Manufactured scarcity (2008)

Book Review from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Green Capitalism. Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance. By James Heartfield. www.heartfield.org .2008

James Heartfield is associated with the former Trotskyist (British) Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which used to publish Living Marxism (LM) and has moved on considerably since “the collapse of Communism” at the end of the 1980's and the dissolution of the formal RCP organisation in 1997. These days the so-called “LM network” produces the edgy www.spiked-online.com website and organises debates and events under the auspices of the Institute of Ideas and a myriad of propaganda campaigns expedited largely through a robust, sometimes entertaining, and not ineffective style of media entryism.

One area this current has been particularly interested in over the last two decades is in promoting a full-on critique of the reactionary imperatives of the politics of “Environmentalism”. In Green Capitalism James Heartfield reminds us that the profit system is essentially a system of rationing, which is now, in certain circles and in a variety of ways, being dressed up as “greenwashing” by Big Business and Governments – as the contemporary ruling elites reinvent scarcity in an age of abundance.

Heartfield rightly presents the capitalist mode of production as an epoch in which the force of human ingenuity has sought to ameliorate the exigencies of life through technical breakthrough with the result that happiness is the condition for most of us in Western societies. I do, however, take issue with the notion that one out of any of the 300 workers at the Lombe silk works on the Derwent in 1721 or the 5000 wage slaves at Arkwright's Mill in Cromford in 1771 woke up for work every day with a sense of unmitigated joy. Whilst those long deceased exploited workers are no longer “variable Capital”, my modern-day neighbours don't seem to enthuse much about the conditions of their means of living whilst having a sup on a Friday night in the local pub, either. Nevertheless, the material gains we have made in the interim between the first factories and 21st century capitalism are impressive.

In a summation of capitalist economics Heartfield tackles the neo-classical economists and suggests they were in effect “Rationers by Trade“ (my phrase not his) but you get the point. Notwithstanding that, the book opens with a great sense of optimism and opines succinctly upon the gains made by the working class under capitalism. The author explains carefully the concomitant progressive and destructive forces at play within the profit system and hints at transcending towards a more rational form of society founded upon technological progress.

This work sets out to show how modern Environmentalism came about as a consequence of ruling elites ideas about scarcity. Heartfield‘s argument is that, in Western society, the myth of the “fragile” planet emerged as a consequence of the retreat from production in the original heartlands of industrial capitalism.

Much of the Green Capitalism provides an excellent exposition of the fools' errand of “Environmentalism” and the levers of power behind that aspect of the moribund profit system. Meanwhile, at times the prose is poor and plodding, and some of the referencing is both points-scoring and unnecessary to make the more essential issue clear. Do we really need to be lectured about Trotsky's ideas on production? Some of this stuff would leave the general reader all at sea in very short order. Whilst a final extraordinary point is clearly made: the world population grew from 791 million in 1750 to 5.9 billion in 1999, as a consequence of advances in agriculture, transport, sanitation, industry. Many of that number exist at the level of subsistence – and it should not be that way! So, from an editorial perspective the narrative simply peters out – a bang and a whimper! Where is the alternative?

Notwithstanding that, this book has much to recommend it, not least for cocking a timely snook at both the modern-day misanthropes who see mankind as a plague upon the planet and the long-dead 'dismal scientists' of neo-classical economics who could not comprehend a theory of productive growth through collective endeavour. Heartfield puts a well aimed, populist boot into the modern-day Green Capitalists – Branson, Goldsmith, Charles Windsor, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Lord (Peter) Melchett, and makes reasoned argument that Western Capitalism has got to go Green for the sake of exploiting new sources of profit.

There is an argument that modern socialists need to take on the Green catastrophists and promote technology and real democracy to face down the spectre of Austerity Capitalism in the 21st Century - in order to kill the pernicious profit system once and for all.

Andy P. Davies

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (77)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 77th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1423 friends!

Recent blogs:

Co-operation

Banks - Who needs them?

150 Years of the Communist Manifesto

Quote for the week:

"The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of other's labour, into the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards a new mode of production." Marx, Capital, Volume III, Chapter 27 (1894)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (76)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 76th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1416 friends!

Recent blogs:

Booms and slumps - what causes them?

