hand they do at least help to spread the idea – well attested as it is now – that humans are a species capable of cooperating with and helping one another in their daily lives and activities and generally prepared to do so.

Of course, publications like Positive News and A Year of Living Kindfully don’t (and can’t) override the ‘bad news’ that we hear about every day and that many experience in their daily lives. But what they do illustrate is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures the society we live in puts on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and interactions of our daily lives, and even in some of the ‘competitive’ situations that are created for us, we can still manage to be kind to others and to cooperate with them.

The question that naturally arises from this is why is it that the society we live in (ie, capitalism) militates against people being ‘positive’ and ‘kind’ to one another all the time? The simple answer is that capitalism is, by its nature, a competitive society with an ethic that runs directly contrary to the human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It encourages people to compete with one another, to try to get the better of them and to do them down if that seems necessary. It does this in various ways, but in particular by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, and so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans, often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others.

Another aspect of this is society’s basic division into two classes, with one of them (the owning class) exploiting the other (the working class) for wealth and profit. So, given that an inbuilt feature of the capitalist system we all live in is that we are constantly driven to compete with others in a variety of ways, as long as that system continues such divisions are bound to continue. So while those who wish to encourage us to be ‘positive’ and ‘kind’ can only be applauded for their efforts, they are in a sense – sadly – on a hiding to nothing if they leave the whole system unquestioned.

But how do you question the system? It can only come through the majority of wage and salary earners – who we call the working class – using democratic political action to establish a society organised in an entirely different way from the current one. In such a society – which we call socialism – people will be able to operate in the harmonious and cooperative way that we know to be most fundamental to humans and beneficial to the species. In such a society, one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the human tendency to share and cooperate will truly come into its own. People will be free to express their talents and creativity in ways that will vastly outstrip the limitations laid upon them today by the need to conform to the rules of a society with the overriding preoccupation of promoting competition between all humans as a way of realising profit for the few.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: Looking into Black Mirror (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the stories in Netflix’s Black Mirror tend to be set in the near future, its roots are set squarely in the past. When the series debuted on Channel 4 in 2011, it revived the long-neglected format of a drama anthology, and has carried on the tradition of science fiction enabling us to explore the consequences of technological advances for people and society, especially before they arrive.

The tales in Black Mirror’s latest series (its seventh) share some themes, discussion of which below will reveal plot details. Creating virtual worlds (the computer games in the episodes ‘Plaything’ and ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, and the immersive media in ‘Eulogy’ and ‘Hotel Reverie’) is a recurring motif, as is a digital avatar of someone, inhabiting either those alternative realities or interacting with the outside world. Their use is linked to recreating the past in all these episodes, underlining the bleak view of the future throughout the series. Showrunner Charlie Brooker’s outlook tends to be pessimistic not with technology itself, but rather with how it is used by institutions or by damaged people. The bitter, alienated IT expert is Black Mirror’s version of the mad scientist trope. Misfit computer geeks using their know-how to get power over those they have learned to resent drives the plots of ‘Bête Noire’, ‘Plaything’ and ‘USS Callister’, the 2017 episode which has gained a sequel in this series.

The use of tech to exploit and control other people runs through Black Mirror like words in a stick of rock. In some episodes, the technological innovation offers more positive experiences. In ‘Eulogy’, AI allows people to virtually inhabit old photographs, while ‘Hotel Reverie’ ups the ante to entering old films and interacting with their characters. While this technology remains science fiction, AI is already blurring our understanding of what’s real, and Black Mirror is as much a thought experiment as a drama. From a more grounded perspective, ‘Hotel Reverie’ gets some digs in at the entertainment industry, being set in a cynical production studio churning out another reboot of a classic film as an anticipated source of revenue.

The episode with the largest helping of satire about the relationship between commerce and technology is ‘Common People’. Its premise is that a woman in a coma is able to have a new treatment to replace the damaged part of her brain with a digital backup, restoring her consciousness with the promise of living a normal life again. Rivermind, the new treatment, comes as a subscription package, and she and her husband learn that she is on a basic tariff with a restricted coverage area, making her shut down when she travels out of the signal’s range. When she involuntarily starts speaking adverts ‘designed to be contextually relevant to the situation you are in’, they decide to switch to the more expensive and expansive ad-free Rivermind Plus package. To afford this, the husband resorts to performing humiliating acts for money on a livestreaming platform. The couple struggles further to maintain a decent lifestyle when the Plus tariff gets superseded by the premium Lux tariff, and their hoped-for pregnancy would incur additional fees now out of their reach.

Despite its sci-fi and dystopian trappings, the scenario is more realistic than it might first appear. The adverts which the woman spouts out aren’t much different to those which some podcasters and vloggers interrupt their spiel with as if that’s a natural part of discussion. And the ‘trash streaming’ site featured unfortunately has real-world counterparts, particularly in Russia apparently. Rivermind is also realistic to the extent that it uses ‘platform decay’ as a strategy to maintain its customers. This is when the quality of an online service or product deliberately declines over time. Punters are initially drawn in by an attractive offer, which then gets superseded by a supposedly improved, pricier upgrade, degrading the original deal. The customer is then tempted to pay more to get the updated version. One service which has been subject to ‘platform decay’ is Netflix, and hopefully Brooker slipped in this critique intentionally. Once the brand became a market leader among streaming sites, it discontinued its cheapest advert-free tariff, effectively raising prices even though its number of subscribers already ensured a hefty income.

