Anarchism in Britain Today (2006)

Book Review from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

We review a new book by an anarchist on what anarchists in Britain think and do today.

There are anarchists and anarchists. Bomb-throwers and pacifists, syndicalists and communists, primitivists and egoists, even anarcho-capitalists. Knowing to our cost that the same can be said of "socialists", we must be careful not to use what one group who call themselves anarchists think as typical of what anyone who calls themself one does.

Benjamin Franks's book, Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchists (AK Press,), deals with anarchist groups today who he calls "class struggle anarchists". Which means we can ignore here the individualists and the anarcho-capitalists, but even so the groups left still have different approaches, especially as, for some reason, Franks includes "council communists" and "autonomist Marxists" among them.

He lists four criteria for being considered a "class struggle anarchist".

1. "A complete rejection of capitalism and the market economy".
2. "An egalitarian concern for the interests and freedoms of others as part of creating non-hierarchical social relations."
3. "A complete rejection of state power and other quasi-state mediating forces".
4. "A recognition that means have to prefigure ends".

Franks places emphasis on the fourth and uses it to judge the principles, organisational forms and activities of "contemporary British anarchists", in particular Class War, the Anarchist (formerly Anarchist Communist) Federation and the Solidarity Federation (direct descendant of the old Syndicalist Workers Federation). The people around the best known anarchist publication, Freedom, are excluded as "liberal anarchists".

Prefiguring future society
We, too, hold that the means have to prefigure the end but reached this conclusion from a quite different starting point: that of democracy in the proper sense. Democracy means, literally, the rule or power of the people, i.e. popular participation in decision-making. It allows various ways of reaching a decision but, in the end, if consensus cannot be obtained, it has to come to a vote; in which case the majority view prevails. Democracy does not mean that all decisions have to made at general assemblies of all concerned or by referendum; it is compatible with certain decisions being delegated to committees and councils as long as the members of these bodies are responsible to those who (s)elected them.

Socialism is a society based on the common ownership of the means of life but, since something cannot be said to be commonly owned if some have a privileged or exclusive say in how it is used, common ownership means that every member of society has to have an equal say. If there wasn't such democratic control there wouldn't be common ownership, so there wouldn't be socialism.

Democratic control is not an optional extra of socialism. It is its very essence. This being so, socialism cannot be imposed against the will or without the consent and participation of the (vast) majority. It simply cannot be established for the majority by some vanguard or enlightened minority. That is our case against all forms of Leninism. The socialist revolution can only be democratic, in the sense of both being what the majority of people want and of being carried out by democratic methods of organisation and action. No minority revolution can lead to socialism, not even one that destroys the state (our case against certain anarchists) - and of course socialism will involve the disappearance of the state as a coercive institution serving the interests of a minority. Hence our conclusion that the movement to establish socialism, and the methods it employs, must "prefigure" the democratic nature of socialism.

Traditionally, anarchists have rejected democracy as an organising principle (not just the democratic state but any form of democratic organisation). The early British anarchists that William Morris met in the Socialist League in the 1880s denounced democracy as "the tyranny of the majority" (which Morris regarded as an absurd position). The anarchists who controlled the pre-WWI CGT union federation in France favoured the activities of an "active minority". Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays declared, in an essay entitled "Minorities versus Majorities", that "the living, vital truth of social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass". As the Socialist Standard commented on this in September 1924: "such views mean that the great body of the people will depend upon the kindness and wisdom of the Anarchist intellectuals to guide and mother us".

It is only in recent years that some anarchists have come to embrace democracy as an organising principle, mainly under the influence of industrial unionists and council communists (who claimed rather to be Marxists). Still, better late than never. But even now most anarchists have difficulty in justifying why someone should conform to a majority decision that he or she doesn't agree with; they still seem to think that no external decision can bind the "sovereign individual" of individualist anarchism (and bourgeois ideology). One group which did accept binding majority decisions - the now defunct Anarchist Workers Group in the late 80s - was denounced by the others, and again by Franks in this book, as crypto-Leninists.

This same ideology is reflected in the difficulty anarchist groups have with the concept of "representation". What they call "representative democracy" (whether in the state or generally) is rejected on the grounds that no group can be "represented" by anyone and that any "representative" inevitably stands in a hierarchical relationship with the group they claim to represent. But why can't a group (s)elect some of their number to represent them - unless you think that the supposed "sovereign individuals" who make up the group cannot sign away their right to speak and act for themselves?

Since even anarchists admit that not all decisions can be made by general assemblies or referendum, they get round this by saying that "delegation" is acceptable. But any attempted distinction between "representative" (bad) and "delegate" (good) is just playing with words.

This is not to say that what is called "representative democracy" in relation to the capitalist state is ideal. Far from it, even in the Swiss cantons and US States and cities where it is supplemented by the right of initiative (of a certain number of citizens to propose laws and call referendums) and the right to recall (unelect) a representative.

State elections
Capitalist democracy is not a participatory democracy, which a genuine democracy has to be. In practice the people generally elect to central legislative assemblies and local councils professional politicians who they merely vote for and then let them get on with the job. In other words, the electors abdicate their responsibility to keep any eye on their representatives, giving them a free hand to do what the operation of capitalism demands. But that's as much the fault of the electors as of their representatives, or rather it is a reflection of their low level of democratic consciousness. It can't be blamed on the principle of representation as such.

There is no reason in principle why, with a heightened democratic consciousness (such as would accompany the spread of socialist ideas), even representatives sent to state bodies could not be subject - while the state lasts - to democratic control by those who sent them there. The only arguments that anarchists have ever been able to put against this are that "power corrupts" and that this practice is not allowed by the constitution. But if power inevitability corrupts why does this not apply also in non-parliamentary elected bodies such as syndicalist union committees or workers councils?

Somewhat surprisingly, Franks does not condemn out of hand anarchist participation in state elections. Discussing Class War's standing of a candidate in a parliamentary by-election in 1988 he says that there could be occasions when this could be done as long it is done in a way that doesn't "reaffirm representative democracy", as he claims we do when we stand candidates. We would reply that when we stand candidates we do "prefigure" the genuinely democratic nature of future socialist society in that our candidates do not stand as leaders or offering to do anything for people but merely as potential delegates of those who want socialism, as mere "messenger boys (and girls)" pledged, if elected, to submit to the democratic control of those who voted them in. We suspect, however, that in not completely ruling out any participation in state elections Franks will be regarded by other anarchists as having conceded far too much.

The book - despite the drawback of having been originally written as a university thesis - does give a useful and comprehensive view of the discussions that have gone on in anarchist circles in recent years. It is interesting to note that some of these have been paralleled by discussions within our party, for instance, whether the revolution is to be a class or a non-class affair, and to what extent can community struggles outside the workplace be assimilated to struggles at the point of production. (For the record, our view is that the revolution has to be the work of the working class, but as the working class understood not as just manual industrial workers but as anyone forced to work for a wage or salary irrespective of the job they do, i.e. most people today; and that non-workplace struggles such as tenants associations and claimants' unions are as legitimate defensive struggles as the trade union struggle over wages and working conditions.)

