The world could produce more food

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog:

Socialists have always contended that the world could produce enough to feed every human being on the planet. This has been confirmed time and again by bodies such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation as well as by agronomists and other specialists in the field. So, why is the world price of wheat, rice and other agricultural products rising? Surely this shows that enough food can’t be produced? No, it doesn’t. What it shows is that food is not produced today to meet people’s needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

World food prices are rising, and this does reflect the fact that paying demand is currently exceeding supplies. But this does not mean that enough food cannot be produced. It means simply that enough food has not been produced.

Various explanations have been offered for this imbalance between demand and supply. Extra demand resulting from the migration of millions of people from the countryside to the towns in places like China and India. Diversion of land to growing biofuels instead of food. Such explanations concentrate on why demand has increased. An article in the (London) Times (26 June) by Ross Clark offers an explanation why not enough food has been produced.

Clark is a supporter of the market (who thinks that any opponent of the “free” market is a “Marxist”) and so expects that sooner or later food supplies will increase to satisfy the paying demand. No doubt it will (but this will still leave those who can’t pay either to starve or to have to rely on minimal hand-outs from charities and from the UN and other agencies). He argues that food production has fallen because in previous decades it had been overproduced. It is of course obscene to talk of “too much” food being produced when there are millions in the world who are starving, but he means “too much” in relation to paying demand. Even so, his explanation is still interesting in showing the irrational way in which the capitalist system works.

According to him:

“The reason for the fall in cereal production over 15 years has not been soil degradation or climate change: while crops yields are not increasing as fast as they were doing in the 1960s, they have still risen by 1-2 per cent per annum over the past 15 years. Rather, the decrease in production has been a straightforward response to overproduction. Remember the grain mountains of the 1980s? They resulted in a collapse in prices that in turn persuaded grain producers to contract their operation. Now that prices are rising again the opposite has happened: the FAO estimates that this year's wheat harvest will rise by 13 per cent as a result of extra planting, putting downward pressure on prices next year.”

He points out that today:

“the background to rising food prices is the shrinkage of global agriculture over the past decade and a half. Globally, less food is being produced on even less land than was the case in the early 1990s. Take the US, which according to the FAO was producing 1,210kg of cereals per person per year between 1990 and 1992 and 1,104 kg between 2001 and 2003. Or Canada, at one time the “world's bread basket”, where cereal production fell from 1,905 kg per person per year in 1990-92 to 1,384 kg in 2001-03.”

Given the current strong paying demand for food, the 1990s levels may well be reached again but, as we just said, this will satisfy only paying demand. What about those who can’t pay?

Though it is far from his intention, Clark provides information which shows that enough food could be produced to satisfy their food needs too. Of course it won’t be, and never will be, under the capitalist market system which he supports. But it could be in a socialist world where production would no longer be limited to what can be sold.

Clark writes:

“the total landmass cultivated for arable crops in 2006, according Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), was 1.402 billion hectares - or 14 million sq km. In other words, all the world's cereals and vegetables are grown on an area equivalent to the USA and half of Canada. A further 34 million sq km - equivalent to the rest of North America, South America and two thirds of Australia - is given over to grazing, much of it extensive, unimproved grassland. The rest of the world - equivalent to the whole of Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia plus a third of Australia - is not used for food production in any way. Some of this land, of course, is desert, mountain or rainforest, which either cannot be used for agriculture at all or would require irrigation, engineering or clearance. But a vast amount of it could quite easily be converted into agriculture, but has until now not been needed.”

What does he mean “has not been needed”? Of course it’s been needed! What Clark means again is that it has not been needed to meet paying demand. We say that it is needed to end world hunger but will only be able to be used for this when once the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all humanity. That’s the only basis on which these currently unused resources can be used to meet the food needs of everyone, not just of those who can afford to pay.

Adam Buick

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (53)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 53rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1272 friends!

Recent blogs:

The Bin Man (Garbage Collector)

Joe Hill : Songwriter to the Working Class

Did Communism Collapse?

Top quote for this week:

[From the Socialist Party lecture, 'What Marx Should Have Said to Kropotkin'.]

"Three things:

1. "Don't call me a State Socialist! I was putting forward a case for abolishing the State while you were still a toddler".

2. "With regard to paying people in labour-time vouchers in the early days of Socialist society, you were right and I was wrong. This was a silly, unworkable idea".

3. "Like me, you're a Socialist. We both want a stateless, moneyless, wageless society. Why then do you feel you have more in common with non-socialist opponents of the State than with me? After all, your disagreement with them is over ends, while you're disagreement with me is only over means".

Adam Buick

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Capitalism: no deal (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism most people must be losers.

Daytime telly is a form of wallpaper: meaningless moving pictures to fill the time between adverts selling insurance or offering to unlock the equity in your home. The prime example of this form is the endless Deal or no Deal, fronted by the great survivor of light entertainment, Noel Edmonds. Ridiculous though the show is, it serves as an unwitting allegory of capitalism.

The premise is that 22 boxes containing a card each detailing a monetary sum between 1p and £250,000 are distributed among the players. One player is selected, and they will win the money represented in their box. The complication is that before they do that, they have to open everyone else’s box, and at various stages a character called “the fat banker” will ring a phone and offer to buy the player’s box.

