On Leaders (1940)

From the August 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The tragedy for Socialists is the manner in which the Nazi movement captured the minds and support of the German masses. Many factors contributed towards this end, but one thing stands out above all else, the misunderstanding of the principles of Socialism. Had this not been so there would not, and could not, have been a mass following for the spurious National Socialism. Throughout the world this method is being employed. Why does it succeed? Because the Labour, Communist and Social Democratic organisations are daily filling the minds of the workers with reformist notions and labelling them Socialism. Thus is provided the foundations of illusion. It is absurd to ask German workers not to believe false ideas, whilst workers everywhere else are taught to believe them. If it is wrong for the workers of Germany to believe blindly in a leader called Hitler, then it is equally wrong for the workers of Russia to believe blindly in one called Stalin, or the workers of Britain in one called MacDonald. This belief in a “Leader” is one fostered through the ages and aided by the reactionary as well as reformist sections. On one occasion, whilst lecturing in Manchester, the writer was asked by a young man, “Who is your leader?” His attendance at other meetings had left him with a psychological reflex resulting in this one question.

A century ago Thomas Carlyle laid down the fashion followed a few years later by Emerson in his “Representative Men,” which reaches its height in Hitler as the “Fuehrer.” From this comes the story of the “self-made man,” as does “Dick Whittington,” and has served Capitalism well as a theme to delude the worker with the belief that he could do it, and so adroitly sidetracking the workers’ class outlook. Individuals there are, of outstanding ability, who, given suitable conditions, stand out as historic figures and may become a Karl Marx or a Charles Peace, but only under the suitable conditions. The world has yet to produce “great” men who can make a fortune selling ice-cream in Greenland. How does Hitler fit in with this? Is he one of Carlyle’s “heroes,” or one of Emerson’s “representative” men? Demosthenes, in his “First Phillipic,” says it would make no difference if Philip were to die, because, if the Athenians acted as they had been doing, they would soon raise up against them another Philip.

Hitler had a secondary school education, had a taste for drawing, considered himself an artist, went to an art school and failed to pass the examination necessary to go further. He was a builder’s labourer, painter and paper-hanger, and lived a down-at-heels life in Vienna and Germany until the outbreak of war in 1914. Now, here was a “born” leader who should have made a fortune and become a power, because, according to conventional ideas, he had it in him. In spite of all the sacredness of his ego, he managed in four years to become, not a General, but only a Corporal. Turn again, Dick Whittington.

The collapse of the Kaiser’s Germany gave a shock to the officer caste. They realised the Army’s position in the nation could no longer be taken for granted. They must exert influence in civilian life by political support, spies, propagandists and political agents of their own. They sent Hitler as their spy, and for propaganda to the public houses in Munich, then under an ill-starred Soviet. When the Army reconquered the city, Hitler’s information sent many Communists and others before a firing squad. He was next sent to spy on the tiny groups formed by Gregor Strasser, known as the German Workers’ Party. He introduced numerous members (private soldiers specially sent) and swamped the group, changing its name to the one now known as Nazi. The first Defence Troop, forerunner of the S.A. (Storm Abteilung) was organised by a paid soldier, whilst the money needed to buy for the party (and Hitler) their own paper (The Beobachter) was raised and supplied by the officer commanding the Munich Army, General von Epp. Thus Hitler had “greatness” thrust upon him. He was not Carlyle’s “hero,” but, due to the foregoing suitable conditions, became an Emerson “representative man.” There stood behind him a national force, the officers of the Army, and on their wings he soared upward. He fished in troubled waters, using the years 1922-1923 of currency depreciation to further his growth. From 1924 to 1929 no progress was made by Hitler, because a moderate but distinct period of “prosperity” showed itself, and in the election prior to obtaining power, Hitler dropped over a million votes. Then came the economic blizzard of 1932-1933. The small investor and business man was swamped; suitable conditions again prevailed; the Big Business needed him and his party, and Hitler turned again to become what he is, not a “born” leader, but a representative man, representing unbridled rapacity. He did not make, he was made.

Lew.

Letter: Socialism, Dictatorship and Democracy (1940)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent (I. E., Sheffield) writes criticising the concluding paragraph of an article, “Russian Invasion of Finland,” published in the January Socialist Standard.

The letter is too long to be reproduced in full, but we deal below with the essential points.

The correspondent refers to the quotation from Kautsky’s “Terrorism and Communism” with which we concluded our editorial.

“It (Socialist development) will not proceed on the lines of a dictatorship, nor by means of cannons and guns, nor through the destruction of one’s political and social adversaries, but only through democracy and humanity. In this way alone can we hope to arrive at those higher forms of life, the working out of which belongs to the future task of the proletariat.”

Then follows the criticism : —

“Even if we accept history, as the article does, as a proof, the conclusions are not convincing. For, taking the case of Russia, where history proves dictatorship to be wrong, does that prove democracy to be right ? It does not. To prove this you would have to find an example in history where Socialism has been achieved through democracy. But your editorial, in spite of what history seems to prove, maintains that democracy will achieve socialism. The reason for this is clear from the terms which are used. Whilst you link up dictatorship with suppression and terrorism, you present democracy as being linked up with humanity. As you are convinced that humanity is an aim. that must not be abandoned, democracy must not be abandoned either. . . . Thus, if we look at democracy and dictatorship as methods of government, then in either of these systems the decisions arrived at may be right or wrong, may help towards the achievement of Socialism or may hamper it. Humanity and barbarism can both be due to regimes of majorities or minorities. . . . Summing up the position, it seems to me, that “in order to assure humanity,” i.e., freedom, and justice, we must be prepared to investigate in each case the means which are most suitable at the present time to bring us nearer to a state of society in which the fullest justice and freedom exist. The means must be effective, otherwise we miss the aim.”

Reply:

Kautsky, in that quotation, refers to “democracy and humanity” as means through which Socialist development will proceed. The word humanity is vague, and we are not responsible for Kautsky’s use of it. We included it in preference to cutting up the quotation. Your definition of the word does not help, because both “freedom” and “justice” are relative terms. But Socialism is our object, not “humanity,” and, as you say, the means for its achievement must be effective, otherwise we miss the aim.

If two alternative means present themselves, democracy and dictatorship, and one has been tried and failed, as the article in question showed, then the other must be accepted as being the only means. That is the lesson of history.

If our object was “freedom and justice,” then we would accept the possibility of its achievement through the instrumentality of a dictatorship. But our object is Socialism—the establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution, by and in the interests of the whole community. Even without the lesson of history it should be apparent that common ownership and .democratic control by the whole community cannot be achieved by dictatorship, either by one man or a number, benevolent or barbaric.

Socialism is a social system, not a political regime, or a phase of some other system. It requires a revolutionary change for its establishment and the co-operative effort of the whole community for its successful functioning. It necessitates fundamental changes in the relationships of the members of the community, the casting aside of long-cherished and deep-rooted ideas and customs. This change cannot be brought about except by the conscious effort of at least the majority of those concerned. No dictatorship, no matter how determined, how well intentioned, how efficient, how “human,” could ever impose such fundamental changes on society. Dictatorships have crashed for attempting less. If the establishment of Socialism requires a majority effort then majority decisions “in meeting each and every situation” are necessary in the struggle for its achievement.

This is not a “dogmatic assertion.” We are not concerned whether “democratic methods are always good and dictatorial methods are always wrong.” We are concerned only with effective means of achieving Socialism.