Netflix’s accountants wouldn’t be too bothered if the bulk of its customers remained on tariffs which include adverts, though, as this means a wide audience as a basis to charge a high amount when selling advert space. The company’s dominance in the market means that it has created loyal customers who remain so despite some ‘platform decay’, and who also provide plenty of behavioural data to be used to exploit their preferences. As always in capitalism, how a service is run and delivered is shaped by what maximises profits, rather than by what works best for all those involved. In ‘Common People’, when the fictional Rivermind applies the commercial prerogatives of a subscription package to someone’s life, it’s an extrapolation of what’s already familiar. The sub-plot of the trash streaming site is another amplification to show the extremes of what people can be forced to do to make ends meet. As an illustration of how the money system rules how we live, ‘Common People’ presents the argument in a stronger way than most documentaries.

Mike Foster

Members Only (2025)

Book Review from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind Closed Doors. By Seth Alexander Thevoz. Robinson. Paperback Edition 2024. £12.99

This is subtitled ‘The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs’ and is an entertaining and well-written account of this phenomenon, from the early beginnings of private clubs in the very late seventeenth century until the present day. Thevoz has previously been librarian of one of the biggest old clubs and also writes for Private Eye, so for the purposes of this book he usefully has an eye for both social connection and gossip.

These somewhat exclusive clubs have been largely centred historically around St James’s and Piccadilly in London, though have spread their tentacles not just to some other upmarket areas of London over the years but internationally as well – including in the heydays of the British Empire, to India, South Africa and so on. Thevoz has included interesting chapters too on women’s clubs, clubs and race and also the rise of working men’s clubs (which were in some ways designed to mimic some of the features of their older and more ruling-class forebears).

Many clubs developed political affiliations – most notably the Carlton Club with the Tory Party and the National Liberal and Reform clubs with the Liberals. For much of the post-war period many of these clubs were in decline though alongside the empire, with crumbling grand buildings and ageing memberships, and literally scores shut before there was a renaissance from the 1980s onwards.

There were two reasons for the uptick – one was the expansion of ‘new money’ and the arriviste estate agents and hedge fund managers who thrived from Thatcher onwards and who saw joining traditional London members’ clubs as a way to aid their networking and also as a sign of acceptance (even if the more longer-term and elderly members didn’t always welcome the presence of these brash interlopers). The other reason was that slowly from the 1960s – starting with Peter Cook’s famous Establishment club – the club model came to be followed by rather different groups of people, typically as a way of circumventing strict licensing laws for alcohol. Arguably the most infamous was the Colony Room Club in Soho but over time others emerged aimed at newer social elites that found the old-fashioned fustiness of White’s or Boodle’s unattractive – and who gravitated towards successful celebrity hangouts instead like the Groucho Club.

Since the turn of the century, in particular, there has been a proliferation of new clubs charging significant membership fees and often aimed at particular types of business professionals, though their presence has sometimes been surprisingly transient. Just before and then since Covid some newer ones have now shut including fashionable clubs like Milk and Honey and the Hospital Club (aimed at those working in the creative industries), clubs which appeared to enter the colour supplements and come into fashion – and then go out of it – with quite some speed.

Others have thrived as businesses and have established multiple locations both in London and internationally – the most well-known being Soho House. Some still thrive on exclusivity, new money and ruling class connections – the most obvious in recent years being 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair, which is where, Thevoz argues, key Brexit plots were hatched and deals were done rather than in the venerable old clubs of Pall Mall.

It seems that the older clubs no longer have quite the appeal they once did for the ruling elite. That they may not be so good for a politician’s image, in particular, is summed up by two events in recent years. One was the infamous Chris Pincher groping incidents at the Carlton Club that led to the departure from office of PM Boris Johnson. Then soon after, and lesser-known, was ambitious current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch turning up at the Carlton Club for a grand dinner only to be driven off when she saw all the press outside as she was mindful of the likely negative association of her being pictured there.

Perhaps these days with Britain’s ruling elites it’s a case of not so much ‘seen but not heard’ as ‘heard but not seen’?

DAP

Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commiserations to you job-seekers out there who fancied themselves as Chief Executive Officer of the international corporation RCC Inc. The position has been filled. There were 135 internal candidates vying to fulfil it with an external individual, Trump, suggesting that he should get the job because he was already running America and as the job involved a one-day week, Sundays, it would be a doddle to do. Note, it was not made clear in the job spec whether megalomania was an essential prerequisite.

What can the new CEO look forward to? According to RSVPLive the job pays a salary of £228,000 a year. Throw in the benefits that go with the position and you’re looking at a cushty little number. The Mirror reported that the last holder ‘had a jaw-dropping net worth of £12million due to the assets associated with his papal office. These include five cars, an apartment and clothing’. The job also includes a ‘top-floor palatial penthouse apartment – which boasts more than 12 rooms, quarters for staff, a terrace and extensive views across Rome’. Throw in lots of free international travel and lots of sitting on a throne whilst ‘authoritative’ visitors including politicians, celebrities, royalty and billionaires come to you from all over the world to bow and scrape and make you feel very important. On reflection, having to be pleasant to these sorts of people may qualify as one of the negatives.

There is unlikely to be any interference from the Chairman of the company, a very reclusive person, a bit like Howard Hughes, whom no one has heard from in aeons. Although do be aware that if sufficiently peed off he might rain down plagues, pestilence, floods and other unpleasantness. The job requires celibacy which given the Chairman’s pettishness means at least you won’t have to worry too much about the life survival likelihood of your first born.

Note that the temper tantrums are taken from that book of fiction which has served as a playbook which, the present post’s predecessors have used to impose, or try to impose, a monopoly of religion and power over the world’s population for two millennium. This includes the use of stick and carrot techniques with the promise both of ‘pie in the sky’ and ‘eternal torment’: see James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which includes a harrowing passage detailing a sermon by a catholic priest on the torture awaiting disbelievers in hell.