On the other subjects which divide contemporary anarchists, we would side with the syndicalists in saying that economic exploitation is primary, but with the anarcho-communists in saying that future society will involve community-based administrative councils and not exclusively industry-based ones. We oppose the blanket rejection of the existing trade unions as proposed by the ACF (and the council communists). And we would agree with statements quoted by Franks (and have said the same thing many times ourselves) that "we exist not as something separate from the working class, not as some leadership for others to follow, but as part of the working class working for our own liberation" (Subversion) and "to the Left the working class are there to be ordered about because we are too thick to think for ourselves" (Class War).

In Franks's scheme, we would be classified as a group practising "propaganda by word" with occasional forays into "constitutional activity" in the form of participation in elections. What we don't do - and which all the anarchist groups engage in - is to participate, as a group, in "micropolitics", local single-issue campaigns. We don't necessarily dismiss all such campaigns as entirely useless but think it best to leave them up to the people directly concerned, merely advising them (if asked) to organise and conduct themselves democratically, without leaders and without outside interference from Leninist (and, indeed, anarchist) groups. As a group composed of people who have come together because we want socialism, we see our group's task as to concentrate on spreading socialist ideas.

Adam Buick

The Axis Against Evil (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US is generally perceived as the central pillar if capitalism, yet US hegemony is increasingly losing flavour with people around the world.

The double standards operated by the US are plain for all to see: the US has a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, yet will not allow Iran and North Korea to develop their own. The lies about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction were followed by a brutal war there, with ever-increasing numbers of casualties. Moreover, the US uncritically supports Israel, and at the time of the recent invasion of Lebanon the US actively delayed condemning Israel's actions in the hope of giving them time enough to destroy Hezbullah. Behind all this lies the need to control oil supplies. After 9/11, the new Patriot Act and the heightened profile of Homeland Security resulted in dissenters at home being portrayed as traitors.

Bush and co propagate a picture of "us and them", "us" being the US and its allies and friends and "them" being anyone remotely in opposition to their idea of world order. But who, more particularly are "us and them"?

According to received opinion and Cold War propaganda it used to be simple. It was "us", the capitalists who loved freedom and "them", the Communists (USSR), who were under state control. With the fall of the USSR the Cold War was over and a new threat had to be manufactured to fill the gap. So now "them" is the Axis of Evil, terrorists and dissenters, all standing against "democracy" and therefore against the "free" market.

However, the Axis of Evil or what's left of it - Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea – aren't in opposition to capitalism. Their rulers are merely in favour of running it their own way, in their own interests, which appear to be directly opposed to the wishes of the US. It is also a challenge that Iran and Syria are believed to sponsor terrorism, i.e. have a different view of and vision for the Middle East. External dissenters will have pressure brought to bear by the various trade organisations using economic sticks and carrots, by threatened withdrawal of aid and even by the (deliberately) weakened UN.

Another "them"
The newest "them" is of a different order, spreading across Central and South America, including the Zapatistas of Mexico; Bolivia which refused to privatise gas and water and now has Evo Morales pushing the social agenda further; Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the Bolivarian circles and the new People's Constitution; Argentina and the Unemployed Workers' Movement; Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement. All these reject the idea of being underdogs in a US-dominated world order.

These movements do not aim at the overthrow of capitalism but they are standing together against its symbols in the shape of the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and transnational corporations. Add to these movements the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist forums, which have led, for instance, to US students fighting to ban Coca Cola from a growing number of campuses. This is because in certain countries unionised workers have been ditched and even murdered, and in India village water has been seriously contaminated by Coca Cola bottling plants. Another example is the ongoing "Nestles Kills Babies" campaign against the policy of promoting baby formula mixed with (often contaminated) water in favour of mother's milk. The "Fair Trade" movement attempts to provide more than a subsistence wage to farmers around the world and give a guaranteed price even when prices on the world market fluctuate.

World poverty is the subject of a myriad of movements present at the World Social Forum, like the Brazilian Landless Movement and the anti-Big Pharma Brigade which campaigns against the big pharmaceutical companies which lock poor farmers into the buying their seeds, fertiliser and insecticides. Other well-known campaigns are those such as are fronted by celebrities like Geldof, Bono and Clinton. These latter campaigns raise the profile in a large part of the world with many people who would otherwise remain ignorant of the problems, widening awareness, interest and questioning.

The US home front
On the home front in the US divisions are widening too. It's one year after the destruction and loss of life from Hurricane Katrina when most of the residents who fled the destruction are still living "in exile" with little opportunity to get back home and scant prospect of work. Almost half of the demolition and construction workers in the area are now imported "Latinos" rather than the formerly resident "Afro-Americans" because, surprise, surprise, the contractors find the immigrants more easily exploitable.

Outsourcing of jobs continues to drive down wages and living standards for the majority. The crisis in the high price of oil raises the level of discontent. It may be nearly the cheapest petrol in the world at the pumps but if you can't afford to fill your tank you can't get to work. Control of the oil can be seen as a prime motivation of the White House and the Pentagon, high prices being good for them and their cronies personally. However the US public want to see their soldiers "home" and the price of gas down.

All of the above, the Axis of Evil, the terrorism, the dissenters, the thousand-and-one movements across the world seeking to "make a difference", the discontent at home, are threats of differing degrees to the current position of the US. While they are not socialist, more and more people are rejecting the idea of a world ruled by US capitalism. And that makes them more open to listening with an open mind to the case for socialism.

Janet Surman

Pathfinders: The Science of Morality, the Morality of Science (2006)

From the Pathfinders column in the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Science of Morality, the Morality of Science

A friend recently remarked that she had been obliged to take her cat to the vet for the third time this year. When asked if the animal had contracted some nasty virus she replied: "Oh, it"s nothing like that. My cat suffers from depression." If the cat had been present to witness the ensuing howls of laughter from the assembled throng, he would no doubt have gone into terminal decline. And, strange as it may seem, he would be right to deplore such a display of callous human ignorance. For feline depression, as it turns out, is nothing unusual, with eight out of ten vets in one survey reporting cases of stress and depression in animals left alone at home while theirowners go out to work (BBC Online, 25 August 05).

But it's not just a case of yowling dogs or sulking moggies hungry for bigger portions of human interaction and a side order of self-validation. The social consensus has moved a long way from the days when medieval farmers were told by priests to cut the feet off their runaway pigs since, not having souls, they wouldn't feel anything. The centuries-long debate about animal sentience, more recently informed by a respectable body of research into animal behaviour, has culminated in zoologists and ethologists concluding that not only do many animals feel, they can think. "The whole climate over whether to accept sentience has changed hugely in the last 15 years", Joyce D'Silva of Compassion in World Farming told the BBC back in 2003 (BBC Online, 9 May 03). And thinking is only the beginning, argues the CIWF, since there is evidence among social vertebrate species of altruistic behaviour and even a crude understanding of morality.

