China's Olympic Trials

From Dave Zirin's Edge of Sports website

"Go Red for China!" was the slogan unveiled on the Chinese mainland by Pepsi-Cola, whose ubiquitous blue can will, "for a limited time," be red. Pepsi is just one of many companies advertising at the Olympics, at a cost of up to $6 billion, in an attempt to tap a largely untouched market of more than 1 billion. "You've never seen the Olympics in a market that has such domestic commercial scale," Michael Wood, chief executive for greater China at advertising firm Leo Burnett, told the New York Times. "When the Olympics were in Los Angeles and Atlanta, the U.S. market was already fully developed."

This is the Olympics the West wanted: games where the grandest prize is not a gold medal but a glittering entree to China's seemingly endless army of potential consumers. This is the reason that George W. Bush will attend the opening ceremonies, the first U.S. President to do so on foreign soil, and that in March, mere days before the crackdown in Tibet, Condoleezza Rice, laughably, took China off the State Department's list of nations that abuse human rights.

But if the stakes are high for Western capitalism, for China they may well be higher. Beijing has spent as much as $40 billion to build train stations and Olympic facilities, uprooting more than 1.5 million residents, all in the hope that the games would mark, as the official Xinhua news agency put it, a "historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation."

Image via Amused Cynicism blog

National renaissance, however, may be giving way to revolt, both internally and from the athletes themselves. The buzz in the lead-up to 8/8/08 is not merely in Beijing. It's in Hunan, Shanghai, Guizhou and earthquake-devastated Sichuan, which have all recently seen mass demonstrations against Communist Party rulers. Provincial authorities are now under extraordinary pressure to crack down on protests. Instructions from Beijing are to "go on a war footing" to head off further upheaval before the games.

The steady percolation of the conflict at home has been matched -- or even exceeded -- by international anger. Athletes, activists and globe-trotting protesters are poised to raise a panoply of issues, including China's crackdown on Tibet, its support for the Sudanese regime and environmental concerns. The Communist Party has been forced to respond to this pressure cooker by opening a steam valve, announcing on July 24 that public protests will be permitted during the games inside three designated city parks. But as the (New York) Times reported, "Demonstrators must first obtain permits from local police and also abide by Chinese laws that usually make it nearly impossible to legally picket over politically charged issues."

If Chinese leaders believe that will release enough steam for a smooth games, they could be in for a surprise. Olympic protest may extend beyond the parks. More than 200 athletes from "Team Darfur" may be wearing bracelets and speaking out against human rights abuses. As Jessica Mendoza of the U.S. softball team told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "I don't think it's my place to tell China what to do. But I do think it's my place to tell people what is happening. I want people to know that nearly 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur since 2004." Athletes are also angry that the air quality in what Beijing is calling the "green Olympics" could be hazardous to their health.

A public relations catastrophe could be in the making if dissenters manage to break through the media blockade that runs from Beijing's troubling record on press freedom to NBC's soft news coverage. It should not be China's to bear alone; it should be shared by the Western nations and corporations that got the games they wanted.

Dave Zirin

Also be sure to check out the Socialist Standard's review of Dave Zirin's What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States

Crunched credit

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

One victim of the credit crunch is the theory that banks can create new purchasing power which didn’t exist before, i.e., can “create” credit. While the writers of economics textbooks show mathematically how in theory the banking system as a whole could on certain unrealistic assumptions turn an initial deposit of £1 into £9 or even £99 (and while currency cranks get hold of the wrong end of the stick and that an individual bank can do this), practioners and journalists who observe them know this not to be the case. They know that banks can only lend out money that has been deposited with them or which they themselves have borrowed or their own capital.

First, a practioner, Bill Browder, chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, a hedge fund (and, incidentally, grandson of Earl Browder, one-time General Secretary of the American Communist Party who lost his job in 1946 when Moscow zagged and he went on zigging):

“The banking system is the financial circulating circulation system. If the circulating system doesn’t work, the patient dies” (interview with the (London) Times 4 August).

Precisely. Banks and other financial institutions involved in lending are in the business of circulating, not creating, money and capital. Ideally from a capitalist point of view, they circulate money from where it is not being used to where it can be applied the most profitably. As Browder points out, the credit crunch represents a clogging up of this circulation of money and capital which, if it continues, could have widespread repercussions on the real world of production.

Now, the financial journalist, Anatole Kaletsky of the (London) Times:

“. . . the whole point of a bank is to exchange short-term, liquid, fixed-value liabilities for long-term, illiquid assets whose value is hard to guage - this liquidity and maturity transformation is, in fact, the main social function that a banking system provides” (14 July).

In other words, banks borrow short to lend long. Borrow ready cash (either from depositors or, these days, from short-term money markets) at one rate of interest to lend to capitalist firms in the hope of earning a higher rate of interest (it has to be added that, these days, banks also engage in speculation on currency and other markets in the hope of making a capital gain bigger than what they have to pay to their depositors and creditors).

What has happened is that their speculation with a view to a capital gain has gone horribly wrong as they put money into bonds which they themselves describe as “toxic” because not all that credit-worthy. Which now nobody wants to hold, so their price has fallen. This means that, instead of making a capital gain they have suffered capital losses, but they still have obligations to their depositors and still have to pay interest on their short-term borrowings on the money market. But because inter-banking trading has slowed down – nobody wants to be left holding a parcel of toxic bonds – the interest rate on these borrowings have gone up.

The banks are reluctant to borrow as much as before from this source. Which means they have less to lend out. Hence the credit crunch. Of course if they really could conjure up money out of nothing then could never be a credit crunch.

The Selfish Capitalism hypothesis (2008)

Book Review from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oliver James doesn’t like “Selfish Capitalism” and wants to return to the “Unselfish Capitalism” he imagines once existed.

A catchy phrase is always a useful way to draw the reader to a book, and Oliver James, a well known media psychologist (the one with the chunky sweater and scarf) has coined a couple in his latest book The Selfish Capitalist (Vermillion, 2008, £14.99).

In 1976 Richard Dawkins gave us The Selfish Gene, and the two books are not unrelated. The notion of selfish gene seemed to capture the ethos of the rise of the New Right ideologues, following the end of the post-war Butskellite consensus.

