Material World: Technology, capitalism and war (2024)

The Material World column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern warfare entails the destruction of both means of production and workers themselves, as we all see on our TV screen at the moment in Gaza and Ukraine. It represents quite the opposite of any progression of our productive potential — a drastic regression — and poses a massive threat to everyone.

What we are referring to here is the technology devoted to the art of killing human beings on a potentially industrial scale and reducing their habitat to an utter wasteland. The very thought of it strikes us as repulsive and inhumane. Little wonder people feel so ambivalent about ‘technological progress’. Little wonder that, for so many, the future has come to look so bleak.

While some innovations have provided us with both benefits and disadvantages, the same most certainly cannot be said of certain other technological innovations one can think of – like, say, a Tomahawk cruise missile costing about $2 million apiece. There are thousands of Tomahawk missiles at the disposition of navies around the world, not to mention all those other kinds of missiles in service. The destruction they could inflict on the planet does not bear thinking about. One cannot even pretend that there is any real benefit to be gained from any of this — unless you count employment for workers in a factory producing such weapons as a ‘benefit’. But then, these same workers could have been far better employed producing something social useful.

There is an argument that is sometimes made that for all sheer waste of human talent and material resources that the military establishment represents, technological innovation in the service of this establishment has had important spinoffs that benefit us all. According to NATO’s website, for instance:

‘Our militaries have one paramount duty: to keep us safe from any threat. Over the years, countless inventors from NATO countries have created new technologies, big and small, that contribute to that ultimate goal. The spill-over effects of this innovation are all around us and have laid the foundations of our modern world. NATO has supported science and innovation for more than 70 years. The Alliance not only provides direct funding to researchers, but also maintains networks that bring together thousands of scientists from around the world to collaborate and build on each other’s work. Military innovation in science and technology has helped to create some of the most iconic and essential items in our streets, offices and homes. Here are seven of the most interesting inventions pioneered and popularised by NATO militaries that are now common in everyday life’.

The article then goes on to list the more well-known inventions initially intended for military purposes, such as the internet, GPS satellite navigation, microwaves, duct tape and so on, plus a much longer list of ‘honourable mentions’ only cursorily referred to.

If this is not an example of special pleading then one wonders what else it could possibly be. Reading this, one might be forgiven for having overlooked that NATO, like any other military bloc, is a huge killing machine that consumes massive quantities of resources and manpower for the purpose of waging war. How is that a socially beneficial use of resources and manpower? Satellite navigation is great if you want to find the shortest route from A to B. But satellite navigation can also deliver a Tomahawk missile to its intended destination resulting in appalling destruction and lives lost. That is not so great.

The spurious reasoning in the NATO piece lies in the apparent implication that but for the existence of the military establishment we wouldn’t have at our disposal something like that handy roll of duct tape to seal our leaking pipe. But who is to say this would be the case at all? It seems presumptuous to make such a claim. Maybe someone would well have invented duct tape or, indeed, something superior to duct tape had there not been any capitalist nation states around or military establishments built up to defend them. One might also note in passing that every military establishment claims its role is purely ‘defensive’ but obviously this cannot be the case otherwise wars would never have occurred in the first place.

The potential for war, however, does not exist because we just happen to possess the means of waging war. On the contrary it is wired into the very system of global capitalism that created these means. Since the so-called Great War of 1914-18, dubbed the ‘war to end all wars’, there has not been a single day when there has not been a war going on somewhere in the world.

War is the military expression of capitalism´s competitive struggle over resources, markets and trade routes where other methods of securing these things have failed. This is notwithstanding attempts to rationalise or justify this conflict in terms of supposedly irreconcilable religious or ethnic or whatever other differences one can conjure up between the warring parties concerned. That, however, is just the froth on the surface of things — the whipped-up pretext for war, rather than its fundamental cause. Dig deeper and you will always find an ulterior, economic motive.

Robin Cox

‘Defence diplomacy’ (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Christmas Eve the Ministry of ‘Defence’ announced that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Trent, would be deployed to Guyana in South America. Sky News described the ship as one used for ‘defence diplomacy’ (tinyurl.com/cysxnpyf).

What, then, was the diplomacy that required the deployment of a gunboat in support? The one-word answer is ‘oil’. The Harvard International Review (27 September) noted:

‘In 2015, the oil giant Exxon Mobil discovered 11 billion barrels of oil off the coast of the small Latin American country. The discovery promises to change Guyana forever, catapulting the country and its people to new heights of power and wealth. Oil already generates US$1 billion in revenues annually for the government and will produce an estimated US$7.5 billion by 2040. By these forecasts, Guyana—the impoverished, rainforest-covered country of just 800,000 people—will become the fourth largest offshore oil producer in the world.’

The discovery was off the coast of a part of Guyana which has been the object of a territorial dispute with its neighbour, Venezuela, since the middle of the 19th century when Guyana was part of the British Empire. In 1899 an international court of arbitration awarded the disputed area to Britain. It’s an area comprising some 75 percent of present-day Guyana. Venezuela never accepted the decision, alleging that it was rigged, but didn’t insist too much in pursuing its claim until now.

On 3 December the Venezuelan government, under Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, held a referendum throughout the country about whether or not to reject the 1899 ruling and to incorporate the area as a new province. The result was a huge majority for, but on a low turnout, and the government duly established the new province, on paper.