And if humans respond to these concepts with a milk bowl full of scepticism, it is not surprising, since many scientists are also fighting a rearguard action against them. "Just a couple of decades ago, the words 'animal' and 'cognition' couldn't be mentioned in the same sentence". says primatologist Frans deWaal, "With this fight behind us, emotions have become the new taboo" (New Scientist, 14 Oct.) In a world where per capita meat production and consumption are probably higher than at any time in recorded history, talk of emotionally aware animals feeling mean or loving or jealous is likely to begreeted with cold disdain. Yet field studies of primates report displays of sympathy, compassion, a clear understanding of what is fair and what is not fair, and instances of group punishment of individuals who disobey rules and inconvenience others. One recent study at Montreal University suggested that even mice may be capable of empathic responses.

The difficulty which this sort of behaviour poses is that modern secular society tends to assume that morality is something which comes from the outside, an abstract intellectual construct established by articulate beings who are capable of imagining all the dire consequences of not knowing right from wrong. At its extreme, among religious groups, morality is located so far outside the species that it does not reside in any known place but in the imaginary mind of an imaginary being in an imaginary universe. But what if morality actually comes from the inside, hard-wired into us? And what if it's not just us? What if other animals share some of the moral and emotional characteristics that we imagine are exclusive to humans, where does that leave our moral justification of ourselves, especially in relation to how we treat them?

It isn't just burger bingers who will start looking guiltily at their Monster Mac. There is a larger philosophical question at stake which affects even scientists, and socialists. What is the point of striving for a value-free science, if we know that in practice it never has existed and in theory never really could anyway? Many have argued vociferously, over issues like the Bomb, genetics, or even stem-cell research, that science without morality is a dangerous and unhinged form of knowledge, yet the problem with the argument is that it is moral in itself.

Thus morality argues in defence of morality. But if we recognise that forms of proto-morality are built-in to higher mammals and primates, perhaps the argument in favour of the moral dimension begins to look less circular and more solidly based.

And what of socialist politics, which is in the habit of highlighting the socio-economic forces which drive changes in society, often to the extent of regarding personal 'lapses' into moral outrage as a form of intellectual flabbiness? Does the case against capitalism and for common ownership and production for use do better with or without a moral dimension? Is it valid to say that capitalism is not only an inefficient and downright destructivesocial system, it is also plain wrong?

Of course, knowledge would not have progressed as far as it has if moralists still held sway, as they have for most of human history. Morality means different things to different societies, and to base one's strategy for the future upon whatever concept of morality is fashionable today would clearly be a big mistake. Yet if a chimpanzee can show the instinctive compassion of onesentient creature towards the suffering of another sentient creature, perhaps it is not for us to attempt to rise above our basic animal instincts as if they were not really ours but, literally, given by the hand of gods. Perhaps it is just as important to oppose capitalism because it is evil, and not merely because it is 'incorrect'.

No planes, no brains.

Another conversation, another friend. This one was on that increasingly tedious subject: did the Americans blow up the Twin Towers themselves? Some people, such as UFOlogists, numerologists, and readers of Nexus magazine, foreswear the genuine wonder of scientific discovery and evidence-based knowledge in favour of fantasies, rumours and conspiracy theories conjured up by dedicated charlatans who from time immemorial have always preferred the tall story to the telling fact.

The 'no-planers' believe that American missiles crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001, and to explain what we all saw with our own eyes they offer the amazing suggestion that these missiles were cloaked in holographic images of passenger jets. In an article in the New Statesman (quoted in the New York Times, 7 Sept), Brendan O'Neill describes an interview with two noplaners, ex-secret service agents David Shayler and Annie Machon, as they enthusiastically describe, following the French journalist Thierry Meyssan, author of 9/11: the big lie (2002), how it definitely couldn't have been a plane that hit the Pentagon.

"Just look at the news footage," says Shayler. "You won't see any plane debris on the Pentagon lawn." O'Neill almost chides himself for feeling obliged to print the web address of a site which features photographs of plane wreckage inside the Pentagon.

The no-planers, like the no-landers, by which term Pathfinders herewith dubs those obsessed cranks who insist that the Americans never landed on the moon, are in sore need of a certain cheap and easily available piece of scientific equipment. This invaluable device, known as Occam's Razor, is in fact more of an old saw, which asserts that if several different theories fit all the known facts, then the correct theory is probably the simplest. To answer the no-planers, the simplest explanation for something that looked exactly like a plane flying into the North Tower is that it was a plane flying into the North Tower, and for the no-landers, the difficulty and complexity of an operation to get humans onto the moon would be as nothing to the difficulty and complexity of pretending to do so and then getting away with the pretence for the last thirty-five years. Perhaps the conclusion to draw from all this is that, just as some animals are more thinking and moral than we care to admit, thus overlapping with us, we humans retain the capacity to be dumb as ducks, thus overlapping with them.

Paddy Shannon

Postscript: Unable to resist, Pathfinders finally succumbed to the primal impulse and clicked on the above link to view the wreckage. The link didn't work. Now that is suspicious . . .

Hitting them where it hurts (2006)

Book Reviews from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Perkins: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. & Greg Palast: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

An economic hit man or EHM is a person who works for a bank or international finance house. Their job is to organise loans to developing countries, to help with infrastructure projects such as power plants, roads or airports. But it is a condition of these loans that companies from the country doing the lending have to undertake the building. The money, therefore, simply moves from a bank to an engineering company. But the recipient country of course has to pay it all back, with interest. If it defaults, the lending country can impose controls such as installing military bases or gaining access to raw materials.

John Perkins worked as an EHM for an American company called Chas. T. Main, but he eventually realised the effects his work was having and so he got out. His book recounts his experiences and how he came to see through what he was doing, and so gives an interesting insider's account of how US control over the Third World is established and maintained. Ecuador, for instance, was loaned billions of dollars, but in thirty years its official poverty level grew to 70 percent and its public debt to $16billion. Nearly half of its national budget is devoted just to paying off its debts.

Saudi Arabia was brought under US influence, partly to ensure there would be no repetition of the 1973-4 oil embargo. The Saudi rulers used their petrodollars to buy US government securities, and the interest on these paid US companies to build infrastructure projects, which were then operated by cheap labour imported form other Middle Eastern or Islamic countries. But on Perkins' account, Saddam Hussein refused to play the EHM game, thus bringing the wrath of the US down on him. He further claims that Venezuela was saved from invasion simply because the US could not take on that country as well as Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time.

The back cover of Confessions has a laudatory quote from Greg Palast, whose own book (first published in 2002) is a wide-ranging look at the links between government and big business. He quotes an IMF report from 2000 which reviewed the impact of globalisation and concluded that "in the recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world population has regressed".

One of Palast's particular concern is privatisation, which he claims has led to huge profits for some and worsening services for the many. Another is shared with Perkins, that of how the Third World is controlled and kept in a subordinate position by the most powerful capitalist companies. In 2001, for instance, Argentina was subjected to IMF-imposed austerity measures that led to soaring unemployment and a dramatic fall-off in industrial production. In 1998 Brazil was loaned billions of dollars and at the same time forced to sell its power companies: British Gas bought the Sao Paulo Gas Company for a song. New Labour, with Blair and Mandelson leading the way, were instrumental in helping US and UK companies get their hands on Brazilian companies and raw materials. The fate of Allende in Chile, overthrown by a CIA coup, was sealed because he refused to pay compensation to American companies whose property he had expropriated.