W. E. Waters

Rear View: From Keir I to Keir II (2021)

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

From Keir I to Keir II

The evolution of the Labour Party over 115 years from Keir I to Keir II is a practical confirmation of the theoretical case against reformism. The Labour Party, instead of gradually transforming capitalism in the interests of the workers, has itself been gradually transformed from a trade union pressure group into an instrument of capitalist rule.

Which of these three statements about Keir Hardie is correct?

1.  ‘.. Labour Parties association with Marxism and a little understanding of the Labour Party’s roots, after all its founder Keir Hardie was a Marxist’ (Labour Heartlands, 13 August).
2. ‘A pacifist, Hardie was appalled by the First World War ..’ (en.wikipedia.org, accessed 1 September).
3. ‘.. his efforts to reform society were driven by a deep faith in Jesus and a commitment to the principles set out in the Sermon on the Mount’ (evangelicalfocus.com, 26 August).

Neither Marxist nor pacifist

Hardie stated in his 1892 election manifesto that he was ‘…in agreement with the present programme of the Liberal Party.’ Biographer Kenneth Morgan elaborates: ‘I found him a man who was not only an idealistic crusader, but a pragmatist, anxious to work with radical Liberals whose ideology he largely shared, subtle in building up the Labour alliance with the trade unions and the other socialist bodies, and supremely flexible in his political philosophy, a very generalised socialism based on a secularised Christianity rather than Marxism… He was no economist and was ill-informed on many issues, but he had uniquely the charisma and vision that any radical movement needs.’ Hardie’s ‘supreme flexibilility’ may explain why he is often portrayed as a pacifist, yet told his electorate in Merthyr: ‘May I once again revert for the moment to the ILP pamphlets? None of them clamour for immediately stopping the war. That would be foolish in the extreme, until at least the Germans have been driven back across their own frontier, a consummation which, I fear, carries us forward through a long and dismal vista… I have never said or written anything to dissuade our young men from enlisting; I know too well all there is at stake… If I can get the recruiting figures for Merthyr week by week, which I find a very difficult job, I hope by another week to be able to prove that whereas our Rink meeting gave a stimulus to recruiting, those meetings at the Drill Hall at which the Liberal member or the Liberal candidate spoke, had the exactly opposite effect’ (Merthyr Pioneer, 28th November 1914).

Labour’s dismal record

Labour has supported all major wars, including WWI, initiated the British atomic bomb, sent troops to smash strikes, established the vicious Special Patrol Group, passed racist immigration laws, imposed ‘monetarist’ expenditure cuts leading to the closure of hospitals and other vitally needed services… In the light of such evidence, how can anyone claim that Labour is anything other than a Party seeking to reform capitalism rather than end it through majoritarian social revolution? Not Philip Snowden, Labour MP: ‘The British Labour Party is certainly not Socialist in the sense in which Socialism is understood upon the Continent. It is not based upon the recognition of the class struggle; it does not accept the teaching of Marx…’ (Manchester Guardian Reconstruction Supplement, 26 October 1922). Nor Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Lord Privy Seal: ‘I look around my colleagues and I see landlords, capitalists and lawyers. We are a cross section of the national life, and this is something that has never happened before’ (Hansard, 17 August 1945). Labour MP Douglas Houghton was impressed by his Party’s achievements : ‘Never has any previous government done so much in so short a time to make modern capitalism work’ (Times, 25 April 1967). Tony Benn, in a candid confession to the Independent (17 May 1989), wrote: ‘Past Labour governments have always worked within the limits set by market forces (as when the cabinet capitulated to the International Monetary Fund in 1976); have always supported nuclear weapons (as when Callaghan authorised the Chevaline without telling parliament); and have regularly confronted trade unionism (as with rigid wage policies)… We must add… a clear recognition that the Labour Party is not — and probably never was — a socialist party, and its individual members do not decide its policy, nor are its election pledges apparently meant to be taken seriously.’

The rich man in his castle

Did Hardie read Emma Goldman’s The Failure of Christianity, published two years before his death in 1915? Where she wrote: ‘The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment…” Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from it. Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the “redeemer” of the people…’

Marxian socialism aims at taking from the masters the power they wield and the wealth they have stolen. Its object is to raise the workers from slaves to freemen. It is therefore opposed to Christianity.

Editorial: The battle for ‘We’ (2021)

Editorial from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Somebody once remarked that the most important word in the political vocabulary is ‘we’. It was a shrewd observation, since to get someone to use ‘we’ in relation to some group of people is to get them to identify their interest as the interest of that group.

In the battle for ‘we’, socialists are trying to get all those excluded from ownership and control of means of production to recognise the fact of their common interest as one class within capitalist society, to regard themselves as ‘we’ and to use ‘our’ and ‘us’ only in relation to that class and its interests.

Those who control one or other of the two hundred or so armed states into which the world is divided have to try to prevent this practice emerging, and deliberately seek to undermine it, in the interest of the other main class in capitalist society – those who do own and control means of production and who derive a privileged income from this. They seek to convince the people who they rule over that the ‘we’ they should identify with is ‘the nation’ as the nation part of what they call the ‘nation-state’.

Those born and brought up in Britain have been taught, through what’s been drummed into them in school and through what they continuously read in the papers or hear on the radio or television, to regard themselves as British. In school they are taught the history of the kings and queens of England, and of the wars in which the British ruling class has been involved over the centuries, and of the evolution of the British state. The media reinforce this by reporting news from an almost exclusively British angle and encourage identification with ‘the nation’ via identification with ‘our’ sports teams and performers.

It therefore comes almost as a reflex action for people to use ‘we’ in relation to the British state and to regard themselves as part of a British ‘nation’. So they spontaneously say such things as ‘we beat the French at Waterloo’ or ‘we won the Second World War’ or ‘we got twenty gold medals at the Olympics’. Even opponents of particular policies pursued by the British state, yesterday as well as today, fall into the same trap and say such things as ‘we should never have conquered India’ or ‘we shouldn’t have nuclear weapons’.

Such usage is music to the ears of the ruling class as they know it means that they currently have the upper hand in the battle for ‘we’.

For socialists, ‘we’ are all those, wherever you are born, wherever you live or wherever you come from, who are not members of the privileged ruling class. ‘We’ are all members of a world-wide excluded class of wage-working wealth producers, who have a common interest in coming together to abolish so-called ‘nation-states’ and establish a world community without frontiers in which all the natural and industrial resources of the Earth will have become the common heritage of all humanity, to be used for the benefit of all instead of, as today, to make profits for the few.

Pathfinders: Fighting fire with fireproofing (2021)

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

Fighting fire with fireproofing

Last month UK climate activists staged a number of sit-down protests in the middle of the M25 motorway, causing hours of tailbacks, associated costs and delays, and allegedly some collisions. The optics on this were not favourable. The papers roundly condemned the tactic, pointing out that, aside from the safety concerns, causing standing traffic jams was environmentally something of an own goal. And inevitably, the Daily Star‘s description of them as ‘Tarquins’ and ‘soap-dodging posh boys’ underlined the disconnect between the perceived middle-class nature of climate protesters and the reality of life for hard-pressed workers trying to go about the daily grind of wage slavery. When you’re trying to motivate the public to act quickly and drastically on climate change, reminding them that you have the leisure and lifestyle to go and sit on motorways during the working day, while preventing them from making their works’ deadlines or minimum wage van deliveries, is a great way to put the kibosh on any hope of united class action.