Welfare capitalism was on the retreat and the young guns of the “night-watchman state” and libertarian capitalism were the ideological vanguard for the restructuring of the relationship between capitalism and the working class. It is this phase of a resurgent capitalism that James calls Selfish Capitalism.

It is the psychological consequences of these thirty years of Selfish capitalism that James examines in this book. It is an enjoyable read, and it brings together some useful material, but its economic and political foundations are suspect.

Emotional Distress and Society
The core of James’s position is that in the English-speaking nations there has been a more rapid increase in the prevalence of emotional distress since the 1970s compared with the 1945-1980 period and when compared with the relatively Unselfish Capitalist nations of mainland Europe and Japan.
In setting out this hypothesis, James spends the first chapter on “The Fundamental Causes of Emotional Distress”. Dismissing both evolutionary and other biological factors as the only or the most significant factor in the production of emotional distress, James, quite rightly 1 believe, states that:

“When you survey the literature on the causes of emotional distress, it is abundantly clear that most cases, perhaps the vast majority of them, are responses to environmental factors.” (p. 17)

For James, the most important of these environmental factors are early childhood experiences, especially those involving sexual and physical abuse, neglect, divorce financial difficulties, late adoption and insecure attachment. However, he does not go so far as to say that experiences subsequent to our sixth birthday are not influential, and that they combine with these earlier experiences.

These later experiences are tied in with a combination of an individual’s social class, gender, age, ethnicity and where they live. Thus, rates of depression, anxiety, alcohol and other substance abuse, and schizophrenia are significantly higher for someone who is poor, female young, immigrant and lives in a city.

James’s brief outline of these points is a preamble to his more important discussion of differences in emotional distress between nations. Basing his interpretation on an ongoing World Health Organization (WHO) survey of 15 nations, he shows that in the USA 26.4 percent of the population suffered a period of mental distress in the previous 12 months, compared with 14.9 percent for the Netherlands and 4.3 percent for Shanghai (there were no figures available for the UK).

To account for these variations, James discusses, and dismisses any explanation based on genetic differences between populations. Moreover, although he acknowledges the effect of wars and economic disasters in increasing the rates of emotional distress, these are only relatively brief periods in the history of a nation. Much more important for him as long term explanations of an increase are the processes occurring in the transition from pre-industrial, rural societies to industrial, urban ones. Drawing on the work of the cultural psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman, James writes that Kleinman:

“estimated that three-quarters of the hundreds of diseases listed in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association] are found almost exclusively in the USA and in Westernised elites, whether Asian or European. Problems such as multiple personality disorder, eating disorders and chronic fatigue syndrome are very largely caused by industrialisation and are virtually unknown in pre-industrial communities” (p.39).

So far then, James has argued that emotional distress is largely environmental in origin, that its distribution within developed (i.e., capitalist) nations is determined by an individual’s social position, and that a significant increase occurred in the transition of nations from pre-industrial, rural communities to industrial, urban societies.

On the whole, this account would fit in with a socialist interpretation, although it would be preferable if it were couched in Marxist categories. His notion of social class is the typical one, based on income and occupation, rather than in terms of relationship to the means of production, and the connection between social class, gender, age, ethnicity and place of residence is not made clear; they appear to be factors isolated from each other rather than related to each other. Also, the technological determinist notion of a transition from pre-industrial, rural society to an industrial, urban one would be better referred to in terms of the changes in the class relations of production, of a transition from a pre-capitalist (e.g., feudal or Asiatic) to a capitalist mode of production.

The Selfish Capitalist Hypothesis
The next step in his argument is to compare levels of emotional distress between industrially developed nations; it is at this point that his notions of Selfish and Unselfish Capitalism come into play. Whilst these nations have comparable levels of industrialisation and urbanisation, the levels of distress are higher in one group compared with another. For example, from the WHO survey, the USA and New Zealand have an average of 23 percent of the population experiencing emotional distress, compared with an average of 11.5 percent for six western European nations and Japan. James’s explanation for this difference is that the English-speaking nations have undergone a shift, since the 1970s, in their economic and political policies from an Unselfish capitalism to a Selfish one, whereas western Europe and Japan have persisted with the Unselfish Capitalist model.

Materialism
In addition to these fundamental causes of distress, James proposes that a major cause of distress in the developed nations is what he refers to as “materialism”. This he defines as “placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances and fame” (p.43). According to James, there is a distinction to be made between “survival” and “relative” materialism. In conditions of absolute poverty, where an individual’s basic needs are not met, or are uncertain, then survival materialism can is likely to contribute to their well-being. However, once these basic needs have been met, then any increase in an individual’s level of materialism, to relative materialism, does not lead to an improvement of their well-being.

Basing his views on a wide range of research, he states that “those with relative materialism are significantly more likely to be emotionally distressed than ones who are unmaterialistic” (p.45). Such views on the apparent paradox that increases in material wealth and possessions do not result in increases in well-being or lower rates of distress have been recently the subject of a number of books such as The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (Schwartz, 2004), and are summed up in the title of an article by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi “If We Are So Rich, Why Aren’t We Happy?” (American Psychologist, 1999).

Recognising the earlier work of Erich Fromm (although this is limited to his views on consumerism), James points out that such a culture of celebrity, bling, Ten Years Younger, It Could Be You, “you’re fired!” etc. is based on creating high levels of insecurity, low self-esteem and dissatisfaction about the self in order then to sell the commodities that will ease these feelings. Such a need structure is produced from very early on, and vigorously maintained and expanded not only by the institutions of advertising and the mass media, but also by the family and schooling. It is this continuous assault on the self and the impossible nature of the ideals set, that results in the increase in emotional distress. Overall, this discussion of relative materialism provides some useful ammunition for an attack on the vacuous consumerism which characterises present-day capitalism.

Up to this point, James’s argument has been compatible with a socialist critique of capitalist culture, with its relentless desire to create facile needs and the commodities to fulfil them—although not quite, as a satisfied individual is a customer lost. However, from now on James’s arguments start to be less soundly based from the socialist point of view. It is here that he makes his crucial distinction between Selfish and Unselfish Capitalism, and begins his defence of the latter. The early promise of an attack on capitalism as such turns into a far from novel, indeed geriatric, defence of reformist capitalism, albeit with a therapeutic twist.