Venezuela, much as it would like to acquire control of the new oilfield, is unlikely to try to actually annex the disputed area. The referendum had more to do with the presidential elections later this year and as a way of trying to win votes for Maduro by beating the nationalist drum. In any event, it is not the land, mainly tropical forest with a few gold mines, that Venezuela really would like so much as the territorial waters off the area’s coast where the oil is. Diplomatic talks have begun, with the US and Britain backing Guyana. Hence the dispatch of the Royal Navy warship to carry out its role in ‘defence diplomacy’.

Diplomacy is not a matter of working out what is the fair solution to a dispute between states. An important factor affecting the outcome is the relative strength of the two sides. In relations between states might is right. Venezuela may be stronger than Guyana and so could seize the land it claims. But Guyana is backed by the US and Britain, because they don’t want a state with a nationalist anti-American government to control the new oilfield (they want a friendly state to) or to extend its territory (in fact they have been working to overthrow the government there), and Venezuela is in no position to take them on any more than it was to challenge the British Empire in 1899.

The cannons roar

In another part of the world another Royal Navy warship, HMS Diamond, has also been engaged in ‘defence diplomacy,’ in the Red Sea. In fact it actually used its weapons. As the Royal Navy’s website boasted on 19 December:

‘Diamond’s actions in the small hours of Saturday morning is the first time a Type 45’s Sea Viper missile has been used in action and the first such shootdown by the Royal Navy since the 1990-91 Gulf War’.

The British Minister of War, Grant Schapps, later threatened more ‘direct action’ than shooting down a few drones (Daily Telegraph, 1 January). On 11 January Britain carried out this threat by joining the US by bombing Yemen, escalating the war in the region.

What is going on in the Red Sea is an aspect of the question of who controls the Persian Gulf, its oilfields and the trade route out of it. In 1980 President Carter laid down the Carter Doctrine that: ‘Gulf oil reserves were of vital interest to the US and the US would therefore be justified in preventing outside domination of the region by military intervention’. This was invoked against Iraq in 1991 and in 2003. Now the threat is from Iran, with the US relying on Israel to counter this. Indeed Israel has already bombed Iran on a number of occasions.

Israel is currently engaged in a war of revenge against the Hamas administration in Gaza. The West supports this because Hamas is an enemy of Israel, its asset in the region, only cynically advising Israel not too kill too many Gazans.

Iran and its allies and proxies see the Gaza war as a chance to weaken Israel as the West’s asset. The pro-Iran government of Yemen has been attacking ships bound for Israel or owned by Israeli capitalists. This has led major shipping companies to re-route their ships round Africa, with serious consequences for international trade.

As the Royal Navy’s website explained:

‘An estimated 23,000 merchant vessels pass through the Bab-al-Mandeb choke point – with Suez the gateway to the Middle East and beyond for shipping from Europe… and for Europe from shipping from the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. Vice-Admiral Brad Cooper, the US officer commanding the Combined Maritime Forces from their headquarters in Bahrain, underlined that safe passage of the Red Sea was “crucial for the world economy”. He continued: “More than 10% of global trade transits the waters anchored by two globally strategic waterways – the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandeb. Regionally, it has even greater impact, channelling trade across more than half the globe, ranging from Europe to Asia.”’

HMS Diamond’s commanding officer was quoted as saying: ‘The Royal Navy has always been committed to the protection of maritime trade’. By force if necessary. In this case in the context of the wider conflict of economic interest in the Middle East between the West and Iran over who controls oil in the Gulf and the trade route out of it.

Adam Buick

Letter: Will anything good come out of the war in Israel? (2024)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I remember dancing and singing Hava Nagila with my two Jewish roommates in our college dorm in 1978, when Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David Accords. Time has shown how naïve we were to rejoice. Sadly, decades will pass again, and it will probably not matter whether or not the current fighting ended with the signing of a major ‘two-state’ accord.

The broad mass of the public is not galvanized either way by what is happening in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The weak and underprivileged, the working poor and the lower middle class aren’t taking sides. They know that the wars are taxing their pockets and that nothing positive can follow if they balloon into regional wars and the price of oil exceeds 150 dollars a barrel.

The ideological battle lines around the wars in Israel and Ukraine do not follow class lines. Most people on either side are white. This is an identity crisis at the top of society. These fissures and divides reflect the declining international strength of the United States and its inability to guarantee that Globalization 2 does not crumble and collapse. This is a conflict between those who support Palestinians against Israeli apartheid, and those who are attracted by Israel’s apartheid treatment of non-Europeans (never mind that most Israelis today are Mizrahi with origins in the Middle East and North Africa rather than Ashkenazi, or European Jews). Incidentally, the supporters of Palestine must be very careful around their new political bedfellows. A person carrying a Pride flag at a recent pro-Palestine rally in London was angrily chased away by other demonstrators.