Not that class unity is on the minds of Insulate Britain (IB), who are demanding that the government pay for the insulation of the UK’s 29 million aged and ‘leaky’ homes, at an estimated cost of between £360 and £640 billion, on the argument that the investment would pay for itself ‘economically, environmentally and socially’ over a 25-year period (bit.ly/2XuyQsU).

One is entitled to speculate about IB’s grip on reality when their section on science begins with ‘The science is clear. We are facing an unprecedented emergency that will destroy this country’ (insulatebritain.com). Really, destroy the country? Still, there’s no question they’re right about the need to upgrade the housing stock to reduce energy waste, and they may be right that investment would pay for itself in the long term. They’re certainly correct that the government’s investment in this area is ‘derisory’. But here’s where there’s another disconnect in the thinking.

It’s probably true to say that if private householders invested a large sum up front in retro-fitting energy-saving upgrades, they would see benefits in the fullness of time. So why don’t they?

The obvious answer is, they can’t afford it. IB knows this very well. Their own sources state that 25 years is ‘clearly longer than the planning horizon for most households’, a rather euphemistic way of saying that people have to worry about making ends meet today, not making savings next year or next decade.

Where the disconnect exists is in not appreciating that 25 years is also beyond the planning horizon for most governments.

We’re not going to make excuses for any government, particularly Boris Johnson’s shambolic and egocentric ‘presidency’, but if you’re going to be in charge of a capitalist government then you’d better operate within the immediate priorities, which may not include expensive long-term green schemes.

The UK state is around half a trillion quid out of pocket due to the pandemic, such that the anti-tax Tories have been driven to ignore their own manifesto pledge and raise taxes and business tax, freeze pay and pensions, and cut public spending. They are in hock up to the hilt, with GDP – the government’s taxable source of income – down by 22 percent after the ‘biggest annual contraction in over 300 years, since the Great Frost of 1709’ (bit.ly/2VLRWK9).

Some credit cranks believe that banks can create money on demand, at any time and without dire consequences, a fantasy view of economics frequently criticised in these pages. Single-issue activists sometimes have a similar lazy tendency to imbue governments with the magical power to waft vast sums into being, at any time and for any purpose, on the assumption that if they don’t it’s only because they are complacent Tory bigots who don’t care or don’t understand the problem. The idea that governments with all their billions simply can’t afford some things doesn’t occur to some activists, especially those who regard ‘politics’ as irrelevant, and who therefore don’t comprehend why it’s more important to states to squander fortunes on aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines than on hospitals and decent pay for carers.

Capitalist governments may have skewed priorities but they don’t have infinite funds. They get their income from taxing the profits of the rich, either directly through corporation tax or indirectly via workers’ income tax. If they tax too much, they’ll have the rich down on them like a ton of bricks. Alternatively they can borrow, and have been doing lately in spades, but then they end up robbing Peter to pay Paul. So, just like householders, they tend to be short-termist. Instead of investing effort and resources in fireproofing for the future and preventing global warming, as socialism would do, they fritter away money firefighting in the present, with their minds on the next election rather than on the next century.

The trouble with IB’s demand to insulate every house is not that it’s a silly idea. It’s a very good idea, and would very likely be a top priority in a post-capitalist non-market society able to do what’s needed instead of what’s cheapest. But in the present system the scheme looks vanishingly unlikely. Most people intuitively know that the rich aren’t going to shell out for the public good, and that governments do what the rich want and not what the poor need. So as well as pissing workers off by blocking motorways, IB’s stunts also reinforce a public sense that environmental activism is one giant exercise in sincere but child-like naivety.

And the public sense is not wrong. In the fond hope of building a broad coalition, activists continue to pretend that the environment is not a political matter. But everything in capitalism is a political matter, especially where profit is concerned. The road protesters who blocked the M25 ended up being arrested. In some parts of the world they might have faced much worse. Environmental activists across the world are being murdered at the rate of 4 a week by vested interests (bbc.in/3hDGk3F). What is killing them is the class war.

The only way to stop this class war is for workers to win it, and to do that we need to organise collectively to end capitalism and the choking stranglehold of the rich. Environmentalists who insulate themselves from class politics by appealing to governments for change are like mugging victims getting a kicking and appealing to the muggers to wear softer boots.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: The Tigray Tragedy (2021)

The Material World column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ethiopia has 110 million people. If the tensions in Ethiopia would result in a widespread civil conflict that goes beyond Tigray, Syria will look like child’s play by comparison’ – Jeffrey Feltman, US special envoy for the Horn of Africa.

Seldom featuring as headlines in the media, since November 2020 there has been a civil war in Tigray, a mountainous region in north Ethiopia of more than 5 million people, a conflict that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions from their homes. The civil war is said to have spread in recent weeks to the Amhara and Afar regions and displaced hundreds of thousands of more people. Some observers hold memories of the Darfur genocide in Sudan.

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, embarked on a military campaign against the region’s secessionist ruling party, the Tigray Liberation Peoples Front (TPLF), after accusing them of attacking a federal military base.

Ahmed was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation policies with Eritrea yet when the elected Tigray leaders requested peace negotiations, he refused talks. Instead he invited Eritrean troops to enter Ethiopia to do battle with the breakaway TPLF and the Eritrean soldiers proceeded to commit widespread atrocities. They also took the opportunity to attack camps hosting Eritrean refugees who had fled the repression and persecution in their native country.

The federal government has declared ‘It is now time for all able-bodied Ethiopians to join the defence forces, special forces and militias and show their patriotism.’

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said ‘a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding before our eyes’, with up to 900,000 people facing famine conditions in what has been called the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade. Tens of thousands of children are on the brink of death.

Ramesh Rajasingham, the UN’s acting humanitarian aid chief told the Security Council that over five million people require humanitarian help.

Attempts to deliver much-needed aid has been hindered by Ethiopia’s government blockades, according to Grant Leaity, the UN’s acting humanitarian coordinator for Ethiopia, sounding the alarm over a critical malnutrition situation unfolding in the embattled Tigray region. Humanitarian access in Tigray remains unpredictable with obstructive military checkpoints thwarting the efforts to deliver life-saving supplies. What assistance is arriving is reportedly being looted by the TPLF insurgents.

Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent told the media that ‘The situation there is one of the most difficult I’ve ever seen. The people there are missing almost everything.’ Rocca said only four hospitals out of 40 are operational in the region and are all facing major shortages in medical supplies. He decried the unacceptable looting that has ravaged most of the health facilities in the region.

UN aid chief Mark Lowcock said, ’There is no doubt that sexual violence is being used in this conflict as a weapon of war.’ Dr Fasika Amdeselassie, the top public health official for the government-appointed interim administration in Tigray, told Reuters, ’Women are being kept in sexual slavery.’

War comes at an enormous human cost. Once again, we are witnessing death and destruction inflicted upon civilians based upon ethnic differences with the divisions spurred on by politicians’ power-plays and propaganda ploys. As always in war, all sides accuse the other of lying and carrying out atrocities. And the likelihood is that all are equally guilty and none of the participants is innocent. Peace for people in Tigray will be elusive.

ALJO

Identity and the politics of scarcity (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are living in a society which even its supporters admit is based on ‘scarcity’ even if their definition of scarcity is rather eccentric (the absence of ‘sheer abundance’, as their economics textbooks define it). Scarcity does exist in the normal sense in that not enough is being produced of the things, services and amenities that people need to lead a healthy and satisfying life.