Capitalism, war and atrocity

Future al Fresco

Quote for the week;

'A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.' Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25 (1867)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Material World: The next capitalist frontier (2008)

The Material World column from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the last few centuries, one region of the planet after another has been “opened up” to capitalist plunder. Often rival capitalist powers fought over the spoils of conquest. In the 19th century they had the “scramble for Africa.” In the 21st they are scrambling to control the resources of the Arctic, which global warming and technological advance are making accessible to exploitation (Socialist Standard, September 2007).

Once the Arctic and Antarctic are brought fully under the sway of capital, what next? Won’t that be the end of the story, the closing of the last frontier? There remains space, to be sure. But won’t the costs of extracting resources and transporting them to Earth be prohibitive? So you might think.
In fact, the strategists of the six powers that now have active space programs – the United States, Russia, the European Union, China, India, and Japan – already have their sights on the commercial and military potential of the cosmos.

Helium-3
On 22 October India launched the Chandrayaan-1 satellite, and on 11 November it entered Moon orbit. One of its main tasks is to map deposits of Helium-3 (He-3). This isotope, used together with deuterium (H-2), is the optimal fuel for nuclear fusion: in particular, it minimises radioactive emissions. It is very rare on Earth – according to one estimate, only 30 kg is available – because the solar wind that carries it is blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. The dust and rocks in the Moon’s surface layer contain millions of tonnes of the stuff.

It has been calculated that a single shuttle flight bearing a load of 25 tonnes (currently valued at $100 billion) would meet energy demand in India for several years or in the US for one year, while three flights a year would suffice for the world (Guardian, 21 October; Tribune, 23 October).

The main problem is extracting the He-3 as gas from the lunar soil. This requires heating the soil to a temperature of 800ºC. in furnaces or towers, using solar power. (Silicon for solar cells is also abundant on the Moon.) To collect enough gas for one load, it would be necessary to process 360,000 tonnes of soil. Nevertheless, technologically this is believed to be feasible; modern furnaces do actually process such huge quantities of material. Some specialists question whether it would be economically feasible to strip mine the Moon in this way.

Despite uncertainties, Indian strategists hope that the Chandrayaan-1 satellite will enable India to “stake a priority claim” on He-3 resources when lunar colonization begins (SkyNews). India’s main rivals in this field appear to be the US, which has “re-energised” its Moon program and plans to establish a manned base by 2020, and also China.

Enough for everyone?
Given the abundant supply of He-3 relative to foreseeable demand, why should India need to compete with other space powers for preferential access? Surely there is more than enough for everyone.

Yes, but some locations on the Moon’s surface are much better for mining than others. Finding the best locations is the main aim of satellite exploration.

First, the nature of the terrain will obviously matter when building bases and installations, whether operated by human workers or robots. It will be a great advantage to have water (ice) available nearby.

Second, it will be least expensive to work in areas where deposits are richest, where the smallest amount of soil has to be processed for each unit of gas extracted.

Third, reliance on solar power for soil heating (and other purposes) puts a premium on those parts of the lunar surface which are exposed to sunlight for most of the time.

These are also the warmest regions (by lunar standards). An example is the Shackleton Crater at the South Pole. India is especially interested in this area, and it is also here that the US wants to establish its base.

Militarisation of the Moon?
Certain places on the Moon are already thought of as “strategic locations.” Thus, the topography of Malapert Mountain makes it an ideal spot for a radio relay station. Near the Shackleton Crater, it enhances the strategic value of the crater area.

Considerations of this kind will become more important in the event of the Moon’s militarisation. This may happen as a result of competition for land and resources on the Moon itself. Or it may happen simply as an extension of existing military preparations: lunar stations may serve as reserve command centres for wars on Earth.

Even if international agreements are reached to constrain the process of militarisation and divide the lunar surface into zones belonging to the various space powers, military threats may arise from “dual use” technologies. Let us suppose, for instance, that instead of mining He-3 a space power decides to generate electricity on the Moon using solar cells and transmit it on microwave beams to a receiving station on Earth. The problem – under capitalism – is that these same beams may equally well be used as powerful weapons against Earth targets.