The new CEO is American-born Robert Prevost who has decided to adopt the alias of Leo the fourteenth. In 1878 the ‘thirteenth’ issued an encyclical against the ‘sect of men who, under various and almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, or nihilists’. In 1891, another encyclical appeared sympathetic to the plight of the working class but actually defended the rights of the property-owning class to the hilt. God given rights, doncha know.

Some new boss, same old boss.

DC

Canada versus Trump (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the Socialist Party of Canada’s monthly newsletter.

Canada versus Trump

You are all aware of the declaration of trade war Trump imposed on the rest of the world on April 2. In Canada there was a sigh of relief that it wasn’t as bad as many feared. Nevertheless, he kept the existing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium and will maintain tariffs on Canadian goods that don’t comply with the North American trade deal that sets rules about limiting foreign content.

Though Canada hasn’t been hit with tariffs as hard as some countries, nevertheless its effects are still felt. A survey conducted by the city of Toronto showed that Toronto businesses are bracing for job cuts and cost increases. Of the 513 businesses that responded, one third said they were implementing hiring freezes, while another third were expecting job cuts. Three quarters were anticipating rising costs, which was the most common concern, while about half are expecting major disruptions to their operations. The city promised to allow companies who can show they’ve suffered because of tariffs, a six-month property tax reprieve.

American companies will not get contracts from the city. Other cities across Ontario are also bracing for the impact; at a conference of city mayors on April 3, they asked the provincial and federal governments for a portion of ‘any stimulus package’, especially for infrastructure funding. Most Canadians are hoping for the federal government, elected on April 28, to be able to deal with the worst aspects of tariffs.

Canada is hitting back at Trump’s tariffs with import taxes as much as 25 percent on vehicles assembled in the U.S. Ford, GM and Stellantis are the automakers with the biggest share of Canadian sales that rely on imports from the U.S. For all three companies a majority of the products they sell in Canada are made in the U.S. Under Canada’s new rules, the amount of tariffs on a vehicle will depend on its components, though Mexican parts are exempt. If a car is assembled in the U.S. with 80 percent U.S. parts and 20 percent Mexican or Canadian components, the 25 percent levy will apply to the U.S. content, resulting in a total tariff rate of 20 percent. One thing about capitalism, life under it gets more complicated every day.

One positive thing about the stupid trade war is the fact that thousands of American physicians want to come to Canada. John Philpott, CEO of CanAm Physician Recruiting Inc., a Canadian company which specializes in bringing international medical personnel to Canada, said since Trump took office there has been a 63 percent increase in registrations from American doctors wanting to work in Canada. Philpott said, ‘My phone’s been ringing off the hook.’ The surge in interest comes as the U.S. faces health care funding cuts, mass layoffs and hiring freezes, including at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which has lost 2,400 jobs. Before Trump was elected many Canadian doctors went to the U.S. for more money; Trump quickly and surely changed that. Of course this can only be beneficial to Canada’s shaky health system, but it’s just an improvement within capitalism which we as socialists work to abolish.

We of the SPC as individuals are against Canada becoming the 51st. state, but politically we will not work against Trump’s mad intention. Whether Canada remains Canada or becomes part of the U.S. it still means exploitation of the working class.

Federal election

The Liberals under Mark Carney won 169 seats at the federal election on April 28. This was 3 seats short of the majority they needed; the Progressive Conservatives (PC) winning 144. The leftist New Democratic Party (NDP) won 7, the Bloc Quebecois 22 and the Greens won one. Most people thought it would be a tight race which it was. Both Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh lost their seats, which must’ve been humiliating. In Poilievre’s case it may well have been his smart-ass personality and his constant personal attacks on his opponents which done-him-in. With Singh, whose party lost 7 seats, it was probably because so many would-be N.D.P. voters voted Liberal, not wanting to split its vote, thinking Carney would do a better job of standing up to Trump than Poilievre, which was the main election issue.

The Toronto Star endorsed the PCs in the election on April 28. Its main points were that Canadians should support a government that is for free enterprise, eliminates barriers such as cutting red tape, restores fiscal discipline, reforms the tax system and develops ‘our’ natural resources and ‘That is why we are supporting Pierre Poilivere and the Conservative Party of Canada’. Since its founding in 1892, the Star’s main mantra has been to this effect, ‘Hey listen up folks, capitalism isn’t the economic piece of junk Marxists would have you think it is. No Siree, it’ll work just fine if you smooth away its rough edges’. You might think that with their crusading and reforming zeal they would support an openly reformist party like the NDP or its predecessor the CCF, but no, they go for a blatantly ‘screw the working class party’.

Of all the provincial Premiers, Alberta’s Danielle Smith seems the likeliest to make a deal with Trump. This is probably because Alberta does a lot of business with the United States selling oil and energy. Recently Smith showed some of her conservative friends she had painted her toenails red to show her support for Canada which fooled few, if any. A Leger poll conducted in March showed that 15 percent of Albertans would like to be part of the 51st state, as 9 percent of the population as a whole. This amazed me as every Canadian I’ve spoken to and of those I’ve read in print are dead against it. Smith has given Carney a list of energy-related demands which includes scrapping a federal tax on oil and gas emissions, eliminating an electrical vehicle mandate and ending prohibitions on single-use plastics. That sounds tough, but some of those issues apply to other provinces.

Carney now has to form a coalition of sorts to get legislation through. Besides taking on Trump’s junk, Carney will have to deal with a possible postal strike, a health system in near chaos, crime which is out of control, housing problems galore including homelessness and a soaring cost-of-living, especially grocery prices; like, ‘Good Luck Mate’. For the working class in Canada, life would be slightly better if Canada did not become state 51, but nevertheless exploitation is exploitation and whether one is exploited as an American or a Canadian it sucks and not a one of the recently elected MPs will take a stand against it.

