Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (60)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 60th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1316 friends!

Recent blogs:

Pioneers of socialism

Wages and exploitation

Why not socialism now?

Quote for the week:

"I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few." William Morris, The Lesser Arts of Life, 1882.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Socialist Party speaker at tomorrow's Glasgow Radical Independent Bookfair

'Learning from 1968……. To the Present'

RADICAL INDEPENDENT BOOKFAIR
August 23rd 2008
Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow

"Recent media reports on the 40th anniversary of the student protests of 1968 recalled students' discontent with class inequalities, civil rights and the increasing beureaucratic control of education. In 2008, in the grip of neoliberalism, recession, temporary contracts, job losses and increasing emphasis on 'employability' in education, it has been reported that today's students no longer want to change society or the education system, but instead just want their education to enable them to get good enough jobs so they can pay their rent. The August RIB will host a symposium that looks at these and other issues surrounding how education policy and practice has developed and changed over the last 40 years, and student/teacher responses to them."

Timetable:

1pm- Angela McClanahan (worker in higher education): Introduction

1.45 start- Benjamin Franks (worker in higher education)

2.05-2.10 start: Gordon Asher (student and worker in higher education)

2.30 Break

3pm Christian Garland (author and activist)

3.20-25 start: Victor Vanni (Socialist Party of Great Britain)

3.40-3.45 start: Audience discussion, chaired by Angela

For more information about the Glasgow Branch of the Socialist Party, visit their website.

Questions of the Day - Parliament

Originally posted on the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist blog

This excerpt was originally published in the Socialist Party of Great Britain pamphlet, Questions of the Day.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always insisted on the necessity for the workers to gain control of the machinery of government before trying to set up Socialism.

The State is the public power of coercion. It arose out of the early division of society into classes, and developed with the development of class conflicts. It is the result of the desire to 'keep order': order, that is, in the interests of the class that is supreme; order to allow the ruling class to protect its property ownership and exploit the rest of the population. Through the ages the State has been controlled, as a rule, by the class that has been economically the most important. Through its control of the State and its power to levy taxes a class that has outgrown its economic importance can often continue for a time to control social affairs. As the State grew in size and complexity it became more burdensome, and the taxes grew with it. This led to quarrels among property owners over the amount of their contributions. Much of the apparent cleavage between parties in modern States is at bottom only indicative of a struggle as to which section of the property owners shall take the weight of taxation.

In the development of the State the modern parliamentary system emerged as the most appropriate means for securing the domination of the capitalist class, the last class to obtain social control. Parliaments were subjected to modification in the course of time and the modern product ensures to the capitalist class their ownership of the means of production and the right legally to exploit the working class.

As the production and distribution of wealth developed on a tremendous scale social affairs have become correspondingly burdensome and complicated. In order to run the State smoothly and secure the peaceable flow of profit, it became necessary to alter parliamentary procedure so that the voice of the mass of the people could be heard; but only in so far as such alterations did not, in the opinion of their leading thinkers, jeopardise the rule of the capitalists. Thus, in due course, helped on by the rivalries of political parties representing sectional propertied interests, each trying to attract working class support and take the edge off working class discontent, the electoral machinery was modified until suffrage became the rule worldwide.

Subject to certain specific commitments to the European Economic Community, Parliament is the centre of power in Britain. It makes the laws and provides for their enforcement Regional and local bodies have certain law-making and enforcing powers but these are subservient to the central body which is supreme and which, where required, supplies the local body with any extra force necessary.

The instruments of power are the army, navy, air and police forces. The final word for setting these forces in motion rests with Cabinet ministers. The Cabinet is the executive council which carries out the will of Parliament. Its members belong to the majority group, or by arrange¬ment are allowed to function through a coalition of parties. In other words, the group that has an absolute majority in Parliament can put into operation whatever decree it wishes by means of its control of the executive — the Cabinet. In theory the Prime Minister is appointed by the Crown (though the selection is confined within narrow limits) and has a free choice in the selection of his ministers; but in fact no Cabinet could survive without a parliamentary majority to sanction its proposals.

Members of Parliament are elected by adult suffrage, and the vast majority of the voters are members of the working class. The result is near enough democratic to ensure that when the mass of the working class understand and want Socialism they have the means to bring it into being through parliamentary action.

Up to the present, the mass of the workers have lacked this political knowledge and have voted for people instead of principles. They have given their votes to those poli¬ticians who made the most alluring promises. As time proved the hollowness of those promises, the workers turned in disgust from one group of political leaders to another, and then back again, as the memory of the previous disappointments faded.

