Candles In The Wind (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the book about my village here in Turkey, ‘Okçular Village – a Guide’ that I wrote a few years ago, there is a section where our Yaşlı Çınarlar, literally ‘Old Plane Trees’ (a local term of affection for our more senior villagers), tell their stories. As one, Şevket Akgün, related his tale he recalled the following: ‘The local education manager then was İzzet Akgül and he said to me, “Şevket, you’re a hardworking student, I’m going to send you to the village institute’’ and I went in 1941 to Kızılçullu for 5 years, winter and summer to study. In the winters we studied, in the summers we learned trades like carpentry, construction, blacksmithing. I graduated in 1946 and in September at 15 years old, I started teaching at Okçular. However, there was no school then’.

The term ‘village institutes’ was intriguing – what were they? Over the years I have slowly and not very diligently gathered photographs, together with a little background and history. It is a fascinating and compelling story of vision, social engineering, personal achievement and commitment to an ideal that, within two decades, would have so ruffled the feathers of the establishment that they felt compelled to snuff out the very concept and to discredit the visionary, guiding lights of the movement.

Right from the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Atatürk recognised that to build a modern, secular society those he described as the ‘true owners’, the villagers, could become the nation’s greatest asset but only if the ‘light of education’ could be passed to them.

By 1935 the process of ‘enlightenment’ was at a standstill with just 5,400 out of 40,000 villages having primary schools. So it was that Atatürk gave his blessing to a scheme that would take the best and brightest of village children, boys and girls, give them the benefits of an additional, broadly based education (initially for six months but expanded in 1940) for a further five years and then have them return to the villages as teachers. The project was passed to İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, an educational visionary, and the Köy Enstitütleri – Village Institutes were born into a world that most of us reading this can scarcely imagine!

The Anatolia of this time had progressed little away from urban centres – electricity, roads and sanitation were virtually unknown. Within the villages literacy was of little value as newspapers were few and far between and radios unheard of. Medical services were unknown or scorned in favour of local folk remedies. In years of drought or semi-drought, when combined with the bitterly cold, harsh winters of Anatolia infant mortality could run at 30-50 percent of those under 1 year old. The lack of education spawned generation after generation of fatalistic, religiously myopic, compliant villagers who were open to exploitation by corrupt bureaucrats and rogues. Village life was unchanged and unchanging with those showing any spark of intellect discouraged and suppressed under the yoke of drudgery and the fight to survive from one year to the next.

Out of this darkness the Village Institutes gathered together the best and brightest and began an educational process that would transform the perceptions of these students in a way that is difficult to imagine. In addition to the 3Rs the curriculum included history, geography, science, philosophy, practical engineering, welding, sewing skills, tailoring/dressmaking, dance, drama, carpentry, hygiene, animal husbandry, agricultural science, forestry and music. Sport was also encouraged and practised – the list goes on. Not only was the curriculum wide-ranging it was also avowedly secular and directed towards the awakening of social awareness to the injustices and inequalities that comprised the lot of most villagers because of their ignorance and dire circumstances.

The compassion and desire for change of those who supported and directed the village institutes can be read into every line of this letter sent by Hayri Çakaloz, director of the Ortaklar Village Institute to all newly accepted students:

‘My dear son/daughter,

You have successfully passed the admission examination and so have qualified to become a student at our Institute. As I congratulate you for this honourable achievement, I am happy to inform you that our Institute family of more than 400 students awaits you with open arms. I kiss you on your eyes.

After receiving this letter, please make the following preparations: Get a closely cropped haircut. Wash your hands, feet and entire body as best you can. If your clothes are dirty, please have your mother wash and mend them.’

I can’t speak for you, but these kindly and practical words leave me deeply moved. Other directors recall newly admitted students arriving in torn and patched clothing or rags; many came barefoot; some with bellies swollen from malnutrition; most with tooth cavities and few had ever seen a toilet. What did arrive with them was a narrow, village mind-set: ‘For these children, life was all about cultivating the field, owning a pair of oxen, getting married, worshipping God and preparing for Paradise. Their recruitment into the Institute shook this vision to its very core’.

Each of the eventual 21 Institutes were expected to become self-sufficient; to this end, as new establishments were authorised, the students and staff would be involved in the building process. As time went on they became the ‘sole contractors’ and did it all themselves.

One day, director of Kızılçullu Institute (where Şevket Akgün studied), Hamdi Akman, asked his newly graduated students if they were willing to help construct a new institute at Ortaklar before taking up their teaching posts. Their response was unanimous and next day 200 male and 45 female graduates set off for the railway station with blankets over their shoulders.

These young men and women had been taught that they were to act not merely as school teachers but as general missionaries of scientific enlightenment and progress – a task that the Institutes had inadequately prepared them for and the social problems they faced would often lead to disillusionment. The spartan regime and relatively remote positioning of the Village Institutes was to prevent the young students from losing all connection with their previous existence and thus becoming unwilling or unable to settle back in the villages. But the result of this system was to teach them about a way of life very different from their own village upbringing, without giving them any first-hand experience of it. They were aware of ideals and values which made some of them despise or despair of the collective ignorance of the villagers, and yet, at the same time, they could have few realistic notions about urban life or about the possibilities of village reform – still less about Western society.

Young teachers were still members of the village and yet they had lost intimate contact through five years of almost continuous schooling. Their new ways and ideas created tensions and a social barrier between them and the village, they came to symbolise the hostile, ‘outside’. They were of the village and yet not of it. (When Şevket Akgün arrived back in our village, assigned as its first teacher, he was 15 years old.)

These teachers faced a dilemma. Either they took their modernising mission seriously, caused offence and faced isolation, or they tried to lead a normal social life, yielding to the conservative pressures of the village community, and living as much like a traditional villager as the job of actually teaching the children allowed. Their difficulties are graphically portrayed by one of them, Mahmut Makal, who wrote a series of books, the first of which, Bizim Köy (published in 1950 and translated as ‘A Village In Anatolia’ when he was just 19 years old) remains Turkey’s best-selling book ever. It is a testament to the abject poverty suffered by many Anatolian villagers in the middle of the 20th century. It is also a testament to the subversive power of education; for once people realise that they are being exploited by others, that poverty and destitution are not the ‘will of Allah/God’, and that there is no reward in the next life, then they are very likely to turn and bite the hand or arse of their exploiters. Mahmut Makal was part of a group that became known as the Village Institute Authors who shocked and dismayed the elite establishment and the conservatively religious alike. Radicalised by educational enlightenment and the desperate poverty of village life, it was not surprising that progressive political ideas caught on.

Alarm bells rang within the establishment and an unlikely alliance between the religious conservatives who hated the secular co-educational teaching and the political and business elite who hated the idea of educated peasants capable of answering back and defending their rights joined to become a formidable reactionary force. The Institutes and those who advocated them were branded as communists in the age of virulent anti-communism, their reputations were smeared and they faced harassment, suspension and imprisonment. Even that great visionary, İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, was hounded out in 1953 and in 1954 the Village Institutes, one of the greatest experiments in modern education and social engineering, were no more.

The dream of Atatürk, İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, Mahmut Makal and many others of a secular education, based on the foundations of inquiry, science and rationality that is free and democratic has not been totally suppressed. There now exists Çağdaş Eğitim Vakfı (Contemporary Education Foundation) established in 1994 that promotes many of the same values from which the Village Institutes evolved.

Marx understood clearly that real revolution (as opposed to bloody revolution) takes place in the minds of men and women when they become truly educated and truly understand the state of the world in which we all live. Men and women struggling to feed their bellies are in no condition to feed their minds, much less struggle to improve the condition of their lives. The threat that an educated population represents to the ruling elite has clearly been recognised by the powers-that-be. Throughout the ‘developed’ Western world governments are in the process of dumbing down the general population, restricting access to quality education by under investment in the state system and a pricing policy that divides the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’.