Proponents of the idea of statehood for Palestine are drawn to the cause as one of ‘national liberation.’ They forget that the bourgeois revolutions ended in the mid-nineteenth century and that although numerous new nations emerged in the twentieth century, their significance was no longer a struggle against a pre-capitalist mode of production. The so-called ‘national liberation struggles’ and ‘anti-colonial’ or ‘anti-imperialist struggles’ of the twentieth century all turned out to be wars between capitalist powers. Every ‘liberation’ movement since the early 1920s has been harsh on all forms of democratic and autonomous groups, particularly among workers. And ‘liberation from imperialism’ always seems to involve subjugation to the imperialism of another superpower (in today’s world, that is the United States on the one hand, and China, Russia, and Iran, on the other).

The backers of Netanyahu’s Israel tend to be connected with the military industrial complex and traditional sectors of the economy. Among them are radical conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who do not want to succumb to the authority of the politically correct supporters of Palestine. Also supporting Israel are far-right groups. Who would have thought this possible? Does this mean that anti-Semitism—racism in general—is a biproduct of the disease, and not the disease itself? Holocaust or no, right-wing fanatics around the world are openly voicing their support for Netanyahu’s government because they appreciate the harsh way it deals with non-whites. But doesn’t a class aspect usually lie behind any manifestation of racism? The Nazi hatred of the Jews, for instance, can be seen as a socio-psychological transformation and generalized expression of the fear the German middle class had for both large capital and labor.

What advantage can simple Palestinians derive from the existence of a homeland for themselves? The worst calamities befall simple people during periods of enforced national unity in war. What can they gain from the existence of a Palestinian state other than more war, death, and destruction? The champions of a two-state solution— which includes many liberal Jews, particularly in North America—are unwittingly supporting the freedom of simple Palestinians to be exploited by their Hamas masters or whatever replacement is found for them in the future.

Is a lasting peace in the Middle East possible? Theoretically speaking, yes. It’s a long shot, but it’s out of the box and obvious. It requires no war, no blood, no creation of a Palestinian state, and no Israel as we know it. Naturally, the starting point would have to be the ouster of the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem and the end of the rule of Hamas in Gaza. Peace will remain a pipe dream until the corrupt monster states in the region—and that includes Netanyahu’s government—fall and are replaced by something new and truly democratic. Only resistance by the people of the Middle East (and Eastern Europe) against their own governments can lead the way to permanent peace. It is impossible to predict what exact form this new ‘people power’ might take. Who knows? Perhaps it might be something along the lines of a unitary republic of workers’ councils. That might work.

Evel Economakis, 

Greece.

Reply: 

Yes, but only if we are talking about democratically elected popular councils on the basis of the common ownership of the means of living; which of course couldn’t exist just in one province of the former Ottoman Empire. 

Editors.

Cooking the Books: Entrepreneurialism (2024)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph (2 December) appealing for Tories to vote Labour, subtitled ‘My party extends the hand of friendship to those who voted for the Tories but feel let down by their failure to act’, Sir Keir Starmer praised Thatcher for having ‘set loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. Entrepreneurialism, what’s that?

One dictionary defines it as ‘the ability to start new businesses, especially when this involves seeing new opportunities to make money’. This is not what most people remember the Thatcher government of the 1980s for. Selling off nationalised industries and council houses, cutting social benefits, mass unemployment and hammering the miners come more readily to mind.

Thatcher is on record as declaring:

‘I set out to destroy socialism because I felt it was at odds with the character of the people. We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism, then roll forward the frontiers of freedom’ (tinyurl.com/mus4fr9v).

By ‘socialism’ she meant of course the sort of restrictions on the workings of private capitalist enterprises that the Labour Party used to preach. Private capitalist enterprises supported her because they wanted more ‘freedom’ to choose how to make profits. In writing of ‘our natural’ entrepreneurialism Starmer even agrees with her ridiculous claim that this accords with ‘the character of the people’.

Entrepreneurs are people who invest money in producing something or providing some service with a view to making more money in the form of profit. This is not necessarily their own money but is frequently money borrowed from a bank or some venture capitalists or even the state who reckon that the entrepreneur has identified a potential way to make more money in which they can share.

In chapter 23 of Volume 3 of Capital on ‘Interest and Profit Enterprise’, Marx discusses how this extra money is divided between the lender of capital and the entrepreneur who actually uses it:

‘The functioning capitalist is here assumed as a non-owner of capital. Ownership of the capital is represented in relation to him by the money-capitalist, the lender. The interest he pays to the latter thus appears as that portion of gross profit which is due to the ownership of capital as such. As distinct from this, that portion of profit which falls to the active capitalist appears now as profit of enterprise, deriving solely from the operations, or functions, which he performs with the capital in the process of reproduction, hence particularly those functions which he performs as entrepreneur in industry or commerce. (…) [P]rofit of enterprise appears to him as the exclusive fruit of the functions which he performs with the capital, as the fruit of the movement and performance of capital, of a performance which appears to him as his own activity.’

Entrepreneurs, especially those who succeed in making lots of profit, have a high opinion of themselves. They see themselves as ‘wealth creators’. They are certainly more involved in this than the mere owner of capital but only because they identify some new way of making money by organising workers to produce wealth.

Entrepreneurs are obviously more useful from a general capitalist point of view than mere coupon-clippers living off dividends or interest as they are an active section of the capitalist class identifying new ways of making profits, the driving force of capitalism. Which is why governments, as the guardians of the overall general capitalist interest in a particular country, seek to encourage them. It is part of their remit. Thatcher recognised this. So does Starmer. Labour is now more than ever an avowedly capitalist party and is openly saying it will govern as such.