The game is obviously entirely random – once the boxes are distributed, there is nothing more the player can do – at most, if they play it right, they can negotiate a good deal with the bank; but even that is down to the luck of which boxes are eliminated (the more lower score boxes are eliminated, the higher the banker’s offers). To emphasise this mechanistic process, if a player accepts the offer from the bank, they are asked to keep on playing as they would have done, to see what they could have been offered, and see whether they could have won more. Players are shown what money could have been theirs, and encouraged to believe that they have lost that money they never had.

If this sounds dull (and it is) the players are encouraged to pad the show out by devising complicated patterns of selecting boxes to eliminate. Even more, they are encouraged to give each other pep talks and egg each other on to think positively. Obliquely, this is associated with Edmonds’ own advocacy of “cosmic ordering”, by which you ask the universe for something and it gets delivered. All of which serves to pad out what is essentially a fairground game of chance into an hour of television.

So, just like capitalism, the wealth – in the boxes – is distributed randomly and unfairly, with only one player having more wealth than the rest put together in their box. Like a market, players have to try and sell their box without knowing what other boxes are out there, but they are encouraged to try and reach for the maximum prize. The players are tantalised and mesmerised by the prospect of £250,000, and very often go on to lose because the contents of their box, as eventually opened, are less than they were previously offered.

Like capitalism, the game disguises its true inhuman mechanics through a mixture of hope and delusion. The slim chance that one person can win is enough to entice the players to keep going, and to keep believing in their cranky positive thinking systems.

The fact is, in capitalism, the fact of birth sets the opportunities available, and is as random as the distribution of boxes. Of course, a few people do manage to climb out of their situation – but it helps if a decent sum was dealt in the first place, and the way they play the game depends as much on luck as it does on their own skill; but the idea that they are self made, and got where they are today entirely through merit is entirely believed by the people who too wish to make the big win like they have. Just as many lose the game, entirely through no fault of their own, but are left with the lingering memory of what the banker said they were worth, and what they have lost.

It is just such thinking that the Tory Party rely upon. Until recently, they have been trailing massively in the polls. The good betting was that at the next election, the most they could hope for was a hung parliament (possibly with themselves as the biggest party). After all, the electoral system is currently against them, they need more votes absolutely to win enough seats to have an overall majority than the Labour party needs.

After years of assiduously refusing to give the Tories any leverage on tax, Labour slipped up, and abolished the 10p basic rate of income tax they had introduced – effectively raising the rate of tax on the lowest earners. That some of that was off-set by rises in the minimum wage, and (less obviously) by the increase in statutory holiday entitlement from 20 to 24 days. Such mathematical factors, though, weigh very little against the conscious fact that people will see the deductions on their payslip increasing in size, and they can be told that it is the government snatching their money away.

This is grist to the Tory mill – they were able to return to their old refrain of being for cutting taxes, and telling people how the highway robbers of Labour were taking their hard earned money and squandering it. Suddenly, they were able to spring into a massive lead in the polls, and romp to a massive victory in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. A victory so massive, that were the swing to hold to the next general election, the Tories would be guaranteed a massive overall win. Suddenly, the hug a hoody and cod greenery were cast off, as the Tories found that their old dog whistle was working once more, and the promise of cuts and cuts and cuts of taxes became the effective way to make friends and influence voters.

Simultaneously, it shattered Labour’s capacity to claim to be on the side of the poor – appearing to throw the burden of a tax cut on the poorest in the land. After all, it was to fund a cut in the 22 percent band that the 10 percent was abolished – Labour couldn’t even point to a reform that the tax increase paid for. So, of course, the leftist rivals of Labour (and the party’s own left wing) managed to jump on the bandwagon and launch an attack on the tax cut, which benefited the Tories by playing into their game. Labour have paid the price for claiming to be able to run the game capitalism better than their Tory rivals.

The secret of the Tories success is that they can simultaneously feed off hope and despair. The hope that one day, with a bit of hard work, you too can make it if you’re left to your own devices. The despair that you’re being robbed by the government through taxes and that your money is being given to those who are living the life of Riley while you slog away. This is the political equivalent of cosmic ordering, of positive thinking. You have a chance – it doesn’t matter how the boxes have been dealt, if you play the game right, you will make it in the end. The same thoughts animate the hopes of all those who pay the prole tax to phone into TV game shows, or buy national lottery tickets, for their big break out of their rut.

Of course, what people don’t see is that they’ve been robbed before the tax man even arrives. Those who work for a wage or a salary are being taken for the value of their unpaid labour that their employer extracts from them through the sleight of hand that is the wages system. Just as the sleight of hand in Deal or no Deal is that the production company, Endemol, make many times more than they give away in prize money, and indeed, wouldn’t even run the game unless they did so. Recognising that, though, would require shattering the illusion of the game.

Seeing that the distribution of wealth means that there must be losers, that those who win got there by luck, that those who lose got there by luck, destroys the game itself. Destroy the cosmic ordering and you remove the incentive to keep playing the game. That the game of capitalism is itself pernicious and destructive demands that it be removed outright, not played as best you can. If a game is inherently unfair, no tweaking of the rules, no aspirations, no change of player is going to alter that.

It is socialists’ job to arm our fellow workers with such knowledge and be a voice to cancel out the obscurantists calls for “thinking wealth” or other such mind candy that is the modern opiate of the masses. Latching on to tax campaigns, whether to relieve the poor or tax the rich, means keeping truck with the rules of capital – the game in which the winners are fixed before hand. So, when the fat banker asks us, “Capitalism: deal or no deal?” No deal! We say.