When we compare the potential contribution of an uneducated Mahmut Makal, and countless others like him around the world, with his concrete achievements after his ‘enlightenment’, we could argue that denial of education is a crime of such enormity that is almost on a par with genocide. Condemning human beings, every one of whom has potential beyond their imagination, to life imprisonment in a cell of ignorance for the misfortune of being born on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks is a crime against humanity.

Like the proverbial ‘Candles In The Wind’ young minds need to be nurtured and nourished – the symbol of education is a blazing beacon of enlightenment and in the winds of change presently blowing through the world it is beginning to gutter – it needs protecting.

Alan Fenn

Pathfinders: Magic bullets (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Things are continuing to move fast in Covid-world, as vaccines have started to be rolled out and new uncertainties have emerged about their probable efficacy. More information on the make-up of the various Phase 3 trials shows that, partly for ethical reasons, old and infirm sections of the population most at risk from Covid were least represented among the trial participants. Vaccines are designed to stimulate the immune system, which is much stronger in young people, so whether the vaccines will even work for older people is basically a guess. Moreover, as the British Medical Journal points out, the trials were not designed to test whether the vaccines could (a) prevent or mitigate serious illness or death, or (b) prevent onward transmission. Ignoring all this, governments are proceeding as if the vaccines are magic bullets.

This is not the fault of the research teams. If you want a vaccine fast, you’re going to have to accept some uncertainties. There just isn’t time to wait and see what the long-term pros and cons are. In some ways public ignorance might be bliss. If people believe the vaccines are proven as effective this will encourage uptake, without which no vaccination programme can work. Conversely, if workers dwell too heavily on the uncertainties involved, this could add force to the antivaxxer position and seriously undermine any global health strategy.

Early reports last month about a small number of rare allergic reactions were gleefully seized on by the media, for whom panicky headlines pay regardless of the down-stream consequences. But compared to libertarian ‘think-tanks’ and private bloggers with conspiracy axes to grind, the popular media are paragons of honesty and integrity. So much bogus information is flying about that it is nearly impossible for fact-checkers to combat it. There is a thing called Brandolini’s Law, which says that ‘the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.’

The problem is not so much fake news, which is often reasonably easy to identify and debunk, as partial truths, which are much harder to disentangle and can look convincing even to a discerning eye. One of the problems with vaccine scepticism is that much of what the sceptics say about Big Pharma is correct.

For instance, it’s quite true that Big Pharma exists primarily to make profits and only secondarily to make drugs, so if more money can be made out of bad drugs than good ones, it will make bad ones. But how could bad drugs be profitable, you ask? They’re profitable if you own the intellectual rights to them and you have the power to market them, whereas good drugs won’t make you any money if you don’t own the rights. That’s why there’s so little research into new antibiotics, despite a global MRSA crisis, because most of the patents were taken out in the 1940s and have long since expired.

So normal working practice is to flood the market with a very large number (one clinical study suggested up to 92 percent) of only marginally effective or completely useless drugs — in the sense of delivering no extra benefit — in a bid to exploit intellectual property investments. As one pharmacoepidemiologist put it, ‘laws designed to encourage and protect meaningful innovation had been turned into a system that rewarded trivial pseudo-innovation even more profitably than important discoveries’. Next time someone tells you that capitalism encourages innovation and that socialism would simply stand still, tell them to go and look at Big Pharma.

Not only that, the profit motive also incites drug companies to try to drive down the time to market by repeatedly inducing regulators to shorten the period of regulatory approval, thus proportionately increasing health risks. How can they do this, you ask? Surely regulators are independent? No, they’re not. Drug companies have to pay governments for licences to operate, and for each approved drug. In practice this means that they can fund around half the cost of these regulatory bodies, such as the FDA in America and the MHRA in the UK. That gives them a lot of financial leverage in influencing decisions, or what’s known as ‘regulatory capture’. A proposed solution is to remove industry funding in order to make regulators genuinely independent. But this would mean that drug companies wouldn’t have to pay anything towards the cost of regulating their own products. Most workers as well as politicians would regard this as absurd and illogical, not to say immoral. More to the point, as taxes derive ultimately from the capitalist class, it would mean that the non-pharma capitalists would be expected to subsidise the business costs of the pharma capitalists, a one-sided deal they could never be expected to consent to.

What is capitalism’s response to this no-win situation? It doesn’t have one. So, inevitably, regulators are in thrall to drug companies, who continually rewrite the rules and extort the market for profit through pointless sideways development, while many real global health concerns go unaddressed. Capitalism may have no solution, but what about going beyond capitalism? It should be obvious that if you take the profit motive out of this arrangement by making everything free, as only a post-capitalist common ownership society could do, these difficulties would evaporate, and the way cleared for real innovation, proper regulation, and decent, effective drugs.

Alright, but this is old news, so why now? Because the anti-pharma narrative is currently being blended into anti-vaxxer propaganda in doses of half-truth, half-placebo. If vaccine sceptics think that because Big Pharma is bent, we should avoid their drugs, they need to take a wider look. The food industry is easily as corrupt as Big Pharma. Does that mean we shouldn’t eat food? The oil and gas industry are dishonest propagandists (see October Pathfinders) and have propped up tyrannical regimes. Should we not heat our houses or turn on our lights? Think mobile phone industry, which caused the Congo civil war. Think Apple, where employees threw themselves off buildings in despair. Think clothing industry, and quasi-slave armies of women locked in collapsing fire-traps. Think plastics industry. Think any industry. Which of these should you boycott? Is the only answer to live naked in caves and eat grass?

The truth is, you can’t boycott the whole of capitalism when you’re still living in it, and you can’t change its market and money logic. The one thing you can do is abolish it, and thereby abolish the prostitution of the planet and the public good for the sake of private fortunes. It needn’t involve bullets, but it would still work like magic.

Paddy Shannon

No big deal (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain's decision to leave the European Union must be one of the riskiest decisions taken by a capitalist state — abandoning hassle-free access to a nearby large market (and a say in its rules and future development] in the hope of obtaining more trade through yet-to-be-negotiated deals with states in other parts of the world. A classic case of letting go of a bird in hand for two in the bush.

It was not a decision that any government, charged with looking after the overall general interest of a capitalist class (as all governments are], would normally have taken on its own. In fact it didn't. Plagued by internal conflict within his party, David Cameron's Conservative government decided to put the matter to a referendum in 2016 which it expected to win. It didn't. A campaign to leave the EU, funded by maverick financiers opposed to any EU regulation of their activities and led by opportunist politicians, won narrowly by 52 to 48 percent.

A rearguard action in parliament, in the interest of the majority section of the capitalist class who wanted to remain, failed and the matter was settled in a general election won decisively by the Conservatives on a Brexit platform. A Vote Leave government came into office and negotiated a withdrawal from the EU on 31 January last year, with a transition period until the end of the year during which a trade deal with the EU would be negotiated.

It was touch and go. Apart from fishing, stumbling blocks were, on the UK side, ‘sovereignty’, and, on the EU side, a ‘level playing field’. Neither of which were matters of interest or concern for the majority class of wage and salary workers.

A political area is constitutionally ‘sovereign’ when its rulers have the final say in matters concerning that area. They make the laws and sign agreements with other states. They also enforce the laws and have the coercive power to do so. However, when it comes to what they decide, states are in the same position as Marx said humans were in making history. They do exercise sovereignty but not 'as they please’, not 'under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.’ Those already-existing circumstances are capitalism, a world system, the operation of whose economic laws means that states are restricted in what they can in practice do. From a political point of view they have the formal ‘right’ to make the final decision — and exercise their 'sovereignty' in making it — but it will be a decision ultimately circumscribed by these economic laws.