Palast also has a forceful chapter on how George W Bush supposedly stole the 2000 presidential election. He's also good on the emptiness of Blair's Labour, which is driven by ambition rather than any convictions. But it's the picture of how corporations (what Perkins calls the corporatocracy) go about the work of making over the world in their own image that is conveyed memorably by both these volumes.

Paul Bennett

New Prime Minister for Japan: business as usual (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Japan has a new Prime Minister who seems eager to foster nationalism. We look at his policies for furthering the interests of the Japanese capitalism.

Koizumi's five and a half year reign as Prime Minister came to a voluntary end in September. He tossed the keys to the official residence to his protege Shinzo Abe after a summer farewell tour that included a pilgrimage to Graceland and a visit to Yasukuni Shrine to pay his respects to the war criminals and their cannon fodder said to spiritually reside there. On September 20, Abe ('ah-bay') was elected President of the Liberal Democratic Party, and six days later the Upper and Lower houses of the Diet approved him as Prime Minister. This quick and easy process, free of public participation and the unpleasant prying from clenched fingers etcetera, must have an envious Gordon Brown shaking his head in disbelief.

Born to rule
A third-generation politician, like so many others in the LDP, Abe has long regarded the top governmental post as his birthright. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi became Prime Minister in 1957, culminating an amazing political comeback after having served a three-year prison sentence as a 'class-A' war criminal for his wartime role as Minister of Commerce and Industry. The US occupational authorities let Kishi off the hook, enlisting his aid in the fight against commies, but the Japanese people were less forgiving and finally drove him from office in 1960 through massive protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty. Kishi's son-in-law Shintaro Abe, father of Shinzo, was expected to become Prime Minister himself one day. In the early 1980s he rose as high as Foreign Minister, but a corruption scandal and terminal cancer brought his political career to an end.

Shinzo Abe's own political career got started in 1982, when his father suddenly ordered him to quit his job at Kobe Steel and become his executive assistant at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In 1993 Abe was elected, in typical LDP fashion, to the same Diet seat his father had held until his death two years earlier. It soon became clear that Abe would become Prime Minister one day, and this became an absolute certainty in 2005 when Koizumi appointed him Chief Cabinet Secretary, after he had been the Deputy Chief Cabinet secretary since the Mori administration.

Koizumi helped Abe tremendously by appointing him to head the negotiations with North Korea to return Japanese citizens abducted in the late seventies and early eighties, along with their families. Being at the centre of this highly publicized issue, which has become the cause celebre of the rightwing in Japan, has brought Abe great public recognition. He has pointed to his own hard-line stance towards negotiations with North Korea as an example of how he is a 'fighting politician.' In his book Utsukushii kuni he (Towards a Beautiful Country), published in July, he defines this term as a politician who 'will act without fear of criticism if it is for the good of the nation and its people.' Abe points to the abduction issue as an example of his fighting skills, suggesting that it took great courage on his part to lead this struggle: 'Many Diet members told me that I had their support, but only a few of them actually took action with me. It's a shame that there were so few 'fighting politicians,' but that's always the way it is in any era.' Here Abe is laying it on a bit thick, as if it took great courage to latch on to an issue that already had strong public support and media backing.

A hard act to follow
One problem for Abe in his tough-guy role, it must be said, is that he comes across as exactly what he is: a third-generation LDP politician who has obediently followed the path to power his family laid out for him. Indeed, his bland life and career probably account for the need to fancy himself a fighting politician in the first place. Abe is not that different from fellow dauphin George W. Bush, who tries to pass himself off as a Texan and prefers the title Commander in Chief to that of President. Unfortunately for Abe, he lacks Koizumi's acting skills. Even though Koizumi is yet another third-generation politician, and a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary at that, he managed to present himself as a rebel within the LDP ranks. He lent his empty statements the air of profundity by delivering them in a scratchy Clint Eastwood voice, with the appropriate pauses inserted to heighten the dramatic impact. Abe, by contrast, speaks in a nasal monotone, without Koizumi's sense of timing. Granted, such superficialities should be irrelevant, but in the demagogic world of bourgeois politics this stuff does matter. The ability of Koizumi to survive for five and a half years was due in no small part to his charisma, whereas his oafish predecessor Yoshiro Mori only lasted a year.

The Japanese public was hoodwinked by Koizumi's vow to either reform the LDP or smash it up in the process. Either option sounded great to most people, and he enjoyed tremendous support as a result. Repeating the magic word kaikaku (reform) on every occasion, Koizumi created the impression that he would revitalise the country. The great thing about the word, as far as he was concerned, is that it could mean different things to different people. To capitalists it clearly suggested his desire to shrink the welfare state, cut corporate taxes, and deregulate the labour market, whereas to anyone not happy with the status quo it seemed that Koizumi was going to attack the entrenched power structure of big capitalists and corrupt bureaucrats. For his LDP colleagues, meanwhile the empty slogan of 'structural reform' seemed just the ticket to prolong their own hold on power.

After starting off at around 80 percent, Koizumi's approval rating did slump a number of times, but thanks to an economic upturn and that magic word of his, he always managed to get back on track around election time. His greatest success was the 2005 general election, which he framed as a simple referendum on his plan to privatise the postal service. By purging the LDP of several members who had opposed this plan, Koizumi made it seem that he was finally carrying through on his promise to shake up the party. The public, if anything, was opposed to privatisation, but the image of Koizumi standing up to 'vested interests' within the LDP looked good, and this manoeuvre handed the party a landslide victory.

White House as a model
Abe will be hard-pressed to match the corny but compelling drama of his predecessor, whose term in office is now referred to as 'Koizumi gekijo' (theatre), but he may not have to rely on his own poor acting skills. First of all, Abe will face less opposition within his own party thanks to Koizumi having diminished the power of the various LDP factions, which have long functioned as nearly independent political parties. In this sense, Koizumi has made good on his promise to change the LDP, although concentrating power in the hands of the party leader was not exactly what most peoplehad in mind.

At the same time, Abe is seeking to gather more power for the position of Prime Minister, with the US White House as his model. Along with appointing Cabinet members, Abe introduced the new position of 'Advisor to the Prime Minster' for the following five areas: national security, economy and fiscal policy, educational revitalisation, public relations, and the abduction issue. This may be an effort to circumvent the ministerial bureaucracies to better assert his own personal power, in the manner of Nixon or Bush Jr. If this is his intention, there is no guarantee of success, and the secretary-general of the LDP's Upper House caucus has already warned that this will 'cause disarray over policy-making and split the administration in two.' What is clear, at any rate, is that Abe is keen to gather more dictatorial powers for the Prime Minister than have existed in the past.