It is a society of artificial scarcity as far as the vast majority is concerned. Society has the means to produce enough for all, in fact more than enough. Enough food, decent housing, a good all-round education, a good health service. Enough for everybody could be produced but isn’t and can’t be as it’s not profitable. So, people are put in a position of having to compete for what there is; and where the rule is that the more money you have the more (and better) you get. People are in effect rationed by the amount of money they have or can get. For most people there is not much choice about this. To get money, you can beg, steal or work for an employer. Working for wages is the basic way most people get the money to buy what they need. But it means that what people can get is rationed by what they are paid.

You can get together with others to try to get a better deal. Socialists have always argued that all those who have to work for wages should join together to get as much as they can and eventually as a class – the appropriately named ‘working class’ – to get rid of the present competitive economic system and replace it with one organised on the basis of the common ownership of productive resources.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t got very far, and has never even been attempted, apart from ill-conceived and misnamed projects such as in Russia and by Labour governments, which failed. Partly because of these failures people, including activists, have come to think and act as if there is no alternative to the present system, and that the most that can be done is to get a better deal within the system, whether as an individual (or family) or as a member of some group other than as an economic class.

As a result, practical politics is ‘scarcity politics’ where individuals and groups compete to get the most they can out of what has been made available. Identity politicians seek to create a new grouping and work to organise their target group as another competing unit. This brings them into conflict with socialists who want all workers, including those in the targeted groups, to organise on a class basis. The identity politicians, if they succeed, will only make a bad situation worse by further dividing people, splitting them into more competing groups than there currently are.

Legitimate grievances

Having said that, the targeted groups generally have a legitimate grievance – they have and still do suffer discrimination purely on the basis of being who they are. The demand to be considered of equal worth, with the same treatment, as any other human being is a perfectly legitimate demand which socialists endorse and practise. There should be no discrimination against anyone on the basis of gender, skin colour, language or even religion. Every human being, whoever they are, is of equal worth and should be treated as such.

‘Black Lives Matter’ is a good example. This slogan is an elementary declaration that all lives are of equal worth. But then the question arises of how to put this into practice. Most countries (with the notable exceptions of those that practise sharia law) recognise the legal equality of men and women. In Britain there is complete legal equality between them and in fact between ‘whites’ and, to borrow a term from apartheid-era South Africa, ‘non-whites’. The only people living here who suffer from legal disabilities are non-citizens (a reminder that so-called ‘nations’ are identity groups too).

Legal equality, though important, does not end other forms of unequal treatment that arise from being poor and its consequences in terms of worse housing, worse education, worse health and inferior health care. This is where the identity politician jumps up and adds extra demands to the simple demand for respect and equal consideration such as the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan. They demand more money be allocated to their target group to improve housing, education and health care services for its members.

The trouble is that, in the context of the politics of scarcity, this will tend to be at the expense of other groups. Capitalist states only spend on social reforms that improve people’s lot if there is also some benefit to the capitalist interest in terms, for instance, of a more educated or fitter workforce. Even then the amount they spend is limited – since they have to pay for these through taxes that fall, directly or indirectly, on their profits. Spending too much undermines their competitiveness and the whole profit motive that drives the system. So artificial scarcity is never going to be ended under capitalism. It can’t be as it’s built into the system.

Zero-sum game

That we are dealing with a more or less zero-sum situation is explicitly recognised when claims for ‘quotas’ and ‘positive discrimination’ are raised. Here, more for one group means less for some other group. What is that other group expected to do? Given that neither group sees any alternative to the present system and accepts that the only politics is the politics of scarcity, they are not going to accept this lying down but will push back and resist, to try to keep what they’ve got (or think they’ve got). Identity politics on one side encourages identity politics on another, making the overall political situation worse.

In some cases this is deliberate, as with racists and nativists, but also those who talk of ‘white privilege’ which implies that all whites have an unfair privilege which should be taken away. The result is that the basic conflict in society is seen as a scramble between different identity groups rather than between those who monopolise the means of life and the excluded majority forced to work for wages.

In-system activists

Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist has coined a useful term to describe the well-meaning people who seek a solution to discrimination and poverty within the present system of artificial scarcity – ‘in-system activists’. But what do they envisage as success? If they reject, either explicitly or in practice, a different system of society (common not class ownership, production for needs not profit), what will things be like if they achieve their aim of eliminating any discrimination against their own target group within capitalism?

Logically this could mean, for instance, governments, parliaments, boards of directors, even the top military brass, composed of 50 percent women and 50 percent men. Or that the percentage of university students from their target group be exactly equal to their percentage in the general population. From the opposite angle, that the same percentage of the majority population should be living in bad housing or in poverty or in prison as their percentage in the population. If that’s 90 percent then 90 percent of those in bad housing, poverty or prison should be from the majority group instead of whatever lesser figure it is now. A redistribution of poverty to benefit the target group. That’s not going to get them very far.

In-system activists may regard this as a caricature of their position but it is a logical conclusion that stems from them trying to obtain more for a particular group within the context of artificial scarcity. They may protest that what they want is more resources to be devoted to improving all sections of the population, even if proportionately more for their target group. That, for instance, the percentage of them going to university could be increased without reducing the number of others going there, by increasing the total number of university places.

They are correct that the resources do exist to improve things for everyone – across the board and not just in education. However, the structure and operation of the capitalist economic system prevents this being done. Using existing resources for this purpose can only be achieved in a quite different system where the aim can be human welfare, not profit, and where artificial scarcity can be replaced by plenty for everyone.

Not communities

Identity politics assumes that all in the target group constitute a ‘community’. To describe some group as a ‘community’ there must be some overriding common interest which binds the group together. But, whatever else they have in common, the identity politicians’ target groups don’t share a common economic – ie. survival – interest. They are divided into classes, into owners and non-owners, rich and poor, with antagonistic, in fact irreconcilable, interests since the wealth of the wealthy is dependent on the past and present labour of the excluded majority.

There are plenty of rich women, gays and non-whites. Those from the excluded majority have a different economic interest from the wealthy members of their supposed communities. Their material needs are not fully met, not because they are gay, non-white etc. but because they are part of the excluded majority forced to work for wages to live. And so they have more in common with others who are in the same economic position as them. Which is why socialists urge them not to identify themselves with the rich people within their proposed identity group but with their economic class.

Those in-system activists who stand for equal treatment for their target group within the artificial scarcity of capitalism could protest against the criticism that logically their ideal must be strict proportionality in the distribution of both benefits and disadvantages amongst all groups. They could say that what they want is not that, but that nobody should be discriminated against because they are a woman, gay, black, or whatever; that everybody should be treated as an equal human being.

Precisely. So they should. But dividing people into separate identity groups is not the way to treat them as equal.

Even if equal treatment of women, gays, black people is achieved under capitalism – and there is no reason why in principle it could not be, even if in practice there are historically-inherited obstacles to this – those in these groups who are not wealthy owners of means of production would still face discrimination: as members of the excluded majority who have to work for wages. They will remain victims of what might be called ‘classism’. This is the one discrimination that cannot be ended within capitalism as it is built into the system; in fact, capitalism, as an exploitative class-divided society, is based on it.

Those who want a better deal for some particular group should not be promoting ‘identity politics’ within a system that imposes artificial scarcity. They should be working for an end to artificial scarcity; which is not possible in a society based on class ownership and production for profit.