There will also be potential conflict between the space powers and other countries that for one reason or another are unable to compete in this sphere. Like the club of nuclear weapons states, the space powers may constitute themselves as an exclusive club and think up a rationale for joint efforts to thwart “space power proliferation,” that is, to prevent other countries from acquiring space capabilities. The two clubs will, of course, largely overlap.

Space programs and socialism
It is absurd for humanity to venture into the cosmos while still divided into rival states and still dominated by primitive mechanisms like capital accumulation. Even the first people in space, almost half a century ago, could see that our planet is a single fragile system.

A world socialist community will have to decide which elements of existing space programmes to retain and which to freeze or abandon. National programmes that are retained will be merged into global programmes, eliminating the wasteful duplication inherent in the competition among space powers. Ambitious programs of purely scientific interest may be deferred pending the solution of more urgent problems.

Attitudes in a socialist world toward reliance on space activities may diverge quite widely. Some people may wish to enjoy the benefits of a complex high-consumption lifestyle made possible by He-3 fuel for nuclear fusion and other off-Earth technologies. Others may prefer to avoid the irreducible risks of a space-dependent strategy and solve Earth’s problems here on Earth, at least to whatever extent this proves possible.

Stefan

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (75)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 75th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1418 friends!

Recent blogs:

Work as it is, work as it could be

Five benefits of not having money

The Keynesian myth

Coming Events:

Did you enjoy your Christmas?

Public Meeting followed by Social.Saturday 10 January, 6pm, at SPGB Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North).

Quote for the week;

'The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages...will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without suspecting that the system is inimical to their best interests.' Rothschild Brothers of London communique to associates in New York June 25, 1863.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

The return of Karl Marx (2008)

From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx is again enjoying something of a revival. After his views on the globalising tendencies of capitalism, it is now his theory of crises that is attracting interest and being discussed in the media. Unfortunately not always accurately. For instance, in an article headlined “BANKING CRISIS GIVES ADDED CAPITAL TO MARX’S WRITINGS”, Roger Boyes, the Berlin correspondent of the (London) Times wrote (20 October):

“Marx's new relevance relates mainly to his warning about the creation of an exploitative capitalism that ends up destroying itself: ‘An over-expansion of credit can enable the capitalist system to sell temporarily more goods than the sum of real incomes in created current production, plus past savings, could buy,’ said Ernest Mandel, the Marxist scholar, quoting his guru, ‘but in the long run, debts must be paid’. Since these debts cannot be automatically paid through expanded output and income, capitalism is destined for a ‘Krach’ - Marx's word for a crash.”

If the suggestion is here, as it seems to be, that it was Marx’s view that capitalism will end up destroying itself in one big Krach, then it is wrong as Marx never argued that there was some flaw in the economic or financial mechanism of capitalism that would lead to it collapsing for purely economic reasons. In his view, as expressed in the last-but-one chapter of Capital on “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”, capitalism would come to an end by the working class becoming more and more organised and eventually expropriating the expropriators and ushering in a society based on “co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself”. In the meantime capitalism would continue being subjected to an ever-repeating cycle of boom and slump, with each boom ending in a Krach which would eventually create the conditions for a recovery of production and the next boom . . . and the next Krach.
The following day the (London) Times2 section of the paper had a full-page photo of Marx on its front page saying “He’s back. Does the financial crisis prove that Karl Marx was right all along?”. The main article, by a Philip Collins, was just silly, but some of those asked to comment did have something sensible to say, in particular Mick Hume (introduced as “The Times’s libertarian Marxist columnist, launched and edited Living Marxism magazine 20 years ago” who said on this issue:

“Marx was right to identify and analyse the tendency towards crises within capitalism, but he did not predict the system's ‘inevitable’ collapse. Today too many people who have never read or understood Marx are trying to turn him into an anti-capitalist Nostradamus who supposedly predicted it all, a soothsayer rather than revolutionary social scientist. Marx always emphasised that the resolution of a crisis would ultimately depend on political factors: that man makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing.”

Hume has come a long way since, as the Trotskyist editor of what we used to call Dead Leninism, he advocated that workers should follow a vanguard party.