Voice From The Back: Masters of deception (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Masters of deception

We are led to believe, by the media, that the men and women who make up the government are motivated by the highest moral standards of honesty and decency. So what are we to make of Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat who wrote the following essay published by The Foreign Policy Centre and reported in the Observer (7 April)? “The postmodern world has to start to get used to double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But, when dealing with old-fashioned states outside the postmodern world continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.”

State of the nation?

It is said that clear thinking leads to clear speaking. That clarity of thought is reflected in lucid communication. If that is so, what must the US President’s thought process be like? Here he is reported by Newsweek (22 April) as he tries to communicate something or other. Your guess is as good as ours as to what he is on about: “And so, in my State of the – my State of the Union – or state – my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation – I asked Americans to give 4,000 years – 4,000 hours over the next – the rest of your life – of service to America.” Eh?.

Arms and hypocrisy

The journalist Alex Bell recently gave an update on the British arms trade in the Herald (6 May): “One of those statistics that lodges in the mind and rarely gets revised is the one about Britain being the third largest exporter of arms in the world. Time to update it, as we’re the second largest. In the last twenty years our arms industry has grown by a factor of 10. According to the Institute for Strategic Studies, revenues from the arms trade were more than $5 billion in 2000, or twice as much as France and Germany combined. They were around $500m in the mid-1970s . . . Don’t forget that just as Tony Blair was trying to calm the border dispute in January between Pakistan and India, he was in Delhi trying to flog jets.” So what happened to that much vaunted “ethical foreign policy”?

The childhood destroyer

Capitalism has only one drive – make profits. In that ruthless drive the planet is poisoned by pollution, the rivers and lakes are turned into sewers and human life is stunted, broken and destroyed. Perhaps the greatest indictment of this Frankenstein society is the way it treats the old, the disabled and the most vulnerable group of all the world’s children: “One child in eight has to do work that could harm them physically or mentally, the UN labour agency claimed. Some 246 million children are in unacceptable forms of child labour, with 179 million in hazardous mining, fishing and construction, says the ILO, but 8.4 million children are caught up in slavery, trafficking, forced recruitment for battle, prostitution, and pornography.” Herald (7 May)

Tory braveheart

The Scottish Parliament over the years has illustrated that it can be just as silly as Westminster when dealing with social problems. In a country that has all the usual features of capitalism – poverty, drug addiction and homelessness all this backwoodsman Tory could proffer to the parliament’s deliberations was the following piece of nonsense: “A Tory MSP has lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament, calling for William Wallace to be officially recognised as a “patriot” before the 700th anniversary of his death in August 1305. Phil Gallie, the Tory constitutional affairs spokesman, said the anniversary of Wallace’s death was an opportunity to ‘right wrong’.” Times (9 May)

God and mammon

According to a recent Church of Scotland report they are losing 17,000 punters a year and, unless this trend is dealt with, they could cease to exist by 2050. So concerned are they about the potential drop in income that the Moderator commissioned a journalist to produce a book entitled Outside Verdict; An Old Kirk in a New Scotland. The author proposes tithing members’ salaries and flogging off manses and overseas churches:. The book states: “There are too many people in the kirk who refuse to think of it as a business, who think that because this money is being used for God’s work, contemporary business practice need not apply.” Sunday Times (12 May). But isn’t it also the business of the Church to tell gullible workers on a Sunday morning not to thirst after the material things of this world, to be content with their lot and look for their reward in the next world?

Euro, Euro on the Wall (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair has used that pathetic excuse for accountability, the television interview (in which two powerful men get to spar verbally before the massed ranks of passive spectating viewers) to float the possibility that he might support a referendum over the Euro soon. It was on Newsnight’s series of interviews where Blair told Jeremy Paxman that he was willing to be remembered as the Prime Minister that took Britain into the single currency. This slight admission, couched in Blairean caveats and obfuscations, was immediately spun by the loyal sheep in the press as a serious indicator of the state of Downing Street thinking on the Euro, a move in the cabinet chess game.

The reason for Blair’s caution is the deep indecision over the Euro issue, not only among politicians, but also among their paymasters in the capitalist class. His position of stating that he will only ever act in the “national interest” (i.e. in the interests of those as own Britain) is merely re-iterating the obvious, until our masters can actually work out what actually is in their interest. Socialists are able to point this out with ease, as we have done several times in the pages of this journal. What we need to do, as well, is observe quite why the capitalist class is itself undecided.

 

In socialism, Europe will be fully unified by having no money

 

One of the basic premises of the materialist method of examining society is that ideas simply do not just fall from the sky, but instead develop over time through the actions of people within a particular set of circumstances. That is, human beings make society and its values/ideas, but within the constraints imposed by the actions of other human beings, and the relations between those people. This accounts for the clash of ideas and political opinions not only between classes, but within classes as well. It is the constraints and actions of people within the capitalist system that has produced the running arguments over the Euro.

Contrary to what some groups believe, the capitalist class is not an eternally cohesive, Machiavellian cabal perfectly capable of imposing its will and interest on wider society. It is riven by differences as each capitalist strives to pursue their own economic interest and seize as much a share of the surplus value produced by social production as they are able, by every means at their disposal: legal, political, economic or criminal. The means by which each capitalist secures their share of surplus value determines their economic interest, and each capitalist will do everything within their (considerable) power to secure and enhance that interest. Capitalists who export will want to see an army capable of defending their interests, manufacturers want stability and low wages, transporters want to see low oil prices, etc.

The relations of these economic interests of British capitalists to the EU can be seen by looking at the trade statistics; in 1999 the UK exported £84 billion worth of goods to EU destinations, as compared with £55 billion to elsewhere. Overall, then, 61 percent of trade was to EU purchasers. Further, the UK receives 52 percent of imports from EU member states. Taken on their own, these statistics – other considerations aside – indicate that the capitalist class should favour the Euro in facilitating trade with its major partners. If we look, however, behind the national abstraction of the UK capitalists’ interest, and look instead to the more specific details, then a different picture emerges.