Selfish and Unselfish Capitalism.
James’s argument is that in the English-speaking nations over the last thirty years such a “materialist” culture has been produced by the adoption of Selfish Capitalist policies. Mainland Europe and Japan, however, maintained their post-war Unselfish Capitalist regimes. In James’s view Selfish Capitalism has four defining features:

“the success of a company is judged largely by its current share price, rather than by its underlying strength or its contribution to the economy”;

“a strong drive to privatise collective goods such as water, gas and electrical utilities”;

“minimal regulation of financial services and labour markets, including the introduction of working practices that strongly favour employers and disfavour trade unions, making it easier to hire and fire. Alongside this, taxes are not concerned with the redistribution of wealth, making it easier for corporations and the rich to avoid them, and to use tax havens within the law”;

“the conviction that consumption and market forces can meet human needs of almost any kind”

(p.120).

In contrast to this, he defines Unselfish Capitalism as “a capitalism which limits personal profits and fosters personal well-being” (p.124). To illustrate the differences between the two, he states that the USA is the epitome of Selfish Capitalism and Denmark that of Unselfish capitalism.

How you define things often sets the limits of what follows. James has limited his basic definitions to the market level, rather than at the foundation of the relations of production. He is concerned more with how the spoils of the exploitation process are divided rather than with the conditions of this process. He does not bother to highlight the essential features of capitalism, but instead focuses on the management of this process by either Keynesian or non-interventionist means. This is why his main emphasis on the political level rather than of the economic one. There is no discussion of capitalism as a society of generalised commodity production organised around private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the working class, of production for profit and other essential features of capitalism.
Rather, private ownership (by private capitalist companies or the state) and working for a wage are an unquestioned given, and emphasis is on a particular choice between the myriad forms which capital can take. No doubt these various forms have important differences from each other, and the effects these have on the working class are worth discussing—and James does provide some useful material—but to restrict one’s vision to varieties of capitalism (under the guise of being “realistic”) is to be captured by the fetishism of commodities. Capitalism is not an eternal, natural system, but a material human creation: we create it, we break it.

I am sure that James considers himself some sort of socialist; after all he does rage against Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, third-wayism and other enemies of the left and Old Labour. But, like them, his analysis remains on the surface of capitalism and does not penetrate to the anatomy of capitalism. James’s argument is not so much wrong as not just radical enough. It is not a matter of which form of wage-slavery is preferable, but of struggling for the abolition of wage-slavery in itself.

There is no Unselfish Capitalism. By its very nature, capitalism is voracious, looking for every chance it can to drain what it can out of the working class, but always aware that it mustn’t kill its source of unpaid surplus value. Indeed, it must sometimes make its host fatter in order to realise its own value. It appears as if the worker is healthier, but it is a health in the interest of the parasite and not the host. As Marx wrote: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Capital, Vol 1, ch. 10, section 1).

Ed Blewitt

Greasy Pole: David Davis Freedom’s Champion? (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody was much surprised when David Davis emerged as one of the two candidates in the final vote for the Tory leadership in 2005. He seemed to be pretty well everything the Tories were looking for, after the disasters of Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – a tough-talking, broken-nosed ex state schoolboy brought up by a single parent against Cameron and his smooth faced, airy platitudes which resisted any efforts to unravel them into making sense but which were offered in impeccable ex-Eton vowels. If Davis was suitably abrasive on the preoccupying issues of the day – crime, immigration, Iraq – well he was, after all, a member of the SAS. Grass roots Tories were expected to be eagerly seduced by this militant of patriotism. There are, of course, far more people who claim to have been in the SAS than were ever accommodated in that elite; they can often be found in the public bar as closing time draws near, eking out their emptying glass with their miserable fantasies. Davis was the real thing, although as an SAS Reservist he was trained to kill with his bare hands but available to do this only at week-ends. An uncorroborated story testified to the level of his ability on the battlefield, of an occasion when Davis and his men were on manoeuvres and he was ordered to lay out an ambush for an “enemy” unit. However he deployed his men in such a way that they would have been firing at each other; had it been in a real war with real bullets they might have wiped each other out. So perhaps tactics are not one of Davis’ strong points; after all he was soundly out-manoeuvred by Cameron’s cleverly designed “call me Dave” campaign for the leadership and now, after a few years of sulking and chuntering, he committed what may be a fatal mistake by resigning his seat in Parliament to contest it again on the matter of the 42 Days Detention law in the Counter Terrorism Bill.

Magna Carta
Now that, as expected, Davis has been returned to Parliament by the voters of Haltemprice and Howden (who may have been bewildered to find themselves cast in role of standing up for centuries of something called British freedom) there will be a searching assessment of his place, and future, in the Conservative Party. At the time of his resignation, launching what he hoped would be an irresistible “Davis For Freedom” campaign (there was also a planned “Celebrities for Davis” operation), he spoke out against a clutch of intrusions – Identity Cards, CCTV Cameras, Official Databases – through which the state keeps an eye on the people and he contrasted these against rights such as Habeas Corpus, which are supposed to prevent anyone being imprisoned indefinitely without knowing the charges against them, originated in Magna Carta. This preoccupation with individual human rights, extending to Davis working closely with Shami Chakrabarti, chair of the pressure group Liberty, gave rise to some irritation among Davis’ party colleagues: one Shadow Cabinet Minister complained that he “seemed to take more notice of what Shami Chakrabarti thought the Conservative Party should be doing than he did of the party leader’s views”.

There was also some surprise in circles which were more comfortable with Davis’ reputation for opposition to such issues as the repeal of Section 28 and gay couples adopting children. Davis himself, in an interview with the Morning Star (yes, an interview with the Morning Star) agreed that “There’ll be plenty of things in my policy brief, ideas that your readers will not agree with – my views on immigration and asylum, my views on penal policy, my views on economic policy”. And along with the support for him there was some very sharp, very pointed, opposition. Among the kinder comments from his allies was “It is madness. He must have had a rush of blood to the head”; and from those who took a harsher view: “We never really trusted him and now we don’t have to worry any more about massaging his giant ego. He will be forgotten very quickly”. All of this was apart from the suggestions that Davis himself should fork out the £80,000 cost of the by-election.