One of the others asked to comment was the Labour MP John McDonnell who proposed that “Das Kapital and Wages, Prices and Profit should be issued to all government ministers as the definitive guides to the causes of capitalism in crisis”. He also recommended a book by Ernest Mandel and another by David Miliband’s father who considered himself a Marxist. If he re-reads Wages, Prices and Profit himself he will see that Marx urges workers to adopt the revolutionary watchword “Abolition of the Wages System”, which is the last thing the party he represents in Parliament wants.

Mandel was in fact writing above only about credit crises, not economic crises. And he wasn’t quoting from his “guru”. The passage Boyes quotes is not from Marx but from Mandel (see http://isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article140). Mandel, who died in 1995 was another Trotskyist, the leader for many years of one of the many “Fourth Internationals”, did, despite this, have a grasp of Marxian economics (at least, as applied to the West since he mistakenly thought Russia wasn’t capitalist). Even so, it is not clear that Marx would have expressed himself in the same terms. For instance, credit - if it is genuinely credit and not just the issue of more paper currency by the central bank - can’t exceed “past savings” plus savings from “real incomes created in current production” since these are precisely the source of any credit, i.e. of the money that is loaned.

Of course debts do have to be repaid and if for some reason (such as overproduction in relation to the market for some key product) they can’t be, the banks and other financial institutions will be in trouble and a financial Krach or, as we say nowadays, a credit crunch will result. Marx wrote quite a bit about these and, to give Boyes his due, he recognises this even mentioning the articles Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in 1857 on “The Financial Crisis in Europe” of that year.

But then he goes on:

“In the manifesto, published in 1848, he lists the ten essential steps to communism. Step five was ‘Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state . . .”

It is true that one of the ten immediate measures, listed at the end of section two of the Communist Manifesto, that the Communist League of Germany advocated should be taken if political power in Germany was to fall into the hands of the working class in the course of the anti-feudal and anti-dynastic revolutions of 1848, did include

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly”.

But there was no chance of the working class gaining control of political power at that time, as Marx and Engels later came to realise. In their preface to the first reprint of the pamphlet in 1872 they wrote that “no special stress should be laid” on the ten proposed measures which had “in some details become antiquated”. So to describe them today, in 2008 over a 150 years later, as “the essential” “steps to communism” is absurd.

No doubt the working class, when it does come to win control of political power, will have to have drawn up a programme of immediate measures, but they won’t include setting up a single State Bank as, given the development of the forces of production, society can now move straight to socialism (or communism, the same thing) where there will be no need for banks as there will be no need for money. What the manifesto elsewhere called “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling” can now be achieved immediately.

Adam Buick

Poles Apart? Climate Change, Capitalism or Socialism?

Filmed forum featuring Glenn Morris of 'Arctic Voice' and Brian Gardner of The Socialist Party. The forum was held at Conway Hall in Central London and dates from April 5th 2008.

Part 1: Poles Apart? Climate Change, Capitalism or Socialism?

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NixsJqxiGQ

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbqp3gagBOY

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHK2vafV78

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd6ujmSMohw

Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggp49GKOJ7A

Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glGlaKxUq-Y

Part 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iAOBT3NUH8

Part 9: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PO8EiKJgIA

Part 10: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vDGcmZFAAc

Part 11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw8eCjtE_7k

Part 12: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8avRnRLfzU

Part 13: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukfrhEAnKDQ

Part 14: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5txAgJ9iqk

Editorial: How to lose friends and alienate people (2008)

Editorial from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be hard to devise a scenario more likely to set the UK media drooling than the storyline that developed during late October. A couple of indiscreet politicians and an aristocrat enjoying the hospitality of a Russian oligarch's superyacht moored off Corfu is not newsworthy in itself of course.

What really attracted the attention of the media was the Tory shadow chancellor (George Osborne) and his indiscreet breach of the code of honour of his old upper-class binge-drinking club, and particularly his friend Nathaniel Rothschild, - who's guest he was - and who is also apparently worth a bob or two.

Osborne made the mistake of gossiping about a conversation he had on board with Peter Mandelson. At the time he was messing around in boats this summer he was an EU Commissioner for Trade but has since returned as a peer to Labour (previously known as New Labour), after various spells as the “architect” of New Labour (previously known as Labour).