Pik Smeet

Editorial: The return of bleak times (2008)

Editorial from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month both the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England announced, as they tucked into a slap-up meal at the Mansion House in the City of London, that austerity was returning.

First off was Mervyn King. He warned that real take-home pay would not keep up with rising prices. "It will not be an easy time,“ he said, “and I know that some families will find it particularly difficult.” Alistair Darling made it quite clear that the government was going to help ensure this, declaring that "continued restraint on pay is required from both the public and private sector”.

It’s the same old story. Profits are being squeezed by rises in the price of oil and raw materials and the government is trying to protect them by squeezing wages. This, at a time when wages are themselves being squeezed by rising food prices and gas and electricity bills.

This was not what Gordon Brown promised when he was Chancellor. “My Budget choice is to lock in stability and never put it at risk”. he said when introducing the 2005 budget, “at all times putting Britain’s hard working families first.”

In that same speech he proudly proclaimed that his policies had conquered the stop-go, boom-slump cycle. “Britain”, he said, “is today experiencing the longest period of sustained economic growth since records began in the year seventeen hundred and one.” He wasn’t worried then about rising oil prices. The British economy could take it:

“In any other period an oil price rise of over 100 per cent and rises in industrial materials and metals of around 50 per cent would have led to a surge of British inflation. But inflation - which went as high as 20 per cent in the 1980s and 10 per cent in the early 90s - has, every year in the last eight years, been 3 per cent or less - the least volatile and most stable of all the major industrialised economies.”

Even in his last budget speech as Chancellor in 2007 he was still under the illusion that he had banished the business cycle, proclaiming “that after 10 years of sustained growth, Britain's growth will continue into its 59th quarter – the forecast end of the cycle – and then into its 60th and 61st quarter and beyond”.

He got out just in time. He had been lucky: the up phase of the business cycle in the British economy had happened to coincide with his period as Chancellor.

As socialists who know how capitalism works – how it can’t be controlled by governments and how it can never been made to work in the interest of wage and salary workers – we knew that sooner or later Gordon Brown would have to eat his words. And now he has to.

Now the crunch has come it is not “Britain’s hard working families” that are being put first, but profits. As it has to be, and always will be, under capitalism.

'My Militant Tendency'

From the Inveresk Street Ingrate blog.

This blog doesn't usually do poetry - see Cactus Mouth Informer for a poetry overdose - but I got a message via MySpace from an Irish poet, Kevin Higgins, advertising his latest collection, 'Time Gentlemen, Please', and I like what I've read of his poetry so far.

I'm guessing that Kevin contacted the unofficial Socialist Standard MySpace page because he spotted the 'S' word.

As he writes:

"Several of the poems deal with my own past experience as a member of Militant from 1982-94 and throw some critical and satirical light of the Left as it was and has become – the title of one of the poems being My Militant Tendency - while others attempt to deal with the political situation now."

If this interview from the Galway Advertiser is anything to go by, it appears that he has travelled quite a distance from his political past:

“From the age of 15 to 27 I was an active Trotskyist,” he says. “I was the leader of the anti-poll tax campaign in the London Borough of Enfield when I lived there. From the age of 27 until, say, 38, a couple of years ago I thought it was a pity socialism was clearly now not going to happen. I was in a kind of mourning, I suppose. But now I think that, for all its faults, the society we have is far preferable to anything the ‘comrades’ would bring, were they, Lord protect us, ever to stumble into power.”

I'm not using this an opportunity to have a dig at the Millies. It's his take on his former comrades, and obviously plays some (small) part in the poetry he now writes and, to be honest, it's not the first time that I've read (or heard) a former Millie voice their concerns in such terms. I don't think it's a peculiarity of that version of the Fourth International. I'd venture that it's part and parcel of the whole Leninist tradition and, anyway, any politics which mistakenly roots itself in substitutionism should always carry a health warning.

And I'm also self-aware enough to see I wee bit of my youthful self in this poem:

My Militant Tendency

It's nineteen eighty two and I know everything.
Hippies are people who always end up asking
Charles Manson to sing them another song.
I'd rather be off putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,
have to mow the lawn first. Last year,
Liverpool meant football; now
it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution.
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar. In all of this
there is usually a leather jacket involved. I tell
cousin Walter and his lovely new wife, Elizabeth,
to put their aspirations in their underpants
and smoke them; watch
my dad's life become a play:
Sit Down In Anger.

More of Kevin's poetry can be viewed here. Details on the newly published collection and a background bio on its author can be viewed here.

Peace sells but who's buying? (2008)

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

They are Islamic Fundamentalists, not big on democracy, have WMDs and are getting more. Another war on the cards then? No - it's called buisness and the people in question are Britain's staunch allies: the House of Saud.

"A controversial deal with Saudi Arabia catapulted Britain to the top of the world arms export league last year, as UK firms won a record £10bn in orders from overseas, official figures show.

The figure amounts to a third of all worldwide export orders for military equipment, ministers and arms companies reported. An essentially political, government-to-government contract - the sale of 72 Eurofighter/Typhoon aircraft, for £4.4bn, to the Saudis - accounted for Britain's number one position, the figures make clear.

The Ministry of Defence says the terms of the contract - called Salam, Arabic for peace - and the total expenditure involved are confidential. But officials make it clear that when upkeep, spares and training were included, the deal could amount to £20bn spread over many years. The figures last year were also boosted by orders placed by Oman and Trinidad and Tobago for patrol boats.

The companies involved - chiefly BAE Systems and the VT Group - were praised by the trade minister, Digby Jones.