Will information goods undermine capitalism? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Information goods are goods whose value derives not from physical characteristics but from the information they convey. In many cases they can simply be copied or downloaded without any cost to speak of (apart from the time spent doing this). Moreover, there is no obvious upper limit as far the volume or quantity of these goods is concerned. They are intrinsically non-scarce or non-rivalrous and, also, ‘non-destructible’ – unlike a physical good.

For instance, by accessing a piece of music on YouTube or an article via Google, you are not denying anyone else the possibility of doing the same. This may very well not be true of a physical good. If I take the last loaf of bread off the supermarket shelf you will, sadly, have to go without at least until the next delivery.

A further characteristic of information goods is that while they have very low or zero marginal costs, their fixed or amortised development costs tend to be particularly high. This cost structure is rather different from the traditional cost structure pertaining to physical goods and, thus, calls for a somewhat different pricing strategy.

Given the non-rivalrous nature of information goods, their zero marginal costs, and the technical ease of capturing or pirating such goods (perhaps in contravention of copyright law), an internet-based business might decide that the most pragmatic thing to do would be to simply abandon the idea of charging for the information goods or service it makes available to its customers. However, while it costs you nothing to have a Facebook page or use the Google search engine this does not mean these commercial entities don’t generate enormous revenues (and profits) for themselves in some other way. In fact, both these entities currently make billions of dollars in profits and even more in revenue. Primarily their revenues derive from advertising (and the copious use of algorithms to more effectively target individual users to benefit their advertisers) though there is also a growing secondary source of revenue in the form of various ‘virtual goods’ or Cloud-based services.

The point is that unless a business like Google was able to make a profit under capitalism it would simply not exist. You and I would not then be able to use its search machine. Being able to freely make use of this facility is contingent upon Google making a profit in the first instance.

As a matter of fact, making this facility free to its users is actually a rather clever way of generating a massive revenue flow through advertising and thus securing a handsome profit into the bargain. People using this facility are a captive audience as far as the advertisers are concerned with adverts being tailored via algorithms, as mentioned, to our own particular tastes and online viewing habits. How many of us would even consider using a Google search engine if we had to pay for it? One suspects only a miniscule fraction of its current users.

Dominated by Big Tech

It is not difficult to see why this kind of commercial activity based on the provision of information goods has come to be absolutely dominated by a tiny handful of very large corporations that have nearly all become household names in their own right. These corporations have the wherewithal to afford the very high development costs incurred. They have the economic clout and reach to shape the industry to suit themselves. For advertisers too, the large size of these corporations has distinct advantages; it provides a platform that enables them to cast their net much more widely – and efficiently – than would otherwise be the case.

Of course, not all information goods are free to the public. Far from it. Internet-based corporations, like Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google), may be able to provide a free service to the public but only because they can cover the enormous, fixed costs all this involves, and make a profit, by making an even larger sum of money primarily in the form of advertising revenue.

However, in the case of other internet-based businesses we see a somewhat different model in place. The information goods and services they provide are not free but are commodified. This is apparent in the case of paywall sites for some online journals or newspapers or else, streaming services like Netflix or Disney. Still other internet-based businesses such as Amazon are engaged in the retailing and distribution of actual physical goods and thus depart even more from the conventional cost structure of businesses purely concerned with the distribution of information goods and services.

However, regardless of the kind of business we are talking about or the type of good it is peddling, the bottom line for any business in a capitalist economy is the need to make a profit. There is no such thing as a free lunch in capitalism. Somebody somewhere ends up having to pay the bill.

Developments like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics and even 3D printing and desktop manufacturing are revolutionising the costs of doing business and shifting the emphasis from tangible to intangible assets. Physical goods are, so to speak, increasingly taking on or incorporating more and more of the qualities or aspects of information goods even though they obviously can never transcend their essential status as physical goods. Or to put it in a nutshell – you can´t have software without the hardware that goes with it

For this reason (and others) information goods are not, and can never be, free in some absolutist sense in a capitalist society as might be inferred from the fact that they – or some of them – can be downloaded effortlessly and without cost to your computer screen; they come with a price (even when the price is not necessarily paid by the consumer but the advertiser in this case).

Too easily beguiled

Some are too easily beguiled by the notion that we are moving, or already have moved, into something called an ‘information-based’ economy. It is the very nature of such an economy, they imagine, stemming from the intrinsic nature of information goods themselves, that has somehow supposedly changed the basic rules of the game, so to speak.

Tom Stonier, for instance, argued in The Wealth of Information: A Profile of the Post-Industrial Economy (1983) that:

‘Whereas material transactions can lead to competition, information transactions are much more likely to lead to cooperation. Information is a resource which can be truly shared’.

Superficially, this sounds all very plausible. One thinks of the crucial role of R&D in industry. A lot of the work of scientists involves collaborating with other scientists and sharing information through peer-reviewed journals and so on. This comes across as all very cooperative and civilised, indeed. Being a ‘non-rivalrous good’, information can be universally shared at virtually no cost. No nasty competition is required.