If you're feeling confused, don't worry - what is of interest to socialists is how the whole episode has lifted a grubby stone to uncover many examples of the shenanigans of our ruling class. For example, one person in the vicinity was Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elizabeth who had her own boat nearby and was spending a week in the Mediterranean just to plan her 40th birthday celebrations. ( If that’s how long the planning takes, what were the actual celebrations like?).

Anyway, upset that his mates were bitching about each other only a few weeks after the yacht-party, Rothschild dropped Osborne right in it by accusing him of soliciting funds for the Tories, from the yacht owner. His name is Oleg Deripaska and he actually comes over better than most in this episode, despite being alleged to be a thug who has effectively extorted billions of roubles out of the state-owned industry through close involvement with the Russian mafia. This is of course outrageous, but if we are being consistent, it is pretty much how most of today’s capitalist class got their wealth, whether a few centuries or a few generations earlier.

This story of thieves falling out in the playgrounds of the rich sheds a little light on how our increasingly inter-connected economic and political upper-class spend their money and time (what Peter Mandelson might term “serious relaxing”). But all parties to this grubby exchange – the economic sugar-daddies and their political lapdogs – appear to have now conveniently agreed to call a truce rather than risk damaging their collective reputation.

Discretion in their discussions with each other obviously counts for more than transparency and accountability to the rest of us who actually create the wealth they go to such lengths to consume. Entering a period of rising unemployment and re-possessions is probably not the best time for the “have-yachts” to rub our noses in the details of the marvellous parties they always seem to be throwing for each other.

Any workers who share our anger with, and analysis of the problems of, capitalism are encouraged to apply to join via the address below on this page. Needless to say, this address can be used also for any billionaires wishing to make a donation.

Greasy Pole: Lamont - When Cameron Got It Wrong (2008)

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

David Cameron is in the habit of sprinkling his speeches, like throwing stale currants into a stodgy spotted dick, with unfunny jokes intended to persuade us that a ruthlessly ambitious, manipulative politician can have a harmless sense of humour. Remember the crack in what was called his keynote speech at this year’s Tory Conference, that he respects entrepreneurs and he knows what he is talking about because he goes to bed with one every night and – in time to get the laughter rocking again – wakes up with the same person every morning. The eagerly tamed audience were enthralled as well as amused and Cameron was able to forget that his bedtime entrepreneur – who, for those who have not been paying attention is his wife Samantha – is a very rich one; her father is an Old Etonian stockbroker and 6th Baronet, her parents are divorced and her mother is now Viscountess Astor. Lucky Samantha showed she has the common touch when she said, in reply to a reporter’s question, that she lived “near Scunthorpe”; it would have gone some way to expunge the image of a blackened steel town summoned up by that misinformation if she had mentioned that the family’s home is Normansby Hall, a lush 300 acre estate which they have owned since the late 16th. Century. Clearly, the Cameron family’s bit of what the Tory leader calls “this broken society” is comfortingly intact.

Lamont
In that same speech Cameron raised some embarrassed titters among the laughs when he shyly admitted to having been an adviser to Norman Lamont when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Labour Party, he said, never let him forget this episode in his climb up the greasy pole. Quite right too – all Tories would like to forget Lamont, the memory of whose time in charge of the Treasury tends to undermine any theories about a Conservative government being inherently more able to tame capitalism’s crises than a Labour one. Lamont was at Cambridge with some rising stars of the Tory governments of the 1980s – Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan John Gummer. How many fantasy careers, climaxing in occupancy of Number Ten, were sketched out on the backs of cafe menus in those impatient days? Lamont held a succession of jobs until the Men in Grey Suits did for Thatcher; as Major’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury he acquiesced in, and so had some responsibility for, the policy of Britain being part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). When Major put himself up in the contest to succeed Thatcher Lamont managed his campaign and he was then rewarded by Major with the Chancellorship.