Even apart from this, all inter-state agreements involve surrendering a degree of their decision-making power to some other body to make final decisions on whether or not the agreement has been infringed. In the case of the post-Brexit trade talks, it was never going to be the European Court of Justice but some other body whose decisions both parties agreed to accept — and override their sovereignty.

It should be quite obvious that the arrangements a state makes to exercise its ‘sovereignty’ are of no concern whatsoever to workers.

The EU's concern was more pragmatic. They wanted a 'level playing field’, by which they meant that the UK, no more than its own member states, should not have a competitive advantage in selling on the Single Market by subsiding (state-aiding] any of its industries or imposing less onerous standards on them (as over workers rights or the environment]. The main problem was over future changes. The EU wanted a binding commitment from the UK to make roughly corresponding changes. The UK was reluctant to commit itself too much to this in a treaty as it regarded this as limitation on the future exercise of its sovereignty. It probably would have kept up with changes but as a ‘sovereign’ decision by an 'independent state, not as something it was obliged to do.

Some pragmatic arrangement was always possible. It depended on how insistent the UK Vote Leave government under Johnson was going to be on having (or appearing to have] full, formal ‘sovereignty’. Would they give priority to something symbolic over being pragmatic? Would they be the prisoners of the rhetoric and tub-thumping about ‘independence’ that helped them win the referendum? We now know the answer.

As far as the working class are concerned, deal or no deal, we were going to be collateral damage in that our freedom to move between Britain and the Continent was to become more of a hassle as visas and stricter border controls are re-introduced and having to face shortages and price rises. Something we could well have done without in the middle of a worsening pandemic.

The Pace of Change (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism in England began at 5 pm on Saturday, 14 October 1066, when William the Bastard became William the Conqueror. This, to some, will appear a contentious proposition, after all that was surely the advent of feudal supremacy.

However, while the Norman nobility and church secured their domination behind the daunting walls of castle and cathedral, ensuring the mass of the peasantry remained firmly bound to the land, there was one group of commoners spared such ties.

The Normans liked rabbits. Not fluffy bunnies as playthings for their children, but as the meat in pies and stews. So it was that along with the mail-clad knights came the warreners. Although of common stock, unlike the peasants they were free men.

Warreners, as the name suggests, constructed warrens, the means of production, which was their property not the local lords’, for cultivating rabbits. These rabbits were rare and valuable, not being native to Britain nor adapted to the climate, and they were sold on the market as commodities.

Thus, at the very moment of the triumph of feudalism, an element, a very minor element, of capitalism was introduced. The question is, when did the implicit principle really begin to become the explicit economic tendency that challenged, then superseded feudalism? Choose your own significant historical moment.

The point here relates to a frequently made assertion that Covid 19 marks a fundamental change in society. That people’s consciousness has significantly changed. Society must find a new way to go about its business.

Socialists will say amen to that (alright, perhaps not amen) if it means people more generally begin to grasp that their best interests are served by collectively deciding to end capitalism. Replacing it with a system of common, democratic ownership of the means of production and distribution to freely meet everyone’s needs is surely an attractive prospect.

Unfortunately, the evidence at the moment seems to indicate no such general ambition. There is a radical change in distribution, but it’s from high street and mall to online, a switch from one set of capitalist enterprises to another. The actual production of commodities remains largely unaltered.

This will entail large scale redundancies amongst those employed in the high streets and malls, impacting also on the social environments. Such is the nature of capitalism. What seems like a fixed dominant industry is quickly swept away by those infamous market forces.

For example, coal mining was regarded as a traditional industry in South Yorkshire, but it existed as a major force for little over a century, already well into decline before the 1984/5 strike. Much of what replaced it was lower skilled and paid. As with King Coal, so it was with Queen Cotton in Lancashire.

And so it’s likely to be with changes today, with zero-hours-contracted delivery drivers and warehouse hub workers replacing salaried (with pensions) shop workers. Consumer capitalism will continue to dominate.

Is this a counsel of despair for socialists, the more things change, the more they stay the same? Not at all. Firstly, it shows people can adapt rapidly to change. It wasn’t that long since it was popular to refer to ‘retail therapy’ as a leisure activity. This arose from the development of the huge out-of-town shopping centres.

They were a change in themselves, drawing huge numbers away from towns. Come a technological advance, IT, add a pandemic, and there is a new retail equation, readily accepted. The point here being that the catalyst of change, in this case Covid-19, cannot be predicted.

It would be all too easy to view a socialist party founded well over a hundred years ago as having failed in its quest to further the realisation of socialism, as capitalism remain ideologically, as well as economically, dominant.

However, as Engels indicated in The Peasant War in Germany, a revolution cannot occur and succeed before its time. Any attempt to force the issue ends in disaster, it certainly doesn’t end in socialism.

What will precipitate a change in the general economic, political and social views of a significant majority of the world working class cannot be artificially engineered or foretold. Socialists can only persist in maintaining the political resources as widely available as possible for the working class to draw on when ready.

Socialists can also keep up a constant critique of capitalism and all it entails to feed into the general discourses of society. Even hearing the oft-made comment, ‘I like your ideas, but they’ll never work in practice’ is positive. The notion has been planted, the negative can be worked on.

To return to the warreners. It is unlikely they spent much, if any, time fretting over whether or not the free market would eventually become the successor to feudalism. They would have gone about their business looking out for any other opportunities that came their way.

Perhaps there were those who thought it might be more generally beneficial if society adopted their freer way of working. Surely there were peasants who looked to the warreners and thought their lot could be improved by similar social and economic arrangements.

Yet, for hundreds of years, feudalism maintained its ideological grip until a pandemic, the Black Death, loosened its grip. A peasants’ revolt notwithstanding, it would be centuries more before the warreners became mill owners.

There is no time scale for, and no certainty of, the achievement of socialism. Whether the Socialist Party ultimately plays a significant or insignificant role in that achievement cannot be known now. For the moment though, today’s socialists are the warreners adding the freely cultivated meat to the political stew.

Dave Alton

Material World: Blame the old for being alive (2021)

The Material World Column from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Society’s treatment of many old people is shameful. Shut away in institutions, out of sight and out of mind, treated as expendable and collateral damage. The claim that we live in a civilised society is challenged by the miserable manner present-day society looks after old people. Too often the attitude is that ‘senior citizens’ are already living on borrowed time as a result of modern medical skills that extend their lives and therefore they should not receive any priority to prolong life.

The callous way that capitalism has developed ‘care’ of the elderly is shown in the manner where all of those with poor immune systems are placed together in one institution so when an infection strikes, it spreads through the unfortunate residents. As with dementia, take patients away from the one place they know and feel comfortable in, and place them with similarly confused people, in unfamiliar surroundings and then wonder why the dementia then deteriorates.

The number of cases of abuse is projected to increase of the aged whose needs may not be fully met due to lack of resources and insufficiently trained staff. The WHO reports that globally around 1 in 6 people 60 years and older experienced some form of abuse in community settings during the past year with levels of abuse high in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, with 2 in 3 staff reporting that they have committed abuse in the past year.

As many as one in five people in the UK over the age of 65 have been abused. The charity Hourglass, in a survey it conducted, said that more than a third of people did not believe that ‘inappropriate sexual acts directed at older people’ counted as abuse. 30 percent did not view ‘pushing, hitting, or beating an older person’ as abuse. 32 percent did not believe that ‘taking precious items from an older relative’s home without asking’ constituted abuse.

And not just the UK. An Australian Royal Commission has uncovered widespread mistreatment. Overall, investigators estimated that over 32,000 assaults – physical, sexual and emotional had occurred in a year in such homes. The abuse was perpetrated by carers as well as other residents. They said about 2,520 sexual assaults had happened in residential nursing homes in 2018-2019, an estimated 50 sexual assaults occur each week. ‘Unlawful sexual conduct’ is believed to have affected 13-18 percent of aged care residents.