The point I wish to make is that despite Abe's questionable skills as a politician, he may survive longer than expected because of the power he possesses and will likely expand if the confrontation with North Korea escalates (as seems likely now that a nuclear weapon has been tested there). If nothing else, Bush's disastrous term in office has shown that an inarticulate and incompetent politician can remain in power given a united party, impotent opposition, and a situation to terrify the public with, and Abe has all of these factors in his favour along with the sort of strong media backing that Bush has enjoyed.

Abe's policies
Assuming that Abe does stick around longer than Mori, what policies does he wish to implement? In many respects, his policies carry on where Koizumi left off. Both claim to champion 'small government,' while being strong believers in the power of the state when it comes to promoting nationalism. For Abe small government above all means reducing the number of government workers and cutting people's health-care and pension benefits. To soften the blow, he promises to retrain workers so as to give them a 'second-chance' in life. One difference in economic policy compared to the previous government is that Abe is making less noise about the need to eliminate unnecessary public works or carry out financial restructuring. His line is that such reforms are impossible without economic growth, and he looks to corporate tax cuts to spur this growth.

Abe's economic policies are not likely to be popular, but he has pinned his hopes on the magical power of nationalism to deflect public frustration. Abe and his LDP cohorts have long claimed that Japan is 'abnormal' because its people lack patriotism. They pin much of the blame for this on the 'pacifist' Constitution and postwar educational system, emphasizing that both were imposed on Japan by the US. Over the past decade, the LDP has been waging a campaign to steadily blast away at both of these pillars.

Abe hopes to preside over a revision of the Constitution, ridding it of Article Nine, which pledges to 'forever renounce the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.' Last year the LDP issued a draft Constitution, and the following sentence from the Preamble reflects its overall tone and content: 'The Japanese people share a duty to support and defend the nation and society they belong to with love, a sense of responsibility, and mettle.' The changes to the Constitution are ominous, but in some respects the LDP is merely bringing the words into line with reality. The existence of Article Nine did not stop Koizumi from dispatching troops to Iraq (although it did necessitate some verbal gymnastics on his part to argue the action was not unconstitutional). The Left, for its part, merely defends the current 'pacifist' Constitution, instead of seeking the fundamental societal change needed to eliminate the necessity of war. This weak position, which effectively defends the status quo while lacking a clear goal, makes it easy for Abe's LDP to appear principled and realistic by comparison. If the LDP does succeed in changing the Constitution, however, it will have removed a handy fig leaf that conceals the reality of the Japanese state.

The same desire to turn back the clock and dispense with democratic rhetoric can be seen in Abe's goals for educational reform. He intends to advance the effort already under way to introduce new history textbooks that cut out unpleasant facts. Abe and the LDP consider it 'masochistic' to teach students about crimes committed by the state, preferring an account of history that builds up their national pride. Abe has also strongly supported the government effort to force students and teachers to sing the national anthem at school ceremonies and display the national flag.

A dilemma for Abe in championing the rightwing campaign for nationalism, however, is that it has already heightened friction with Japan's supposed ally South Korea and main trading partner China. The influential corporate lobbying group Keidanren called on Koizumi to stop visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in order to improve diplomatic relations. In his first month in office Abe did visit China and South Korea, in an attempt to patch things up, but he seems unlikely to stray too far from his far-right allies. Abe has nationalists to thank for his quick rise to power, and nationalism is the best card he has to hold on to his own position and keep the LDP (and the capitalist class) in power.

Michael Schauerte

Why Aren't We Shocked by Bob Herbert

Why Aren't We Shocked?

Really excellent article by Bob Herbert in today's New York Times on misogyny in today's society. Please pass it on.

Friendly Fascism

Fascism is Fun

Funny, funny video.

Feel free to repost, as it hits the spot.

all the best,
Darren
Inveresk Street Ingrate Blog

PS - If you don't get the joke, then I've got these magic beans that I would like to sell you. 

A Parable by Leo Tolstoy

I see mankind as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures and plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite grass enough for the cattle. Consequently, the cattle are tramping underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence.

I saw the owner of the herd come to them, and when he saw their pitiful condition he was filled with compassion for them and thought of all he could do to improve their condition.

So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And that they called Charity.

Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing up into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast.

Because they were dying off in the cold nights, he put up beautiful well-drained and well-ventilated cowsheds for the cattle.

Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence, he put corks on the horns of the cattle, so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and the old cows over 70 years of age.

In fact, he did everything he could think of to improve the condition of the cattle, and when I asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing, break down the fence, and let the cattle out, he answered: "If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them."

Food For Thought

From the Socialist Party of Canada monthly newsletter:

Once again with feeling - the poverty issue.

The Toronto Star launched an Anti-poverty campaign entitled, "Ask Why" to bring attention to the plight of the working poor in Canada.

It describes the life of a Sri Lankan woman who holds down two cleaning jobs (she was a teacher in her native land and holds a degree in the liberal arts)), and who has to leave her two children with others during the day and the night, and manages to bring home a grand total of $1,150/month.

The apartment rent is currently $850 and in eleven years in Canada she has never been able to afford real furniture but relies on plastic patio chairs. It should be noted the response that followed was tremendous with offers of better jobs, donations and gifts of furniture, a testament to the humane response of the populace, but, I think, even the hardliners would agree that this is no solution.

The Toronto Star is a liberal paper, perhaps just to the Left of Centre, and has along tradition of highlighting the injustices of our economic system. It has high quality reporters with a conscience producing very good and thorough articles. It perhaps could be compared to the Guardian. On page two, it printed articles from the end of the 19th. Century on poverty.

For example, "Families in dire want of food because the husbands and fathers have been unable to obtain work" (1894); "Nineteen thousand undernourished children attend Toronto schools" (1931); "Three hundred jobless sleepnightly along Don river's banks" (1931); "Shameful! Here is a very small boy with very large spectacles! They cover the whole eye and have little discs on each lens to correct an astigmatism. He can see better in a cellar than in the open sunlight because he works 6 hours of the day in almost Cimmerian darkness" (no date).

There are many similar articles. The shocking point is, for all the heartfelt desire that the editor and writers have put into this theme, which has covered two weeks, there is never any connection made to the fact that what the paper attacked in 1894 is still going on today as evidenced by the lead story. We are told facts such as there are 650,000 working poor in Canada, or that 40% of the country's poor have jobs but cannot make enough to make ends meet. One reporter actually cited the following, "Writing in the latest edition of the journal Healthcare Policy, University of British Columbia economist Robert Evans points out that over this period (25 years), most of the economic gains recorded in Canada were appropriated by the super-rich. Between 1976 and 1990, the average per capita income in Canada barely budged. But over the same period, the top 0.01 per cent of earners saw their incomes more than doubled."

The last 25 years! Just who the hell do they think was appropriating the workers' income for the last three hundred years and will continue to do so for the next three hundred unless the workers wake up! The editorials made the usual offerings - raise the minimum wage, raise the tax thresholds for the low earners, more language training for immigrants. Again, no connection to the nature of capitalism.