Lament’s time as Chancellor was not noteworthy for its controlled tranquillity and optimism; indeed his public standing was so abysmally low that years later he recalled a London cabby telling him that one of his passengers, on seeing Lamont crossing the road, offered five hundred pounds to run him down. (He was not to know, of course, that it could be left to Lamont’s political friends to bloodlessly get rid of him later). He was associated with a recession rated in some quarters as the worst since the end of the war and his blithe assurance that it would be “short-lived and relatively shallow” did not inspire any more confidence than his later claim to descry “the green shoots of recovery” all around – although they were not apparent to his struggling colleagues. This fixation with mouthing statements so unwise that they could only haunt him throughout his career was typified by his telling the Commons, in May 1991, that “Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying”. (He did not view his own projection into unemployment, when it came, in quite so positive a light).

Panic

The big crisis in Lamont’s time so near to the top of the greasy pole was “Black Wednesday”, that day in September 1992 when he oversaw Britain’s withdrawal from the ERM. This was especially embarrassing for him because only weeks before he had given a categorical assurance that nothing of the kind would happen: “There are going to be no devaluations, no leaving the ERM. We are absolutely committed to the ERM. It is at the centre of our policy” (26 August 1992). Little wonder that Lamont was looking so unkempt when, on 17 September 1992, he emerged into Downing Street to face the voraciously waiting hacks. Amid the panic that day interest rates were dizzyingly raised from 10 per cent to 12 per cent and 15 per cent, then brought back to 12 per cent. The Treasury was not alone in its panic; workers who were buying their homes through a mortgage were desperately worried about how they were to afford the higher payments and whether there were more, similarly chaotic, days to come. They were probably too anxious to notice on their TV screens, as Lamont came through the door of Number 11, that he was followed by a shadowy figure, caught briefly and fuzzily by the cameras. It was his “political adviser” – David Cameron, future Leader of the Opposition, who would one day bellow his scorn at Prime Minister Brown for floundering among the multi-crises of capitalism and who would then be anxious to conceal his association with the ludicrous failure who was once his boss.

Habitual optimists may rejoice that a new age of transparency and candour has dawned with Cameron’s confessed embarrassment at the memory of his time with Lamont. But forgetting a fretful past has been developed to a very fine art by suitably ambitious politicians. There would be, after all, an awful lot of embarrassment for them to misremember. Judge for yourself if this is likely to happen or whether they will continue to see their future as survival through concealment and deceit.

Ivan

“Commerce is more sovereign than the sovereign” (Karl Marx)

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

While the Chancellor of the Exchequer was making his pre-budget announcement based on the mere hope that recovery would begin in 2010, Gordon Brown was addressing a meeting of the employers’ organisation, the CBI. If he stuck to pre-released text of his speech he said:

“We have seen in previous recessions how a failure to take action at the start of a downturn has increased both the length and depth of the recession. That was the mistake made in the recessions of the 1980s and early 1990s. To fail to act now would be not only a failure of economic policy, but a failure of leadership” (London Times, 24 October).

He was being rather selective in his choice of historical precedents. He forgot to mention what happened in the mid-1970s when the then Labour government did try, as his Labour government is trying today, to spend its was out of that recession – and failed. To such an extent that the Prime Minister James Callaghan had to confess to the 1976 Labour Party Conference:

“We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment” (London Times, 29 September 1976).

But Brown also forgot that an attempt was made to try the spend the way out of the 1980s recession. Not in Britain but in France, following the election as President of Labour-type reformist François Mitterrand in May 1981 and his party’s victory in the general election that followed in June. One of their election promises was to abandon the austerity approach of the previous conservative government in favour of:

“a relaunch of economic activity by an increase in the purchasing power of the most disadvantaged and so by a relaunch of consumer goods”.

Sound familiar?

And this is what they did, the first measure the new government took, in June 1981, being to increase the minimum wage, pensions, family allowance and housing benefits and to announce that 200,000 new government jobs were being created. Like Alistair Darling, the Minister of the Economy and Finance hoped to be saved by an early economic recovery:

“We are hoping to anticipate, but in a reasonable way, a recovery in the world economy”.

The world economy’s reply was to force a devaluation of the franc within four months, in October 1981. From then on it was downhill all the way. The following June the government had to devalue the franc a second time, the Prime Minister offering the pathetic explanation:

“the international recovery was not at the rendezvous”.

By October 1982 the Minister of Planning was admitting:

“We must not dream. The crisis we are going through is going to get worse”.