This fact has led some to question the usefulness of Parliament and to advocate industrial action. But those who have done this have forgotten that the workers have been as readily betrayed on the industrial field as they have on the political. They have forgotten that whenever the workers have placed their trust in leaders they have almost always been let down. This has not been due to the field of combat, but to the method adopted. When the workers cease to regard certain individuals as endowed with some special capacity of leadership, they will adopt the method of issuing to delegates instructions that are to be carried out regardless of the delegates' own views or wishes. The ground will then be cut from under the feet of those who prosper out of leadership, and such people will no longer have a saleable article for the capitalist in the shape of a blind following.

There has not yet been a parliamentary test of the power of delegates acting on instructions given them by a large body of workers knowing exactly what they are after and how to get it. In fact outside of the Socialist Party (and our allied parties abroad) the method has never really been applied. Time after time the specious words of some acknowledged leader have diverted groups of workers from their original aims, generally on the plea of expediency. Expediency has for generations acted as a useful pretext to cover the compromising activities of leaders. The foolish belief in leadership has been a considerable barrier to working class knowledge and progress. The power and wealth leaders acquire induce them to fortify their positions and insist on the necessity of leadership as a permanent institution, accompanied by appropriate means of wire-pulling and mutual bargaining for position.

Socialism will not be possible until the mass of the workers understand it and are prepared to vote for it. When the workers understand Socialism they will know what to expect and what will be involved in putting it into operation.

Two other theories, both of them dangerous and impractical have been put forward by those who deny the usefulness of parliamentary action to achieve Socialism. One is that the workers can gain control of the State without the vote by means of an armed uprising. The other is that the workers can set up their own machinery of government in opposition to the capitalist State. The two theories converge because in practice the capitalist class, controlling the armed forces through their parliamentary majority, will see to it that no hostile armed force comes into being to challenge their supremacy.

When the majority of workers have become socialist there is no need for an armed uprising. They withdraw their support from capitalist parties and support the socialist party so that Parliament, which controls the armed forces, will be composed of socialist delegates. If some capitalists did try to organise resistance they would reveal themselves as a small minority, lacking popular support, trying to create chaos in the furtherance of their sectional interest against the declared will of society: they would be bound to fail.

However this is not the situation the advocates of armed uprising or the setting up of a rival State machine ask us to face. It is not majority action resisted by a capitalist minority they have in mind but a minority action against the capitalist State, with the mass of the workers still not socialist-minded and at most only moved by discontent. This is an altogether different state of affairs. The capitalist government would be in a much stronger position, politically as well as militarily, than the insurgent minority. With the passive backing of most workers, who after all would have voted them to power in a previous election, they would be able to denounce the insurrectionists as opponents of democracy and would-be dictators. Militarily they would have the armed forces and police to crush the uprising.

Minority action is suicidal folly and could not lead to Socialism even if successful. For unless the immense majority of workers want Socialism there is no possibility of it being established. Even if an insurrectionist minority managed to get control of political power, it could not alter the basic problems and processes of capitalism. It would have to contend with the anti-socialist prejudices of the majority and it might be overthrown in another insurrection.

Historically, minority action has been a feature of revolutions which Marx called 'bourgeois', that is, of revolutions which swept away barriers to the development of capitalism and led to the rule of the capitalist class. By the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Marx and Engels, minority action was being rejected as a socialist tactic. But after 1917 the Bolsheviks used the great prestige of the Russian revolution to put the clock back. A tactic which merely led to a change of rulers in Russia came to be popularised as the only way for the workers to win their freedom. But armed uprisings, led by a 'vanguard' party, are a method of a would-be capitalist ruling class and cannot be used by the workers. The workers' method can only be democratic political action based on socialist understanding.

In Britain, Parliament has a complete and secure grip upon the armed forces, and government interventions in the strikes and disturbances of past years have shown on whose side they act. These were a forceful illustration of how necessary it is for the workers to obtain control of Parliament before attempting to uproot the existing foundations of society. They further show that the only way to obtain control is by sending socialist delegates to Parliament.

It has been suggested that when the socialist movement was large enough to challenge the position of the capitalists, the latter would abolish Parliament. The abolition or suspension of Parliament would, in the first instance, end the right of workers to combine, and would thus make illegal all forms of working-class combination, trade union as well as political. But the cost to the capitalists of the abolition of Parliament would be the end of their rule nd the beginning of chaos. The State machine would be unable to function, owing to the conflicting views among civil and military employees of the government.