Its very abundance, goes the argument, means that an information good fundamentally breaks with the logic of the market itself. ‘Plenty’ undermines the rationale for attaching a price tag to a product and, thus, the idea of exclusively owning this product – in this case an information good. Insofar as a price tag is still attached to such a product this can only be explained, it is argued, by the fact that the provider is seeking to perversely, and quite unnecessarily, exclude others from freely using it. The motive of the provider is simply one of self-gain to be achieved by such means as patents and copyrights. In other words, they are asserting an unjustifiable monopolistic hold over the product in question in an age of potential plenty.

Indeed, this, it is sometimes suggested, is precisely why ‘late-stage capitalism’ is today dominated by the existence of virtual monopolies – or, more precisely, oligopolies. Prices are no longer explicable in the conventional terms of supply and demand. Rather they are imposed by diktat by the price makers – namely, those industrial giants striving to enlarge their share of the market in which they operate – to the detriment of price takers, the consuming public.

The basic idea that information technology is – allegedly – more and more bent on subverting the rationale for a market system is a recurring theme in books like Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski´s The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (2019). Capitalism, according to them, is being progressively hollowed out from within and what remains of it is but a brittle shell that seeks to needlessly confine and imprison the new life forms it has given birth to. These represent its arch nemesis: in particular, information technology.

Such technology, goes the argument, by enabling the application of so-called ‘centralised planning’ within the corporation and, by extension, the suspension of market principles – has the potential to transform society along ‘socialist’ lines or at least, provides us with a model of what such a future society would look like. This in itself is a questionable proposition in some ways, but it is also one that seems fundamentally at odds with the pre-eminent role of big corporations today in promoting market imperialism and commodity fetishism.

We should be more cautious in our assessment of the potential impact of information technology and not get too carried away with fanciful notions of the imminent arrival of what has been dubbed ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (FALC). There is no reason to think that information technology or the enhanced role of information as a factor of production, will somehow in and of itself pose some kind of existential threat to capitalism.

This should be obvious from the standpoint of capitalist businesses. The idea that they would somehow resign themselves to economic suicide seems inherently implausible. Under capitalism, generally speaking, technological innovations tend not to be taken up and developed by businesses if there is no prospect of making a profit by doing so.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski´s The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism was reviewed in June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard.

How democratic is ‘Democracy’? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell made the following remark about democracy:

‘In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning’.

As Orwell noted 78 years ago, democracy is felt to be a political system that is good, and therefore when people wish to imply that a political system is good, they call it democratic. The question of democracy, however, like all political buzzwords, is in need of detailed and sober scrutiny by socialists, both for its connection with the capitalist society of today, and with the future socialist society to which we aspire.

Democracy in context

In considering democracy, we must be clear not to confuse fact and fiction. The ideas of the age do not represent reality, but are just that: illusions we tell ourselves (or are told about ourselves by others). As Marx and Engels cautioned in The German Ideology, we must not allow the ‘idea’ to become the ‘active force, which controls and determines [our] practices’. In this sense, socialists do not believe in democracy in the same way we do not believe in god.

In speaking of democracy we are thus talking not about a philosophical ideal, a utopian vision towards which we should be constantly striving, but an actual system existing in reality. It is not the job of socialists to perfect ideas, but to critique ruthlessly all that exists.

Democracy is often said to have originated with the Ancient Greeks. Certainly ideas of voting and the consent of the governed have existed throughout history. However, we must remember that for most of its history, democracy in the form of voting has been merely a method of sharing power between members of the ruling class. Ancient Greece was the democracy of slaveholders, and the English Parliament was the democracy of landlords.

It was not until 1832 that the vote in Britain began to be extended – rising from 1 percent of the population to 7 percent. Universal suffrage was not achieved until 1928, after a political conflict lasting over a century to fully extend the vote to working-class men and women. In America, blacks were excluded from voting until the 1960s under Jim Crow laws. Swiss women did not gain the right to vote in federal elections until 1971.

For most of its history, therefore, democratic forms of government have gone hand in hand with highly repressive and authoritarian political systems, in which the majority of the population have been prevented from voting even under republics and parliamentary governments.

How democratic is democracy?

The current form of democracy – liberal democracy – is based upon an idea of a separation between the private sphere and the public sphere. The public sphere is the realm of politics, civil rights, law-making; the private sphere is that of economic transactions between free individuals. At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine and John Locke saw a free society of individuals based on mutual agreement as the natural state of humanity. To them, the public sphere of states and laws was a necessary mechanism where people surrender some of their natural freedom to join forces and protect themselves and their property by mutually submitting to a central authority, namely a government.

This idea lies at the heart of modern democracy: the bills of rights and written constitutions that exist in almost every country on the planet, limiting (at least in principle) the powers of governments, flow directly from this philosophical idea that Private individualism is good and natural whereas Public collectivism is at best a necessary evil.

What liberal democracy fails to address, however, is the power individuals hold over each other. Individuals do not exist freely in relation to each other on a level playing field; even without the presence of a state, inequality and injustice would still exist in any society where ownership and control over resources is limited to a single class. Under a class-divided system, freedom in practice means the freedom of ‘man to exploit man’. The ‘rights’ to own property and make contracts protected by constitutions mean, in practice, the right of the capitalist class to hold us hostage to their economic power. Marx wrote at length on this dichotomy between liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and its reality of class exploitation, for instance in On the Jewish Question:

‘Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society and shows itself […] as soon as civil society gives complete birth out of itself to the political state. The god of practical need and personal self-interest is money’.