"As demonstrated by this outstanding export performance, the UK has a first-class defence industry, with some of the world's most technologically sophisticated companies," he said.

From here

A trade minister praising sophisticated killing machines and a contract called "Peace"...? Orwell, anyone?

Graham C Taylor

Material World: Evo Morales: A Call for Socialism? (2008)

The Material World Column from the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 21 April, 2008, President Evo Morales of Bolivia delivered the opening address to the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. His speech included the following passage:

“If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials, to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.”

Despite the striking anti-capitalist content of most of this passage, the last sentence reveals that Morales does not have a clear conception of the socialist alternative. He still thinks in terms of the money system.

The accurate way of posing the problem focuses not on the waste of money but on the waste of real resources of all kinds – the waste of nature and its bounty, of human life and labour, of knowledge and its potential. True, money represents or symbolizes some – far from all -- of these real resources, but in a very inadequate and distorted manner. To substitute the symbol for the reality is a mystification.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that Morales is a good deal closer to a true understanding of socialism than most of the so-called “left” in Latin America or elsewhere. The very fact that he is addressing a world forum about the future of the species and the planet suggests that he is seeking an alternative at the global rather than national level. Although nationalization forms part of his domestic policy (the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was nationalized in 2006), he does not equate nationalization with socialism.

The model of the ayllu
In a number of interviews Morales has been asked what he and his movement – the Movement for Socialism (MAS) – understand by socialism. Thus, Heinz Dieterich of Monthly Review (July 2006) asks him what country the socioeconomic model of the MAS most closely resembles. Brazil? Cuba? Venezuela? Morales does not like the way the question is put. (“[Socialism] is something much deeper. … It is to live in community and equality.”) He talks instead about the traditional peasant commune or ayllu of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, based on communal landholding and “respect for Mother Earth.” He himself grew up in an ayllu of the Aymara people in Oruro Province; in some parts of Bolivia such communities still exist.

In another interview, to journalists from Spiegel, Morales says: “There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable.” As the World Socialist Review, published by our companion party in the United States, comments: “This is more than just a variation on the leftist copout that socialism is a goal for the distant future; it is, on some level, an acceptance of it as a real alternative to capitalism” (See here.)

Rejecting vanguardism
Another indication that Morales is closer than most of the “left” to a genuine understanding of socialism is his opposition to the Bolshevik idea of the “vanguard party.” The MAS, he tells Dieterich, “was not created by political ideologues or by a group of intellectuals, but by peasant congresses to solve the problems of the people.” It has always rejected the pretensions to “leadership” of Leninist groups of different varieties -- followers of Stalin, Trotsky, or Mariategui (a Peruvian Bolshevik who has had great influence on the left in Latin America).

Of course, Morales is not only a thinker with more or less clear ideas about capitalism and socialism. He is also head of the government of an underdeveloped country that has to operate within the parameters of a capitalist world. As such he is no position to realize his more far reaching aspirations. At most, he has been able – like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela – to divert some of the proceeds from the sale of oil and gas to making some improvement to the life of the impoverished indigenous communities.

The fact remains that an internationally known figure has stood up at the United Nations and called upon the world community to bring the capitalist system to an end. Morales’ concept of socialism may be less clear than we would like, but it does at least bear some relation to the real thing. Viewed from the time when the UN and its specialized agencies are converted into the planning and coordinating centre of world socialism, this will, perhaps, be regarded as a milestone in its history.

Stephen Shenfield

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (52)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 52nd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1265 friends!

Recent blogs:

Anglo-Marxism

Questions Answered - and Asked

The museum piece

Top quote for our 1st anniversary:

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Power and Privilege

From the Marx and Coca Cola blog

And this man wants to be president. From MSNBC :

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama released their Senate financial disclosure statements on Friday, revealing that Mr. McCain and his wife had at least $225,000 in credit card debt...The bulk of the McCains’ obligations stemmed from a pair of American Express credit cards that are held in Cindy McCain’s name. According to the disclosure reports, which present information on debts in a range rather than providing a precise figure, Mrs. McCain owed $100,000 to $250,000 on each card.

Unlike the millions of Americans who can't afford to pay their bills, because wages haven't risen in years, and are using their credit cards just to get by, Cindy McCain's:

filing, however, indicated that she had substantial holdings in property and stocks — including shares in Anheuser-Busch, which this week became the target of a takeover bid that is expected to send its value climbing. Her land holdings included parcels in Arizona and California, one of which was sold last year for a profit of more than $1 million.

In other filings, the McCains have reported total household assets of $24.6 million to $39.5 million. In recently releasing a summary version of her 2006 tax return, Mrs. McCain reported income that year of more than $6 million, some $300,000 of which was derived from her salary as the chairwoman of Hensley, which was founded by her father.

But here's the punchline courtesy of Huffington Post:

In fact, according to a prior disclosure form filed in May that was provided to The Huffington Post, a significant amount of the McCains' credit card debt is being held by American Express at an interest rate of zero percent.

I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact he's a US senator. Mavericks don't need to pay their bills.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (51)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 51st of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1262 friends!

Recent blogs:

Wage-labour versus capital

The London bombings: recruiting killers

Friday Pep Talk!

This week's top quote:

"And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security, that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor." [John Ruskin, Unto This last, Essay III, 1860.]

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

The happy slave syndrome (2008)

From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is a transcript of a talk from a recent SPGB Day School.