For instance, each statistical region of the UK, bar one, exports the majority of their goods to the EU, some, such as Scotland, send 70 percent of their produce to an EU state. The exceptional region is London. London exports 55 percent of its produce to non-EU destinations. Of course, under capitalism, it is not the size or population of a region that determines its say, but its wealth, and London’s non-EU exports represents 8.15 percent of all UK exports, and 20.7 percent of all extra-EU trade: a total of £11.3 billion worth of exports. Likewise, London imports £21 billion worth of goods from outside the EU, representing 11 percent of import value, and 58 percent of the capital’s import trade. This represents an enormous share of UK trade, and much more than any other single region can lay claim to. (All Stats ‘Regional Trends 2000’, ONS)

This regional disparity is significant for one main reason: when looking at the distribution of national types of industry, it’s clear that over 80% of London’s businesses are in the service sector. Whilst this includes retail firms, it also includes insurance companies and stock brokers, etc. The presence of the City of London region, and the financial and stock exchanges is a big factor in this preponderance of the service sector in the region and many of its exports and imports are a product of international financial transactions, the shuffling of electronic claims to riches from one side of the world to the other, and trading in currencies.

A great many of these London firms, then, will be dependent on being able to extract economic rent from exploiting the restrictions on capital investment caused by currency blocs, whether from pounds to dollars or pounds to Euros. They thus not only have an interest in trading with economic partners other than the EU, but also retaining the pound to protect their income from transaction costs. It is this combination of interests which leads to economic nationalism being prioritised over joining a trading currency zone.

Given the historic and continuing cultural, administrative, and ideological importance of London, the national capitalist class would be unwilling, to say the least, to go directly against the interests of this important sector of British capital. Specifically, a great many of those service firms in London depend upon its centrality to the British state for their business, an interest they would be willing to defend. Add to all this that the minority of exporters to outside the EU still add up to a substantial number who will be willing to side with those who derive their interest from London, and then we begin to unravel some of the reasons why the capitalist class is at a seeming impasse about its potential future economic interests due to its divided internal composition.

This situation accounts, at least in part, for the political situation with regards to the Euro. The Tory Party has traditionally had a strong faction of ideological nationalists whose attachment to the idea of Britain is not contradicted by any personal interest in pursuing the Euro project (indeed, many, as small business folk, will have to bear much of the implementation cost of the Euro). Likewise, the Tories established themselves as a party close to the financiers in the City of London during the Thatcher period and, just as importantly, as being closer to the political, cultural and economic interests of the United States and Wall Street than the EU. These attachments currently enable Labour leaders to try to depict the debate as being about unregulated international finance capital versus domestic industrial/manufacturing capital, playing on old prejudices of ‘wealth producers against bankers’ and attracting support from their allies in trade unions associated with manufacturing.

It is not a question, though, of the ineluctable differences between two essentially different models of capitalism, as Labour hacks will kid themselves, but personal competition between capitalists and the political fallout from this. Furthermore, the consequences of this situation are already beginning to be played out. A week prior to Blair’s statement, Prescott and Byers announced plans for English regional devolution: that is, greater political autonomy being removed from London and spread to regional assemblies as want it. Aside from tapping into the same liberal seam of thought as inspired national devolution to Scotland and Wales, it also provides a means for capitalists in regions outside London to be able to have more control in order to be able to direct their affairs without the interferences by capitalist interests in London. This is in line with the concept of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ by which the supporters of the Europe project hope, among other things, to bypass the influence of those interested in British ‘national’ capital and its historic ties with US finance.

Of course it all goes to show that the nation, and nationalism, are not an eternal and essential characteristic of human beings as some would have it, but are solely a tool for pursuing the further interests of sections of the master class at given points in history. Indeed, the current situation of market interpenetration between British capital and that of its EU partners is itself the result of over forty years of state policy (a fact that some capitalists will be aware of), and if they finally decide against pursuing economic union with the EU, they could equally look around the world for other options.

As such, the working class has no interest in this passing show of inter-capitalist squabbling over the Euro, except to note the spectacle and prepare for the day when there are no more nations to be interested in and money to squabble over.

Pik Smeet

Marxian Economics (2002)

Book Review from the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx and the Classics. An Essay on Value, Crises and the Capitalist Mode of Production. By John Milios, Dmitri Dimoulis and George Economakis. Ashgate. 2002.

The book’s title reflects the fact that in one sense Marx was in the tradition of Classical Political Economy, building on the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo both of whom like him propounded a labour theory of value. On the other hand, Marx regarded his work as a “critique of political economy” (the title of one of his books and the subtitle of Capital).

Marx’s critique is straightforward enough. Smith, Ricardo and the others imagined that they were studying economics as if it were a natural science like physics or chemistry whose laws were valid for all times and places. Marx pointed out that what they (and he) were in fact studying were phenomena that only came into being under specific historical and social circumstances – predominating production for sale on a market with a view to profit – and that the laws and categories they used (such as value, price, money, wages, profits, rent and interest) were not useful or valid for all time and for all economic systems. Value didn’t exist before capitalism came on to the historical scene and wouldn’t exist after capitalism had disappeared.

This meant, the authors point out, that when Marx used the word “value” he did not mean the same thing as, in particular, his immediate predecessor, Ricardo. Whereas for Ricardo value was an empirically observable phenomenon that could be measured directly in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour-time needed to produce it from start to finish, for Marx value was an intangible social relation and which would exist under any economic system. As such it could not be measured directly, not even in terms of labour-time. All that could be measured was its expression as “exchange-value”, ultimately as a monetary price (which, due to the averaging of the rate of profit, was only indirectly linked to a commodity’s notional labour-time content).

