Cooking the Books: Capitalism with Chinese characteristics (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month a pro-Beijing think-tank, Anbound, sent us (and others) an op-ed on ‘China’s state capitalism in the Eyes of the West’. Although the words ‘state capitalism’ were sometimes in inverted commas, sometimes they weren’t suggesting that they had no real objection to the term.

The article was in response to one that had appeared in the Economist on 15 August entitled ‘The new state capitalism: Xi Jinping is trying to remake the Chinese economy’. This argued that the head of the Chinese dictatorship, Chairman Xi, ‘is presiding over what he hopes will be the creation of a more muscular form of state capitalism. The idea is for state-owned companies to get more market discipline and private enterprises to get more party discipline, the better to achieve China’s great collective mission.’

The Chinese think-tank summarised the Economist article:

  ‘China is gradually establishing a commercial legal system, and its response to enterprises is more sensitive. The formulation of bankruptcy and patent regulations has increased fivefold since 2012. Predictable rules make the market run more smoothly as well as increase economic production. Finally, the last element is to blur the boundary between state and private firms. State-owned enterprises are forced to increase financial returns to attract private investors’.

This sounds like the sort of ‘mixed economy’ that exists in the West, so why is it called ‘state capitalism’ and not just ‘capitalism’? The answer seems to lie in the sentence that followed:

 ‘At the same time, the state has also strengthened the implementation of strategic control over private enterprises’.

Even this is not that different from what some governments of traditional capitalist states aspire to, though in China’s case it is being done more systematically and by a state controlled by a single dictatorial party.

In any event, it is not the same as the state capitalism that used to exist under Mao where most of the industrial means of production were owned by the state, itself monopolised by a bureaucracy whose top members effectively owned them collectively and benefited from this in terms of a privileged lifestyle. When referring to the USSR, which was the same, Maoists called the privileged ruling group a ‘red bourgeoisie’. A case of people in glasshouses throwing stones.

What exists today is more akin to the New Economic Policy that the Bolsheviks were forced to adopt in 1921 and which Lenin described as the development of capitalism under the control of ‘the proletarian state’, by which he meant a state controlled by a vanguard party (falsely) claiming to represent the working class. For Lenin this was to be a temporary expedient to help overcome Russia’s economic backwardness, and the capitalists it generated were small fry. In China it is seen as a permanent situation in which the one-party state controls and directs the activity of large shareholder-owned capitalist corporations, many export-oriented.

Is it a viable alternative way of running capitalism to the multi-party political system that exists in the capitalist countries of the West? It is certainly working at the moment. The new class of private capitalists seem content with the situation and are not campaigning for the end of one-party rule. They probably prefer the stability this brings, just as their counterparts in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did.

In fact, like them, China is seeking to control and direct private capitalism to achieve the same ‘great collective mission’ of winning a place in the sun at the expense of the older, more established capitalist states that dominate the world.

Capitalism vs the Environment (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution, capitalism has had a relentless impact on the environment, causing devastating climate change. With production motivated by making money rather than safeguarding the environment or satisfying people’s, needs wasteful and polluting methods will be used if they minimise costs and maximise profits. Any legislation which aims to curb environmental damage still has to fit into this framework. We in the Socialist Party do not shout for minimum reforms or minor changes to current worldwide production methods in an attempt to mitigate or offset the damage already done. Instead we believe that the only real solution is an end to the root cause of the problem, that is capitalism itself – nothing more, nothing less

We believe that it is the workers of the world who do all the producing and wealth creation, yet we are the last to realise the benefits when profits are growing. And the first to experience the hardships of downturns, recession and austerity.

The Socialist Party, which is part of the World Socialist Movement, is like no other organisation, insofar as we are the only group calling for an end to capitalism, and for it to be replaced by global socialism. This would be a world based on a revolutionary change of the means of production, from being owned by a tiny minority to being held in common ownership with free access to goods and services according to individual and self-defined needs.

The Socialist Party has been advocating revolutionary change since its inception in 1904. If you would like to learn more, then please visit spgb.net where you will find all the information you need, including details of points of contact in your local area.

Covid and capitalism’s unnecessary dilemma (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The crisis provoked by the coronavirus pandemic has brought out clearly the nature of capitalism as a system where most people depend on the income they get as wages from employment. They are in this position because they are excluded from ownership and control of the places where they work and where wealth is produced. These are in the hands of a minority, generally through joint-stock companies, who use them, in fact only allow them to be used, to produce goods and services for sale with a view to profit.

To obtain the money to buy what they need, the excluded majority has to go out on to the labour market and successfully sell their ability to work in return for a money wage (sometimes called a salary). Some, who have a long-term job and so a regular income, are able to convince a bank or a building society to grant them a long-term loan to buy a house or flat, which will be theirs if they keep up repayments and interest for 25 years or so. Others work in precarious, low-paid jobs and have to rely between jobs on state hand-outs or the informal economy to survive. Those who are unemployable, through long-term sickness or disability, have to rely entirely on meagre hand-outs from the state.

When wages stop

One of the measures taken by the government to try to slow down and limit the spread of the virus has been to close down all but ‘essential’ businesses, defined mainly as those engaged in producing, transporting or selling food and other everyday household essentials. Over ten million workers – some 35 percent of the employed workforce – have been affected. If the government had not stepped in, all these would have been without resources within a few months, if not before. Such is the precarity in the end of all those dependent on working for a wage. They can’t stop working for much more than a month or so without having to beg for a handout from the state to survive.