The size and complexity of a modern nation is so great that the time has long since passed when members of the ruling class could themselves occupy any considerable number of the administrative posts and manage any appreciable part of their activities. From top to bottom all departments are filled by paid or elected officials, and only a very few of these officials are drawn from the capitalist class itself. Practically all the work of controlling the activities of society today is performed by peopfe who depend for their livelihood upon their pay — members of the working class. The armed forces, including most of the officers, are also recruited from the working class.

Thousands of functions have had to be delegated to subsidiary bodies like local councils, statutory boards and tribunals. Year by year this delegation of function grows.

Circumstances, therefore, have compelled the capitalists to place administration in the hands of elected or appointed bodies. If they were to attempt to end this in the face of a determined socialist majority, they would bring their house down about their ears.

The importance of Parliament is quite plainly recognised by the capitalists, and they give clear evidence of this at election times by the amount of wealth they spend and the inconvenience they suffer in order to ensure their control of it.

The attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain on the need to gain control of the political machinery has been logical and consistent. We hold the same view as Marx as to the necessity of the workers gaining control of the machinery of government before they can establish Socialism. We also hold Marx's view that in the industrially advanced capitalist countries the vote will give that control. The one way to prevent the capitalists from using political power against the workers is to refrain from voting them and their agents into political power. Accordingly we have always urged the workers not to vote for any candidate who is a supporter of capitalism.

Pathfinders: Capitalism's model behaviour (2008)

The Pathfinders column from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The business of science, it might be said, is to distinguish what is knowable from what is not knowable. The first great flowering of modern scientific thinking, in the days of Newton, Leibniz and Descartes, established a revolutionary perspective of certainty and predictability on a world previously dominated by a largely religious or superstitious belief in nature’s untameable randomness. Instead of being at the mercy of fate, humanity through science could be its master. Everything, in theory, was knowable. If the position, mass, velocity and direction of every particle could be known, so it was thought, then in principle the entire future of the cosmos could be extrapolated from this knowledge.

This faith in the power of science to unlock any secret seems touchingly naïve today, after the cold showers of quantum physics and chaos theory. But the war continues, between the certainty and uncertainty principles, between what science can do and what it can’t. And inevitably, with possibly the biggest financial crash since the 1930’s on the world’s doorstep, some scientists are looking at the economy and asking the same big questions.

Do financial booms and busts have causes, and are those causes identifiable, and more crucially, predictable? Or is the economy essentially a chaos system, whose workings a computer the size of Jupiter could still not reliably forecast?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury argues (New Scientist, 21 June) that financial bubbles are not only unpredictable and unstoppable, but even useful and desirable. According to this theory, bubbles generate an enormous incentive to take reckless risks in developing new technologies or systems with important social benefits but low financial returns. When the bust comes, the reckless lose their shirts, but the social benefits remain for the rest of us. Thus, for example, the dot-com bubble and bust ruined investors but laid the foundations of the modern internet. The recent housing bubble stimulated the building of lots of houses, which will still be there when prices have crashed, and much more affordable in the future.

There is a lot one could say to this. Firstly, a financial bubble is by definition an inflation in credit out of all proportion to any parallel increase in production, and is in consequence the most inefficient and wasteful method of stimulating development. To say that some good comes out of such catastrophic events is not to say anything at all. Development would have happened anyway, and regularly does, without any inflationary cycle to push it along. Secondly, it is an ivory-tower argument which takes no account of the terrible toll such busts have, not on fatcat investors who can afford it, but on millions of workers who already live on the breadline and have no resources with which to withstand the depredations of global recession. Third, it is an example of ‘spin’, where an admission of lack of control is packaged with a sales-pitch, to make a virtue out of a necessity. It is like arguing that bubonic plague serves a useful purpose, because it stimulates change in society.

When divorced from this preposterous spin, the admission that humans cannot control the economy walks a very dangerous edge. It is only a short step to the Marxian conclusion that the economy – capitalism – is an irrational system and should be abolished in favour of a more rational one. Aware of this, some scientists pursue the neo-Newtonian ideal of being able to predict the market. To this end, they offer us computer models.