‘Classist’ discrimination can only be ended in a classless society based on the common ownership of productive resources where everyone has a chance to have an equal say in the way things are run and the same access to what they need to live and enjoy life. In short, where the old socialist principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” applies. Everybody accorded equal consideration irrespective of what they are. And nobody discriminated against as regards access to material goods, services or amenities.

Adam Buick

Don’t tax the rich – Abolish them (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics abound showing how the wealthiest around the world have grown even wealthier. Economists explain that never before in history has any society’s inequality been so extreme as in this current epoch. The concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever smaller minority is a global phenomenon. Money goes to money as it is said.

In the USA the combined fortunes of the richest seven billionaires passed $1tn for the first time. The richest 0.01 percent of Americans, 33,000 individuals, now pay just one-sixth of what they used to pay in tax, when measured as a percentage of their total wealth. The IRS recently published estimates that the richest 1 percent of US households don’t report around 21 percent of their income, using complex tax avoidance strategies that allow them to cheat the federal government.

In the UK, between March 2020 and 2021, the 54 UK billionaires saw their wealth increase £40 billion (US $54.9 billion), a gain of 36 percent.

Around 500 super-rich Russians, who make up less than 0.001 percent of Russia’s population, owned more than the poorest 114.6 million, or 99.8 percent of the adult population. In China, Zhong Shanshan saw his wealth during 2020 increase by 3,300 percent ($66 billion). Nor was he alone, with many others enjoying a rise in profits. So much so that the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is now demanding financial sacrifices from the country’s wealthy.

And such is the embarrassment of riches among capitalists that in the USA some have formed an organisation called ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ aimed at making wealthy people pay more in taxes.

Even the conservative International Monetary Fund has called on governments to shift the burden of taxation away from low and middle earners and towards the better-off, warning that unfairness in taxation leads to social unrest.

Politicians are uniting to combat international tax avoidance and tax evasion schemes. We already see that there are efforts to unify different countries’ tax codes to close down loopholes that enable various methods of dodging local taxes.

Rather than attempting a redistribution by levelling incomes and reducing the disparity using government fiscal policies, the Socialist Party proposes a much more fundamental solution – the expropriation of the capitalist class.

Austerity policies and reductions in the welfare state are paying for tax cuts to the wealthy and this is proving to have deadly consequences. The USA is described as the richest society ever known, yet we wouldn’t guess it given the ‘deaths of despair’ caused by addictions and mental ill-health taking the lives of tens of thousands.

Billions of people are being affected by reduced pensions and social security benefits; by lower subsidies, including those for food and fuel; by government and local authority caps on the delivery of public services like education, health, social work, water and public transport; by the rationalisation and narrow-targeting of social protection so that only the very poorest of the population receive ever more frugal state benefits with more people being excluded.

The Socialist Party takes the uncommon, but very much the orthodox Marxist position that the ultimate burden of taxation, despite a few minor exceptions, falls upon the capitalist class (this is explained elsewhere in our publications). When particular businesses cheat by tax evasion, they are stealing from their fellow capitalists by not paying their ‘fair’ share of the revenue for the upkeep of government services.

This all leads to our unusual stance that we don’t really care at all about the rich tax dodgers, although it does reveal their hypocritical nonsense of being patriotic and law-abiding. Indeed some of the wealthiest claim to be philanthropists who donate to charities but it exposes the undemocratic attitude that spending policy is to be decided by these individual capitalists and not collectively by their ‘executive committee’, the state.

So when it comes to naming and shaming the rich for tax dishonesty, we say it is a crime far less than the thievery from working people of the fruits of our labour-power through the exploitation of the extraction of surplus-value. But we may take a well-deserved feeling of schadenfreude when those ‘captains of industry’ are being exposed as the crooks that they are. The capitalist system is rigged from the start and working people have been conditioned since childhood to love it, preserve it and ultimately defend it with our lives even as it enslaves, impoverishes and kills us. The problem is not the billionaires but instead the ownership of the means of production by the capitalist ruling class. And the problem is not greed but instead the way the capitalist system works, the creation of surplus value from the sweat toil and, yes, often the blood of working people.

ALJO

Feeding Frenzies in the South China Sea (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the talk of COP26 has tended to obscure other aspects of capitalism’s dark agenda that lurk below the surface, waiting to bite someone’s legs off. One such agenda burst to the surface last month with the gung-ho expedition of a British Carrier Strike Force through the South China Sea combined with the announcement of a new military (Aukus) pact between Britain, the US and Australia, designed to make Australia the nuclear submarine policeman in the Indo-Pacific and contain Chinese expansionism. Suddenly, instead of global warming, the papers were full of breathless talk about global war.

China, on its way to overtaking the US as the world’s premier superpower, economically if not yet militarily, is acting as if it owns that particular ocean and everything in it. Increasingly dodgy activities, including creating artificial island air bases and mounting amphibious landings that look like practice for invading Taiwan, are causing much alarm to regional powers and indeed anyone who wants to use that ocean as a shipping route (ie. everybody).

America’s motivation is obvious. Australia has just fallen out with China, it’s biggest trading partner, so will be happy to accept US/UK weapons tech as leverage. The UK meanwhile, having just bought two carriers it couldn’t afford (with a paltry 8 F-35 fighters on board which had to be supplemented by a further 10 US planes just so it didn’t look ridiculous), is desperate to preserve the illusion that it’s still a world player, with Boris Johnson wittering about ‘Global Britain’ to distract the voters from ‘Brexit Balls-Up’.

Meanwhile New Zealand, with its lovable mumsy Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, is caught on the prongs of a dilemma, being in the ‘Five Eyes’ espionage ring with Australia, the UK, US and Canada, but simultaneously also having China as its biggest trading partner. It would be terrible for Jacinda’s image to be embroiled in a regional macho pissing contest, but she can’t stay out of the fray. She’s felt obliged to announce a ban on Australian nuclear subs in NZ waters, in line with existing policy on nukes, but must be squirming about the fact that New Zealand is also the administrator of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact (CPTPP). This pact was set up by the US expressly to restrict China’s trade influence, and includes Australia, Canada, Japan and Chile. But then Trump pulled the US out, and the UK applied to join. Now China has applied to join as well!

WTF? you might say. Indeed. And China is also in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) which has 14 member states including South Korea, Japan and, er, Australia and New Zealand.

Funny that Britain fell over itself to exit a European trading bloc, supposedly in the interest of ‘free trade’, while elsewhere countries including the UK are falling over themselves to join trading blocs, even when they seem to be in competition with each other.

We offer no brilliant analysis of this regional game-play, except to observe that capitalist states circle each other like sharks sniffing for blood, and if they find any, it’ll no doubt be workers who end up as the fish food.

Paddy Shannon

Have the Tories gone socialist? (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Events and circumstances occur that undermine and trash the accepted narratives and certainties of capitalist society and highlight capitalism’s shortcomings in providing for human needs. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc economies at the end of the 1980s, it was the received wisdom that the free market with its competition between private businesses was the only viable way to run society; economies with substantial state intervention stifled private investment and in their wake brought economic stagnation and decline. This orthodoxy was accepted by all mainstream political parties until capitalism entered another of its periodic crises with the financial crash of 2008. Governments of all hues were then forced, against their political instincts, to intervene to bail out the banks. However, with the large government debts and budget deficits that were built up as a result, capitalism’s supporters were able to draw attention away from the real cause of the crisis, capitalism, and pinpoint the blame on the state sector, in particular the welfare state.