For some of us our wage slavery can buy us a comfortable, prosperous lifestyle and personally rewarding work; for others it means being discarded; for most of us perhaps it’s something in between. But in any event, the sole purpose of the capitalist system is to make a profit out of us and to accumulate capital, and no amount of TV property programmes, cars, foreign holidays, latte coffee, or shopping makes any difference to that.

A certain proportion of us are able to believe that ‘we’re all middle class now’, because some of us at least can afford to accumulate a certain amount of stuff. But this is an illusion; there is no middle class. We’re all working class in the economic sense that we have to sell our labour in order to live, with the exception, of course, of the small number of capitalists who can live entirely on the labour of others. The rest of us are all, economically speaking, working class by virtue of the fact that we have to let ourselves be used, to sell our labour power, to live.

And yet, how readily we embrace the illusion! From the ‘minnows’ of the Wall Street stock boom in the 20’s to Margaret Thatcher’s new homeowners and the ‘Sids’ of working class share ownership, and now, in Russia, China and India, we reach out again and again in individual aspiration, setting aside the hope of banding together and ending our exploitation. We try to win in the rat race instead of trying to abolish it, thereby ensuring that the capitalist class goes on mining our lives for profit. We are like the credulous ‘natives’ of imperial mythology, marvelling at our handful of pretty beads while the white man robs us of everything.

Our hope has been dashed in so many ways. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot have poisoned our understanding by pasting the word ‘socialism’ onto the very opposite, their barbarous tyrannies. Labour movements have been disabled by the capitalists’ increased ability to move capital and workers round the world. Reformist parties have caved in to the needs of capital to the point of embarrassment. We find dumb serenity staring at a screen or through a windscreen.

Nevertheless, beyond this, I think that we ourselves have been structured to accept this system. One way of looking at the way capitalism has formed us and we form it in turn, is through a consideration of our psychological defences, a psychological term for the means we use to manage our lives in the face of threats to our stability.

We all try to find ways of defending ourselves psychologically. It’s natural and necessary. We couldn’t get through the day if we were constantly overwhelmed by the world, if we were totally impressionable. However, a defence can distort our awareness of reality, in this case, of how we are made use of, and so we shape ourselves to the economic circumstances, in order to be able to tolerate them.

The first means of defence I want to look at is ‘projection’. To project can be to imagine that some outside figure or power possesses something that is part of ourselves. For example, a woman who had an unfriendly piano teacher as a child, might project her love of music into her daughter, and want her to do well. Both she is impoverished by her projections,missing out on an opportunity to be creative herself.

In a similar way, I think that we project our capacities into money, we imagine that money holds great powers, although in reality those powers belong to us.

We have the ability, all of us, working together as citizens of the world, to run the world together democratically, as equals, with no need for money or other forms of domination. But we act as if we don’t. We project our own functions and capacities into money, we attribute those qualities to money and deny them in ourselves. Money is endowed with the same sort of status as a god, it seems to be the source of everything; but of course we are, as the people of the world, self-evidently, the source of everything. Nothing comes from money; money is an agreed convention; it’s a fiction that holds and wields all the power we can’t bear to own. We are like our fictitious piano woman – she could play the piano but she sees all of that in her daughter. The analogy is that we could run the world, but we let money run it instead.

We also project into money our adult capacities and onto money the status of a parent on whom we depend. In relation to money it is as if adults are babies or small children, unable to judge whether we need something or not. It is money, the stern parent, that tells us we can’t have things. This parent can be so stern that for many of us money refuses us enough to eat, refuses us medical care. It can deny us the barest dignity in old age, or even life itself. When we can’t have something we need, we say ‘Where’s the money going to come from?’ And this can apply equally to goods which are, in reality, either plentiful or scarce.

It works the other way too. We assume that our wants are limitless and that, if money weren’t an obstacle, we’d just accumulate things endlessly and not know when to stop. Money then can be an overindulgent parent, that lets us be completely spoilt, that offers us no limits. Money can give us victory over the social and human limitations that come from considering others. If you’ve got enough money you don’t have to give any thought at all to other people, and in this society that’s just about the highest form of freedom we can imagine. When we are living in a wasteful and reckless way, we say ‘We are prosperous now and this is what we want! Nobody can tell us what to do!’

So the centre of decision making is located outside ourselves. If we can’t afford it we can’t have it, and if we can afford it we have to have it.

Money starves us or it fattens us up, but either way, it is money that is in control, enabling our labour to be siphoned off and gathered together as profit.

This oppresses us, but it also frees us of responsibility. If we project our power elsewhere then we are excused the work of taking responsibility for it. Living in a socialist society, having assumed our own power, will indeed be hard work and a lot of it will unfortunately be the boring slog of going to meetings and trying to sort out our relationships with each other socially, and make decisions. In a sense, we don’t want to grow up – far better to leave it to the parents to tell us what to do, while we just gripe from the sidelines.

The second defence mechanism I’d like to discuss is that of ‘identification’. To ‘identify’ means we fuse or confuse our identity with that of another. For example, I might watch a Clint Eastwood film and feel, for a while at least, as if I too am hewn from granite. But it also means the taking in of another person, so that I might recognise enduring traits in me that are like my own father or mother, for example.

In this case of our adjustment to capitalism, we identify with the powerful. We prefer to imagine that we are all pocket capitalists. Instead of recognising that the owners of capital might be using us, we imagine ourselves to be in control, and the owners of capital to be our servants. We think we are sophisticated, knowing consumers who know a bargain when we see one, and companies exist to meet our every caprice and whim, rather than the reverse.