The authors criticise Marx for not always sticking in his writings to this distinction and for occasionally slipping back into Ricardo’s position. This may well be true – there is certainly a discrepancy between his endorsement, albeit rather lukewarm, of labour-time vouchers in one place and his devastating criticism of schemes for labour-money elsewhere – but it should be borne in mind that in his first publications – The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and A Critique of Political Economy (1859) – Marx didn’t distinguish between value and exchange-value and that, apart from Volume I of Capital (1867), all his other writings on economics were unedited, hand-written notes, prepared for publication by others after his death (Volumes II and III of Capital, Theories of Surplus Value, the Grundrisse). Since Volume I of Capital was carefully edited and seen to publication by Marx himself (incidentally, after most of his posthumous publications had been written) in cases of ambiguity or even contradiction it is what he wrote in this that must be regarded as his considered view.

On two keys points of understanding the way capitalism works the authors reach the same conclusion as we have, on the so-called “law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit” and on the reason for economic crises.

Much ink has been spent on the falling rate of profits (sometimes called, in view of so many predictions which failed to materialise, the falling rate of prophets). Many consider it to be a key element of Marxian economics, an economic law of capitalism uncovered by Marx. Marx’s point is simple enough. Capital is divided into “constant” capital (buildings, machinery, materials, etc) whose value is simply transferred unchanged to the product in the course of its production and “variable” capital (the capital laid out in employing productive labour) so-called because this is the only element of total capital whose value “varies” through productive wage-labour producing a “surplus value” over and above its original value. Marx calls these C, V and S respectively and so expresses the rate of profit as: S/(C + V). It is clear that, from a purely mathematical point of view, that as long as S/V (the rate of exploitation) remains unchanged if C increases faster than V the rate of profit will fall. Marx set out one good reason why C would tend to increase faster than V: technological advance. With this more of the accumulated capital takes the form of means of production (C) than of additions to the wages bill (V).

However, Marx deliberately chose not to call this the “law of the falling rate of profit” but merely the “law of the falling tendency in the rate of profit” (an odd formulation since something must either be a law or tendency but not both, but this was taken from one of Marx’s unedited papers). This was because he knew that other factors than technological advance could affect the outcome and that it could not be assumed that these would always be constant (as “the law of the tendency” as stated above assumed). Marx went on to list various “counter-tendencies”. Two in particular stand out.

The first is what he called the “cheapening of the elements of constant capital”, by which he meant factories, machinery, etc, and the ways of using and organising their use, becoming cheaper than previously. For instance, technical advance need not necessarily translate itself into C rising faster than V and would not if the inventions and innovations were more “capital saving” than “labour saving”. C could also rise less than V for non-technological reasons such as falls in raw material and energy prices due to market conditions.

The second was an increase in the rate of exploitation (S/V), i. e., the amount of surplus value produced per unit of productive wage labour. This in fact is another consequence of technical advance and indeed, under capitalism, is precisely why technical inventions and innovations are introduced, the capitalist class waging a non-stop class war against the working class to increase the amount of surplus value extracted from their labour—what might be called the “law of the rising tendency of the rate of exploitation” or indeed even the “law of the rising rate of exploitation”.

It should be clear that if C does not increase faster than V and/or if S (the amount of surplus value) increases, then (other factors remaining the same) the rate of profit (S/C + V) will not fall. Which means that, in the world of real capitalism, the outcome of these tendencies and counter-tendencies cannot be predicted in advance. As the authors put it:

“. . . the Marxist ‘law of the falling tendency’ in the rate of profit, although logically sound, is not a theoretical reflexion of the actual trend of the rate of profit . . . it applies under certain conditions . . . that may well not exist in a given capitalist society. Furthermore, it influences the rate of profit along with a variety of other factors not directly associated with technological innovation, factors which Marx considered to remain constant when presenting his ‘law’. This means that a falling profit rate in a given capitalist economy over a time period, which may be established on the basis of concrete empirical analysis, can be due to factors other than those related with technical innovation and the ‘law of the falling tendency’, which means that a further investigation will be necessary, if one wants to locate the exact causes of the profit rate’s course” (pp. 155-156).

The authors take the same approach to the reason for economic crises under capitalism to reject the same views held by some in the Marxist tradition as we do:

“Crises are conjunctural suspensions of the conditions for unimpeded reproduction of total social capital. They constitute transitory manifestations of the internal contradictions of capitalism and not permanently operative causal relationships inherently governing capitalist relations (a permanent deficiency in consuming power as against production, or the ever acting ‘law of the falling tendency in the profit rate’)” (pp. 182-3).

We are obliged to add that chapter 4 on “The Question of ‘Commodity Fetishism’“ is both confused and confusing and detracts from the rest of the book. In fact, when the authors venture into philosophical matters they follow too much the theories of the now completely discredited French philosopher, Louis Althusser, who ended up murdering his wife and confessing that the only work by Marx he had read properly was his journalistic The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. There is also a hint, at the very end of Chapter 3, that the authors could think that the banking system has the power to “create” a “volume of credit . . .which constitutes a multiple of all forms of liquid assets and reserves”. If this were true—that the banks can lend out more, much more than what has been deposited with them – then it wouldn’t be true that labour is the sole source of newly created value. Not only Marx but the Classics Smith and Ricardo too would have been mistaken.