To me, it's all so very simple - wealth produced is split between wages and profits and because the capitalist class own the whole lot, they take the lion's share - that it seems or the whole world is daft.

For socialism,
John Ayers

For more information on the Socialist Party of Canada, please click on the picture below:

Send Back The Clowns

The October 2006 Socialist Standard is now online.

Das Kapital (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx's Das Kapital by Francis Wheen. Atlantic Books, 2006.

In a series of "Books That Shook The World" which includes Paine's Rights of Man and Darwin's Origin of Species, Wheen's biography of Das Kapital (to give Capital its original German title) is fairly short at 130 pages including index. Wheen has already had a critical and commercial success with his biography of the man himself, Karl Marx (1999) and this work seems likely to do the same.

Das Kapital was planned to be the first of six volumes, but Marx only saw the first volume through to publication. The second and third volumes, and the volumes entitled Theories of Surplus Value, were all compiled from Marx's notes after his death. Apart from a brief Introduction, Wheen's book is divided into three chapters: gestation, birth and afterlife. There are no notes, bibliography or guide to further reading and although Wheen is mostly content to let Marx speak for himself he does occasionally paraphrase and in one place he is seriously mistaken. Wheen explains that value (socially necessary labour-time) may differ from price and sometimes price may be higher than value, but Wheen adds, "under a socialist system this surplus would be redistributed for the benefit of the workers" (p.33). Marx never argued this and the whole thrust of Das Kapital is that value, price and profit can never work for the benefit of the workers. Marx also, incidentally, never argued for redistribution, preferring instead to judge the success or failure of a social system by its ability to produce for human need. Wheen is rightly critical of commentators who read into Das Kapital things which are not there (e.g. increasing "immiseration" or impoverishment of the proletariat), but that has not stopped him falling into the same trap here.

Controversially, Wheen claims that Das Kapital should be thought of as a work of art and this was Marx's stated intention. Das Kapital is usually depicted as a work of science, but Marx seems to have considered art and science to have similar objectives - that is, to see through surface appearances ("the veils of illusion") to reveal the underlying reality. And yet it was the late Louis Althusser who maintained that there was an "epistemological break" in Marx's writing, with the early artistic or philosophical work being only of marginal interest, whereas the later works such as Das Kapital contained his mature and scientific thinking. But as Wheen points out, in Althusser's posthumous memoir he admitted to being "a trickster and deceiver" and only ever studying "a few passages of Marx." Althusser and his work on Marx was a fraud. But even if Althusser was not a con-man, the distinction between an early and a mature Marx does not withstand serious scrutiny.

The alleged impact of Das Kapital on twentieth century politics is well summarised, including the fall of the Russian empire and China's contradictory claim to be "Marxist-Leninist" (Wheen insists that "'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt"). The framework for viewing these and other events, argues Wheen, is to be found in Marx's writing on capital.

For as Wheen puts it:

"Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century."

Lew Higgins

Pathfinders Column: High and Dry (2006)

The Pathfinders column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Water World 1

"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it". Thus spoke one Inuit villager, on describing winter temperatures of 9 degress celsius that should have been -30 degrees celsius (Independent on Sunday, 27 August). As the Arctic warms up twice as fast as the rest of the world, and sea ice has shrunk in area by a quarter and in thickness by a half, its inhabitants are discovering that their igloos are heat traps, their water supply needs wells and their workplaces need air-conditioning. Meanwhile Greenland farmers - for they do exist - are starting to grow broccoli, cauliflower and Chinese cabbage, while having to make up, among their thousand words for reindeer, some new words for the salmon which are appearing in their rivers, and the barn owls, hornets and robins which are now adventuring to the far north. What the Inuit think of global warming can be surmised by the number of their houses and snowmobiles that have started falling through the ice, and one can easily see why they think "the world is slowly disintegrating." Meanwhile in Siberia, roads and buildings built on the permafrost are starting to collapse, and the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk has recently suffered a major flood (BBC Online, 12 September).

Greenland is the second biggest ice mass after Antarctica, with glaciers as large as Manhattan and as high as the Empire State Building, and it is now melting at a rate that has alarmed even the alarmists. Evidence from NASA satellites and ground-based researchers concluded in February 2006 that Greenland's glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice cap were to completely disappear, which it is quite likely to do by the end of 2100 at this rate, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet) (BBC Online, 11 August). If this happens, New York, New Orleans and half of Florida including Miami, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale will be underwater.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Washington is facing rebellion from state governors all over the country to stop stalling over Kyoto and do something, not least because their own oil and gas companies are already one jump ahead with 'greener' technology and need the relevant legislation to be enacted so they can capitalize on it. Leading the way is Da Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who when not terminating crooks by state execution is so keen to display his green credentials he sided with the Democrats against his own party in order to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act, which aims to cap emissions in California, the world's 12th largest CO2 emitter, by 25 percent by 2020 (BBC Online, 1 September). But even Arnie is unlikely to hold back the Arctic flood, because capitalism just doesn't sit down and listen to reason, as his Republican ex-buddies know perfectly well. The reason they opposed his cosy Californian carbon-capping caper was because they knew perfectly well that unless such a plan was federal, so that nobody could get out of it, all the investment would leak out of the state into neighbouring ones which were not required under their state law to worry so energetically about the problem.

------------

Water World 2

While the Inuit are fast running out of ice, a third of the world's population are faced with a shortage of any water at all. The situation has arisen twenty years earlier than projections forecasted, according to a report by the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka (New Scientist, 26 August). The report states that while in some places physical shortage of water is to blame, in others it is a question of lack of financial investment. So are they talking billion-dollar pipelines from the water sources to the dry interiors in Africa, Asia and parts of China? Not a bit. The state-of-the-art technology is, wait for it, plastic buckets and bags, lots of big ones, to catch the stuff as it falls out of the sky. Storing roof and road run-off, they argue, could double or triple food production in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. Not only that, but saving water for 'unrainy days' in this way could slow the expansion of rain-fed agriculture into virgin habitats from 60 per cent by 2050 down to 10 per cent.

The predictable response of most people reading this would be a Homer Simpson-like 'Duh'. You don't need to be an engineering genius to figure out that water butts are a good way of saving water, so why in hell aren't they doing it already, you cannot resist asking? Presumably because in the capitalist scheme of things, poor Africans, Indians and Chinese peasants don't have the price and don't rate the price even of a plastic bucket.

-------------

Water World 3

Socialists always welcome any sincere attempt to solve the world's problems, even if some of these attempts are inevitably misguided. One doesn't in all honesty expect a great contribution to be made by new-age mystics so it is no surprise that when Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie approached the UK government with a scheme to clean up nuclear waste, using a deeply mystical Kabbalah water which they claimed had received extensive testing in a Ukrainian lake, the government didn't show much interest in the Ritchies' esoteric knowledge of Jewish mystical liquids and in fact showed them the door (New Scientist, 26 August). One might expect however that the government official who recounted this story would show the appropriate respect for such eminent celebrities, or at least a cool and precise scientific detachment. Instead, the official described the encounter as follows: "It was like a crank call . . . The scientific mechanisms and principles were just bollocks." Lovely to see scientists descend to plain English occasionally.