A fall in living standards affecting so many people was something that the government could not let happen, if only to maintain public order and avoid widespread civil unrest. The scheme it came up with to avoid this was ‘furlough’ – enabling employers to keep workers on their books without them working but with the government paying 80 percent of their previous earnings. On 8 May, 8.9 million workers were furloughed. Some 1.6 million more were not so lucky. They lost their job and had to rely on means-tested Universal Credit, the number claiming this surging from 2.6 million in February to 4.2 million in May. Since Universal Credit only brings your income up to the official poverty line these suffered a drop in income of considerably more than 20 percent.

The government was prepared to fork out the money – obtained by borrowing it – but only on a temporary basis on the assumption that the business closures would only need to last a few months. Since a government has no resources of its own, it can get money to spend only by borrowing it from capitalists or from taxes that will ultimately fall on capitalists. No government can go on compensating workers for any lengthy period for being deprived of their usual source of income – the wages paid by their employers for the use of their working skills to produce some good or provide some service for profit. It’s just not sustainable.

The government has to aim to get the economy – production for profit – going again as soon as possible, with workers producing sufficient amounts of new value to provide a profit for their employer and to cover their own consumption. The government did try to do this after a few months but this proved to be too soon and the virus began to spread again, threatening once more to overwhelm the health service, though epidemiologists had been warning that this was likely to happen anyway.

Hence the government’s dilemma – which to give priority to: profit-making or public health? Hence, too, a particular problem for the present Tory government under pressure to prioritise the economy from the small businesses, which mainly cater for workers’ consumption and many of which risk going under, whose owners are an important support base for that party. In the end, as long as no effective vaccine is widely available and if the virus continues to spread, that is what the government will have to do.

They won’t have a choice. Despite the inevitable public outcry and political consequences, the government would be forced to sacrifice the health of the old who, in any event from a capitalist point of view, are a burden as they no longer work to produce the profits that capitalism is all about. It might not come to this –vaccination might become widespread or else the virus might peter out – but if neither of these happen within a year or so this is what would have to happen.

As it might be

In a socialist society a pandemic like the present one could be dealt with rationally without the complications that occur under capitalism due to its production for profit and working for wages. Where the means of wealth production are the common property of society these will be used to produce solely and directly to satisfy people’s needs and not for sale with a view to profit.

Even in such a society a pandemic of the kind we are currently experiencing could occur and the measures to be taken to contain it – basically, social distancing while a vaccine is developed – would be the same. However, these measures would be being implemented within a quite different framework. Everybody would already have access to what they need simply by virtue of being a member of society, without having to pay for it out of money wages obtained by working for an employer. Those able to contribute in terms of work would cooperate to produce what was needed, while everyone would have free access to what they required to meet their needs. In short, the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ would apply.

This would be a much better framework within which to deal with any pandemic. To reduce contact between people, some production units and distribution centres might have to be closed and most people expected to stay at home except to collect food and other essentials as now. However, this would not be accompanied by the problems that result from doing this under capitalism. No production unit would ‘go out of business’ and not re-open; productive units would simply be temporarily closed. No-one would suffer a reduction in what they needed; free access for all, whether at work or not, to food and everyday essentials would continue. It would be inconceivable, indeed incomprehensible, that some children would have to go without a meal outside of term time.

If there was a longish delay in finding an effective vaccine or if the virus continued to spread for a couple of years or more, this would amount to a ‘natural disaster’ situation and some temporary rationing of non-essentials might have to be introduced. Once again, this would be done rationally, without the complications of maintaining production for profit and workers’ incomes, as the context would be a world of common ownership and production directly to satisfy everybody’s needs.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: To workers from Ireland (2020)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of you will be concerned about what is happening in places like Belfast and Derry. You will probably support the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland,

We too are concerned about the conditions our fellow workers in other parts of the world have to live and work under. We know that the role of the police and army is everywhere to protect private property and the existing political set-up.

When Ireland got independence in 1921 the North East part for economic reasons, was kept under British rule though given a parliament and government of its own. The government there has since armed itself with various undemocratic powers to use against its opponents. It is against these powers, and against bad housing and unemployment, that the Civil Rights people are protesting.

Protest movements are nothing new and are not confined to Northern Ireland. They exist everywhere and show that everywhere workers are discontented with some aspect of their lot. It is by promising to do something about this that politicians obtain your votes — and it is their failures that lead people to protest on the streets.

The politicians fail not because they are dishonest or incompetent but because capitalism cannot be made to work for the good of all.

If you accept this, then you will see that direct action is in the end as futile as voting for parties that stand for capitalism. You will see too the uselessness of a United Ireland as a way of solving the problems of workers in the North. This would merely be a political re-shuffle — a change of masters, we would say — that would leave unchanged the class basis of society which is the real cause of these problems. As anyone who has lived in the Irish Republic can confirm, people there face the same problems of bad housing, unemployment and insecurity (indeed this may be why you are now living here in Britain).

The lasting solution to these problems in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Britain and the rest of the world is Socialism.

(Socialist Standard, December 1970)

US politics: what to expect from Biden and Harris (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

What can we reasonably expect from the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

An assessment of the likely policy orientation of the new administration would ideally take into account the record of the political careers of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the sources of finance for their campaign, the appointments that Biden makes to cabinet post, and – last but not least – the political and economic circumstances in which the Biden White House will have to operate.