Adam Buick

Media musings (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the media, the working class is constantly exposed to a significant flow of mind-numbing drivel and misinformation. Important issues of the day are distorted, totally ignored or relegated to the margins of page eleven or broadcast as minor news items on the TV. Sensationalism is used to increase market shares and sell adverts, which thus brings in profits. In this latter regards newspapers can be said to be a means of exposing us to advertisers rather than of telling us what we need to know.. The market for a newspaper is advertisers – other business out to make a profit – and the product us! It would be no bold assertion to say that the editor of a daily tabloid is far more interested in the number of advertisers he attracts than the news he reports – though the latter pulls in the former. Thus the never-ending hunt by tabloid hacks for the latest sex scandal to feed a readership hungry for insignificant gossip and trivia, a readership consequently bare to hundreds of adverts a day.

It is easy to despair at endless streams of workers leaving their newsagents in the morning clutching the Sun or the Daily Star, knowing the news they will be reading during their lunch break will be that regarding the love life of a soap star, instead of a piece on US foreign policy or the situation in Israel. A recent issue of the Sun carried a full page photograph of David Beckham’s injured foot and readers were asked to put their hand on the foot at 12.00 midday and pray for its speedy recovery because the English football team were so dependent upon it. Reportedly many workers did just that in the belief that a concerted countrywide focus on the injury would miraculously heal it. If things were that easy, they could have printed a photo of the Queen Mum and asked for readers to place their hands on it and pray for her resurrection.

The fact that so many workers are prepared to buy such newspapers each day reveals how big the task facing socialists is. All these workers need a real education they will never receive via the press or TV. The capitalists are wonderfully aware of this – an unenlightened working class is hardly going to pose a threat to their interests; the real threat comes from a class conscious majority, hungry for useful information, who don’t give a shit about how many hamsters Freddy Starr eats or how many women Jack-the-lad from Coronation Street has bedded.

Everyday, British people are subject to the media for an estimated 4 hours every day, either via newspapers, radio or TV, so it is important for the master class that they can control and manipulate the media for their own ends. Major media corporations in Britain are enjoying a growing monopoly. Just five companies account for 85 percent of all newspaper sales, with Murdoch’s News Corporation controlling over 60 percent of newspaper circulation. As well as this it also has vast shares in Twentieth Century Fox, Harper Collins publishers, BSkyB and StarTV, which covers most of Asia and the Middle East, numerous newspapers and TV stations in Australia, Stream in Italy and Sky Perfect TV in Japan, giving it access to the minds of almost two-thirds of the global population. AOLTimeWarner – the world’s largest media company – owns CNN, 40 percent of US cable TV, 50 record labels, countless magazines, as well as being the world’s largest Internet Service Provider.

Needless to say, such media corporations and the likes of Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul, have interests that conflict with those of the workers. Thus it is in their interests that news and important issues we should know about are distorted and kept from us, or presented to us in such a way that we end up with tunnel and distorted vision, unable to make informed decisions or engage in intelligent discussion. Thus the media is very much a part of the indoctrination system, reinforcing the basic social values that ensures the survival of capitalism – passivity and sub-missiveness to authority, the virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or illusory enemies, a suspicion of anything outlandish or threatening to the status quo and national pride, etc.

Because people are misinformed, they are oblivious to the real nature of the system that exploits them. This then makes it easy for the media to confuse the workers by hiding real power from view. The result is – and this is intentional – is that they blame governments, their allegiance to political parties often switching overnight because of a newspaper’s slanted coverage of certain policies and social conditions. A newspaper like the Sun can make all the difference to a political party’s electoral chances. Hence Tony Blair’s visit to Australia to prostrate himself in front of Rupert Murdoch in 1997, fully aware that the Sun can run post election headlines such as “It was the Sun what won it” (which followed one Tory election victory). The fact that it is the capitalist system that is seriously faltering, creating problems governments just can’t cope with (because it is the system controlling them, not vice versa) would be too dangerous to print or report.

With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. The “information revolution” has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this “revolution” becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the powers-that-be will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there is more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the workers would be accessing informative websites in their spare time?

John Bissett

Well endowed (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The market system continues to demonstrate its incapacity to efficiently provide people with a home. On 15 May the media was filled with reports of a crisis in endowment mortgages. Some 3.6 million people in the UK are facing a shortfall in their home mortgages, out of the some 6 million policy holders.

Endowment mortgages are a way of paying a mortgage by investing in the stock exchange. They enable policy holders to reduce their monthly repayment flow by only paying off the interest, while their policy matures in stock market investments to repay the original advance in a lump sum at the end of the loan period. Effectively, they allow people to buy houses by gambling on the state of the stock exchange.

These mortgages were very popular in the 1980s, a period when the Government were lauding the stock exchange and encouraging people to become home-owners. Poor results on the stock exchange, after the fallout from the speculative dot com bubble, have seen returns on endowments dwindle. A sample 25-year endowment maturing in 2001 would have fetched £93,145, whereas one maturing in 2002 would fetch some £77,096, a shortfall of £16,049.

Although the mortgage holders have benefited from recent low interest rates, many will still face a distressing and uncomfortable time finding the necessary money to keep a roof over their heads. Many are calling for investigations into possible mis-selling of endowment mortgages, with lenders being accused of playing down the risks involved in the policies.

Corporate perfidy is at most a symptom of the problem. As the master class continues to try to shape society into its own image, it encourages the workers to try to behave like capitalists: investing the resources they have to live on into the market casino. From their perspective, this both binds the workers to the interests of capital, and provides a source of money to manipulate for profit.

Without the reserves of resources that capitalists themselves have, though, workers leave their necessities of life exposed to the vagaries of competition. Where a capitalist just sees the magnitude of their fortune shrink, workers see their money becoming insufficient to maintain them. The distinction between the exchange value of money and its use value threatens the very homes of millions of workers, and very firmly sets out the barrier between the interests

Pik Smeet

World View: Zimbabwe: from bloody elections to extra poverty (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The old adage that “a hungry man is an angry man” is one that finds echoes in the deteriorating economic situation in Zimbabwe. Indeed, the same dilemma is to some extent threatening the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as a whole. The future looks increasingly bleak.