Supporters
Apart from Chakrabarti, Davis was supported by what might be described as an incongruous bunch. Prominent among the MPs was Bob Marshall-Andrews, slipping effortlessly into yet another rebellion against the party leadership. From the Tory benches John Redwood, an exalted Fellow of All Souls, may have been looking to expunge some embarrassing memories of his time as a minister And we should not omit Roger Gale, Tory MP for Thanet, former disc jockey on a pirate radio station and a supporter of the death penalty for fatal knife attacks, even if this “would mean repeal of the Human Rights Act but I have no problem with that” – which was less than a ringing declaration of respect for the kinds of human rights which David Davis was supposed to be defending.

Inevitably there was Tony Benn, enjoying a retirement of darting from one dead-end protest to another after he had, as he put it, resigned from Parliament to get involved in politics. Just as inevitably, there was Bob Geldof, personifying an optimism for resuscitating a moribund career by doing Something Entirely Different. More dramatically Rachel North, who survived the July 7 bombs in London, supported Davis and denounced the Labour Party’s failure to put up a candidate in the by-election as “disgraceful”.

Stunt
Instead the whole enterprise was condemned as a “stunt” – which seemed to have been borne out by the number of candidates for the by-election, some of them in comparison making the Monster Raving Looney Party seem sane and progressive (in fact their Mad Cow-Girl attracted 412 votes, seventh in the list of twenty-six). But Davis’ critics were MPs, who are not inspired by, or even familiar with, the idea of resigning on a matter of principle. And what is abundantly clear from the history of their parties is that stunts are essential to their existence. Stunts inform their various programmes and promises, which vary widely between one election and the next and sometimes from week to week when they are in power. Stunts, for example, justified the invasion of Iraq, the incoherent fumbling with which this government is trying to tone down the effects of the present economic crisis, the vicious squabbling between political leaders whose public face is one of ecstatic unity. Apparently unaware of it, Davis has emphasised the awful reality of a society which nurtures the interests of a minority class through stunts – a cruel, massive deception of the rest.

Ivan

Playing the world's smallest violin

From the Marx and Coca Cola blog

You can imagine how sad I was to see this story on the front page of my local fish wrapper: Rich are not so different when economy is down. I cried a little. The story does briefly raise one interesting point:

"To be sure, the poor and middle class are being hurt more, but upper-crust thriftiness could reverberate across the rest of the economy.

The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes account for nearly a quarter of all spending, according to data compiled by research firm Moody's Economy.com from a 2006 federal survey....

Other government data show households in the top one-fifth of the U.S. population ranked by income earn about half of all total personal income before taxes — an imbalance that gives the wealthy immense economic clout, said Sara Johnson, an economist at the research firm Global Insight.

"Consumer spending makes up 70 percent of gross domestic product, and when one group accounts for a very substantial share of consumer spending, they also account for a large share of the economic activity that creates jobs," Johnson said."

The richest 1% have the largest share of the national income in two decades. According to the Wall Street Journal this is due in large part to that group's declining tax rate.

Instead of a story about how an accumulation of wealth, and by extension economic power, in the hands of fewer and fewer people is having a disastrous impact on the economy at large, the story instead focuses on the "hardships" endured by the not-working class:

"Many are asking their personal shoppers and private-jet providers to seek the best deals rather than over-the-top extravagances."

Boo-hoo. They'll have to start eating the nonorganic arugula.

"He also may buy a hybrid to supplement the two Mercedes in his heated four-car garage."

So sad. Think of his children.

"A lot of our clients stop by a deli on the way to the airport, rather than have a catered meal on the plane" costing $50 per boxed lunch, said Justin Sullivan. Sullivan is the founder of Regent Jet, an Andover, Mass.-based broker that buys blocks of aircraft time to trim costs for high-end clientele whose multi-leg itineraries can sometimes exceed $100,000."

Eating from a deli! What is this, Mexico? And this quote from the managing director of investments at the beleaguered Wachovia Securities:

""People are examining, 'Do you keep the yacht, do you go to the classic-car auction, do you take the private jet?' Those sound like nice problems to have, but at the same time, they are issues."

(Marx and Coca-Cola will be on hiatus while JM recovers from his rage-induced coma.)

JM

About Solzhenitsyn

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

According to the BBC today, Solzhenitsyn "opened the eyes of the world to the evils of Soviet Communism". No, try again. "He exposed the brutality of the Stalin era." Much better. By way of contrast, the Socialist Party has held the same, consistent and correct attitude towards Russia since before Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was born!

Searching our website, you could be forgiven for thinking that we have had nothing to say about this world famous author. This is not the case as at present only a only a fraction of our published material going back to our inception in 1904 is available online. The Socialist Standard of January 1972, for example, has a piece titled 'From a Russian prison camp':

"...We are not concerned here with his stature as a writer but rather with the way he adds to our sketchy knowledge of Soviet society. In 1945 he was sentenced to 8 years for comments he made about Stalin....His three novels dealing with the Soviet scene are 'One Day', 'The First Circle' and 'Cancer Ward'. Respectively they describe the world of the manual worker, the intellectual and the chronically sick.
In 'One Day' we learn how starving and frozen prisoners labour on a construction site (temperature minus 39 degrees), queue for fuel, munch their ration of dry bread and try to wangle a smoke or an easy job. As in the outside world, "you feathered your own nest as best you could". You knew that you were cheated of your rations by all who handled them. Graft was everywhere, and so were the informers. But prisoners spared their energy, needing it for survival.
In 'The First Circle', he describes an expensive top-secret research institute in Moscow where class enemies, saboteurs and other top scientists, imprisoned in the Thirties and Forties, enjoyed relative luxury. Yet the State is cruelly oppressive here too: the cruelty is of a different type, that's all. At Karaganda it was physical cruelty - hunger, cold and overwork; at Mavrino it is psychological - pressure to meet impossible deadlines successfully, dread of a transfer back to labour camps and fear for their persecuted families. As at Karaganda, and as in all parts of Russia, informers abound - the hallmark of a police state.
If you ever wondered what has happened to ordinary Russians, these books will tell you much. In the two books together, Solzhenitzyn has covered a lot: from the lowest camp drudges, the wives at home on the collectives, ex-Party members who helped collectivize the countryside at gunpoint and their wives, unable to get work without disowning their husbands, right on up through the secret service rat-race to the Minister, Abakumov, and the Immortal One himself.
Finally in 'Cancer Ward' he underlines the idea that his real subject is not a prison society but Soviet society. The whole of Russia is a sick society, all alike are sick - doctors and patients, jailers and prisoners. All Russia is a prison where every fifth man is an informer.
For all Russians, he says, life is an endless sentence without amnesty, measured by months of deprivation and humiliation. The proletarian is everywhere a prisoner of the system: we are all doing time. Some prisons are plush like Mavrino "the first circle of hell." Others are unspeakable. His explanation of the lush conditions at Mavrino applies equally to the so-called middle-class here: "It has been shown that the better sheep are fed and looked after, the higher their yeild of wool."
Solzhenitzyn earned the right to claim: "I've got an advantage no spy can make me lose: what I've been through, and seen others go through, should give me a good idea of what history is about, don't you think?"