Paddy Shannon

Travelling People (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Caroline Moorehead: Human Cargo: a Journey among Refugees. Vintage.

The title says it all really: human beings shunted from one place to another, in response to political events, and treated as objects to be kept at arm's length or sent back as quickly as possible to wherever they came from. There are perhaps 12 million refugees in the world today, and twice that number of internally displaced people (IDPs), who get less attention, and also less financial support when they return to their homes.

Caroline Moorehead visited a number of areas where refugees live (or survive is perhaps a better word) and talked to many people. She starts in Cairo, full of 'lost boys' from other parts of Africa, originally mainly from Sudan but now increasingly from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and elsewhere. Many asylum-seekers from Africa travel first to Italy, to Sicily and to Lampedusa, a small island less than 100 miles from the coast of Tunisia; many drown on the way there.

Between Mexico and California is a fence designed to reduce the flow of Mexican migrants northwards. The border is deliberately kept semi-closed, as the US needs some (but not too much) cheap Mexican labour power. But it is still policed in a draconian manner: for instance, a canal which provides a possible crossing point has been converted on the US side so that it's hard to climb out once you've swum over. Over two thousand people have died trying to cross the border, ten times the number who lost their lives trying to escape over the Berlin Wall.

Meanwhile, Australia has an extremely tough line on asylum, following its earlier racist 'White Australia' policy. Would-be migrants from Indonesia and elsewhere in south-east Asia have a hard time even getting there, following the introduction of Operation Relex, which involves naval vessels and aircraft turning back boats of asylum-seekers. Many of those who actually make it to Australia may be locked up indefinitely, despite having committed no crime.

Some Palestinians who fled their homes when Israel was established in 1948 have spent over fifty years in refugee camps - not many, though, because life in a refugee camp is hard and few can survive that long. Many more in number are the children born in camps, to parents who were themselves born there too.

Often, also, refugees are driven to suicide since their stories of violence back home may not be believed. One young Iranian killed himself in Newcastle in 2003, leaving a note that said, 'You have to kill yourself in this country, to prove that you would be killed in your own country.'

One encouraging aspect of the book is the way that local people, from Sicily to Australia and Newcastle, have rallied to support and help refugees in their midst. It is one thing to rail against those who are allegedly coming to steal jobs or live as scroungers, but it is quite another to encounter the hopelessness and destitution of people who just want somewhere to live without persecution and bring up their family.

Moorehead makes a number of good points: that migration is 'the unfinished business of globalisation', and that nobody wants to be a refugee. 'Why', she asks, 'should something as arbitrary as where one is born determine where one is allowed to live?' The answer, sadly, is that under capitalism, artificial lines on maps divide the world into different camps, which enable those who own the earth to defend their bit of it and to make claims on other bits. A sensible society would have no concept of refugeehood or any of the other states of oppression so movingly described here.

Paul Bennett

Marx, People and Society (1979)

From the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

These days it is fashionable to write long, confusing, dull books about Marx. The qualifications for the job are a commitment to Leninism, a selective bibliography and a capacity for dialectical distortions. The search to discover what went on in Karl Marx's mind has beaten the question of what a Scotsman wears under his kilt as the number one talking point in trendy pubs. To play the game you don't have to be a socialist - but it helps if you learn by heart the required Leninist cliches. Thanks to these modern Marxist scholars we have not just one Marx but many: Hegelian Marx, Young Marx, Mature Marx, not to mention Dead Marx who passed his words of wisdom beyond the grave to Young Lenin. One of the favourite topics of those who treat Marxism as a spectator sport is what they call 'Marx's ontology' (his conception of the nature of Man).

Marx's view of 'human nature' is essentially different from all others because it is historical (seeing people as socially developing beings) and dialectical (seeing humanity and Nature as two parts of the same whole). Marx speaks of 'reality' as being both 'naturally human' and 'humanly natural'. The idealist philosophers had always constructed their own model of the human race and placed it in Nature. It was not coincidental that these models corresponded to the ideals of the ruling class of the day. Thus, capitalist philosophers depict humanity as selfish, lazy aggressive and incapable of co-operation. Unlike the Utopian Socialists, Marx did not construct an ideal being to fit into a preconceived pattern of socialist society. His conception involved two questions, firstly, what are the general characteristics of a natural being, and secondly, what are the specific characteristics of a human being? He divided these human attributes into dialectically interdependent powers and needs.

Marx associates three powers and needs with human life; work, eating and sex. He did not say that people must work or eat or have sex in one way as opposed to another in order to be 'natural', but simply that these activities are in the nature of their being. The attributes of 'Species-Man' are more extensive, for it is these that separate it from the unthinking animals. Marx's concept of human nature, then, is concerned with natual and specific attributes of homo sapiens, not the particular moral predilections of the philosopher.

But he doesn't leave it that. Marx's view was that in private property society, an especially under capitalism, people are alienated from their real selves (or, to borrow a Feuerbachian term, alienated from their human essence). By alienation is meant - not surprisingly - the absence of unalienation, people living in accordance with their species and their nature: Socialist society. This is where the Redbrick intellectuals lose Marx's point entirely. He was not concerned with alienation as some kind of existential void to which 'modern man' is doomed. The existentialist, Hyppolite, has it wrong when he writes that alienation is a 'tension inseparable de l'existence' and is inherent in 'la conscience de soi humaine'. Marx consistently relates alienation in property societies to socialist unalienation:

[Communism is] "the complete return of Man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being - a return become conscious, and accomplished with the entire wealth of previous development."

This will mean:

"the positive transcendence of all alienation - that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, State, etc, to his human, i.e. social, mode of existence." (1844 Manuscripts).

In his only complete outline of his theory of alienation, Marx indicated four relations which cover the whole of human social existence. Firstly, people are said to be alienated from their activity. Marx especially refers to productive activity, for that is the most important form of human creativity:

" . . . labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being: that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not a home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it." (1844 Manuscripts).

Secondly, Marx explains how we are alienated from the product of our labour:

" . . . the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in the double respect; first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour - to be his labour's means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker."1844 Manuscripts).

The third relation of alienation, according to Marx, is that people are alienated from each other because of class divisions and inevitable social conflict:

"Just as [Man] estranges himself from his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own . . . a man alien to labour and standing outside it . . . the capitalist or whatever one choosed to call the master of labour." (1844 Manuscripts).

Finally, men and women are alienated from their species-being:

"In tearing away from the object of his production . . . estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his organic body, nature, is taken from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes Man's species life a means to his physical existence. "(1844 Manuscripts).

There have been those who have questioned whether these early writings of Marx (only published in English in the early 1930's) should be treated as being consistent with his later developed theories, Clearly, any of Marx's writings, taken in isolation and detached from socialist conclusions, can be futile and even misleading. Used by socialists in the battle to free the working class from the world of capitalism, the concept of alienated people - with its dialectical negative, unalienated humanity - is a vital aspect of a coherent Marxist theory. For trendy academics the exercise is about as vital as a fortnight's holiday in Highgate Cemetery.