We do not yet know about appointments. In accordance with customary practice, some key personnel will no doubt be recycled from the Obama administration. However, we do have information about campaign finance. And from the long political careers of Biden and Harris we can learn a great deal about their attitudes and their patterns of behavior. Biden has under his belt 38 years as a senator plus two terms as Obama’s vice president. Harris has had four years as a senator; before that she was District Attorney of San Francisco for seven years and Attorney General of California for six.

A useful account of Biden’s career is provided by Branko Marcetic, a staff writer for Jacobin magazine, in his book Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden (Verso and Maple Press, 2020). In the November 2020 issue of Jacobin the same writer analyses the financing of this year’s presidential election campaigns. Another exposé is that written and published by Chris Aclixia under the self-explanatory title The Biden/Harris Ticket Is The Ultimate in Plutocracy: Screw The Little Guy.

Biden the compromiser 

Two points bear special emphasis. First, Biden has always been a great believer in bipartisanship and consensus. The leitmotif of his recent victory speech, for which he received fulsome praise from the corporate media, was his commitment to national unity and ‘healing’ after the divisiveness of the Trump presidency. Unity presupposes compromise. Biden’s compromises, however, are always with the Republicans to his right. And as the latter are much less willing than he to make concessions, ‘compromise’ generally turns out to be a euphemism for surrender.

Marcetic sums up the sorry result as follows:

‘Biden has spent his career reflexively adopting his right-wing opponents’ position as his own… He has repeatedly worked with Republicans to advance [many of] their political goals, dismantling the legacy of the New Deal in the process… Biden has got swept up in every right-wing panic of the last few decades – crime, drugs, terrorism — often going even further than Republicans in his response’ (p. 6).

This brings us to the second point. Both Biden and Harris have made major contributions to the explosion over recent decades in the size of the prison population – a phenomenon that has led many observers to call the present-day United States a ‘carceral state.’ As district and state attorney in California, Harris was keen to get even non-violent petty offenders locked up and reluctant to agree to their early release, which she opposed on the grounds that they were an important source of cheap labor for the state. But when her subordinates urged her to prosecute a crooked businessman she refused. Later he made a generous donation to her campaign fund.

Who paid the piper?

Now let’s follow the money. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

Trump versus Biden was the most expensive election ever held. The combined spending of the candidates is estimated at $14 billion – over twice the amount spent in the 2016 presidential election.

Many companies gave money to both candidates. Especially firms in the military-industrial complex. They certainly had no reason to be displeased with Trump, but they wanted to hedge their bets.

Mining corporations and the fossil fuel industries (oil, gas, coal) supported Trump. The high-tech firms in Silicon Valley supported Biden.

The financial sector – ‘Wall Street’ – backed Biden, as it had backed Obama and Hillary Clinton. The medical industry gave to Biden, presumably because he has always firmly opposed national healthcare schemes like ‘Medicare for All.’ Show business supported Biden, as did lobbying and law firms.

Overall, more billionaires gave money to Biden (150) than to Trump (108). Most small business owners supported Trump.

Circumstances

In the American political system, the executive branch governs not alone but in collaboration and conflict with Congress and the judiciary. The Democrats are set to retain their control over the House of Representatives, but the Senate hangs in the balance. Which party controls the Senate always has a palpable impact on the effectiveness of a presidential administration.

Whatever happens to the Senate, the Biden administration will be burdened with a conservative Supreme Court that is likely to rule radical new legislation (if there is any) unconstitutional.

We must also take into consideration budgetary and other economic constraints – some flowing directly from the current situation, others imposed by the general requirements of the capitalist system.

Thus one change that does seem likely to occur as a result of this election is the adoption of serious measures at the federal level to bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control. However, similar measures already taken in states with Democratic governors have proven costly enough to jeopardize other state-funded services. The same problem will now arise in the federal government. Even if taxes on the wealthy are restored to pre-Trump levels, it is hard to imagine a fiscal situation less conducive to maintaining – let alone expanding — social provision.

Policy implications

What are the implications of all this for the policies the Biden administration is likely to pursue?

We can expect some reforms, if only for the sake of appearance, but hardly any with real substance. For example, the United States will probably rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change, but there will be no Green New Deal (or at least nothing worthy of such a grand name). In the field of healthcare there may be an attempt to revive Obamacare – nothing more.

Those radicals who seek to ‘push Biden to the left’ under current circumstances have set themselves a truly Herculean task.

Stefan

A Lesson from Trump (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The day after the outcome of the American presidential election became clear, someone wrote on our party’s Facebook page: ‘I can’t help but feel a lot happier this morning, knowing that the odious vile strange orange man has been sent packing’. There can be no doubt that, on a visceral level at least, many other workers worldwide felt a similar sense of relief that the unspeakable individual in charge of America had been dismissed from office. When I wrote to my sister-in-law the same day to wish her a happy birthday, she replied that ‘getting rid of the monster is the best possible present’. On a political level too many people were relieved, in view of the widely expressed claim that, if re-elected, Trump would have proceeded to establish some kind of dictatorship stamping on all dissent and in particular taking draconian measures, Mussolini or even Hitler style, against all ‘progressive’ forces.