But notwithstanding such insights, another article - 'About Solzhenitsyn' - from the April 1974 Socialist Standard reveals some serious flaws in his thinking:

"..Before weighing in with criticisms of his manifesto (Sunday Times, March 3), we must make it clear, first, that we have always opposed all forms of censorship, and secondly, that in criticising his ideas we are no way defending the Kremlinite creed, to which we have consistently expressed our hostility. But however sympathetic we may be to one who has struggled successfully and made his views heard in spite of all the Soviet censorship and suppression machine, we cannot applaud his political views.
We should like to have greeted him as a world citizen, an internationalist, not a nationalist. But his views are based on an insular patriotism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. He believes in the myth of the "national interest": indeed he bases his argument against a Russian war with China, not on the view that working-class interests are not at stake, but simply on the calculation that Russia could not win such a war and therefore it would be against Russia's "national interest"..."

By way of conclusion, his writings did not as the BBC claim help "expose and bring down the Soviet Communist system". Since the collapse of the brutally oppressive system of state capitalism in Russia, can it be said that the life of the working class there has improved dramatically? The same question can be asked about South Africa since apartheid. Another novelist, D.H. Lawrence, gave the answer when he stated "earning a wage is a prison occupation".

Robert Stafford

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (58)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 58th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1316 friends!

Recent blogs:

Poles Apart? - The Arctic, Capitalism and Global Warming

The Curse of Money

History as mystery

Quote for the week:

"Et non dicatis aliquid proprium, sed sint vobis omnia communia": 'Call nothing your own, but let everything be yours in common'. [St. Augustine, ca. 400AD.]

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Reclaiming Marx's Capital (2008)

Book review from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reclaiming Marx's “Capital.” By Andrew Kliman. Lexington Books, 2007

After Karl Marx's Capital was published it has come in for criticism from a particular direction. In Volume One of Capital (1867), Marx argued that the value of commodities (goods and services produced for sale and profit) are determined by socially necessary labour-time. Profit comes from unpaid surplus labour appropriated as surplus value. In Volume Three of Capital (1894), Marx explained that commodities tend to sell at prices of production, which is the price sufficient to yield the average rate of profit on capital advanced, and commodities actually sell at market prices which fluctuate around prices of production (assuming no monopolies). Marx indicated in Volume One that in a later book he would show the difference between value and price, as his analysis moved from the abstract to the determinate. And we now know, though Kliman does not mention this, that the notes which comprise Volume Three and edited for publication by Engels after Marx's death were written before the manuscript of Volume One.

However, many economists (including some who claim to be Marxist) maintain that prices cannot be derived from values in the way Marx described. In economics this is known as “the transformation problem”, but it has implications for other aspects of Marx's theory of value. What are the objections? The critics start by making a couple of assumptions about Marx's theory. Firstly, it is assumed that value and price must be two separate systems. Secondly, it is assumed that inputs into production and the outputs that subsequently emerge must be valued simultaneously, and the input and output prices must be equal. When these assumptions are made, so the critics claim, Marx's theory of value becomes “internally inconsistent” and breaks down.

However, these assumptions are mistaken. In Marx's theory, value and price are interdependent; profit exists when, but only when, surplus labour has been performed. The assumption that value and price must be two separate systems implies that there can be profit without surplus labour, which is a major misinterpretation of Marx's theory. And the assumption concerning simultaneous valuation and the equal prices of inputs and outputs flatly contradicts the main principle upon which Marx's value theory is founded, that value is determined by labour-time. It is because valuation necessarily involves labour-time that input and output prices can differ. Kliman shows that the “internal inconsistencies” appear when the theory is viewed as a simultaneous valuation and disappear when not viewed as a simultaneous valuation. In short, the critics have badly misunderstood Marx's theory of value.

Lew Higgins

Is it the Big One? (2008)

Editorial from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a joke amongst stock exchange gamblers about the analyst who predicted nine of the last three bear markets. The same could be said about some critics of capitalism who have been predicting the next Great Depression since 1945.

Capitalism is an uncontrollable system and another 1930s slump cannot be ruled out. But history never repeats itself exactly, not even as a farce (not that a repeat of the horrendous 1930s could be viewed as a farce). Every slump or recession is different because capitalism is anarchic and unpredictable. In fact, if it wasn’t then capitalist governments might have a better chance of developing some policies to avoid them.

The socialist case against capitalism is not dependent on capitalism being in a slump. Even in times of “prosperity” capitalism does not, and cannot serve the interests of the majority who are obliged to sell themselves for a wage or a salary to get a living. Unemployment may be lower and real wages may be rising slowly, but the basic fact of profits being derived from the unpaid labour of those who work remains. And profit-seeking dominates decisions about what, where and how to produce. Priorities are distorted as profits always come before meeting needs.