Campaign groups try to publicise the exploitation of suppliers that is the cost of low prices to ‘the consumer’. I wonder whether, identified with the capitalist class, we in some way enjoy supermarkets acting as our agents in pushing other working class people to the limit so we can feel we’re getting a bargain. Isn’t there a seductive joy in being able to feel like the oppressor, like a proxy slave owner with all these poor little people slaving away so we can pick our week’s shopping off the shelves? And what about the fast food customer bullying and patronising the person serving the burgers? Isn’t there an element of acting like the lord of the manor in that behaviour? Isn’t that part of the deal, that you get to boss somebody about?

However, the supermarkets’ own marketing patter describes our slavery accurately enough, though they put it in advertising code . They describe us as ‘discerning consumers with an eye for price’; decoded, that means that we’re broke and overwhelmed with debt. They say we are ‘leading today’s high pressure, busy lives’. That means we’re overworked, sweated labour just like in Dickens’ time, but repackaged as living some kind of exciting fast-lane lifestyle. We’re not even consumers, not really. The capitalist is the ultimate consumer. The cost of our labour is the total value of keeping us going, keeping us fed, housed, entertained and all the rest of it, so low prices in the shops means that we are cheaper too. The rich are sophisticated consumers of our labour and they certainly know a bargain when they see one.

My argument, in short, is that we are characterologically adapted to the capitalist system; that we feel no need to get rid of it because of the firmness of our defences against knowing just how merciless it really is. How could it be otherwise, when we have created it and lived in it for so long? This view has the virtue of explaining why we stubbornly hold onto this exhausting, murderous society of rich and poor, user and used; but I can see how it might appear to be a pessimistic outlook.

However, I don’t think it is. It seems to me that that hope lies in a paradox here; paradoxically it is in admitting our slavery that our freedom lies.

Our difficulty is in realising that, no matter how seductive the consumer society is, we are still wage slaves, and our lives are lived, as Fromm says, ‘for purposes outside ourselves’. And it seems to me that if enough of us were to face up to that seemingly unbearable fact, and start to take back our capacities and set about using them, then that could be the beginning of the end for capitalism. It could also be the beginning of a completely new system, where our common purpose is the fullest development of every single person in the world.

Peter Rigg

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (50)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 50th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1261 friends!

Recent blogs:

Democracy – and ‘democracy’

The happy slave syndrome

Worldcon

This week's top quote:

"Most workers believe that if only prices came down or were at least stabilised their chief troubles would be over. They should remember that while it is true that at present hundreds of thousands of workers cannot afford to buy a house on mortgage, exactly the same was true between the wars when prices of houses and prices in general and wages) were only a fraction of what they are now. For the workers capitalism means hardship whether prices are high or low or falling or rising." Edgar Hardcastle, The ABC of Inflation (1972).

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Relearning history (2008)

From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Don’t believe what you were taught in school or hear from the media about benevolent Britain. We look at some books that give the other side of the story.

For those caught in their long-held conviction of the benevolence of British history, of the goodwill and generosity extended by successive governments to subjects of colonial conquest around the world; for those whose history books told stories of great white men’s great adventures into darkest Africa, of fantastic voyages to unknown shores lasting years and necessitating the loss of many lives, of returning heroes laden with treasure and tales of faraway cornucopias; for those who retain romantic visions of countries conquered and occupied for reasons of honest trade and incidentally to improve the lot of indigenous populations, to bring them civilisation and democracy; for those who considered the invasion of Iraq an aberration, an atypical intervention, something outside the realms of normal government procedure, blatant lies deliberately told to the populace as a cover-up for an illegal act; for those who cling to the fallacy of their leaders being beyond reproach because it’s not “British” to collude behind the scenes or to manipulate events. They always play the game by the rules and British justice is known to be above reproach. After all, didn’t we invent cricket?

For all those – it’s time to re-learn history, this time the real history, to have the scales removed from the eyes, to be confronted with the hard evidence, undeniable facts revealed from previously secret documents painstakingly investigated and compiled by those who seek the truth for humanity’s sake. This time to have the courage to question one’s enduring beliefs in the light of authentic revelations. This time to see through the obfuscation and downright lies that have been the staple diet fed to us by our elected representatives, generation after generation, with the purpose of pursuing their own secret agenda, extending personal interests and cementing alliances with powerful allies often with complete disregard for international law, agreements and that detail of small importance, public opinion.

The following are a sample from investigative journalists and historians known as tenacious and imperturbable individuals resolutely determined to get the truth out into the public domain.

Birth of the corporation

The history of the East India Company, a forerunner of the modern shareholder/corporate set-up is a story of ‘executive malpractice, stock market excess and human oppression.’ Nick Robins says in The Corporation that Changed the World that he set out to address the issue of the company’s social record as a corporation, something which he believes no other history of The Company does. Compared with today’s “corporate leviathans” the East India Company “outstripped Walmart in terms of market power, Enron for corruption and Union Carbide for human devastation.” From its origin in 1600 as an aggressive spice trader, using guile, bribery, mercenary armies, piracy and plunder it moved on to take control of Bengal and Bengal’s cotton fabric industry. Robert Clive (of India) decimated the weaving industry and, as an eerie precursor to current day India’s farmers’ suicides as a result of impoverishment by transnationals, weavers amputated their own thumbs rather than be forced to spin thread for less than starvation wages.