In the UK, David Cameron pursued this line of attack by accusing the previous Labour government of profligate spending, which left the state coffers empty, thus necessitating the build-up of government debt to combat the economic downturn. This narrative allowed Cameron to re-position the Tories as the responsible low-tax and small-state Party that helped him secure the election victories of 2010 and 2015.

In the 2019 General Election, Boris Johnson employed the same narrative to contrast his party with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party which, it was alleged, would put the economy at risk with its spendthrift proposals. Along with his pledges to get Brexit done and ‘level up’ the country, he was able to coast to victory. However, almost as soon as he had his feet under the desk at Number 10 Downing Street, the coronavirus pandemic crisis came along and knocked his government sideways. The government was forced to take direct control of the economy by ordering the closure of retail and hospitality businesses during lockdowns, and had to fork out cash to subsidise them and pay 80 percent of the wages of their furloughed workers. Consequently, huge amounts of government debt were built up.

Having nearly maxed out the credit card, the government had little choice but to break an election pledge and raise taxes to fulfil another election promise to fix the social care system and also to help clear the backlog of NHS cases caused by the pandemic. Johnson chose to raise the National Insurance contributions for both employers and workers by 1.25 percent and taxation on dividends by the same percentage from April 2022. The government hopes to raise £36 billion over three years which will mainly be allocated to the NHS with some of the money going to social care. This raised howls of betrayal from the letter pages and columns of the Conservative press. The front page headline of the Daily Telegraph (8 September) screamed ‘Highest taxes since the War’. In a piece that appeared in the same newspaper the next day, the authors, Camilla Tominey and Tony Diver, apparently with a straight face wrote, ‘Yet the Conservatives’ newfound socialist drift threatens to pose even bigger problems for Sir Keir Starmer’.

Opponents of these measures from all political parties have pointed to the unfairness of the extra burden this extra levy would place on lower-paid workers. At first sight, we should be moved by this newfound concern shown by Tory politicians and media pundits for lower-paid workers, but unfortunately it does not seem to apply to all workers. Not to those who are about to have their Universal Credit benefits cut by £20 nor those who will be coming off furlough at the end of September and are facing unemployment. Labour’s compassionate stance overlooks the fact that the previous Labour government raised National Insurance to fund the NHS in 2002. It is not only for lower-paid workers that crocodile tears have been shed, but also for the low-wage young workers who have to pay for the older workers, who don’t pay National Insurance (aside from working pensioners who will be required to pay National Insurance from April 2023). Capitalism’s supporters never miss a trick, pitting younger workers against older ones.

The pandemic did not create the problems of health and social care, but exacerbated them and brought them into sharp relief. The government plans have been criticised for containing little in the way of reforming the NHS and the social care system. Some suggest that improvements could be made by adding private insurance into the system. This ignores the fact that private companies will only engage if they can squeeze as much profit as they can. All this chatter sidesteps the main problem in that social and health care currently takes place within a society where profit must take priority over human need. In other words, the capitalist state is limited in what finance it can provide without impinging on the profitability and competitiveness of the national state.

Raising taxes and government expenditure have nothing to do with socialism. These are tools employed by the capitalist state to manage the capitalist economy and as we have seen that the government cannot wield them as they please. Socialism is a society of common ownership where everyone has free access to the social product and there is no state, no wages system, and no money system.

Oliver Bond

Letter: What about the monarchy? (2021)

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

What about the monarchy?

Dear Editors

I have subscribed to your journal to read intelligent alternative opinions as part of a thought-provoking process. I had intended to renew. However, the article on pages 14 and 15 ‘Parasites’ puts me off – it is below the belt as we look forward to H. M. The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Clearly the writer assumes an elected President would be much better. How shallow. Just look back at the conduct of so many past and present. Being elected does not ‘improve the human condition’, often elected by minorities. The Queen’s 70 years of service has been remarkable and should be commemorated.

Councillor G. Wanstall, 

Dover.

Reply:

You have correctly understood that we are not monarchists. We are opposed to monarchy, even a rubber-stamp constitutional one. It can’t and won’t survive into socialism. Obviously.

In the capitalist state known as the ‘United Kingdom’ the monarch is not only the formal ‘Head of State’ but also the focus of the nationalist identity that the capitalist class seek to inculcate into the state’s subjects. With some success, as you are far from alone in your view.

Are the royal family ‘parasites’? The capitalist class think they perform a useful role for them. We don’t see that they do anything useful as far as the rest of us, the excluded non-owning majority, are concerned. They are the head of what’s left of the aristocracy and great landowners in their own right. In any event, calling another human being ‘your majesty’ or ‘your highness’ offends against our democratic sentiments.

However, this does not mean that we see any merit in the British state becoming a republic. That would, as you put it, ‘not improve the human condition’. It wouldn’t make any difference, either way. Capitalism would remain as would the problems it generates for the excluded majority forced to work for wages. The USA and France are long-established republics but the position of the excluded majority is no better there than it is here. Whether the capitalist state you live under is a monarchy or a republic is an irrelevance.

So, you are wrong to conclude that we want the head of the British state to be an elected president instead of a monarch. Our priority is ending the class-divided capitalist system and replacing it with a one based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources by all the people. Neither a monarch nor a president will have any place in such a society.

To tell the truth, we are dreading the 70th anniversary next year of the present monarch ascending to the throne. It will be a festival of British nationalism to which we, as world socialists, are opposed – just as we are to all nationalism, everywhere. – Editors.

After the Revolution: Managing the Environment (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time socialism is established climate change and degradation of resources will have had an even greater impact than currently. So, how might a socialist society adapt to be in harmony with the environment? Depending on how long the wait is, the many factors to be seriously considered include climate insecurity, energy insecurity and food insecurity. These, together, reveal the absolute necessity of going beyond the limits of industrial mono-agriculture.

Inclusive global socialism is a world without a monetary profit system, unlike today where capital rules every facet and dimension of our lives. There are many wasteful jobs in capitalism, non-productive in the sense of being solely related to money, when what we sorely need is to be productive in ways that satisfy our needs and that work in harmony with nature, with our bio-system. It is imperative that the balance which has been gradually destroyed from the industrial revolution onwards is restored.

Mono-culture versus diversity

All life on this planet has three basic needs, air, water and food. Harsh as it sounds everything else could be viewed as a bonus. Whilst addressing the numerous challenges which lie ahead we must also recognise that these problems cannot be dealt with from a purely UK perspective – or European, North American, or any other single territorial focus. All areas of the globe are in this together and unless we are prepared to take that into account there is no chance of successfully remedying the problems created by our single common problem – the capitalist system.

It is common knowledge globally now that these basic essentials (air, water, food) are consistently and continuously contaminated as a result of the way the current system works, for profit, not for public or planetary good. Socialism can focus on more localised food production built on the experience of local knowledge of the vast variety of seeds and plants available. Control will be out of the hands of present-day multinational corporations which have consistently degraded soil, water and air in the name of profit. The aim will be healthy, uncontaminated food.