Obviously more people are discontented in a slump than at other times but history does not provide any evidence that slump conditions are consistently better for getting across the socialist message. The priority for an unemployed person is a job or rather the money needed to buy things that goes with a job. Socialism could indeed immediately solve this problem by ensuring that everyone’s material needs were met, but socialism cannot be established until and unless a majority want it and are prepared to take the necessary political action to get it. Socialists, however, cannot produce this immediately by waving a wand. In the meantime unemployed people want a job and have been known to follow all sorts of demagogues who promise them this.

Socialists do not subscribe to the view “the worse, the better”. Even so, slump conditions do expose the irrationality of capitalism. Closed factories alongside unemployment queues. People in bad housing alongside stockpiles of bricks. People in need of food alongside food mountains and, worse, food bonfires. In short, poverty amidst potential plenty.

But are we heading for another big slump? Nobody knows. Capitalist opinion is divided. Anatole Kaletsky, writing in the (London) Times (17 July), reported that “according to the overwhelming majority of financial analysts in the City of London and Wall Street, the world is now in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s”. He disagrees. He regards this merely as a panic reaction amongst bankers who are seeing their expected profits disappear.

Socialists don’t know either but the very fact that another big slump cannot be ruled out confirms in itself that capitalism is an irrational and uncontrollable economic system. The sooner it is got rid of and replaced by a system under human control and geared to serving human needs the better.

Pieces Together: The Wasteful Society (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE WASTEFUL SOCIETY

"World military spending grew 45 percent in the past decade, with the United States accounting for nearly half of all expenditure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said Monday. Military spending grew six percent last year alone, according to SIPRI's annual report. In 2007, 1,339 billion dollars (851 billion euros) was spent on arms and other military expenditure, corresponding to 2.5 percent of global gross domestic product, or GDP -- or 202 dollars for each of the world's 6.6 billion people. The United States spends by far the most towards military aims, dishing out 547 billion dollars last year, or 45 percent of global expenditure. (Yahoo News, 9 June)

THE SCIENCE OF DENIAL

"The Bush administration has worked overtime to manipulate or conceal scientific evidence — and muzzled at least one prominent scientist — to justify its failure to address climate change. Its motives were transparent: the less people understood about the causes and consequences of global warming, the less they were likely to demand action from their leaders. And its strategy has been far too successful. Seven years later, Congress is only beginning to confront the challenge of global warming. The last week has brought further confirmation of the administration’s cynicism. An internal investigation by NASA’s inspector general concluded that political appointees in the agency’s public affairs office had tried to restrict reporters’ access to its leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. He has warned about climate change for 20 years and has openly criticized the administration’s refusal to tackle the issue head-on." (New York Times, 4 June)

JAILHOUSE BLUES

"The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other country in the world and more than ever before in its history, Human Rights Watch said Friday. The number represents an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, compared to 152 per 100,000 in Britain, 108 in Canada, and 91 in France, HRW said in a statement commenting on Justice Department figures also released Friday.” (Yahoo News, 6 June)

PAY KILLERS MORE SAY THE CITY

"Now working in the City, Mr Galloway is also involved in campaigning against the limitations of Armed Forces Compensation Scheme. He hopes that by speaking out he can highlight the plight of men and women accustomed to risking their lives. "Everyone always wants a pay rise. But soldiers really do need to feel appreciated," he said." (BBC News, 5 June)

Workers against the Bolsheviks (2008)

Book review from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24. Soviet workers and the new communist elite. By Simon Pirani, Routledge, 2008.

One of the consequences of the fall of state capitalism in the USSR at the beginning of the 90s has been the opening up of the archives of the old regime, including those of its secret police. This book is a fascinating study, based on the minutes of meetings of soviets and factory committees as well as police reports, of the fight put up by factory workers in Moscow in the period 1920-24 to defend their interests under, and at times against, the Bolshevik government. Pirani also describes the beginnings of the emergence of members of the Bolshevik Party as a new, privileged elite.

In 1920 and 1921 during the civil war and its immediate aftermath, conditions in Russia were dire. Workers were paid in kind, but the rations often arrived late and were sometimes reduced. This led to protests and strikes, which the Bolshevik government was prepared to accommodate as long as these were purely economic and did not challenge their rule. The government was particularly edgy in 1921 at the time of the Krondstadt Revolt, whose demands for free elections to the soviets and a relaxation of the ban on private trading, had the sympathy of many workers. In fact, in the still not entirely unfree elections, to the local soviets that year members of other parties (Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists) and non-party militants made gains at the expense of the Bolsheviks. Pirani concentrates on these “non-partyists” who seemed to have been factory militants who wanted to concentrate on economic issues, but with an acute understanding of the balance of forces and what could extracted from the government.

In 1923 the government cracked down on the other parties, including their factory activists, and stopped them carrying out any open activity. Pirani notes that “no non-communist political organization worked openly in Moscow again until the end of the Soviet period”. The non-partyists survived a little longer while the Bolsheviks tried to co-opt them into their party. What political opposition there was was confined to dissident Bolsheviks, inside and outside the party, some of whom adopted a pro-working class stand over wages and conditions, but eventually they too were silenced and many of them joined the members of the other parties in the labour camps of Central Asia and Siberia.

Lenin’s attitude was typical of the one he had displayed twenty years earlier in his notorious pamphlet What Is To Be Done? : that workers were not to be trusted to know their own best interest; judging this had to be left to an intellectual elite organised as a vanguard party. Pirani summarises part of Lenin’s speech to the 11th Bolshevik Party Congress in 1921:

“Lenin argued that the Russian working class could not be regarded as properly proletarian. ‘Often when people say ‘workers’, they think that that means the factory proletariat. It certainly doesn’t’, he said. The working class that Marx had written about did not exist in Russia, Lenin claimed. ‘Wherever you look, those in the factories are not the proletariat, but casual elements of all kinds.’”

Pirani comments that “the practical consequence of this was that political decision-making had to be concentrated in the party”. This distinction between the actual working class (who cannot be trusted) and the “proletariat” (organised in a vanguard party who know best) has been inherited by all Leninist groups ever since and used to justify the dictatorship of the party over the working class.

Pirani’s book should be read by those who think, or who want to refute, that the state in Russia under the Bolsheviks could ever have been described as “workers”. The workers there always had to try to defend their wages and conditions against it, even in the time of Lenin and Trotsky.

Adam Buick

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (57)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 57th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1319 friends!