Yet could this actually have happened? There is no doubt that Trump showed psychopathic traits similar to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin – arrogant, narcissistic, bigoted, racist, authoritarian, demagogic, etc. But could he have gone ahead and taken control of the American state in the same way as former dictators have taken over their state and wreaked havoc on those who they opposed or who opposed them even to the point of genocide? Part of the answer to that lies in what actually happened in the American elections. What happened was that Trump, would-be dictator or not, was dismissed from office via that country’s democratic electoral process, in much the same way as many other leaders have often been dismissed from office in advanced capitalist democracies. The point is that the US has a well-entrenched mechanism for doing that regardless of whether the incumbent leaves quietly or, as Trump, kicking and screaming. It also has a mechanism (many mechanisms) for preventing an individual, whether deranged or loathsome or anything else, from exercising personal unrestrained power. This means that, even had the result gone the other way and Trump had strutted on as before, he could not have installed himself as the kind of ruthless dictator who rides roughshod over all opposition as Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin did and as others still do today in places where capitalist democracies have not yet – or not yet fully – emerged.

So, continuing the comparison with Mussolini and Hitler, why then were those dictators able to take over in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s? They were able to because Italy and Germany had not at that time reached the same relatively secure level of capitalist economic and political development of countries as the US (and others such as the UK, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, etc.) has today. Italy and Germany in that era did not have the same well-rooted system of political administration that exists today both in those countries and elsewhere and so were always a possible prey to the nationalist demagoguery of a dictator promising to cure all ills while spreading division and crushing opposition.

That same kind of demagoguery has of course echoed favourably with the over 70 million Americans who voted for Trump. And that can only be dispiriting for socialists who see as a prerequisite for the kind of society we advocate – leaderless, moneyless, wageless, frontierless and entirely democratic – the active agreement and support for that society by the majority of the world’s workers. What has happened in the US seems aeons away from that, especially as even the half of the electorate that voted for Biden were only choosing at best a ‘lesser evil’. That ‘lesser evil’, the Democrat Party, will, by the very nature of the system it is in charge of, continue to run that system in a business-as-usual way, i.e. in the profit-seeking interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the majority of the wealth. And this will continue to be the case as long as most wage and salary workers continue to have a mindset that supports, or at least acquiesces in, capitalism and the profit-seeking force that drives it.

Yet, having said that, what the example of Trump’s fall from office has shown is that in the US, as in other advanced capitalist countries, there is a well-entrenched system of democratic voting in place which, when the time comes, can be used by a socialist majority to ‘vote in’ socialism when the necessary consciousness has spread sufficiently for that to happen. And when it does, no would-be demagogue or dictator will be able to do anything to prevent the majority from making it happen.

Howard Moss

Free Meals (2020)

 From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why not free meals for all?

That free meals for children during school breaks was ever an issue is surely a brazen example of the iniquities of capitalism.

The story ran like some synopsis for an updated staging of the musical ‘Oliver’, only it isn’t fiction. Why is it that the sixth largest economy in the world, that has borrowed, and will continue to borrow, many billions of Covid pounds, jibs at a few relatively measly millions to feed children plunged into poverty through no agency of their own?

A more pertinent question is, why should a resource that’s as vital to life as air be rationed by the ability to pay? A society that is struggling with the present pandemic to keep people breathing would not tolerate a system denying oxygen to those without the requisite bank balance.

Yet that is the logic of capitalism. Children, many of key workers on pathetically low pay who daily put themselves at risk of infection, are at the mercy of a squabble between national and local governments as to who will provide a meal a day for them.

The logic of socialism is that food will be available to freely supply the needs of everyone, adult or child. As it will be for all necessities of life. People will take what they need because they won’t have to take or hoard more, just in case. After all no one deliberately tries to breath in more air than they need.

Such will be the outcome of socially organising production to satisfy self-determined needs, rather than the capitalist need to satisfy profit taking and the restrictions on access this necessarily entails. Surprise, surprise, this option is not being promulgated in any of the media coverage of children and their inconvenient urge to eat between term times.

Out of control (2020)

Book Review from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History Of A Failing Civilization by Fabian Scheidler.  (Zero books. 440 pages.)

Whilst this book could be described as a potted history of control and dissent over millennia it is much more than that. It is filled with relevant historical examples which lead to discussion of current global events and the general state of the world. None of the horrific statistics of current deaths in former colonies or empires of the West are new incidents but are merely the long continuation of what began many years ago, have increased, and have become an integral part of the ‘system’, the ‘megamachine’.

Western Christian efforts through history to control and subjugate whole populations to their beliefs continues to the present with, perhaps, a slightly altered emphasis. Now businesses have ‘mission statements’, governments ‘space missions’, and ‘the market’s radical preachers push a universalist ideology’. Structural racism today, the author suggests, comes from colonialism and empire-building which needed justification in order to subject populations to disenfranchisement and exploitation. Hence the Christian religion, along with scientists and philosophers, to declare ‘white’ superiority and exceptionalism. The author’s point here is that the colonial ‘wars’ should more correctly be referred to as genocide.

The underlying theme of the megamachine is that of the cycles of gradual development, decay, and renewed development of the economy, the military and the power of authority – but always linking current practices to earlier, similar planned events. And reminding us in different ways that ‘modern states have arisen neither for the benefit of populations, nor with their consent, but as products of physical violence.’

There are far too many threads to mention in a brief review but all are relevant to the societies we are living in today where everything is compacted and concentrated and where we are living with the results of past decisions. The post-WW2 years began ‘the rapidly accelerating species extinctions that are now threatening to escalate into one of the greatest crises in the history of life on the planet’ but as constant economic growth is an integral part of the machine then that is exactly what should have been expected and was forecast by some more than half a century ago. There is a section devoted to the ills of the current system’s approach to the environment, ecology in general, agricultural and industrial methods, the need for constant growth and the warning of what’s to follow if the decision is to carry on regardless.