Later came Warren Hastings, responsible for pushing opium into China (illegally), causing the later “Opium Wars” and eventually forcing Chinese ports to open to trade. Despite the British government’s initial protests at the opium trade they were soon persuaded by the company’s Governor General in India that the revenue was growing too quickly to be abandoned. Nick Robins shows only too well that “a peculiar amnesia continues to hang over the role that corporations such as the East India Company had in the creation of the modern world.”

Public statements; Private record

Covert military action, support of military dictators, direct and indirect responsibility for millions of deaths around the world since the end of World War Two, support for various regimes that would surprise a lot of the British public. From previously secret files, now released into the public domain (even if still partially censored) Mark Curtis, in Unpeople. Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, reveals that “British ministers’ lying to the public is systematic and normal”, that “the culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy making”, that “the policy makers are usually frank about their real goals in the secret record” and that “humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy.”

A strategy beyond propaganda, ‘perception control’ (thought control to you and me) “is designed to counter the major threat to British foreign policy: the public.” How many in Britain know – that British forces fought in Vietnam? And that in breach of the Geneva Accords also supplied arms to the US for use in Vietnam? About Britain’s support for Idi Amin? Support for Pinochet? About the “dirty war” in North Yemen in the 1960s where the British engaged with the wrong side for purely political reasons?

With enormous discrepancies between public statements and private files in both Labour and Conservative terms of office it is shown quite clearly that successive governments have nothing but contempt for their electorate. Curtis recommends the reader to undergo “a personal transformation, decolonising the mind of accepted truths and received wisdom.”

Media and government united in deceit

The role of the media, controlled by monopolies of multinational companies, requires ever more scrutiny; however, much of the public still tends to take their pronouncements at face value. Within the world of the media, integrity and the search for the truth is the main motivator of only a minority. It is interesting how mud tends to stick though, even when thrown at the innocent. People remember the breaking of a story but are often more unsure or forgetful about the outcome. The “no smoke without fire” syndrome. Take, for instance, the Scargill affair in 1990 when Maxwell’s Mirror launched an all-out attack on Arthur Scargill. According to Seumas Milne (at the time a journalist with the Guardian and author of a subsequent book The Secret War Against the Miners), Arthur Scargill and “Scargillism” were and had been “the enemy within” to Maxwell’s media empire, the “modernising” Labour Party leadership (Kinnock et al), the Conservative government and Thatcher in particular (she had voiced this comparison of the miners with the Argentinian junta that had invaded the Falklands two years earlier) and to British security and intelligence agencies. The two year smear campaign against Scargill came close to the end of two decades of determined effort by the Tory party “and Margaret Thatcher above all – to avenge absolutely and unequivocally their double humiliation at the hands of the miners in the historic strikes of 1972 and 1974.” A vendetta against the miners which was aimed at destroying the NUM and, as collateral damage if necessary, the British coal industry too. Maxwell’s Daily Mirror smear campaign, Milne asserts, would never have taken off had it not been for “the monopoly ownership grip of multinational companies on great swathes of the media” and too many compliant journalists happy to report what they knew to be fabrication as fact. It was the perfect distraction of public attention from Scargill’s warnings of the government’s intention to bring down the coal industry. The campaign worked as planned except that ultimately Scargill was acquitted of all and any crimes and the corrupt were only found to be amongst his accusers. Ironic, but another result for a government against its people.

The Chagos Islands (inc. Diego Garcia)

A tiny archipelago, home to some 2000 people living in “conditions most tranquil and benign” (1950s Colonial Office film), a group of islands so small as not to warrant a place on a page of the 2002 Peters World Atlas. It can only be found like fly droppings inside the back cover. But, starting with Harold Wilson’s, seven successive governments have clung together around a huge lie – a lie they fabricated and used against the islands’ inhabitants since they started removing them from those islands in 1968 – that they were merely transient workers. In fact they were first taken there as slaves by the French in the eighteenth century and became British in 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat. Now the islands are home to around 4000 US troops plus all their support personnel and paraphernalia, swimming pools, golf course, two of the longest military runways in the world (used for bombing Afghanistan and Iraq) and suspicions that captives are being “rendered” there for “serious interrogation.” The US are seeking to extend their current lease, which expires in 2016, for another ten years at least, for islands which are deemed too risky (with spurious claims about climate, water shortages etc.) for the original British inhabitants to return to, even though there have been two High Court rulings allowing them to do so. (See Freedom Next Time by John Pilger).

To compare and contrast the forced removal of these British citizens (compensation of about £1,000 GBP per person) with Britain’s resistance to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands (also with a population of about 2,000) in 1982 at a cost of £2 billion pounds is poetic irony; an order-in-council agreed by the Queen in 2004 to ban the islanders from ever returning home for one population, for the other a Christmas broadcast by Tony Blair in 2006 telling them, “It is your right to determine your future.”

Why must these atrocities be kept secret from the public? Simply because if too many of us get too angry for a sustained period and decide collectively to get active it’s all over for them. Justice and morality are values we have been tricked into believing are at the core of the leadership of our society, propaganda of the most despicable kind used against the very people they are mandated to represent. They may be immoral and pervert justice but that doesn’t negate our individual humanity and desire for honesty. It may even strengthen our resolve in the search for the truth. It reveals the rottenness of the establishment, not of the people. We, the people, can decide to reject that establishment and work together towards a truly representative democracy.