The pandemic has exacerbated problems. Worldwide, the elderly in care homes were initially designated as low priority but it was the continuation of a trend that began with care becoming a for-profit industry.

In the last week of November, Covid-19 has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people who lived and worked in long-term care facilities in the United States. According to public health expert Michael Barnett, one in 13 have now died as a result of Covid-19. So far, at least 75 percent of Australia’s coronavirus deaths have been aged care residents.

When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, Julio Croda, from Brazil’s Department Of Immunisation And Transmissible Diseases, said he experienced a lack of urgency from the government when his department predicted that the elderly would bear the brunt of the coronavirus and would be more likely to die from the disease. Solange Vieira, who helped restructure Brazil’s pension system, said the quiet bit out aloud, ‘It’s good that deaths are concentrated among the old. That will improve our economic performance as it will reduce our pension deficit.’ In Britain too the pandemic has been an ill wind, with the Office for Budget Responsibility calculating that:

'The Government will save over £600m in state pension payments this year following a steep rise in excess deaths among the elderly, according to the budget watchdog’ (Daily Telegraph, 25 November).

Even in ‘progressive’ Sweden, its policy of promoting herd immunity led to older people being acceptable sacrifices. The ‘herd’ will survive, but what about the weaker and frail members of society? Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, answered, ‘Unfortunately the mortality rate is high due to the introduction [of the virus] in elderly care homes.’

Yet long before the present pandemic, back in 2013 the then Japanese finance minister, Taro Aso, at a meeting discussing social security reforms said that the elderly should be enabled to ‘hurry up and die’ to relieve pressure on the state to pay for their care (Guardian, 22 January 2013).

Society traditionally emphasised respect towards the elderly but as families and communities became increasingly atomised, abuse and abandonment has increased and our elders have been more and more stripped of their dignity. Is it really an exaggeration to claim that in today’s world old people are seen as disposable, to be discarded when the need arises?

Providing for the infirm and elderly is a social responsibility which all the able-bodied members of working age should share in equally. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’, no matter their age. A socialist world will not treat old folk like machines that have been rendered obsolete and fit only for the scrap heap. Only a socialist society is capable of supporting the increasing longevity of its people and honouring and respecting our aged fellow-workers.

ALJO

All that glitters . . . (2021)

Book Review from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The London Dream. Chris McMillan. Zero Books. 2020. £19.99

Subtitled ‘migration and the mythology of the city’, this is a critical look at London and the immigrants who are attracted to live and work there. McMillan writes broadly through a lens of Marxist class analysis, though also draws heavily on some of the ideas of non-Marxists such as Richard Florida, who has written extensively about the ‘creative classes’ within capitalism and the dynamic turbulence of which they are an intrinsic part. In London’s case, much of this is perceived as being centred on the so-called ‘flat white economy’ and Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch, though it stretches much further and wider than this.

For McMillan, the ‘struggle between the hope of the London dream and the exploitation it fuels’ is the main focus of his investigation. Through analysing a variety of themes and sectors (the cleaners that service the City of London travelling in on the night buses, to jobbing actors and writers seeking their fortune but struggling to make any sort of living, through to the Uber drivers), McMillan does a good job of laying bare the exploitation that keeps the city going. He interviews a number of people who have come to London to chase their dream and is mature and reflective in analysing their success (or – largely – otherwise). In this respect he knowingly treads some similar ground to Ben Judah’s excellent This is London, which we reviewed in the Socialist Standard in June 2016.

London is now very much the ‘world city’ and whereas in 1951 as few as 5 percent of the population was born outside the UK, now the total is well over a third and growing – indeed two thirds of children born in London today have at least one parent who was born outside the UK. The Huguenots and Jewish refugees of earlier stages of capitalism have been replaced by Afro-Caribbeans, Bengalis and latterly eastern Europeans and those seeking their fortune and new experiences from the old colonies like Australia and New Zealand. But it is the low-paid, gig-economy jobs they typically fill – the waitresses, bartenders and delivery drivers. While two-thirds of registered London black cab drivers identify as ‘white British’ this only applies to 6 percent of Uber drivers, many of whom sometimes earn as little as £2 per hour net pay.

Though the book seems to be marred periodically by an unusually large number of typos and similar errors, McMillan is a good writer and brings the city and its people to life. He ends by saying: ‘London is a city of hope, a city of misery. A city where there is always something to do and no shortage of precarious workers struggling to do it. It is all part of the London dream. And still, they come. But for how much longer?’ (p.258). True enough, though what the book really lacks most is a re-imagining of the city in a way that transcends capitalism itself and the exploitation it engenders. But it is a stimulating read and a book that demonstrates that all that glitters in not all gold – and why.

DAP

Rear View: Status quo (2021)

The Rear View Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Status quo

‘To Beat Covid, Beat HIV, & Beat Inequality, Find the Money’. This is the title of a recent opinion piece by Winnie Byanyima and published on the Inter Press Service News Agency (ipsnews.net, 27 May). Other articles by her include ‘Overcoming COVID-19: World Leaders Must Finance a More Equal World to Beat Pandemics’, as well as ‘Coronavirus Proves Need for Free Healthcare for All – Now‘ and ‘The Next UN Secretary General Should Be a Woman – and Must Be a Feminist’. Such naïvety is echoed by many other writers found on this news site, alas, but at least, unlike the BBC, it is a safe refuge from non-stop coverage of royal funerals, births or other non-events. However, IPS whilst being a useful source of news not covered by mainstream media outlets such as the BBC, suffers from a relentlessly reformist, sometimes even rose-tinted perspective; which can lead to glaringly obvious blindspots. ‘Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave‘, said Frederick Douglass. We should fill in the blanks, be alert for media lies, distortions and half-truths, as well as conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts‘. We should remember Marx’s favourite motto – doubt everything! – and this from his German Ideology (1845): ‘the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production’. The BBC and IPS in their different ways support the status quo.

None so blind

Sania Farooqui, author of ‘Women Leading Somalia’s Health System’ (ipsnews.net, 17 May) says ‘one of the doctors leading healthcare and currently involved in the fight against COVID-19 in Somalia is Dr. Deqo Aden Mohamed, an obstetrician-gynecologist… ‘ The doctor explains ‘the government runs only three hospitals here, so imagine in Mogadishu we have 4 million people and just three hospitals. The second wave of COVID-19 was much harder than last year. What we lost in one year’s time, we lost in one month in 2021’. Farooqui adds: ‘currently the country is grappling with the triple threat of drought, COVID-19 and insecurity in Mogadishu which is driving severe humanitarian needs in Somalia. Somalia has already seen a 48% increase in deaths from COVID-19, doubling of cases from 6,687 to 13,812 cases in just 59 days’. Grim reading, but this is only a partial account of suffering. An article in the Guardian last year (19 May) reported that Somalia’s coronavirus lockdown led to a huge increase in female genital mutilation. According to Plan International, circumcisers went door to door offering to cut girls stuck at home during the pandemic. Somalia has the world’s highest FGM rate with about 98 percent of women having been cut. Sadia Allan of Plan International commented: ‘We’ve seen a massive increase in recent weeks. We want the government to ensure FGM is included in all Covid responses‘. Dr. Deqo Mohamed has apparently made no comment on this matter.