Under capitalism, political democracy provides the fig-leaf of economic dictatorship.

Something worth fighting for?

Socialists look to the ballot as providing a secure way forward for the transformation of society and the dissolution of class distinctions. At the same time, however, we must not shy away from the uncomfortable realisation that democracy does not mean freedom. Far from it, the history of democracy shows that it is not only compatible with, but comfortably well-suited to, sustaining class dictatorship.

As the German Social Democrat legal scholar, Hermann Heller wrote in 1928:

‘Through financial domination of party, press, film, and literature, through social influence over schools and universities, [the rulers] are able, without using direct corruption, to influence the bureaucratic and electoral apparatus in such a consummate fashion that they preserve every democratic form while achieving a dictatorship of content.’

Herman Heller died five years later in exile in Madrid. The Weimar Republic in Germany was overthrown by the Nazis, with the backing of Junker landowners and the big industrial bourgeoisie. Before all else, the Nazis ruthlessly suppressed the leftist SPD and the KPD; arresting their politicians, closing down the left-wing press, and ransacking the offices of trade unions.

Since the invention of universal suffrage, every person has one vote, and each vote is counted once. This does not mean that all votes are equal. The capitalist class own the media, the movie studios, the printing presses, and they sponsor the universities and research institutes. They have far easier access to scholastic qualifications and government jobs, and unlimited publicity through advertising, pop culture, and news media to reinforce the sanctity of the capitalist mode of production. As Marx and Engels outlined in The German Ideology:

‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’.

There are no easy answers to how socialists should navigate past these obstacles. However, in grappling with difficult questions of democracy and class conflict, we must remember what is at stake. On the one hand stands a ruling class which history shows to be violent, amoral, and ruthless. On the other stands the mass of the world’s population, robbed of the value they create by this class, and living in or just above destitution, and ultimately, it is to end this that we fight. Not for the democracy of the ruling class, but for a socialist world free of exploitation and the violence its maintenance necessitates.

Uther Naysmith

Party News: The Socialist Party's Summer School (2024)

Party News from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our understanding of the kind of society we’re living in is shaped by our circumstances: our home, our work, our finances, our communities. Recognising our own place in the economy, politics and history is part of developing a wider awareness of how capitalist society functions. Alongside an understanding of the mechanics of capitalism, political consciousness also involves our attitude towards it. Seeing through the ideologies which promote accepting our current social system requires us to question 

and judge what we experience. Realising that capitalism doesn’t benefit the vast majority of people naturally leads on to considering what alternative society could run for the benefit of everyone.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion explores what political consciousness is, how it arises and what we, as a class and as individuals, can do with it.

Our venue is the University of Worcester, St John's Campus, Henwick Grove, St John's, Worcester, WR2 6AJ.

More information, including details of talks, ticket prices and how to book a place can be found on the Socialist Party’s website. Scan the QR code or visit worldsocialism.org/spgb/event/spgb- summer-school-2024/

Email enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religions, well some anyway, amongst other things, preach tolerance don’t they? Not in Kansas, USA, apparently. A new after-school club is causing such a kerfuffle that a petition has been raised against it. The petition says: ‘Satanism has a strong history of persecution and violence towards the church and those who believe in God.’ And goes on ‘Whether you believe in God, are a Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Hindu, Buddhist or even atheist you should see that ending this club is not just because it opposes Christianity but because what they stand for and the actions they will make are wrong and immoral. This isn’t an argument over religion and Christianity but of right and wrong.’ (Newsweek 27 December). It’s a Satan Club. Are young folk setting out to wind up their parents and authority?

#    #    #    #

In Iowa, ‘the Satanic Temple of Iowa placed with state permission a small altar on the first floor of the Iowa State Capitol. It displays what are described online as the seven fundamental tenets” of Satanism, including the statement that “the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend”’ (YahooNews 13 December). The incensed State Representative wants to bring in a law to display ‘the Ten Commandments in all state buildings, including the Capitol, and in Iowa public schools’, but admits ‘few people think there is much that can be legally done about it because of free speech and freedom of religion.’

#    #    #    #

Richard Dawkins in his 2009 book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, notes that in 2008, a Gallup poll, in response to three questions regarding the origin and development of humans on this planet, found that 36 percent of Americans thought that evolution had taken place over millions of years but that God had kick-started it; 14 percent thought yes, millions of years of evolution but definitely no god: and a staggering 44 per cent thought (rather believed because thought implies rationality) that God was responsible for the creation of humans within the last ten thousand years. The percentage of the latter who favoured October or some other month is not known.

A Gallup poll along similar lines in 2019 appears to show that the 44 percent is down to 40; the 36 is down to 33, and the 14 has seen a large jump to 22 percent. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of Protestants consider themselves ‘born-again or evangelical Christian.’ Opiates are hard to kick.

#    #    #    #

Now the stepmother of US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has called out his extremist Christian beliefs (LBTQNation 13 December, quoting a Guardian interview). She says that Johnson, who is a creationist, has an indifference to environmental issues because he believes that ‘God will take care of you.’ So stuff the environment. An ideal capitalist politician given the damage capitalism causes.