What has to be remembered and given serious consideration is this; if we do nothing after being party to such a revelation in a book, credible newspaper account or reliable TV documentary the atrocity, injustice, inhumanity, chauvinism or deceit will still be there and will continue to affect those afflicted by it and the lie will still be a lie and we will still be the recipients of the lie. When these shameless lies are put firmly into the public domain it is the public’s responsibility to guard against collective amnesia, to constantly remind ourselves and each other of the accumulation of crimes committed in our name.

Janet Surman

Cooking the Books: The way the world can feed itself (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

That was the headline of an article in the Sunday Times (27 April) by their Economics Editor David Smith. The way he endorsed was allowing “large, technologically sophisticated agro companies” to take over food production from peasant farmers in Africa and elsewhere. Yes, but what will happen to the millions of dispossessed peasants this would create? How will they be able to get money to buy food? But at least he conceded that it is technically feasible to produce enough food to feed the world’s population.

It might have been expected that the recent increase in the world market price of wheat and rice and the resulting food riots in Haiti and other countries would lead to a revival of the views of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, the 18th English parson turned economist, who argued that world poverty and starvation are due to overpopulation, to not being able to produce enough food for everyone. But no. All the pundits and all the spokespersons of international capitalist institutions such as the World Bank and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) seem agreed that the problem is not that enough food cannot be produced to feed the hungry, but that the hungry cannot afford to pay for the food that has already been produced. As Peter Smerdon, Africa spokesman for the WFP put it in an interview with the London Times (8 April):

“it is not a question of availability as one saw in previous drought-induced famines. ‘People can suddenly no longer afford the food they see on store shelves because prices are beyond their reach. It is about accessibility . . .’”

In fact, it seems to be generally admitted that food production could be increased and, indeed, will be increased in response to high prices.
David Smith made the same point we made here in February:

“Set-aside subsidies have been an important part of the common agricultural policy. Farmers have been paid not to produce. Last September, however, EU ministers agreed on a zero set-aside rate for 2007-8, to boost grain production by 10m tons”.

Meanwhile in rice-growing Thailand:

“Fields that have lain fallow are being ploughed and planted; in wet and fertile central Thailand . . . farmers are contemplating three or even four harvests a year, beyond the usual one or two” (London Times, 28 April).

This raises the question of why in a world where there is mass hunger in some parts – 1 billion in “absolute poverty” and a further 854 million who are “food insecure” (London Times 8 April) – this land wasn’t used before to produce more wheat or rice. The answer is obvious: it wasn’t profitable, the price wasn’t high enough.

The ironic thing is that this extra food production will not benefit those in “absolute poverty” since they still won’t be able to afford to buy it. And if prices fall again, as they might well do since the rise is partly due to a speculative boom amongst commodity traders, then the land will be taken out of production again. That’s the way the market works. But what a way to run the world.

There is an obvious solution: produce food directly for people to eat. But, first, the land and all the rest of the world’s resources, industrial as well as natural, will have to stop being the private property of rich individuals, multinational corporations and states and become the common heritage of all humanity. On this basis enough food could rapidly be produced to eliminate starvation immediately and, within a few years, to provide every man, woman and child on the planet with an adequate diet.

Cooking the Books: The nature of business (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember the scenes in January last year when hundreds flocked to Branscombe beach in Devon to scavenge for the cargo of a beached container ship? Some saw this as confirmation of the popular prejudice that it is "human nature" to grab, grab, grab. Actually, it was a manifestation of human behaviour in a society where normally everything has to be paid for when something becomes unexpectedly and temporarily available for free.

But that's not the main lesson of the incident. This April the Marine Accident Investment Branch (MAIB) of the Department for Transport published its report on what happened (See here for the report). The report didn't just deal with the technical aspects of why the hull cracked and why the ship had to be beached to avoid a serious oil spillage but looked at the wider context too.

In section 2.10 on the "Container Ship Industry", the MIAB observed:

"Without the ability to quickly ship large quantities of containers across the oceans, containerisation would be generally constrained within the continents. However, the commercial advantages of containerisation and intermodalism such as speed and quick turnarounds appear to have become the focus of the industry at the expense of the safe operation of its vessels. The industry is very schedule driven, and operators inevitably have an eye on the timetable when making key decisions".

On the particular accident last January, the report went on:

"In this case, the decisions to sail: without an operational governor; sail in excess of the maximum permissible seagoing bending moments in order to allow greater flexibility for the time of departure; to operate at near maximum bending moments when underway; and to keep the ship's speed as fast as possible when pounding into heavy seas, were symptomatic of the industry's ethos to carry as much as possible as quickly as possible".

This wasn't the first time the MAIB had pointed this out. The report quotes from a previous report put out in September 2007 on another accident:

"Working practices relating to the planning, loading, transportation and discharge of containers are largely unregulated and have been understandably focussed on the need to maximise efficiency and speed of operation. While key industry players will attest that safety is of paramount concern, evidence obtained during this and other MAIB investigations into container shipping accidents suggests that in reality, the safety of ships, crews and the environment is being compromised by the overriding desire to maintain established schedules or optimise port turn round times".

Something will no doubt be done to tighten up the regulations – or rather the unenforceable "code of best practice" – if only because accidents cost the shipping companies money. But the real question is why weren't proper safety measures already in place? The answer is the commercial pressures that all firms are subject to under capitalism. The shipping companies are all in competition with each other for business, and those who can deliver quicker get the contracts.

It is not human nature to grab, grab, grab, but it is the nature of capitalist businesses to take risks and cut corners with safety to win the battle of competition and make more profits.