Recent blogs:

Marx's Basic Theory

Another world

Marxian Economics in the Modern World

Quote for the week:

"In conflict with them ['social democrats'] for a generation are those who would sacrifice immediate success to sound principles, who have been content to be fewer in numbers if clearer in understanding, who have given transient political issues the 'go-by' and have harped upon social revolution, who have expounded economics and the class struggle, when others were shouting against taxes and tariffs, who have earned for themselves the name of Impossiblist, and have been content therewith. The war has justified them. . . The 'practical socialists' are cutting one another's throats in the trenches." [Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Canada, 4th Edition, 1915.]

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Cooking the Books: Profits Before Homes (2008)

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

“One of Britain’s biggest brick makers is to close two of its largest factories”, reported the (London) Times (9 June). A few days later the same paper was reporting, as an example of what is happening all over the country in the building trade, that “Heatco Midlands has laid off its apprentices and told its employees that it cannot afford to pay them for a full week’s work because building work has dried up in the space of a month” (12 June).

Why? Why are brickworks being closed? Why are building workers being laid off or put on short-time? It is certainly not because the need for new or refurbished houses has been met. According to Shelter, “England is suffering a massive housing crisis. There simply aren’t enough decent, affordable homes.” Here are some of the figures they provide to back up this statement:

8.1 million homes in England fail to meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.
more than one million children in England live in bad housing.

in 2006/07, 554,000 households in England were overcrowded.

in 2007, almost 100,000 households were found to be · homeless by local authorities - almost twice as many as in 1997.

at the end of December 2007, 79,500 households were living in temporary accommodation arranged by local authorities. Nearly 60,000 of these households had · dependent children.

Nearly 1.7 million households are currently on local authority housing waiting lists.

So, the need for more houses and better housing is still there. The problem is that under capitalism houses are not built with the primary aim of providing somewhere for people to live. They are built to be sold on a market with a view to profit. And, at the moment, there’s a slump in what is openly called “the housing market”. Which is expected to last for years; at least that’s what the speculators think. On the futures market, “traders are betting that house prices will fall 50 per cent in four years and they do not expect prices to recover until 2017”

(London Times, 12 June).

Wienerberger’s chief executive, Wolfgang Reithofer, was perfectly frank about why the two factories were being closed: “It is a question of finance and this has impact. It will impact the strategy of housebuilders. They will not start new projects or will delay some other project.”

He thinks that demand will eventually recover but by “demand” he doesn’t mean the needs identified by Shelter but only paying demand, what the economists cynically call “effective” demand. The demand of the millions of people suffering from bad housing doesn’t count – isn’t effective – because it’s not backed up by money. This, in accordance with the harsh economic law of capitalism of “can’t pay, can’t have”.

The building industry has set up a charity to help the homeless called, ominously, “Crash” (www.crash.org.uk). This handing out of a few pennies to charities for the homeless while cutting back on housebuilding is just adding insult to injury.

Not that the solution to the housing crisis is to give people more money to spend on housing. That’s not going to happen anyway. The solution is simple: build houses just for people to live in. But that’s not going to happen until and unless we move on to a society where things will be produced precisely to satisfy people’s needs instead of, as under capitalism, to make a profit and leave people homeless or in bad housing if they can’t pay.

Stimulating packages

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Tourism: can it be green? (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those ‘green consumers’ who have adopted the principles of a green lifestyle eco-tourism fits neatly with the now familiar slogan to ‘Think Globally – Act Locally’ as a counter to environmental destruction. The adoption of a green lifestyle can include: Buying only organic food; keeping a record of your carbon footprint; using bio-degradable products; ensuring your savings and pension fund is ‘ethically’ invested in bio-diversity products or sustainable projects; supporting ‘fair trading’; participating in recycling schemes; be sparing on the use of plastic bags; and even endorsing the Body Shop empire. The solution is presented as an individual act rather than the collective action of individuals struggling for social change to put a stop to environmental destruction. Of course you can do all of these, but you shouldn’t think that such activities will necessarily lessen the impact on the environment.

For instance, despite the claims of the eco-tourism operators that their priority is sustainability and biodiversity, the green consumer lifestyle facilitates the opening up of a new market where environmental concern is transformed into a commodity. When the market is presented as the saviour of the environment then green consumers, and eco-tourists in particular, need to be aware that they cannot disregard the logic of production for profit. Nevertheless, for socialists the idea of adopting a green lifestyle is not to be derided, because – despite these shortcomings - it is a tentative step towards working with nature, rather than against it.

By increasing our understanding of the interaction between the natural environment and the impact of human activity society will be in a better position to minimise the damage on natural resources, and be able to arrive at rational judgements on whether or not any interference in the natural environment is justified and warranted. But be warned that such environmental concerns are not on the capitalist agenda. For the priority under capitalism is to make a profit by exploiting the environment through market forces.

We travel for relaxation. We travel for adventure. We travel to escape the familiar and venture into the unknown. Tourism brings in money and creates employment: one in 16 jobs worldwide is directly or indirectly related to tourism. In Thailand, tourism is the leading source of foreign exchange. And although tourism can help to maintain a country's interest in its own cultural and artistic heritage and, at it its best, can foster genuine friendships between different members of the human family this all comes with a price attached.

Increasingly, 'alternative travel' as eco-tourism is known in the tourist trade, is being marketed as the only way to see the world these days. And as more and more people venture off the beaten track to experience unique cultures and unspoiled nature, ecotourism is considered the fastest growing market in the tourism industry, with an annual growth rate of 5 percent worldwide. According to the World Tourism Organisation this represents 6 percent of the world gross domestic product and 11.4 percent of all consumer spending.

Whereas, previously, you enjoyed the values of the natural environment by joining the Ramblers or Youth Hostel Association, now its considered more adventurous (and expensive) to take part in white water rafting down remote rivers, or to go native in the Australian bush, stay with the indigenous people in the Amazonian rainforest, enjoy the delights of the local wildlife and the taste of organic food at an eco-lodge in India. These eco-travellers are setting out on foot safaris in Africa, camping in the Mexican rainforest, and trekking to hill tribe villages in Thailand. You can also have a holiday in a tree-house in Costa Rica and enjoy the delights of a ropeway through the jungle canopy. And if none of these at to your taste what about some whale watching in Victoria B.C. where you can disrupt the breeding habits of the grey whale and walrus?