What one has to say about computer models from the outset is that they can be a very powerful tool for understanding complex systems, provided that the parameters fed into the models are correct in the first place. The more complex the system, the more complex the parameters, and the less certainty over the initial algorithms. Climate modelling is a case in point. The best computers in the world can only predict the weather with any confidence up to three days in advance, after which the variables spiral exponentially out of control. Thus, attempts to predict the consequences of global warming vary widely.

The established way to test a model is to see how well its predictions accord with past documented events, in this case economic crises. Older models, which presupposed standard economic theories of rational trading and the law of value, that is, prices tending to gravitate towards their proper values, have had no success in predicting inflationary bubbles. Some success is now being claimed for models which recognise irrational elements such as trader fear and the herd instinct, and which are designed around artificially intelligent buyers and sellers who interact among themselves, just like real traders (New Scientist, 19 July). But these new models only deal in probabilities. They estimate that the probability of a bubble and bust event is a good deal more likely than older ‘equilibrium economics’ models suggested. But of course they can’t say when. Worse, while the weakness of fixed parameter models is that the parameters may be wrong, the weakness of artificially intelligent models, computer models which can ‘learn’ and modify their own parameters, is that they may rapidly become as complex and opaque as the system they are trying to emulate. One may end up with a computer model which becomes as incomprehensible as its real life counterpart.

The observation has been made in this column before that a computer model of socialist production and distribution, while complex, could be a useful contribution to socialist thinking and would not have to factor in such unquantifiable elements as trader fear or speculator frenzy. Indeed the strength of the socialist model would be in its relative simplicity. Once total demand and total supply are known, a small standard deviation would suffice because in the real world, based not on floating prices but on fixed use-values and known energy costs, production would proceed in a steady state. Only large scale catastrophic natural events, such as droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis or severe storms would cause any blip in the production process, but unless an event was so catastrophic that it affected global production, such as an unstoppable plague or an asteroid impact, the essentially steady and predictable production of socialist society would be able to absorb it. There’s a Nobel prize waiting for the computer scientist who comes up with the first working model of socialist non-market economics. But of course, they’d only get their prize in socialism. And, one need hardly add, there wouldn’t be any money attached.

Paddy Shannon

Pieces Together: Another Labour Party Success (2008)

From the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

ANOTHER LABOUR PARTY SUCCESS 

"Britain was the world’s biggest arms seller last year, accounting for a third of global arms exports, the Government’s trade promotion organisation said. UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) said that arms exporters had added £9.7 billion in new business last year, giving them a larger share of global arms exports than the United States. “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,” Digby Jones, the Minister for Trade and Investment, said." (London Times, 18 June)

ANOTHER CAPITALIST NIGHTMARE 

"British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world’s most deadly and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban. Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted to the use of the weapons, condemned by human rights groups as “brutal”, on several occasions, including against a cave complex.The use of the Hellfire AGM-114N weapons has been deemed so successful they will now be fired from RAF Reaper unmanned drones controlled by “pilots” at Creech air force base in Nevada, an MoD spokesman added. (Sunday Times, 22 June)

OIL AND WAR 

"A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say. The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said." (New York Times, 30 June)

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (59)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 59th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1315 friends!

Recent blogs:

What to Do About Fascism?

Not Worth the Paper

Free work versus forced employment

Quote for the week:

"Not only can we manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country, but that their interference is becoming more and more a nuisance." Engels, 1881, Social Classes - Necessary and Superfluous.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Bangladesh; migrants export class struggle

From the LibCom website

In recent days over 800 Bangladeshi workers have been deported by the Kuwaiti government for organising strikes and violent protests.

There are about 200,000 workers from Bangladesh in the Gulf countries, mostly employed in cleaning services, security guards or construction. Every year thousands of poor Bangladeshis pay a labour recruiting agent (dalal) to arrange temporary jobs in Kuwait and other wealthy countries. Many workers find the labour brokers have ripped them off as pay is much less than promised - and sometimes less than other workers doing the same job. Others find on arrival the agents have failed to provide any work and so leave them stranded at the airport. Accomodation is also inadequate and expensive so that the whole point of the migration - to save and send money to family back home - becomes impossible.

It is common for employers to demand the passports of workers at beginning of employment, under threat of lower wages if workers refuse. But this makes workers vulnerable as they risk deportation if police find them without documentation. (Unsurprisingly therefore, there are thousand of illegal migrant workers, often using false ID.) If workers make demands on the boss he can simply inform the police that the worker is dismissed and so no longer has any legal right to remain in the country; wages owed to workers are sometimes used to pay for the travel costs of their own deportation.