The need to emphasise local and regional farming is in contrast to all the various problems globalised agriculture has caused around the world. One example out of many reveals how the monetary system in India has led to greater discrepancies between ‘rich world/poor world’ access to food. Multinationals have taken over great swathes of agricultural land to grow fresh fruit and vegetables for export which has necessitated the import of wheat and rice (previously locally grown) from North America. Before this theft of land farmers on their own smaller plots provided more than was necessary of a variety of crops. But now millions are either landless farmers working for large corporations or have moved to cities in search of whatever work is available. Two negative results are increased air pollution from fresh crops being flown by air and increased pollution from the shipping of grain crops; and the vast amounts of water needed for irrigating such crops is stealing much needed water from many local communities. Whilst aggravating climate change, fossil-fuel-dependent industrialised global agriculture is unable to change within the current system. This globalised capitalist trade is severely damaging the planet and all its various life forms, and continuing on such a path in socialism is neither desirable nor viable.

When considered rationally there is absolutely no contest between capitalism and socialism in the field of agriculture. The industrial food system is based on oil; bio-diverse, organic and local food systems are based on living soil. The industrial system creates waste and massive harmful pollution; living agriculture is based on no waste.

‘Green capitalism’?

What is currently considered waste in farming is allied to the profit system. Any avoidable costs are passed on to third parties or simply to nature. These externalities come in many forms. Massive cesspools from raising cattle, pigs and poultry in huge numbers in confinement are well known for the contamination and despoliation of local water systems. Mono-crop production based on chemicals (pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers) regularly poison the air, the water, the soil and the crop, negatively affecting both farm workers, local people and customers who are buying chemically contaminated food.

Organic farming has little if any waste. Green crops are recycled into the soil in order to add or fix nitrogen. Animal ‘waste’ is returned as enrichment to the soil, not released into the water system. Animals are fed on natural diets not chemical concoctions given to increase milk, egg or meat yields. There is much evidence showing the dangers of the many chemicals imposed on industrially raised animals, birds and fish including increased illnesses, deaths and allergies for some of which mega-corporations are having to pay record amounts of compensation after long-running court cases.

A proper, natural food cycle, not this chemical circus which has been forced upon us, and a more localised system of production radically reducing transport miles, together will give us fresher, healthier food, air and water.

A wide interpretation of what socialism will look like in practice will be vital if we are to continue to survive on this planet. Many different and varied cultures exist around the globe with hugely varying customs and proven methods for sustainability, low energy use and a more relaxed way of life than many in our so-called ‘developed’ world. Within this context and regarding the ‘neoliberal’ driving force of ‘globalisation’ – negatively impacting the planet by reaping riches without hesitation or concern for the disintegration of eco-systems – what will be the relationship between these different cultures? Are electric cars, from production through their useful working years, or wind energy as an alternative to current energy supply actually the real answer to some of our problems? Or are they just ‘green’ ideas of the business community still out to make profits?

There are multiple green groups around the world calling for governments to meet various standards or protocols, but if we invested any hope in the progress gained from meetings and protests we would surely be disappointed. Since the first Conference of the Parties (COP) in 1995, carbon emissions by 2018 had risen by 40 percent. The measures currently proposed by COP participants are expected to result in a 3°C warming since the mid-18th century, with some leading scientists forecasting at least 4°C. Some members of the Socialist Party are planning to be in Glasgow for the COP26 in order to present our view of what needs to be done. According to Neil Faulkner of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, ‘Industrial pollution destroys our eco-system and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogens… globalised, financialised monopoly capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.’

How many individuals even noticed that 5 June was World Environment Day? Established by the UN General Assembly in 1972, 49 years ago, this year’s theme was ‘Ecosystem Restoration’ – also declared to be the decade for ecosystem restoration. Put it in your diary and check it in 2030.

In April, the Nobel Prize Summit ’Our Planet, Our Future’ announced a threat to ‘the enormous gains we have made in human progress’ and that ‘The ‘next decade is crucial: Global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by half and destruction of nature halted and reversed’. Unfortunately, participants are clearly and firmly enmeshed in capitalism’s mind-set. How else should we interpret this nonsense from their agreed statement? ‘Economic, environmental, and social externalities should be fairly priced’ (our emphasis) and ‘Complement GDP as a metric of economic success with measures of true well-being of people and nature.’ Meanwhile, recent UN Food Systems Summit meetings (Rome, New York) flew in delegates from all over the planet to stay in some luxury hotels. We wonder how much they contributed to the health of the environment.

Janet Surman

What is the Kindness Test? (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you a kind person? You can find out, it appears, by filling in an online questionnaire compiled by psychology researchers from the University of Sussex and sponsored by the BBC. We won’t know the results of The Kindness Test till February next year, but, from the various articles and interviews about this in the media over recent weeks, it’s hard not to get the impression that the researchers expect the answer to be ‘yes’ and to show that human beings are a kind species generally prepared to cooperate with and help one another in their daily lives and activities.

In talking about this, the psychologists have suggested that, if we consider all the interactions we have with other people over a period of time, the vast majority are likely to be of a kind and collaborative nature, even if we do not necessarily notice this or register them as such. These include simply smiling, saying hello or chatting to others, often people we don’t know, giving priority to other road users when driving and thanking them for doing likewise for us, opening doors for people, helping elderly people or children to cross the road, etc. Such acts, it seems, vastly outnumber examples of ‘non-kindness’, i.e. uncaring actions or acts of hostility.

At first glance, this may not seem to be the case, for, as we all know, what is much more likely to ‘make news’ is negative, uncooperative and, especially, violent forms of behaviour, while the caring, cooperative activities tend to get taken for granted and go unmentioned. So the most common ‘news’ items are about disagreements, arguments, abuse of various kinds and violence, sometimes extreme murder. These far outnumber any ‘kind’ actions reported.

Not that acts of kindness and cooperation aren’t mentioned sometimes but it’s usually only when they seem ‘spectacular’, featuring for example outstandingly brave and selfless actions by people without thought of consequences and potential risks for themselves. Rescuing others from fires or saving people from drowning are obvious examples, as in the recent, much publicised case of two brothers diving into deep water to rescue a child who had fallen from a wall into the sea and risked being swept away. The brothers delivered the child back to the parents and then walked away without waiting to be thanked. Only when the parents went to considerable trouble to find the rescuers later via social media did the brothers come forward producing a heart-warming story of thanks and reunion among those involved as well as inevitable feelings of happiness and human solidarity in those reading about it. So many people are prepared to make sacrifices to ‘do the right thing’ even if this means helping total strangers and endangering themselves. And most other people will admire those who behave in this way.

All this of course conflicts with the idea held by many that human beings are by nature selfish, uncooperative, and even cruel and violent, and so any attempt at establishing a world of social harmony is doomed to failure. This is an idea that has been expressed or implied in much that has been said, written and published over the years, both in commentary on human behaviour and in writings of fiction. The Christian doctrine of original sin is one example. It was reiterated in more secular form in the ‘all men are evil’ statement by Machiavelli in his sixteenth century work The Prince, taken up again in the following centuries by Thomas Hobbes who argued in his Leviathan that human beings are greedy by nature and human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’, and then repeated in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, where private interest or ‘self-love’ is seen as the primary mover of human action. This view of humanity was taken up again in the twentieth century by writers with more ‘scientific’ pretentions such as Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape). And it has seemed to receive confirmation in widely read works of fiction such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and, according to your interpretation, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

But the tide, so it seems, is turning. In recent years much study has drawn the quite contrary conclusion that not only are human beings capable of manifesting peaceful and cooperative behaviour rather than being hostile and competitive with one another but are more likely to behave in that way if conditions allow it. It all depends on the circumstances. According to this argument humans are eminently flexible beings who will always prefer to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless they are pushed into doing otherwise by conditioning or situation. And they will do this because it is likely to benefit them in a practical way (i.e. one good turn is likely to deserve another) and also because human beings derive satisfaction out of being of assistance to others and enjoy the approbation of their fellow creatures that this is likely to bring.