A thoroughly worthwhile read with a wealth of useful and relevant information for a book of this size, plus end notes with references and several timelines relevant to the various topics. What there isn’t is a socialist view of the one and only thing to be done to stop the progress of this megamachine. Instead there is a final chapter on ‘Possibilities’ which, depending on your disposition you could either ignore or write your own.

Janet Surman

Rear View: Rashford’s missed penalty (2020)

The Rear View Column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rashford’s missed penalty

Oliver Twist asked for more in 1838. Many more did in 1904: ‘We are told that over 100,000 school children in London alone go breakfastless to school. For them there is little hope for a sturdy manhood. Arrest the progress of physical deterioration amongst the children through the provision of meals by the State to all school children and you will do much to strengthen the physique and stamina of the race’ (Socialist Standard, September 1904). Fast forward 116 years: ‘… UK lawmakers voted against a motion that would have extended free school meals to children over school vacations, helping to offset a growing hunger crisis in the country that has left as many as a fifth of children in households regularly beset by hunger. The vote was a disappointment for Marcus Rashford, one of England’s brightest young soccer stars…’ (time.com, 23 October). We have been used to reformists scoring own goals for two centuries. Any reforms we could win for ourselves on the basis of the capitalist system will always be circumscribed by the need to keep the capitalist system functioning. Mendacious parasites will tell you otherwise. Blair, for example, stated in 1999: ‘Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty forever, and it will take a generation. It is a twenty-year mission, but I believe it can be done.’ Twenty years later, the Daily Mirror ran this headline: ‘DWP child poverty figures a ‘national scandal’ as 4.1 million kids are hit’ (mirror.co.uk, 28 March, 2019). ‘The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which ‘charity’ would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable’ (George Orwell, Tribune, 20 December 1943, published under the name ‘John Freeman’).

Che? No way!

‘Twenty left publishers from around the world release a joint edition including two essential texts by Che Guevara on the fifty-third anniversary of his assassination by the CIA in Bolivia. These texts, with insight from Aijaz Ahmad and María del Carmen Ariet García, provide us with a clear and resolute summation of Che’s spirit of conviction, scientific insights, human compassion, and unrelenting will to achieve the victory of the oppressed over the oppressors’ (thetricobtinental.org, 8 October). Compassion? ‘These people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face of the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names … they would feel completely happy and fulfilled…. ’ (part of Che’s address to the First Latin American Youth Congress in July 1959, three years before the Cuban missile crisis). ‘What I wanted to stress is that the working class is not putting forth its full effort’ (televised speech, 1961). ‘By working on the proletariat’s sense of responsibility, we hope to greatly improve the quality as well as the presentation of industrial products’ (article in Cuba Socialista, 1962). ‘The perfect revolutionary, the member of the ruling party, must work every hour and every minute of his life, during these years of very hard struggle that lie ahead of us’ (speech to textile workers, 1963). In fact, for each of Guevara’s references to the future communist society, he made at least a dozen pleas urging the Cuban workers to increase production.

Leaders get lost!

‘Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel highlighted the imprint left on the Latin American progressive forces by the victory of the Popular Unity of Chile, which brought socialist Salvador Allende to power in 1970…. The revolutionary process of the 1970s remained in Latin American history with its painful but unavoidable lessons for future revolutionary processes in our region, he assured. He also said that during his visit to the Palacio de La Moneda during his stay in Santiago de Chile, in 2013, the historical leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, told him that there was a spirit in that place and invited him to find it. That invitation, coming from a Marxist like Fidel Castro, was totally devoid of mysticism. He was, without a doubt, calling us to review a history that still has much to teach us’ (cadenagramonte.cu, 16 October). Yes, we should learn the lessons of history. Regarding Chile, in her book Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today, D. L. Raby writes ‘with a president voted in by only 36 per cent of the electorate and a coalition which only briefly achieved a little more than 50 per cent (in April 1971), there was no real mandate for revolutionary change.’ And this is what Fidel said when urging Mexican businesspeople to invest in Cuba, in 1988:’We are capitalists, but state capitalists. We are not private capitalists’ (Walter Daum, 1990, The Life and Death of Stalinism). The job of revolutionary socialists, wherever they are, is to make the world socialist revolution and this boils down now to the immediate task everywhere of spreading socialist ideas among the working class.

Nuclear winter or a socialist summer?

‘The weapons, known as intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, are intended as part of a near-total replacement of the American nuclear force over the next few decades at a total cost of more than $1.2 trillion…. The nuclear modernization program was launched by the Obama administration and has been continued by President Donald Trump’ (apnews.com, 20 October).

Editorial: Back to capitalist normality (2020)

Editorial from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this US Presidential election, the billionaire hustler who conned millions of working-class Americans into believing that he had their interests at heart has been given his cards. In the spirit of his rather dire TV show – the Apprentice – about 74 million Americans, mainly workers, declared ‘You’re Fired!’ Unlike his contestants who stoically picked up their bags and left the building, Donald Trump has been throwing his toys out of his pram and has chucked lawsuits around alleging electoral fraud. Some fear that this may be a prelude to an attempted coup or even a civil war. It is more likely that he is performing a last bit of theatre for his supporters, showing them that he is prepared to the fight the ‘Swamp’ to the bitter end, despite rewarding some of their members with top jobs in his government and handing them a huge juicy tax cat in 2017.