The Prime Minister continued with his inanities:

“The day will come when the recovery will be there”.

In December the Minister of the Economy and Finance confessed:

“It is not us who are the masters of the world. The world goes as it is, it is in the grip of forces that no one can master”.

Then after a third (yes!) devaluation in March 1983 he declared:

“We were banking on an economic growth of 3 percent, but the recovery didn’t come”.

In October 1984 the number of unemployed passed the peak of 3 million (it had only been 1.7 million when Mitterrand came into office).

This failure to shorten and lessen a slump by trying to relaunch popular spending is one of the most spectacular on record. No wonder Brown didn’t mention it.

Brown, Darling and the others may not be around to have to make the abject confessions of failure that Mitterrand’s ministers had to make. But they will have maintained Labour’s record of every Labour government leaving office with a greater number of unemployed than when they took over.

Adam Buick

Putting the rant into itinerant (2008)

From the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (74)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 74th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1408 friends!

Recent blogs:

The Continuing Trade Cycle

The taxation myth

Reply to the BNP

Coming Events:

DID YOU ENJOY YOUR CHRISTMAS?

Public Meeting followed by Social.

Saturday 10 January, 6pm, at SPGB Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North).

Quote for the week:

'Everything in the world is purchased by labour.' Hume, 'Of Commerce,' in Political Discourses, 1752.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Cooking the Books: God and the Market (2008)

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

Commenting on the current world financial crisis former 1968 student leader and now a Green MEP, Daniel Cohn Bendit, said that “the belief that the market is god is over” (Guardian, 17 September). Someone who should know more about God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, hopes this is so as he thinks that the Market has become a rival to his god.

In an article in the Spectator (26 September) Dr Rowan Williams in effect accused “market fundamentalists” of breaking the First Commandment – “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”. He even called in Marx to back up this charge of idol worship:

“Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry.”

Dr Williams is said to be a learned man and he is right: Marx did see capital as the product of human labour which had come to dominate those who produced it (except that he saw this as applying to capitalism in general not just to “unbridled capitalism”).

This was in fact his whole “critique of political economy” (the subtitle of Capital), that the economic laws of capitalism were not the natural laws that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, the Rev Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and the others thought but forces that came into operation only because society was organised in a particular way. Market forces were the result of human activity which had escaped from human control and which had come to dominate them as if they were a natural force.

Dr Williams may also be aware that here Marx was applying to economics the theory that Ludwig Feuerbach had applied to religion in his 1841 The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach argued that, far from God making man in his own image, it was the other way round. Humans made God in their image and attributed to him the powers which they collectively possessed, and then bowed down and worshipped this figment of their imagination. If humans were to realise this and take their own destiny in hand there would be no need for God or religion. So, according to Feuerbach, the Archbishop’s god was also an idol.

The Archbishop was getting a dig at Marx in when he said he said he was right about this “if about little else”. But Marx once made a harsh comment about the Church of England, writing in the Preface to the first edition of Capital, that it would “more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income”.

It is interesting to speculate what the one article it would keep might be. At one time it would have been obvious – Article 38 that “the riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast . . .” If he keeps on reading Marx maybe the Archbishop might be prepared to abandon this one too.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (73)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 73rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1402 friends!

Recent blogs:

Good Cap, Bad Cap

Why not socialism now?

Another Winter of Discontent?

Coming Events:

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Film starts at 4 p.m.

Sunday 23 November: The War on Democracy

"Have we evolved to make money?"

Saturday, 22nd November at 6.00pm

The Socialist Party debates with Dr.Terence Kealey (author of Sex, Science & Profits)

Birkbeck College. (room 407), Malet Street, London. WC1, (nearest tubes: Goodge St & Russell Square)

Quote for the week;

"For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ... At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself." Marx and Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle (1879).

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Have we evolved to make money?

A SOCIALIST PARTY DEBATE

ON SATURDAY, 22nd NOVEMBER AT 6.00PM

'Have we evolved to make money?'

Bill Martin of the Socialist Party debates with Dr.Terence Kealey (Author of Sex, Science & Profits)

BIRKBECK COLLEGE, (Room 407)

Malet Street, London. WC1

(nearest tubes: Goodge St & Russell Square)