Selective science

‘Mauritius’ First Female President on Why We Need Science Diplomacy to Address Major Challenges’ by Stella Paul (ipsnews.net, 20 May) begins: ‘If we want to address the great challenges this world is facing, we have to factor science into all our narratives, according to Dr. Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, the first woman president of Mauritius’. This is a refreshing change from a malady of misleaders promoting ‘alternative facts‘, conspiracy theories and non-evidence based medicine, yet it should be remembered that Margaret Thatcher, FRS, Prime Minister of the UK for eleven years from 1979, the first with a science degree, graduated from Oxford University as a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. The new president does not mention Thatcher but acknowledges that ‘for the past few years, there has been an anti-science sentiment voiced by major leaders on this planet. And this undesigned sentiment has weighed very heavily again when it comes to addressing issues like climate science, for example, climate change and biodiversity. They have weighed in as well in terms of handling this pandemic that we are currently living in. So, I think if you want to address the great challenge that this world is facing, we have to factor in science into all our narratives’. All narratives? What, then, is the scientific basis for male homosexuality continuing to be a crime in Mauritius?

Truth telling

‘In The Socialist Party of Great Britain we are all members of the working class, and cannot hope that our articles will always be finely phrased, but we shall at least endeavour to lay before you on every occasion a sane and sound pronouncement on all matters affecting the welfare of the working class. What we lack in refinement of style we shall make good by the depth of our sincerity and by the truth of our principles.’ This statement taken from the first edition of the Socialist Standard in September 1904 remains true today, as does a quote attributed to Orwell: ‘during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act’.‘ We are not alone. Other groups and individuals reveal truths too, at least some of the time. ‘Neither Israel, Nor Palestine: No War but the Class War ‘ (libcom.org, 22 May). ‘For too long our politicians, leaders & corporations have fed us the SAME lies, the SAME broken promises, the SAME too-little-too-late solutions, the SAME destructive fossil fuels ‘ (Jayathma Wickramanayake, @UNYouthEnvoy, 20 May).

A hundred years of Northern Ireland (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A country, whose prospects and longevity many people must have doubted at the time of its inception, is set to have its one hundredth anniversary commemorated this year. Northern Ireland is preparing to celebrate its centenary in summer 2021 and by extension, the current version of the British state (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) will also mark 100 years of formal existence. For most countries, plans for such events are generally non-controversial and can engender a range of emotions varying from enthusiasm to indifference in the citizenry depending on how patriotic people feel and the level of identification they have with ‘their’ country. This is not the case for Northern Ireland and the ‘celebrations’ are likely to be quite muted. Indeed, for one of the governing parties in Belfast, Sinn Fein, its core, defining objective is the permanent elimination of the state.

Something else that is noteworthy is that in the other three nations that make up the UK, there appears very little awareness or interest in the significance of this coming event with the news agenda and public concerns dominated by COVID and the practical implications of Brexit. Furthermore, the centenary of Northern Ireland must logically mark a centenary for the state existing south of the border but no parallel or corresponding ceremony of any kind is at the moment planned for the Republic of Ireland. The peculiar position of Northern Ireland makes this an issue of interest to socialists. For most countries, there is a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the state amongst the population even if for purely pragmatic reasons. Because of the pervading national consciousness, there usually is a consensus of support for these commemorations even if many individuals are not actively involved. Given socialists’ antipathy to all nationalist ideologies, the reasons behind the ambiguous attitude to the usual bout of flag-waving and anthem-bellowing that usually accompanies such events is worth exploring.

The invention of the state of Northern Ireland, while not a temporary measure per se, was never really intended to result in a permanent new entity. It was set up as a matter of political expediency, as the only solution to the irreconcilable demands of Irish Nationalists and Unionists on the island of Ireland. For the British government of the time, it seemed the only workable outcome to what had been an intractable problem even though its arbitrariness and shortcomings were always evident. The border was never envisaged to be a full international frontier between two sovereign nations but an internal line demarcating two clashing ethnic groups living in a part of the United Kingdom. Its creation had all the hallmarks of a desperate government grasping at any solution to remove, even in the short term, an exasperating irritant.

Origins

The origins and validity of the state of Northern Ireland have been long studied and debated. In the early years of the seventeenth century, during the reign of James I, the organised and large-scale colonisation of a part of the island of Ireland, the northern province of Ulster, by people from northern England and southern Scotland was initiated. By the end of that century, the majority of the people in the province were British settlers and their descendants; Protestant in religion compared to the native or indigenous Irish who were invariably Catholic. However, and a point that would achieve great significance subsequently, the colonists were not uniformly distributed across the nine counties that would constitute the province but tended to be concentrated in the six more north-easterly counties. So as a result of this mass immigration, from the eighteenth century onwards, Ulster began to diverge significantly from the rest of Ireland in terms of economy and society. For a start, the province became much more prosperous than the rest of the country. It was regarded as being more dynamic and innovative than the South and a seedbed for new technologies, new industries, radical political ideas, and more modern social conventions. In some respects, it occupied a position in Ireland that California is reputed to have in the United States, being the part of the country that leads the way in adopting future trends. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, the local city of Belfast had overtaken the traditional Irish capital of Dublin in population and economic importance.

Because the whole island was governed from London (and became constitutionally united with Britain in 1801 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), the divergence between the two parts of the country was initially not a troubling issue for the government in London. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, a growing sense of Irish nationalism began to develop amongst the Catholic population who predominated in most of the southern part of the island. This led to a demand from them for the political separation of Ireland and Britain and the creation of an independent, all-island nation. This was resisted by the local Protestant majority in Ulster who believed their prosperity was vitally linked to remaining within the UK. After a considerable period of political turmoil, that had started in the mid to late nineteenth century, the solution finally adopted by the London government in 1921 was the formation of two regimes on the island of Ireland. The southern state, initially organised as a dominion state in the British Empire, would eventually become the fully independent Republic of Ireland; and the northern state was a devolved administration, with its own Parliament and government in Stormont, but subsidiary to Westminster and remaining within the UK.

The delineation of the border between the two states was a matter of much political passion at the time and fundamentally settled by sectarian considerations. Northern Ireland would consist of those six counties of the nine-county province of Ulster that would ensure a secure Unionist (at the time regarded as being synonymous with Protestant) voting majority and with a large enough land mass to be sustainable and not just to become a small British enclave on the island of Ireland. This meant the borders of the state were defined not by any geographical or historical landmarks but by the religious allegiances of the people. It resulted in a northern state with a two-thirds Protestant population, who generally welcomed its creation and sincerely believed it guaranteed their very continued existence, while simultaneously containing a one third, Nationalist and Catholic minority, some of whom bitterly resented the imposed new arrangement and yearned to be reunited with their southern co-religionists.

For the first fifty years of its existence, Northern Ireland could be regarded as performing quite satisfactorily although having to weather occasional periods of Republican violence against the state from elements of the discontented Nationalist minority. Whilst being fully democratic in terms of contemporary liberal European norms, (regular elections, a free press, independent judiciary, etc.) it had an authoritarian, majoritarian flavour in its conduct towards the minority Catholic population. Its leaders and senior government ministers tended to be drawn from the wealthy, large land-owning, Ascendancy class, many with some military background and intimately connected to the leading members of the Tory party in London at the time. Its single greatest achievement and ‘selling point’ was that it considerably outperformed the South in economic terms and thus ensured a better standard of living for all its citizens, though Catholics were always relatively disadvantaged. Its improved prosperity was partly due to its own local efforts, the significant amount of funding it received from the British Exchequer and the idiosyncratic and inept economic performance of the South under the leadership of its anachronistic leader, De Valera. This superior performance was important to the Stormont regime who always recognised the implicit economic rivalry it had with Dublin and realised that its continued secure existence was in part predicated on exceeding its southern neighbour. In fact, both North and South had a superficially antagonistic but mutually beneficial co-existence. In public propaganda, both justified the need for their survival by reference to the religious intolerance and bigotry that they claimed was prevalent in the other jurisdiction while absent in their own. However, the Republic had one trump card in that game of bogus moral high ground of tolerance; while Northern Ireland had a significant and growing Catholic minority who remained a distinct entity, the Protestant population of the Republic was always much smaller and declined so rapidly after 1921 that its remaining residual elements had no choice but to accept assimilation in the state.