Besides refusing to fight climate change, Johnson’s religion has fuelled his virulent anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs.

DC

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A billionaire bungalow boss is bankrupt months after boasting about his bursting bank account. Entrepreneur Bob Bull, at No.88 in The Sunday Times Rich List, owes £725million,

(tinyurl.com/shc5uezf)

Over 1 in 5 children live in poverty in 40 of world’s richest countries, 

(tinyurl.com/35umy5t7)

In a recent interview, Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA). own stepmother called out his extremist Christian beliefs and blasted the House speaker for using religion to justify his indifference to environmental issues. ‘It speaks to those religious beliefs’, Janis Gabriel told The Guardian. ‘Don’t take care of the environment because we have a finite amount of time here and God will take care of you. It’s crazy.’ 

(tinyurl.com/2sr2zt53)

Scientists Warn That the Dubai Climate Conference Is Full of Crap.

(tinyurl.com/yc2vfxt9)

Communist China survivor blasts UN ‘eco-socialists’ for hypocrisy on eating meat: ‘From the Marxist playbook’.

(tinyurl.com/59h8scs9)

122 killed by a fire in a wedding hall. 82 killed by a fire in a Covid-19 hospital. Three months later, another hospital fire claimed the lives of 92 more. Though they may seem to be freak accidents, these fires were preventable tragedies sharing one common theme: gross negligence. Government investigations into these fires found that local authorities were negligent in their failure to enforce safety regulations and conduct inspections. Contractors used cheap, highly flammable construction materials to cut cost. 

(tinyurl.com/ykcmrw2d)

‘There is no democracy in Gaza when you want to speak against Hamas or its de facto government. We fear they will arrest us during the war, or after the war if we spoke against them. They can easily kill us even, and tell the world we are spies’, said Hasan Ahmed, 39, who was in the hospital with his injured brother.

(tinyurl.com/ycx6nnxd)

…I see a possible change coming through ‘the slow rise of solidarity between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Jews opposing the all-destructive war’. As a pragmatic realist, I am well aware that such a solidarity is difficult to imagine today. But it is here that we should resuscitate the famous motto of the May 1968 protests in Paris: Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible. Be realistic, demand the impossible. The truly dangerous utopia is the idea that the solution to the Middle East crisis can only be achieved through military force.

(tinyurl.com/mhrs6r98)

A progressive Thai MP has been sentenced to six years in prison for insulting the country’s powerful monarchy on social media.

(tinyurl.com/5n8wmv4n)

Sex can be bought for as little as £30 before 9am and £10 after midnight on the streets of Leeds due to the cost-of-living crisis. 

(tinyurl.com/y3rfmdnd)

This food was made by the People and it should fill the bellies of the People…Don’t fall prey to the myth of scarcity! 

(tinyurl.com/2bthwu2r)

‘It’s time for humans to become aware of the new reality and to collectively move where we want to as a species. We have the capability to do that and are already seeing signs of such movements. We can break out of dead ends’, concludes Søgaard.

(tinyurl.com/3n6c64cb)

New Year, old notions (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

As midnight chimed fireworks sparkled and people held hands, hugged and wished each other Happy New Year. Meanwhile in far too many places rather more dreadful pyrotechnics continued being unleashed.

Rockets erupted with fire and shrapnel in heavily populated built up areas, the deadly crackle of assault rifles continued to exact an inexorable toll of civilians and soldiers alike. The recently screened BBC series Vigil is being repeatedly realised in awful reality as military drones are launched by leaders utterly unconcerned about casualties, mere collateral damage.

While Russia and Ukraine continue their internecine conflict, their place in the headlines has been temporarily usurped by Israel’s determination to out-atrocity Hamas, apparently quite prepared to risk provoking Hezbollah into some futile act of bellicose response.

Two bombs in Iran have been exploded, amongst a crowd assembled to pay respects to a military man assassinated by an external power, seemingly by Islamic State. Muslims slaughtered by Muslims. The Middle East is demonstrating that the three Abrahamic religions, whatever they might profess otherwise, are no promoters of peace.

American evangelical Christians even claim the conflicts in and around Palestine have a divine purpose. Their government is seemingly prepared to continue supplying weaponry and support to those deemed politically righteous. Ukraine has even moved the birthday of Jesus, from their orthodox point of view, into line with their allies.

There is a common feature in all these conflicts; that is, the fundamental competitive nature of capitalism being expressed as nationalism. Zionist state, Palestinian two-states, Islamic State, or the states essentially created by the Bolsheviks now fighting it out.

In Britain, amongst those whose ‘socialism’ is in the Leninist tradition, there are arguments favouring one side or another in the conflicts. There are those who claim groups such as Hamas must not be criticised for their actions because they represent the oppressed.

How representative they actually are is debatable as there is no way of objectively assessing how many in Gaza actually lend Hamas their support. But even if they do it is hard to see how the seemingly random killing of a 1,000 plus Israelis advances Palestinian well-being. Especially as the response of Israel’s government was wholly predictable.

Political leaderships and their military ultimately will prioritise their nation’s state over the lives of the citizens. The common man, woman and child, are an expendable resource, self-replicating in the longer term, in the struggle for competitive advantage.