We can safely say that Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next US president. Should we be celebrating? The only ones who have any real reason to celebrate are the US capitalist class. They have tired of Trump’s erratic style of government, where policies are made on the hoof without any overall strategy, and dislike the disruption in global trade caused by his trade wars. Many of them are prepared to pay higher taxes in return for this capitalist normality. Unfortunately for them, there was no Biden landslide, as had been predicted. About 70 million Americans, again mostly workers, voted for the orange conman. Perhaps some believe, despite all the evidence, that he is working on their behalf; others like his patriotic posturing, while some are attracted by the religious and social conservatism that he supposedly professes. Some even see in him a saviour from ‘communism’.

There will also be a return, or more accurately a continuation, of capitalist normality for the American working class. They will be still be living in poverty, whether relative or absolute. Homelessness will still blight many workers’ lives and many will resort to food banks. That the Democrats are unlikely to secure a majority in the Senate and that the Supreme Court is packed with conservative judges, which some pundits suggest may limit the ability of the new administration to pursue progressive policies, is beside the point. The real inhibitor is the economic system itself which prioritises profits over human needs. For this reason Biden will not be able to do much about the economic devastation that capitalism has wreaked on the Rust Belt states that provided much of the fuel for Trump’s support, and even if he is more competent in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, the capitalist infrastructure again will provide limits to what he can achieve.

There is much talk about America being deeply divided. This is true, but the real division isn’t, as the media make out, between workers who support Biden against those who support Trump, but between the capitalist class, who own and control the means of production, and the propertyless working class. To overcome this division, we need a socialist revolution not a change in who occupies the White House.

Quote: John Lame Deer (2020)

 From the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.’

John Lame Deer, Lakota Sioux protester and satirist (1903 – 76)

Apologies

 Apologies for the long gap in posting on the blog. Two reasons:

1) The laptop's on its last legs, so scanning etc can be difficult.

2) Blogger decided to change its publishing gizmos and, quite frankly, it's fucking horrendous and it's all but hacked me off to the point where I'm thinking of putting the blog into cold storage. They really have made it ten times more laborious to post. I'll see it out till the end of 2020, and see how I feel about it in the New Year.

Editorial: Science, Politics and Profits (2020)

Editorial from the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

As has long been predicted, the second wave of coronavirus is upon us. All along the government has claimed it has been following the science. On the face of it, this has appeared to be the case. In March, in common with most countries, the government instituted a national lockdown, where all non-essential businesses were closed and the state paid up to 80 percent of the wages of furloughed workers, to suppress the virus. It appeared for once that workers’ welfare was being put before capitalist profits. Prior to this, however, the government toyed with the idea of herd immunity, which had the advantage that businesses could stay open and trade normally, where the virus would be allowed to spread among the population. But with the prospect of millions of workers being laid up in hospital, not making profits for their employers and costing the state billions in healthcare, plus an unacceptably high death rate, the government abandoned the idea and reluctantly went for a national lockdown. The fact that it was implemented late likely led to thousands more deaths.

The decision to end the lockdown was based not on the grounds that the virus was beaten but under pressure from businesses that were feeling the squeeze. This and the lack of a functioning track and trace system have, no doubt, contributed to the recent upsurge. Also, the government urging workers to return to their places of work so as to prop up the local hospitality businesses didn’t help.

This time, the government has disregarded the scientific advice to introduce a second short term national lockdown and instead has brought in a three-tier system in England (separate arrangements have been made in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) where different regions are subjected to varying levels of restrictions according to the severity of infections in their area. It is not hard to see why the government preferred this option. Keep as many businesses open as possible and keep the number of furloughed workers to a minimum. However, it has led to run-ins with some of the Northern local leaders. The most notable one is with Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who initially resisted the imposition of Tier 3 restrictions in his area demanding more money to compensate workers and local businesses.

The government has also to be mindful of the costs of further restrictions. Its debt is already more than 100 percent of GDP, which is creating unease among Tory MPs and Tory supporters in the press.

Although the government couches its measures in terms of saving livelihoods and jobs, it is really capitalist profits they’re worried about. Science is not immune to this priority, so some scientists can always be induced to tell governments what they want to hear. Some scientists have thus signed the Great Barrington Agreement, which argues for ‘focused protection’ and herd-immunity, an approach the World Health Organization and others have described as dangerous, unethical and unscientific. In socialism, we would simply follow the science to beat a virus. In capitalism, nothing is ever so straightforward.

Another Labour Government or Socialism? (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party

Why does anybody join the Labour Party? Some join to make a career for themselves; to become leaders, rulers, future Labour Lords, men and women entrusted to run capitalism. At every Labour Conference it is easy to spot the opportunists: minds dominated by the opinion polls, concerned to be seen supporting whatever illusions or prejudices will win them seats in the places of power, red ties and smiles for the rank and file, but really they are aching to get away from all the noise, back to “the real job” of becoming successful politicians. The average Labour voter is being used by them.

Capitalism

Then there are those workers who join the Labour Party because they want modest reform of capitalism. They want to attend to this or that symptom of the capitalist disease, but will not get involved in the revolutionary work of abolishing the cause of the problems because “that would be immoderate –a vote loser”. These Labourites devote hours every week and years of their life trying to make the profit system just a little more humane. They have been at it since 1906 when the first Labour MP’s entered parliament: trying to empty the ocean of social distress by the bucketful. These people belong in the Labour Party because it is, at its best, a party of capitalist reform.