This is more or less the argument about ‘human nature’ (or more correctly, human behaviour) that the Socialist Party has been putting ever since its inception close to 120 years ago. It has done this despite all attempts to deny and decry it by both religious and secular ‘authorities’. And now it is truly coming of age, both among those carrying out scientific studies of human behaviour and those talking and writing about it in the media and elsewhere. Albert Einstein’s statement of over 80 years ago that ‘human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate’ has been echoed in many compelling and authoritative studies in the present century such as A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2011), Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff (2019), Sitopia by Carolyn Steel (2020) and Humankind by Rutger Bregman (2021).

Consideration of this raises two significant implications. The first one is that the society we live in today, capitalism, has both a way of organising and an ethic that run directly contrary to the ‘normal’ human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It encourages people to compete with one another, to try to get the better of them and to do them down if necessary. It does this by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, and so pushing them to behave in a way that divides them from their fellow humans, often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others. Herein is the obvious answer to one of the questions in The Kindness Test, the one which asks ‘What prevents people from being kinder?’. An inbuilt feature of the capitalist system we all live in is that we are constantly driven to compete with others in a variety of ways and, while that system continues, this simply cannot be changed, otherwise capitalism would not be operating according to its nature. Yet, given this reality, what is truly remarkable and significant is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures capitalism places on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and connections in our daily lives, and even in the ‘competitive’ situations that are created for us, we still manage to be kind to others, to cooperate and to share.

The other implication is that, in a society organised in an entirely different way from capitalism, the society that we call socialism, people would not have the slightest problem in operating in a harmonious and cooperative way most if not all of the time. In such a society, one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the natural human tendency to share and cooperate would truly come into its own. Nor would this mean bland uniformity, or lack of initiative or creativity it has sometimes been suggested. On the contrary in such a society individuality would come into its own, as people are free to express their talents and creativity in a way that would vastly outstrip the limitations laid upon them today by the need to conform to the rules of a society which puts competition between all humans as a way of realising profit for the few at the forefront of its preoccupations and so drastically limits the way in which human imagination and inventiveness could and should be at the service of all. In a socialist society, immense satisfaction will be experienced by huge numbers of individuals as on the one hand they will be able to contribute their mental and physical energies to increasing the commonly held wealth of society, whilst on the other hand they will be satisfying their own self-defined needs from the common store.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: Labour power shortage (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘So what’s wrong with labour shortages driving up low wages?’ asked Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian (29 August). Nothing, but it does bring out the commodity status of the human capacity to work, what Marx called ‘labour power’:

‘By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description’ (Capital, Vol 1, ch. 6).

It’s the energy a human can expend on some work activity. Under capitalism it is something that is bought and sold, sold by workers and bought by employers.

It is sometimes said that what workers are selling is their ‘labour’. This can be passable as a shorthand for ‘labour power’ (as in ‘labour market’ or ‘labour shortage’) but can be seriously misleading insofar as it suggests that what workers are selling is the product of the exercise of their labour power; that they are being paid for their work and at its full value. But they’re not, because a part of their work, over and above the part corresponding to their wages, is provided free to their employer. In the case of those working for the government and its agencies (civil service, local government, health service, education) this saves their employer from having to spend so much. In the case of those working for an employer selling some product or service, it is something their employer converts into money as their profits, what in fact makes the capitalist economic system go round.

This is admitted by orthodox economists and national statisticians as they define ‘value added’ as the revenue generated in productive activity, not just wages but profits too. If workers were paid for the whole of the value added in production – and only human workers add it — there would be no profits. What they are being paid for is their labour-power, not their work.

This is why socialists are not being pedantic when we insist on drawing a distinction between ‘labour power’ (the capacity to work) and ‘labour’ (the outcome of working).

Generally speaking, workers receive the value of their labour power in that they are paid the value of what it costs them to produce and reproduce it, appropriately called the cost of ‘living’. As it is sold on a market, just like commodities the actual price paid for a particular kind of labour power varies with market conditions. When demand exceeds supply, the price goes up, the quicker if workers are organised to press for this. When supply exceeds demand, it goes down, though again if they are organised workers can prevent it falling as much as it might otherwise do.

The present shortage of lorry drivers, hospitality workers and social care staff is being called a side-effect of Brexit. Boris Johnson claimed, on 7 September in the House of Commons debate on paying for social care, that this was intentional. Wages in low-income occupations, he said, were going up ‘in exactly the way that those of us who campaigned for Brexit hoped’. Whether or not this was intended (and the financiers who funded the Brexit campaign would not have minded as this wouldn’t affect them), it has happened.

HGV drivers are benefitting – temporarily while more are trained – but many of the lowest paid will be no better off as the tax credits they are paid (the subsidy the government pays to low-wage employers) will go down.

There is, or rather should be, an elephant in the room: how come most humans are put in the position of having to sell their mental and physical energies to another group of humans?

Obituary: Tim Hart (2021)

Obituary from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tim Hart discovered the Socialist Party only after he had retired, when he saw an advert for it in a newspaper. He was originally from Sussex but at that point was living in South Wales and soon became a member of Swansea Branch (now South Wales Branch) of the Party. He quickly became convinced by the Party’s case and also took a keen interest in its history and development. He often said he only regretted that he’d come so late to his political home and the clear, rational understanding of the world it gave him. He’d been involved in various causes and organisations but inevitably became unsatisfied with the illogicalities and inconsistencies of their ideas and actions and above all with their ‘single-issue’ approach to things according to the particular issues and circumstances of the day. He found the ‘all-round’ approach of the Party – the way it took on capitalism as a whole and not just its symptoms – a far more satisfying way of looking at the world.

Once in the Party he quickly became involved in various activities, including being its Assistant Treasurer, a member of its Executive Committee and writing articles for the Socialist Standard. So interested did he become in the Party’s history that he had plans for making sure that knowledge of all its activities and publications could be made available electronically for future record and reference. A project that he had in mind but didn’t come to fruition was to interview some of the Party’s longest-standing members, so that the interviews could then be published in the Socialist Standard.

Yet, though he espoused the Party’s ideas for the explanation they gave him of history and the current world, he never lost his ‘doubt everything’ mindset and was never anything if not fiercely independent. In his life he had changed jobs and occupations a number of times (e.g. banking, management consultancy, law, teaching, landscape gardening), often because he found it impossible to tolerate the submission to authority and frequent abuse of power inherent in employment. And indeed, even while agreeing with the fundamental tenets of the Party’s case, he differed, for example, from the Party’s view that the liberal democratic type of capitalism represented an advance on the more ‘backward’ one-party state forms, considering them all at bottom equally authoritarian and oppressive. He also had a more draconian view of the climate crisis than usually expressed by the Party, considering that it was probably too late now, whatever action was taken, for the environmental situation to be rescued.

He was a kind person to have a discussion with and you always knew that anything you said, whether he agreed with it or not, would be responded to in a comradely and tolerant way. He was a keen swimmer and cyclist, activities he continued with even during his short final illness. He was also a marvellous grandad to Luke and a devoted father to Elaine and Della, to whom we convey our sincere condolences.

Howard Moss

South Wales Branch