While the Unionist leaders in Stormont were aware of the growing challenges posed by the Civil Rights movement that had begun in the mid-1960s, there seemed a certain complacency present regarding the future of the northern state. Coming up to its fiftieth anniversary, preparations were made to mark the event which was to be known as Ulster ’71. It was planned by then local Prime Minister Terence O’Neill before he resigned in 1969. Like all such ceremonies, its aim was to demonstrate ‘progress’ and to establish the forward-thrusting modernity of the state to the citizens. Also, it had the long-standing aim for Northern Ireland to showcase itself to Great Britain, to remind the mainland that it was still there and was a useful and important component of the whole nation. Notwithstanding its achievements, some Unionists tended to be defensive and insecure about how Ulster was perceived by the British public and anxious to display their worth to their compatriots in Britain. Looking back there is a poignancy to the events shown in the films that were made of Ulster ’71. While conveying an air of superficial optimism about the future, that year of 1971 really marked the end of Northern Ireland in the form it was originally intended to have. Within 18 months, the Stormont parliament was permanently prorogued, the Government of Northern Ireland ceased to exist and was replaced by direct rule from London. After 1971, there was 25 years of the Troubles followed by another 25 years of an uneasy peace. Today, irrespective of its formal constitutional arrangement as an integral part of the United Kingdom, the province is more linked to its Southern neighbour than at any time in its history. The UK government currently accepts that it is not possible to rule Northern Ireland without the tacit support of Dublin.

Changing demographics

Looking at it now, Northern Ireland has changed considerably since its creation with the decline of its traditional Unionist ruling class and the underpinning social structures of the Unionist-minded population. Demographically it is now very close to 50/50 between Protestants and Catholics and while this distinction is still important, it is not the all-defining criterion of yesteryear. A recent development is the increasing number of people identifying as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than the previous binary choice of British or Irish. Partly as a legacy of the Troubles, it is one of the poorest parts of the United Kingdom and also significantly lags behind the Republic in terms of average income per head. It must be an open question as to whether its continued presence as one of the nations of the UK is deemed essential to the capitalist class, as represented by the British government. Moreover, its future is very dependent on the outcome of Brexit in the years ahead. As part of the final arrangement between the UK and the EU, Northern Ireland remains within the Single Market and this necessitates some checks and barriers to trade between it and the mainland, marking a weakening of the Union to some degree at least. It has the strange feature that British firms are now ‘exporting’ goods to other firms that are meant to be in the same country! In passing it is ironic to note that this Northern Ireland protocol (undoubtedly a contrived political device that Boris Johnson has embraced for a short-term advantage) has been implemented almost 100 years after the creation of the Irish border itself by a previous London government as a similar stop-gap solution.

More immediately, any move towards Scottish independence will mark a major fracture of the UK and have profound implications for the province which has always had a stronger cultural connection to Scotland than to England. A poll on the border is always a possibility and the outcome of such a referendum is difficult to predict because of the volatility of the situation. Politically, Unionism, at least compared to the early years of the twentieth century, is considerably weaker now than it was then but that doesn’t necessarily mean a united Ireland is any closer let alone inevitable.

So what might socialists make of Northern Ireland achieving and marking its centenary? Any anniversary celebration by a state is usually an exercise in promoting the relevance and validity of that state to its citizens and their future and furthering ideas of patriotism. Unlike most countries where (unfortunately) most the workers readily identify with the remembrance of important historical events, Northern Ireland’s history means that is unlikely to happen in the usual sense. Traditionally minded Unionists will naturally be eager to celebrate the event while the staunchly nationalist element of the population will probably ignore it. More profoundly, socialists do not accept the division of the world into countries as the most sensible arrangement for society. Fundamentally countries exist to promote the interests of the local (capitalist) elites. Why and how they are ‘different’ to the countries that adjoin them is in many cases a result of historical events that now have no contemporary resonance or meaning. Northern Ireland has always been denounced as an artificial state by its Nationalist detractors, created solely to ensure a certain political outcome, but all countries are really just artificial constructs. Their populations are the sum of previous waves of migrations that have occurred and the sometimes arbitrary delineation of their frontiers just reflects the outcome of historical military engagements. For socialists, the fact that they still exist and can successfully claim the allegiance of their citizens shows the power of carefully fostered ‘identity’ politics. So, while Northern Ireland has its own peculiarities, its predicament over its centenary reflects much wider issues.

Fostering nationalist ideas and inculcating a faithful consciousness in the population have always been central functions of governments everywhere. But they are aware that such activities must be undertaken with care. Capitalists need nation-states to exist but they also need the freedom to trade profitably with the capitalists of other countries. While governments need a loyal citizenry, excessive and unchecked xenophobia can damage the interests of capitalism in that country by promoting a desire for foreign adventurism. History has proven many times that war is a risky business for those who engage in it. This may explain the curious phenomenon that, with arguably the most nationalistic government in London for over a century, there is such a subdued approach being taken to this centenary event. The Johnson government recognises that post-Brexit, the drawbacks in needlessly antagonising the nationalist segment of Northern Ireland and in turn the Dublin government, can have unpredictable repercussions for trade with Europe.

So Northern Ireland has proved the sceptics wrong and got to the big one-zero-zero. Whether or not it makes it to its 150th anniversary or its bi-centennial or whatever is, in a sense, a matter of indifference to socialists. The same sentiment applies to all other countries. We seek a different world system.

Kevin Cronin

Pathfinders: Space Race 2.0 (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

You know who the first man on the moon was, right? And the second? Bet you can’t name the third, or the next nine. After the initial feat, and an edge-of-your-seat crisis with Apollo 13, the space race quickly got old, and global interest waned. 50 years ago this month, the crew of Apollo 15 made the fourth landing on the moon and drove the first moon rover, and barely anyone noticed. Not long after this, the huge money sink of the Apollo programme was scrapped. For all the sciency hype, the moon’s only real purpose was as the finishing line in a space race aimed at putting one over on soviet ‘communism’.

Now we’re watching Space Race Reloaded, this time as a multi-player game involving the US, Europe, China, Russia, India and others, and including for the first time large amounts of private capital. What on earth – or off earth – is going on?

Space exploration has attracted its share of eccentrics, like ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes who, in February 2020, launched himself skyward in a steam-powered rocket to prove that the Earth was flat, but died proving instead that it was very hard. If you’re going to be eccentric, it helps to be rich, and the bullish billionaire trio of Bezos, Branson and Musk have not hesitated to vie in what, from a worker’s earthbound perspective, are pointless and ecologically egregious vanity projects involving low-orbital flights for rich tourists. The bulbous head of Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket inspired an inevitably phallic comparison by the Daily Star which talked about the billionaires ‘willy-waving’ with their ‘giant thrusters’.

But it’s more than just boys showing off their toys. In May China parked a rover on Mars, and last month launched a crew up to its new Tiandong space station, as well as announcing plans for a joint Sino-Russian moon base. Meanwhile Nasa’s new director Bill ‘Big Willy’ Nelson has ‘sought to leverage China’s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund Nasa’s plans to return to the moon’.

In the 1970s, space programmes relied solely on the resources of national governments. Now things are different. Since 1970 the wealth of the top one percent has grown at 100 times the pace of the bottom 50 percent, creating mind-boggling resources of private capital that can now be invested in the biggest projects. Nasa has contracted part of its operations to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, including servicing the International Space Station, and that’s only the beginning.

SpaceX also won the contract to supply the moon lander for Nasa’s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, as part of its Artemis moonshot programme. Disappointingly for space nerds, the SLS is an unimaginative repeat of the old Saturn V burn-and-discard 3-stage system. After some notable successes with reusable rockets, SpaceX did hope to win the contract for a Nasa reusable rocket design but its Falcon Heavy rocket isn’t anywhere near big enough to get to the moon, and its gigantic Starship rocket – billed as a potential Mars crew shuttle – is still in development.