Socialism

There is another category of workers who join the Labour Party: those who want to change society – transform it. This category includes not only the infantile Leninists of the Militant Tendency (whose conception of revolution is as outdated as it is elitist), but very many other ordinary Labourites who think that the election of a Labour government is the way to bring about socialism. It is to these people in particular that the Socialist Party–an organisation entirely separate from the Labour Party –addresses itself. It is our claim that by voting for and joining the Labour Party you are not in any way furthering the cause of socialism; the election of another Labour government would indicate that the workers do not yet understand or want socialism.

This was it

From the outset there have always been Labourites who have said that they are out to achieve socialism. Their sincerity is not in question. At the 1925 Labour Party Conference, George Lansbury stated that “Socialism is inscribed on our banners … we intend that the land of Britain and all its resources shall be owned and used in the service of the British people”. In Labour’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face The Future, workers were told that: “The Labour Party is a socialist party and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose is the establishment of the socialist commonwealth of Great Britain”. When that 1945 government was elected many workers thought that this was it–the dawn of socialism. What happened? Industries were nationalised – only to leave workers like the miners exploited under state capitalism. Troops were sent to Korea, the NATO gang was joined, the British atom bomb was secretly initiated, and support was given to the bombing of Hiroshima, all by a so-called socialist government. The dockers’ strike was smashed by the use of troops. Bevan promised there would be no homeless workers in Britain by the time the Labour government left office; in 1951 they lost the election and capitalism in all its ugliness was still wholly intact.

Disillusion

Then came the Wilson and the Callaghan years; radical transformation remained something to talk about at Conference, but running capitalism in accordance with its harsh economic laws was what those governments were all about. Many workers voted Labour in 1945, 1964 and 1974 and concluded in disillusion, “If that’s socialism, we won’t bother to vote for it”. That is why Labour’s share of the vote has fallen: workers do not believe the promises as much as they used to and they are right not to.

Leaders

“But we’ve got the wrong leadership”. This is the perpetual cry of Labourites who are mystified as to why the great change is not coming. It is not very long ago that Neil Kinnock was the golden boy of the Left. But now he has become a “realist”, as all leaders seeking to run capitalism must. The recently published Labour Party programme does not even mention the word “socialism”. Tony Benn, a member of the last Labour government, has described it as “violently anti-socialist”. Therefore it would seem that reality must be to leave a party which possesses such a programme. Of course, you will hear rousing speeches from Leftist leaders who will tell you that “Socialism is inscribed on our banners”; you will meet Labourites who will tell you that “anything” is better than the Tories; you will hear on the grapevine that there is a new socialist leader waiting in the wings and that, when they get power, socialism will be back on the agenda. The dogmatic belief that another Labour government is in the interest of the working class is one that will be thrown at you from every angle. But in your own mind you know very well that you will never see the establishment of socialism by sending Labour MP’s to Parliament.

The Alternative

Socialism will only be established when the vast majority of workers understand it, want it and democratically organise for it in a party which is not out to mend capitalism, but to end it. Socialism means the total abolition of capitalism. An end to private and state ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution, production would be solely for use, with all people having free access to the common store of goods and services, instead of production for sale on the market with a view to profit. To win workers to organise for socialism is a massive task and it is easy to be demoralised and deceive yourself that there is an easier way to initiate the new system. But there is no alternative to the hard work being carried out by the Socialist Party–and the sooner those who want us to succeed join us, the sooner it will be done.

Why you should (still) be a socialist (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A myth is being celebrated. The rejoicing conveys all the emptiness of idiot-priests delighting in the exorcism of a demon spirit. The slayed ghost in question is “communism". The claim is that it, together with Marxism, socialism and anything else at all that dares to question the immutability of the capitalist system, is no longer on the historical agenda.

So it was that Jean-Denis Bredin. writing in Le Monde (4 September), a few days after the dissolution of the so-called Communist Party of the Soviet Union, could state triumphantly:

  Communism is dead—the word, the party, the empire, the theology, it’s all dead and everyone is happy . . . Mr Gorbachev was the timorous individual who started the progress . . . on the road which history had forced upon him. into the brilliant sunshine of the market economy. Are not the communists, if any are left, blind men and women who never understood that capitalism has taken over human destiny, that there would no longer be a Revolution but rather an eternal reform making the rich a little less rich, the poor a little less poor, not overnight but through the patient work of centuries. promising freedom and bread for all?

This crazed triumphalism has become an ideological hysteria, pushing the enemies of social change into ever new regions of intellectual arrogance in their assertions that—to use the catchphrase of She Who Was Deposed—There is No Alternative. What they are saying is that the decades of misery which followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 are proof that the consequence of deposing the dictatorship of Capital is ruin and grief. The tearing down of the statues of the Leninist leaders demonstrates, it is argued, that workers will never again be misled by those who dare to doubt the eternal life-span of “the brilliant sunshine of the market economy”.

The fundamental error—more than error: grand deception—upon which such reasoning is based is twofold. Firstly, the Leninist revolutions did not remove capitalism. Secondly, "the brilliant sunshine of the market” still does not shine upon the workers who form the majority of the world's population; on the contrary, we live under black clouds of debt, poverty, pollution, war, mass starvation, economic anxiety, all of which are direct consequences of the system of production for profit.