Steve Coleman

Will Labour Lose? (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present Labour government appears to have run out of steam, but trading one group of career politicians for another is not the answer.

An astute observer once said "governments are not elected . . . they are dismissed". According to this view, after a party has had a period in power the electorate consciously aims to get rid of it by voting for a rival party in a decision regarded as the "lesser of two evils". And it is undoubtedly true that every government - regardless of political banner - has always ended by alienating the electorate that once supported it. Many voters believe politicians are dishonest or have become cynical about elections, reasoning that "60-seconds of democracy" is small recompense for five years of neglect and policies that rarely express their preferences. If elections are so meaningless, some reflect, then there can be little point in voting - a sentiment borne out by low electoral turnout.

Despite being unable to find lasting solutions to workers' problems, political parties must always try to combat voter disillusionment. Behaving like chameleons, they must search for ways to improve their image, reinvigorate old policies and give the appearance that this time things will be different, this time the electorate will be given exactly what it wants. Before the 1997 general election the Labour Party successfully engineered its own metamorphosis, re-branding policies and redefining its agenda. The commitment to nationalisation enshrined in the 1918 Party constitution was abolished and Trade Union influence over policy - always more mythical than real - was publicly abandoned. Its image, thus transformed, seemed revitalised and business, media and the electorate acclaimed the party that now called itself New Labour.

But nine years after the Labour Party was enthusiastically swept into government, the same electorate cannot wait to dismiss them. Reviewing the May local elections results the Electoral Reform Society concluded the Labour government faces "wipe-out" in the next general election and "predicts that Labour stand to lose 149 of its present 355 MPs bringing its commons strength down to 206 - even worse than 1983". Ministers have responded with conciliatory messages that Labour will listen more closely in future and, in the words of John Prescott, "renew itself after nine years in government".(Observer, 28 May)

In the third week of June this year, Labour's tattered image took another knock when an Ipsos Mori poll revealed that one in four Labour supporters wants their party to lose the next election. The poll deduced that "the leadership is becoming increasingly divorced from its own grass roots, 23 per cent agree Labour should be kicked out of power". Supporters wanted the party to experience "a period out of office to rethink what they stand for and what their vision is for the future". A majority of those polled expects the next general election to end with either a hung parliament or a Tory majority, believing a re-launched Conservative Party to be more in touch with what ordinary people think. In the wake of hospital cutbacks, Home Office scandals and the 'peerages for cash' fiasco, Hazel Blears conceded, "the voters are angry that we have taken our eye off the ball". (Observer, 18 June).

At the end of June, Labour Party fortunes went from bad to worse. In the double election in Blaenau Gwent - where Parliamentary and Welsh Assembly by-elections were held simultaneously - an embittered electorate took revenge by voting down both Labour Party candidates. The elections were prompted by the death of Peter Law, who had defected from Labour and succeeded in overturning a 19,000 Labour majority in 2005. Until it was lost, Blaenau Gwent, whose past MPs include Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot, was regarded as Labour's safest seat. Defeat in the Assembly election denied Labour of the majority it hoped to regain in the Welsh Assembly.

The wave of disillusionment is not just confined to Labour voters, however, with disaffection spreading inside the Labour Party itself. Labour Party membership has declined dramatically since 1997 and is now below the 200,000 mark - the lowest level since Ramsay MacDonald split the party in the 1930s. The membership has grown weary of being implicated in what the media call a "conspiracy of lies," and resentful of arrogant leadership. A YouGov poll presented to the Compass conference on 17 June found that only 25 percent of Labour Party members believe they influence Party policy, while three-quarters felt policy had been hijacked by rich donors whose influence has grown as membership has shrunk. The Labour Party, desperately short of funds and like many of the electorate struggling with debt - estimated at 27 million pounds -, must either depend on millionaires or turn to state funding, a move not popular with the public.

Aware of growing hostility, many senior members are distancing themselves from Prime Minister Blair by announcing that the Labour Party under Brown's leadership will revitalise itself and re-brand unpalatable policies. "The trouble with the current approach is that we will go out of power for 15 years," grumbled Michael Willis, speaking to the Compass conference. Like many, he blames Iraq and Blair's presidential style for the electorate's resentment. (Guardian, 19 June). Every effort is being made to show 'clear water' between Labour under Blair and what Labour might be like under Brown. "Too many traditional Labour supporters felt the government had taken their goodwill for granted and said government was getting more difficult," said Ed Balls, Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Brown's political allies promise greater Party equality, reducing dominance of Whitehall and "restoring progressive politics." (Guardian, 19 June)

But if forecasters can be believed it now seems likely, irrespective of who actually leads the Party, that Labour will lose the next general election. Yet does it really matter which party forms the next government?

Capitalism is a splintered society; divided not just by sectional ownership of the means of production but by the economic rivalry of independent states striving to exercise authority over given geographical areas. Conventional political parties endorse the framework of capitalism and compete to win control over the state and to administer the economic system within its boundaries, which necessarily means perpetuating the wages system and the persistent hardship for wage and salary earners. The policies propounded by these parties are similar because they are manifestations of the same political imperative - a continuation of capitalism - and are distinguishable only to the extent that they propose different organisation methods to administer the same economic system.

Voters vote governments out because they appear incompetent, incapable of finding solutions to the daily problems that confronts wage and salary earners. But government can never solve these problems because their permanent solution lies only in the abolition of capitalism and the wages system. Economic laws that politicians are powerless to change and leave little room for manoeuvre determine what politicians do and how they must react. It is not the deceitfulness of politicians that is the problem but rather the economic structure of society.

But it is not just political parties that refuse to think outside the framework of capitalism. Most wage and salary earners rarely question the structure of society and passively support the system that always works against them. In misguided expressions of defiance that flow from frustration and lack of understanding, voters repeatedly swap Labour governments for Conservative, or Conservative governments for Labour - as they have on seven separate occasions since the second world war - in the hope that it will somehow make a difference. They are always disappointed by the outcome. Mandating a political party to administer capitalism means that workers surrender political power to their class enemy and condone the continuation of their own exploitation, their insecurity and their poverty - a lesson that workers seem unable to grasp as the same mistake is slavishly repeated over and over again.

But while trading one group of careerist politicians for another can never be the answer, changing society's economic structure is the only answer.

Capitalism exists only because workers allow it to exist. Changing the structure of society, however, is not as simple as changing political allegiance to a party. Capitalism is based firmly on a principle of leadership, where a minority in secret makes decisions and the excluded majority is told what they should do and how they should think. Changing the world's economic structure by converting the means of production from class ownership to common ownership requires that workers individually understand what they want and actively combine to change their condition. Socialism cannot be delivered by leaders and is achievable only by the concerted action of a politically conscious mass movement without direction or leaders, for only then will the majority become the decision-makers.

The task may be daunting but must begin somewhere. Workers would do well to start by considering whether capitalism - under any political party - is really the future they want.

Steve Trott