If the moon wasn’t really the point last time, this time it might be. First, there is the matter of helium-3 (see Pathfinders, March 2014), a rare isotope on Earth but abundant on the moon and potentially useful in nuclear fusion that might provide up to 10,000 years of cleanish energy. But it’s still uncertain whether helium-3 extraction would be economic. Second, there is the fact that the moon, as a satellite, will be out of range of the satellite wars which are widely predicted (Pathfinders, November 2020), and which prompted a Nato space war summit just last month (Times, 15 June). Third, Nasa confirmed in 2020 that there was water on the moon, which was a game-changer. In space shuttle days, the cost of lofting a kilo of water to space was $54,000. With SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 shuttle to the ISS, this dropped to $2,720 (Link). Yet a permanent moon base is only really feasible if there’s a local supply. The water concentration Nasa detected in sunlit areas was 100 times less than in the Sahara desert, however the presence of any at all suggests that there may be vast deposits of ice in the dark polar craters. These would not only enable moon colonies but also potentially supply liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuels in order to make the moon a launch point for further space exploration, and as a staging post for Mars.

But it’s not all about ends, it’s also about means. China has been making giant technological strides lately, and this is alarming the Americans, because space technology is also weapons technology – ‘there are no technologies used in space that aren’t dual-use’. The fear is, whoever gets a lead in space has a lead in perpetuity. Moon bases today, missile bases tomorrow, perhaps.

It need hardly be said that socialists deplore the militarisation of space. But billionaires like Musk are motivated by an altogether higher purpose, and that doesn’t include the silly story about him planning to mine a gold asteroid worth $700 quintillion. He is well known for tweeting about potential extinction-level asteroid strikes, and how humans need to colonise other planets so all our eggs are not in one basket. Nasa has pooh-poohed the notion of deadly asteroids, however a darker truth could lie behind the prediction. What if the super-rich suspect that climate change is out of control, and that the Earth is ultimately doomed through its own (i.e. their) folly?

What better use for your billions, and what better legacy, than to initiate searches for a viable replacement planet? In this context, the search for extraterrestrial life takes on a new significance. Nasa has just announced probes to explore the supposedly bio-generated phosphine layer in the upper atmosphere of Venus. And just last month the Juno probe did a flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and thought to have a liquid iron core, hence magnetic shielding, and more subterranean water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. Next year it will do a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa, with a thin oxygen atmosphere and, it’s believed, a water ocean 60 miles deep under a 20-mile-thick ice crust. Europa is one of the most promising sources of life, if any, in the solar system. The European Space Agency is planning a trip there in 2022, and Nasa again in 2025.

The idea of the capitalists funding an ‘exit strategy’ to escape the dead Earth they have created is of course the plot of Ben Elton’s 1989 novel Stark. We say, they’re welcome to live on some frozen airless dump, and we hope they rot. But let’s hope we get socialism before that happens, and before any idea of exporting capitalism to other planets really gets off the ground.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: My journey to becoming a socialist (2021)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

One cold Friday night some 40 years ago, I had what I have now come to realise was something of a serendipitous encounter with a complete stranger while enjoying a beer or two in The Horseshoe Bar, Glasgow, just before making my way to London on the overnight train to take part in what was called ‘The People’s March For Jobs’ demonstration at Hyde Park.

As a young member of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) printer’s union, I felt quite proud to be a banner-wielding protestor against Prime Minister Thatcher’s government and their total disregard and contempt for the working class, and somehow felt the need to express my anger the only way I knew how.

There was a good few dozen of us print-workers gathered from all around the multitude of factories based in and around Glasgow, with one particular thing in common – a distinct hatred of Thatcher and her Tory cronies.

Anyway, whilst in the throes of alcohol-induced rage and fury, I was approached at the bar by a chap with a distinct goatee beard who was also enjoying a refreshment or two.

‘What you up to young man?’ he asked.

‘Oh, on my way to London to join the People’s March For Jobs,’ I proclaimed proudly.

‘Whit the fuck ye daen that fur?’ he bluntly enquired. Somewhat taken aback, I was a bit stuck for words. ‘Waste o’ fuckin time, if ye ask me pal,’ he went on. ‘Whit difference dae ye think it’s gonnae make son?’

‘Well,’ I said ‘that bitch is closing down all the factories, and causing misery for everyone. I’m a socialist and I want to do something about it,’ I chelped back.

He erupted in laughter and told me that I had a lot to learn. He bought me a beer and invited me to get myself down to the Stirling Library at Royal Exchange Square in the heart of Glasgow some Saturday afternoon where I will find out ‘what a real socialist is’. Somewhat disgruntled by this I vowed to accept his challenge and see for myself just what this guy was talking about the next time I happened to be in the city centre.

The People’s March For Jobs came and went, and several months passed during which time I’d actually forgotten about my encounter with this strange man who dared to doubt that I was anything but a bona fide socialist. True to my word, I eventually headed on down to Royal Exchange Square whereupon I did indeed come across a group of mainly men taking it in turns to address a fair-sized crowd who had gathered to listen to them shouting about the forces of ‘capitalism’ and how ‘real socialism’ was the only solution to addressing the problems inherent in that disruptive and destructive worldwide system.

I was blown away and more than just a wee bit curious about the concept of this new world order that would revolutionise the way in which we functioned and interacted together as humans. A complete change from the current system of competition, to one of cooperation. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. I just had to find out more.

There was about an hour or so of questions and answers from the assembled crowd — some of them quite forceful and aggressive, some very supportive and showing genuine interest — all of them answered articulately with superb confidence and knowledge by the same man who I met in the pub a few months earlier. The meeting began to come to a natural end and I hung around until there was only a handful of guys and a couple of women left. I was approached by one fairly well-spoken chap in a grey trench style raincoat, who asked me if I enjoyed the session and would I like to join them for a beer? Not one to turn down such an invitation, I found myself being made most welcome by this group of strangers in a local hostelry who were only too happy to answer this inquisitive young man’s enquiring mind about this thing called ‘world socialism’.

What an incredible experience! I left a couple of hours later completely awestruck by what these ‘genuine socialists’ had described to me as a ‘world of abundance’ where everyone will be free to live a life of their choosing and for the benefit of all. Instead of the way things are now, whereby we’re all enslaved by the wages system, and if you don’t have a job, you cannot afford even the basics of human needs. If you do, it’s only because you’ve been forced to sell whatever skills you have to the highest payer, and even then, only just about manage to survive. It all gave me food for thought, and I thought it was corrupt.

A lot has happened in my life since that fateful day. But one thing remains, my absolute conviction and determination to continue along with other like-minded fellow workers and true socialists – not the kind of wishy-washy reformists who think that by accepting piecemeal reforms handed down by the capitalist class and the politicians that they employ, we will somehow reach social equality for all – that’s not going to happen.

What I have discovered is that although we may well be slightly better off in terms of material goods and commodities than those of our forebears, this is still a far cry away from what is possible when the majority of us come to understand and realise what can be achieved with the will and determination to make it happen. Then and only then will we realise the true fruits of our collective labours, instead of handing them over to that privileged minority of parasites who feed off of our labour in order to feather their own nests with luxuries. The kind of luxuries that they proudly show off and boast of, while the rest of us look on in despair of their greed and the gross inequality that we have to endure under capitalism. Come join us, fellow workers. You’ve got nothing to lose but your chains. Who knows, maybe one of these days you too will be writing all about your journey to becoming a socialist in the pages of this journal.

Paul Edwards

No Borders (2021)

Book Review from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Build Bridges Not Walls. A Journey To A World Without Borders. By Todd Miller, City Lights Books, 2021. 161pp.