There are many more such holidays on offer and they are increasing by the day. At the last count taken in 2007 ten percent of the global travel market is now eco-tourism. And though the 21st century is considered an era of environmental sensitivity and climate change remains firmly on the global conscience, with remote locations becoming more and more accessible many countries are beginning to promote their natural wonders to bring in the eco-minded tourist. But in doing so the market system is faced with a conundrum of trying to preserve natural resources and also try to accommodate the vast numbers of tourists they will attract.

The ideal of eco-tourism, as defined by Martha Honey, the executive director of the International Ecotourism Society, reads like a travel agents dream:

"Travel to fragile, pristine and usually protected areas that strives to be low impact and usually small scale. It helps educate travelers; provides funds for conservation; directly benefits the economic development and political empowerment of local communities; and fosters respect for different cultures and human rights."

However, this ideal in many instances fails miserably to achieve its aim and in fact contributes to environmental destruction. For the reality is that in terms of human impact eco-tourists are no different – other than in scale – to the everyday tourist on a package holiday to the Costa Bravo. This is what an official for the World Wildlife Fund told Leo Hickman about on the impact of tourism in Thailand:

“The tsunami was nothing compared to the impact of tourism. It is a much larger, long-term problem. . . . I was born in 1972 and when I was eight or nine it was still largely virgin rainforest here on the island. By the late 1980s, though, it was mostly developed. We have now lost so much of the biodiversity and primary forest and the soil is destabilising in many places. The construction of hotels upstream is creating a lot of sediment in the water and this causes damage to the coral reefs when it washes out to sea. It also affects the mangroves on the east coast. A lot of our waste water – about 40 per cent – is still being pumped out to sea on the west coast where all the resort areas are.
Land is now so expensive here due to tourism; the cost of living is even higher than Bangkok – it has meant that many local people have been forced to sell off their ancestral home and have now lost their only real asset. There is even competition for schools here for the first time. And there is a lot of overfishing here; this is for export rather than for the tourists per se, but lobsters are now being brought in from Burma to meet the tourists’ appetite for these vulnerable creatures. The corals are also damaged by tourism. Snorkellers actually cause more damage than divers because they touch the coral more often….”

(Leo Hickman, The Final Call – In Search of the True Cost of our Holidays, 2007).

In Costa Rica, whose parks are wildly popular with the millions of people who visit the country each year, the behaviour of some wild animals has been altered - some monkeys attack and bite tourists when not fed. Along the trail to the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, deforestation is getting worse as locals cut down trees to heat meals and to provide hot showers for foreign eco-trekkers. And Mount Everest itself is becoming infamous for the amount of discarded rubbish left on the routes towards the summit. Some estimates put it at over 2000 tons which don’t include the remains of a helicopter. And in the lower regions of the Himalayan foothills the popularity of backpacking is not only causing serious soil erosion but water pollution.

And what has happened in Nepal is only one example where eco-tourism is becoming transformed into eco-vandalism through the insanity of the profit system. Another example is what is happening in Kerala in India which is marketed either as, ‘God’s own country’, or as, the ‘Gateway to Paradise’. Kerala is a unique water region famous for its lakes, rivers and back waters and distinct wildlife and fauna and is also an attractive stopover or base for the eco-tourists who visit the nearby National Reserve. However, what is not marketed by the Kerala Tourist Board is the lack of sewerage facilities and rubbish collection for its thousands upon thousands of houseboats and hotels and so called eco-lodges. Before Kerala became invaded by tourists the indigenous population ensured their impact on the natural environment was sustainable or recyclable. Now water courses are becoming heavily polluted with sewerage and the plastic debris of a throwaway society.

Besides environmental damage there can be profound social and cultural consequences to travel as well. For example, what is occurring in Northern Thailand, home to many different 'hill tribes,' is a case in point. Uniquely individual in language, customs and dress, these semi-nomadic peoples share a history of ancestor worship and a close relationship with the land. However, with the introduction of eco-tourism they also share the experience of being in something akin to a human zoo. Hill tribe trekking operations sell 'authentic visits’ to see 'primitive peoples`. But what the eco-tourists are not told is that much of the so called culture on show has a tenuous relationship with the actual culture of the people they are visiting, for in actual fact the ‘traditional’ culture has been transformed into a commodity to meet the demands of the tourist market. In short the eco-tourist is being sold an illusion that the culture on display is ‘authentic’.

The ravages of eco-tourism and tourism in general are becoming so self-evident it raises the question what can we do to lessen the impact of human activity but nevertheless still enjoy a holiday – both at home and overseas? Firstly, it is essential to acknowledge that when market forces literally encourage an irrational human impact on the environment and natural resources, how can you also realistically expect those self-same forces to solve the environmental problems they created in the first place? Therefore, in the search for solutions it’s become vital that we look outside of the capitalist box where the social relationships of private ownership of the means of living constrain and restrict our constructive abilities to remedy environmental destruction.

In socialism where the principle of free access underpins the common ownership of the means of living our options and choices on travel and holidays would be extended and influenced by what positive contribution we can make to the country we are visiting. And with package holidays and mass tourism a thing of the past it is most likely holidays in socialism would not be restricted within a timescale of 10 to 14 days of hectic hedonism but transformed into an unique opportunity to stay in a particular location for as long as it takes to understand the history and culture of that region. In effect the transformation in the social relationships from private property ownership to common ownership will radically alter our perception of travel.

Under such conditions eco-tourism will come into its own with visits to particular regions becoming combined with studies on the wildlife, fauna and local culture. On the other hand you may wish to take part in making housing improvements by demolishing shanty towns or transforming a former holiday hotel into flats for the local population. Alternatively you could help out in a health clinic, or even give a hand to clean up polluted waterways. In effect whatever your particular choice of holiday the aim will be to combine it with an understanding that the framework of socialism will assist everybody on the globe in meeting their needs for shelter, food, clothing, education and health. Indeed it’s time to start thinking of trashing capitalism not the planet.

Brian Johnson