Amin Ahmed Chowdhury, a former Bangladesh ambassador to Oman, told bdnews24.com: "Brokers of employers and recruiting agents take workers' passports on arrival, saying they are necessary for making identity and medical cards."

"Their exploitation starts with the taking away of passports," said Amin, who pointed out the practice was illegal.

He added that the brokers of the recruiting agents often made workers sign new contracts in a foreign language for much lower wages than pledged in Bangladesh. (independent-bangladesh.com 7 Aug 08)

***

Kuwaiti newspaper Arab Times in a report yesterday said one of the workers alleged that the company has not paid two months' wages to a number of workers, and is not giving them weekly holiday.

Some of them are even forced to work 16 hours a day without any payment for overtime work, he said.

Another worker said the manager of the company beat up some workers for no reasons, and deducts five dinars per day if any worker fails to turn up for work due to illness.

He alleged that the company is compelling them to buy plane tickets from a certain travel agency, which charges exorbitant fares, the Arab Times reported.

“We want the company to pay our wages through bank, besides paying us for overtime. Most of the workers are falling sick because of the long hours of work. The company is also not allowing us to take sick leave. How can we work under such an environment?” the worker posed a question. (Daily Star 22 July 08)

The trouble began in the last two weeks of July. Thousands of Bangladeshis and other South Asian migrants (from Nepal, India, probably Pakistan, etc.) employed as cleaners, rubbish collectors and stevedores/dockers went on strike over a long list of grievances; poor wages, poor working conditions, overtime without pay, lack of sick leave and time off, etc. The workers also claim that employers force workers to pay extra for health and accomodation — costs they say should be borne by the companies. Demonstrations at two sites where they're housed outside Kuwait City turned violent, with workers smashing windows, vandalising cars and clashing with camp officials, police and army - who moved in with tear gas and clubs. 800 Bangladeshi demonstrators were arrested on 28th July but clashes continued for several days.

"The army beat us mercilessly while breaking up the protest and also in detention camps," said Mohammad Ilyas, 28, who started work in Kuwait three years ago after selling everything he owned and borrowing from relatives to afford the agent fees. "Now I am a wretched person. My dream is over, he said." (Reuters, 1 Aug 08)

As the deportees arrive back in Bangladesh, evidence of beatings by Kuwaiti police and soldiers are plainly visible. While cracking down on the unfamiliar sight of public violent labour unrest by its normally invisible migrant labour force, the Kuwaiti state is obliged to recognise its dependency on exploiting cheap South Asian labour for its menial jobs. So it has conceded that it will abolish the dalal labour broking/pimping system and set a minimum wage at over double the present rates of pay.

The two exports; Ready Made Garments & Ready Made Workers

Bangladesh has also announced greater regulation of labour brokers' practices. Despite its complete disinterest in ever previously regulating or limiting workers' exploitation by local recruiting agents, the Bangladeshi state is now also anxious to resolve the labour unrest and repair the damaged reputation of their migrant workforce; over 5 million Bangladeshis work abroad, mostly in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, sending home around $8 billion a year and providing a vital foreign exchange injection to Bangladesh's economy. This is almost as much as the $9 billion the country's other main export - ready made garments - brings into the country.

Keeping the home fires burning

The migrants return to the ongoing struggles at home. Despite the continued State of Emergency in Bangladesh, a report published this week describes the growth in unrest among garment industry workers over the first six months of 2008. There were 72 incidents of labour unrest related to unpaid wages, lay-offs and holiday time disputes; and in 13 cases, workers took to streets to protest at the killing or torture of fellow workers. At least 988 workers were injured in clashes with police; 45 workers were arrested, over 10,000 were fined and at least 78 sacked over participation in demonstrations. The incidents have been spread over all the main ready made garment centers.

The protests and strikes followed a familiar pattern; an incident in one factory sparks a walkout, then those workers march to other factories and bring out many other workers. Demonstrations often become roadblocks; police actions can often result in rioting, fierce large-scale clashes with cops and sometimes attacks on bosses' property. All this is in the context of some of the lowest wages in the world, ever-higher food and fuel prices and employers often refusing to implement previously agreed improvements in pay and working conditions. Food prices have doubled in Bangladesh since September 2006, while wages have remained largely static.

The high level of struggle of the Bangladeshi working class continues and now spreads across borders.

Ret Marut

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