A book about a world without borders is always going to be one that interests socialists who themselves envision a borderless, stateless society of free access to all goods and services organised democratically on the basis of each according to ability to each according to need. And in this book, the author establishes his own imaginative credentials from the very first pages by envisioning the world as ‘a land without political boundaries’ which ‘connects us to one another’ and stating his intention to ‘examine the natural inclination of human beings to be empathetic with one another, to forge solidarities with one another, and how such inclinations contrast with the borders that invoke and perpetuate chronic forms of racial and economic injustice’. His book focuses mainly on the way in which the policing of the border between Mexico and the USA creates immense suffering – violence, dehumanisation, early death – for refugees from Central America seeking but being prevented from finding better lives north of that border. But in so doing, it throws off a large number of reflections on how similar borders throughout the world provoke similar suffering and suggests that the abolition of borders ‘could make the world a more sustainable, habitable place for all’.

Both its reflections on the author’s personal experiences in reporting on border zones over many years and its analysis of the political system that dictates and enforces border control constitute a powerful indictment of nationalism and the nation state and the way in which they make life hell for people on the move from one country to another for reasons of war, persecution, crop failure, drought, flood, or just plain old-fashioned poverty. He tellingly makes the point that no such preventions exist for ‘people who are very wealthy’ or for those associated with the capital which flows from one country to another. And he illustrates how governments are prepared to spend massive resources on ‘drones (engineered with locust-like wings and… armed with facial recognition software), high-tech cameras, motion sensors, war technology, night vision goggles and an arsenal of weapons’ to keep out those who nationalist fervour considers politically or economically undesirable. Meanwhile, worldwide, he points out that, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, ‘2.1 billion people suffer from malnutrition’.

So what is to be done? The author makes the point that ‘demanding to abolish the border is as unthinkable to many people today as it once was to ask to abolish slavery’, but that chattel slavery has been (largely) abolished and so we should use our imaginations to try and step over the new frontier he points to. However, it must be said that the abolition of chattel slavery can be seen to have been in the interest of a system – capitalism – that was always going to be more efficient in the more advanced stages of its development by using another kind of slavery, the kind that exists today – wage slavery. Much less likely is it that the abolition of borders will be seen as being in the interest of capitalism and of the national capitalist classes that own the world, since, as the author himself tells us, ‘2,153 billionaires have more money than 4.6 billion people – 60 percent of the world population’. Since the small minority is unlikely to give that up of their own accord, it can only be left to the majority of the other class in society – those who sell their energies for a wage or salary – to make that happen and to bring about the end of the wages system, which will also mean the end of the border system and the nationalism that underlies and sustains it.

So the author is right to say that ‘building such a world [i.e. a borderless world] means imagining a radically different global order than we have now’ and it is heartening that he refers approvingly to the book by Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, Wageless Life: a Manifesto for a Future Beyond Capitalism. But after such a powerful set of arguments against the nation state and the system it supports, it is a little disappointing that he does not take those arguments further and make them even more imaginative by openly advocating the abolition not just of borders and states but of money, wages and the whole of the profit system. Instead he seems to remain entrenched in the idea of money as the currency of human interaction (‘The resources are there. The money is simply misdirected’) and to limit himself to advocating arrangements like ‘the bottom-up democracy of the [Mexican] Zapatista movement’. The fact is that, so long as the money and wages system and the profit motive underpinning them continue to exist, it is inconceivable that the competing states supporting their national capitalist classes will be dissolved and their borders taken down. If you stick with that system, you are stuck with the state, and with the plurality of states, in conflict as their political and economic interests rub against one another.

Howard Moss

We can feed the world (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jack Kloppenburg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that hi-tech agriculture is frequently justified by the rationalisation that it will feed the world. Kloppenburg says that is the wrong approach.

‘People need to feed themselves — they need to be allowed to feed themselves’ (Link).

We should concentrate attention upon the economics which drives agriculture and the food industry rather than disproportionately focus upon specific technologies and techniques.

The farming industry rarely asks ‘What do we grow that is best for the land?’ or ‘What can we grow that will benefit our community the most?’ or ‘What crop will be most nutritious and damage the land the least?’ Those are not questions that the food corporations ask. Instead they usually have just one question, ‘How much money can be made out of the land?’

The Malthusian overpopulationists gained popularity with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (propped up by Garret Hardin’s later ‘Tragedy of the Commons’) which claimed that the world population was exploding and food production would fail to keep up with the numbers of people.

It led to what is known as the Green Revolution, and it is a policy still being emulated in modern times by the Bill Gates Foundation. What it did was basically to take fertilisers and pesticides, an integral part of intensified industrial farming methods, and transfer the practices elsewhere to increase production. Today Gates and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa have joined various corporations such as Monsanto, manufacturers of the Round-Up herbicide, to introduce genetically modified crops with the same end of increasing harvest yields.

However, such pessimistic predictions did not materialise because the rate of population growth dropped. The world population no longer is expected to reach the earlier projection of 12 billion. Now the estimate is 9 billion or even 8 billion and the world already is well able to supply sufficient food if wastage is reduced.

Sweet-sounding statements from government ministries are frequently rendered meaningless by businesses bent on maintaining their expansion and growth. Capitalist accumulation is limitless. The purpose of capitalism is endless expansion of production for profits and an ecological nightmare has arisen from irrational, unplanned, undemocratic production, rather than a rational, democratically planned economy. Capitalism will poison and pollute the planet beyond recovery if it is not replaced.

Spurred by UN population projections and its calculation of the degree that food production has to increase, ie that the world must produce 70 percent more food by the year 2050 through yield growth to feed the expected rise in population, many commentators determined that the world needed to upgrade its farming methods with innovations such as genetically modified seeds and foods. We are told that the agribusiness corporations manufacturing fertilisers and pesticides, and the food processing companies, are the only sector capable of feeding the planet’s population and that family-owned, small farms are not equipped to do so. The food industry has no motivation other than to derive more profits from the food chain. Corporations expend a huge budget on public relations in defence of their business plans.

Yet there is no global or regional shortage of food other than some localised supply deficiencies caused by armed conflicts or temporary pest problems like, for example, a locust plague. Many countries are net food exporters. Wherever we look, farmers are already producing a surplus. There is no food scarcity. Food security could be provided for all people, all the time. Currently substantial crop harvests go to bio-fuels to drive vehicles. Crops that could fill the empty bellies of the hungry are diverted to fill fuel tanks or to fatten up cows and pigs. A 2013 estimate is that 4 billion additional people could be fed if animals were absent from the global feed chain, and that figure excludes nomadic pastoral livestock rearing, which often takes place on marginal land less suitable to arable farming and could easily continue to be practised.

Then there are plantations growing cash crops such as palm oil, coffee and tea. Cut flowers are a major export of Kenya’s horticulture. These may bring in valuable foreign currency for local elites but has very limited ability to feed the local people. World agriculture possesses the possibility to substitute non-edible crops for nutritious sustenance but Big Ag chases the stock market as well as the food market and states assist by providing generous financial and tax subsidies to it.

We cannot lay out any detailed alternative but we can broadly predict that in socialism the people would likely adopt a more flexitarian diet, supplied by the use of mixed cropping, agro-ecological production systems, and conservation agriculture, using more appropriate soil and watering procedures and requiring much less chemical input. A method called the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has the potential to feed a further seven billion if universally applied.

The World Socialist Movement long ago determined that increasing production does not solve hunger as it is not a technological issue but a political and economic problem.

An editorial in Journal of Sustainable Agriculture agrees:

‘Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity…the world produces more than 1 1/2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people… cannot afford to buy this food…The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people’ (Link).

In anticipation of more people living on the planet, we already have the knowledge and skills to feed those extra mouths. Socialism will exercise these to provide sufficient nourishment and end scarcity whereas it is in capitalism’s interest to maintain malnutrition and food shortages to keep prices up.

ALJO