Lenin led to Stalin
Lenin and his Bolshevik Party were not socialists or communists (properly understood, the two words stand for the same thing: a society of common ownership), but élitists who sought to impose a new regime by minority insurrection. In the 19th century Engels had warned against the outdated notion that a so-called enlightened vanguard could emancipate the workers without the latter knowing about it. Marx had as his basic political motto that the working class alone could emancipate themselves, not leaders or vanguards.

By contrast, the Bolsheviks, in the style of capitalist revolutionaries such as Jacobins or Blanquists, took power in Russia where the workers were in a small minority and wanted only peace, land and bread, not socialism. It was impossible then, as it would be now, to establish socialism without a majority of socialists in society. It was inevitable that the Bolsheviks formed a dictatorship. The iron rule of Lenin, where opposition parties and newspapers were outlawed, the trade unions were turned into errand boys for the state, and secret police were at the service of the Party-run state, turned into Stalinism with all of its mass slaughter and torture and systematic suffering and pervasive lying. Stalinism was the product of Leninism.

In fairness to Lenin, his clique took power and knew that they had no hope of creating socialism in one country. Lenin was quite clear that the best that could be achieved was state capitalism in Russia. It was such a form of capitalism which was built up within the Russian Empire and which has failed so wretchedly. The Stalinists were to call this state capitalism “socialism” and "Communism”, and many leftists in the West convinced themselves that Russia was an island of socialist freedom in a capitalist ocean. They were as foolish as those in Russia who now look to Britain and the USA and see the mixture of state and private capitalism here as some sort of utopia. Distance creates absurd illusions.

The long history of the Leninist belief in the liberatory character of the Bolshevik regime has been one of the greatest obstacles to socialist understanding in this century. How often have we socialists talked of a free, co-operative, democratic social system to replace capitalism only to be told that if that is what we stand for we should go to Russia—where, incidentally, we would probably have been locked up for advocating such revolutionary ideas. The death of state capitalism and its naive supporters in the form of the Communist Parties can only be good news for socialists.

The Socialist Party has a proud record of exposing the pretensions of the pseudo-Communist dictatorships. While Stalin was being praised in Britain as “our democratic ally” we were exposing the purges, the show trials and the wage-slave status of the Russian working class. When Leninist newspapers such as the Morning Star, backed by money stolen from the Russian workers, told us about the happy lives of Russian workers and the peaceful intentions of the Warsaw Pact and the way in which nationalist and racist prejudice had been overcome within the Russian Empire, this party responded with utter scorn.

From food queue to dole queue
The celebrations in the West are all the more ridiculous when it is considered that orthodox capitalism is in the midst of a huge economic crisis which will be added to by the new demands upon the ailing Western economies to aid Russia and the new states which are coming out of its Empire. Bush has plenty of rhetoric to offer gullible listeners enchanted by his New World Order, a fairy-tale image of international capitalist unity, but is short on cash to pay for his little scheme. The fact is that the USA faces a record budget deficit; whole cities are on the brink of bankruptcy and working-class discontent is of a proportion which creates inner-city rioting and crime on a scale which makes Belfast look like a tame theme park. Is Bush to export to Russia and the Ukraine the economic wonder-drug which places the American workers in a position that one in five of them are living below the official poverty line?

As for the British government, its leader is so concerned about the coming of "freedom" to Russia that he celebrated it with a flight to visit his trading partners in the leadership of the brutal regime which butchered the workers in Tianenman Square. If Mr Lamont is to go to Moscow we suggest that the workers there prepare for a few more years of queuing, just as millions here queue for the dole in a country which tells talented and eager wealth-creators that it would be better for them to sit at home doing nothing because it is unprofitable to exploit them. The economic “experts" who are to lead Russia into the “free" market propose that there will be 30 million unemployed Russians within a year. Such is “the brilliant sunshine of the market economy”.

The Leninist left has no future. Those who went along with the nonsense of "Soviet socialism" are discredited and have one final historical task; to apologise to the workers for misleading them—and to socialists for getting in our way. The Right is in trouble because it no longer has the Russian bogey-man to frighten the workers with. Of course, there will be a sustained and vicious attempt to drown the vision of socialism in the muddy pit of the Leninists' grave. Anti-socialists have used this tactic since 1917 and have been more than adequately answered.

The future for genuine socialists—libertarians not statists; democrats not vanguardists; Marxists not Leninists; clear thinkers not sloganising sheep—is a good one. Our opponents in the Labour Party, who once posed as short-cut socialists, have now come out in the open as no-way socialists. Kinnock would be happier to be seen as a left-wing conservative than a real socialist. So, that red herring is out of the way. And the myth of “the socialist world" is now virtually buried. That leaves us with one final myth to shatter. The Big Lie: that capitalism can ever work in the interest of the majority.

The "magic of the market” and the miraculous power of “market forces" have enjoyed an improper reputation during the 1980s as having something to offer. That reputation will be short-lived, not simply because we socialists are going to expose its falsity at every turn, but because the market itself will fail to deliver the promised goods to the workers. Frustration will create an appetite for an alternative. Not a phoney alternative, as workers have so often fallen for. but the genuine socialist article: common ownership and democratic control of all the resources of the planet by all the people of the planet. Communism is dead? No, it has yet to be tried. And when the recognition that common ownership is the answer dawns upon more and more workers, as surely it will, the swines who bathe in "the brilliant sunshine of the market economy" will experience a severe case of sunstroke.

Steve Coleman