Long faces are a commonplace in the streets in most (if not all) urban areas. Queues for basic commodities are unending. This has given blank cheques to the unscrupulous, profiteering vendors who charge exorbitant prices for scarce commodities such as the staple, maize meal, sugar, cooking oil – to mention just a few. The irony is that Zimbabwe was once a significant regional supplier of agricultural products.

These shortages are human-made rather than natural. Mugabe’s fast track land reform programme has offered to the people every kind of hindrance and no encouragement at all. The shambolically executed “re-settlement programme” has seen the displacement of some of the 4000 white commercial farmers by would-be peasant farmers, many with very slight practical experience and little or no equipment. The question is why is this happening now? Why, since coming to power in 1980, had Mugabe done so little to progress the question of “land redistribution” before now?

Under the Lancaster House agreement, land redistribution was to be implemented on the basis of “willing buyer – willing seller” with Britain putting up the money to make this arrangement work. But the formula never really worked. Moreover, many of the existing white farmers are “people who bought farms after independence, encouraged by Mugabe in the 1980s to develop farmland. Mostly, they were local whites who decided to take up farming, or return to it, but some came from South Africa” (CNN.com/world, 16 August, 2001). What little land that was redistributed tended to gravitate into the hands of people like the “relatives of ministers, army generals, permanent secretaries, directors of government departments and local party bosses” (Mail & Guardian, December 14, 1998.) There are reputedly at least 600 commercial farms (exceeding 1000 hectares each) belonging to rich blacks, mostly with links to ZANU-PF.

In the early years of independence, falling commodity prices on the world market – a common predicament faced by many developing countries – led the Zimbabwean government to succumb to IMF pressure to introduce austerity measures. In 1991, an Economic Structural Adjustment Plan (ESAP) effectively “liberalised” the economy by privatising state-owned firms, slashing social spending, and facilitating inflows of foreign capital. However, this only made matters worse. It decimated the manufacturing sector of the economy, destroying over 50,000 jobs. Real wages began to fall and the economy stagnated. In addition to this Zimbabwe’s involvement in a protracted war in the Congo imposed a crippling burden on the state.

This was the background against which we saw increasing outbreaks of industrial discontent during the 1990s which led, in due course, to the formation in 1999 of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai was a trade unionist. But protest was not confined to the urban areas; in the rural areas too increasing impatience at the slow pace of land redistribution likewise threatened to undermine support for the regime. Faced with a growing opposition within the country the Mugabe regime then began to increasingly resist IMF pressures to further “reform” the economy which caused the IMF and the World Bank to suspend all further loans to Zimbabwe in 1999.

It was in this context and with the prospect of a presidential election in March 2002 that Zanu-PF began to take up the cause of land redistribution more vigorously. This move was cynically calculated to win support from the rural population (while the threat posed by urban workers was reduced by such Machia-vellian tactics as were outlined in April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard). Mugabe received plaudits from the rural peasantry with the slogan “Land to the people!” and that was enough to enable him to scrape home with 1.6 million votes compared to Tsvangirai’s 1.2 million (if you disregard those among nation’s 5.6 million registered voters who were prevented from casting their vote). But having been returned to power, the Mugabe regime has now has to contend with an economy that is largely in ruins.

To make matters worse, there has been a terrible drought. The resettled farmers’ efforts were substantially undermined by this event which affected the whole country. Droughts are not uncommon in this part of the world and in the past the government used to have adequate stockpiled reserves – amounting to more than 1 million tonnes of maize – to cover such eventualities. However pressure from the World Bank forced the state to sell off these stockpiles with the result that it now has to import maize from elsewhere at a considerable cost

The government had received early warnings from concerned bodies in Zimbabwe (and many international bodies as well) about the drought and that their reserves would not suffice as far as the needs of the people were concerned. But because of Zanu-PF’s culturally induced paranoia of winning (elections), they, through the minister of Lands, Agriculture and Resettlement, Joseph Made, dismissed these reports as baseless and mere speculations concocted by unscrupulous organisations to defame the credibility of their government.

So all Zimbabweans are now waiting for the masquerading, self-proclaimed “socialist” – Mugabe – to fulfil his promises of land and bread. There is a noticeable difference in outlook, not to say suspicion and even hatred, between rural and urban folk, something that the Mugabe régime has itself fostered. The former tend to support the government because of its promise of more land which they see as the answer to the problem. The generally speaking, better educated urban workers, on the other hand, tend to support the MDC and know all to well that the country is now under sanctions and their “illegitimate” government has no foreign currency to deal with the growing food crisis. They see the lives of Zimbabweans as that of a man submerged in a duck pond up to the lips. The slightest ripple of misfortune will serve to drown him.

The fact of the matter is Mugabe and his counterparts are dangerous men, passionately dedicated to capitalist doctrines and contemptuous of the masses. His regime can offer nothing but more suffering as a precondition of some never-never land of economic salvation. On the other hand, the MDC is itself hardly much of an alternative to recommend, dominated as it is by capitalist interests. Their economics advisor Eddie Cross, a leading member of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) has already talked (before the election) of continuing where Mugabe left off by privatising the top parastatals in the country and getting “government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years” (quoted in P. Bond, Radical Rhetoric and the Working Class during Zimbabwean Nationalism’s Dying Day”, JWSR). Hardly something likely to benefit the workers of Zimbabwe.

In the meanwhile, Morgan Tsvangirai has refused to accept an offer of a coalition government. The South African and Nigerian presidents, Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo respectively have failed to convince Tsvangirai before the recent Commonwealth troika meeting held in London. This led to the suspension of Zimbabwe from the club for a year. What a mess: from bloody elections to extra poverty.

Bigboy Musemwa