It is worth pointing out to those who profess their anti-imperialism through their partiality for this side or that in these armed conflicts that history is against them. A half century or so ago anti-American imperialism’s activists marched the streets chanting, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh, Vietcong are going the win’. They did, and fifty years later Vietnam is securely capitalist and well favoured by America.

However, in 1965, General Curtis E. LeMay, US Airforce Chief of staff, referring to North Vietnam said, ‘We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age’. Subsequently, an uncounted number of Vietnamese were killed by frequent bombing from altitudes so high there could be no pretence that military targets were identified, or that civilian casualties were unfortunate, but unintentional. There was also the widespread use of Agent Orange, a defoliant that caused widespread birth defects at the time and also in those conceived long after the war ended.

This campaign was conducted on behalf of the nation whose representatives are presently calling on Israel to moderate its action in Gaza, while continuing to supply the munitions.

Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Iraq subjected to ‘shock and awe’, Ukraine and Russia, Hamas and the IDF, all justified by national interests. It also raises the question of what constitutes terrorism. If it means inflicting terror on those on the receiving end, then terrorism is the default position of all nation states when pursuing their interests militarily, either actually or by threat.

Peel away the publicly stated rationales offered in justification, then competing nationalisms are exposed. Putin can accurately point to NATO expansion, but it’s Russian interests opposed to Ukraine’s, which has its own self-identified national interests to defend, that have led, once more, to war.

In the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia look on the present conflict with their own competing national interests in mind. One antithetical to Israel, the other perceiving benefit from a possible working relationship with Tel Aviv.

And so the behind the scenes discussions revolve around the one-state and the two-state solutions for Palestinians. As if by drawing more lines on maps nationalist divisions can be ameliorated if not wholly overcome.

Meanwhile British politicians continue to invoke Israel’s right to self-defence as if that mitigates somewhat the humanitarian tragedy being enacted. The moral high ground may seem an exalted place to stand, looking down on those seemingly too benighted to look up and see beyond their errors. But it is a cold, isolated place.

Not that the UK is exempt from nationalism, rather it is riddled with it. From coronations to Brexit to political divisions, its competitive nature all too apparent. This year’s general election will be promoted by the SNP as a de facto referendum on Scottish independence.

This demonstrates an essential feature of nationalism, which is that it is pitched against ‘the other’. The other in this case is England, as if there is something elemental to being Scottish that is fundamentally different to being English.

Surely, a denizen of Edinburgh has more in common with a Londoner than a crofter on Orkney, as the Londoner compared with a North Yorkshire hill farmer. Neighbours living next door to each other have similarities and differences. But their best interests are served by sharing their commonalities and their individual attributes.

Far better than killing each other over which flag should be saluted is ditching all the flags and working together to realise human potential throughout the world. A truly international commonwealth in which competition has been replaced by cooperation.

Gaza will be the present iteration of terror inflicted by the bellicose until the slaughter is put on pause before being unleashed elsewhere. Unless and until, that is, people decide, as we are well capable of doing, to abolish capitalism and its attendant nationalistic notions.

Dave Alton

What has capitalism ever done for us? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some who read Marx’s seminal work Capital are quite surprised, or even shocked, to encounter the great revolutionary extolling the virtues of the capitalist mode of production. We even encounter reactionaries using this to somehow justify their faith in the contemporary version of capitalism and its corrupt and destructive nature. They seem to believe that this shows even capitalism’s greatest enemy to be complicit in their admiration for exploitation, inequality and injustice.

For socialists this merely illustrates their ignorance of the evolution of the productive forces and the historical context it creates. Just as the Left continually point to the promotion of the state ownership of industry in The Communist Manifesto as still being relevant as a policy today we see a complete misunderstanding of how history proceeds and how it decides what political strategies are relevant at a particular time and place and not the ideological needs of the radicals of either the Left or Right.

It goes even deeper than this because for many, and unfortunately this includes the great majority, it is inconceivable that although humanity has created the economic systems we cannot control them – they control us. Just as in nature the evolutionary forces are beyond the control of any particular species so the cultural and economic manifestations of human productive activity have been a matter of mystery and so elude those who seek to understand and so control them. Ironically, we only realise this now because economic evolution’s current historical context has made this possible. Marx wasn’t born with a specific genius to understand capitalism but capitalism created the possibility that someone like him could understand it. Everything depends on historical context – and here’s why.

The success of our species is entirely due to our technologies – from bone axes to nuclear power and from the invention of language to its abstraction called writing our frail bodies have been protected, to a great degree, from the murderous rigours of nature. The eventual symbiosis of humanity and its technologies evolved into a total synthesis where it became meaningless to speak of one without the other. An understanding of humanity and its cultural evolution became the study of modes of production and the specific classes that became politically dominant because of this.

Any dissection of the propaganda/ideology of these dominant groups always reveals an economic foundation. In this country in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the struggle between capitalism and its representatives and the reactionary forces of feudal autocracy was bloody and without pity. The superficial religious ideologies of either side were promoted as the cause of the conflict but we see it now as the climax of a great class struggle created by emerging and old forms of production and their economic and political prerequisites. We also see that the attempted establishment of socialism by the True Levellers or Diggers was premature and only happened because of the political anarchy of the time. Not only were Cromwell and his bourgeois followers extremely successful at war but also at commerce, trade and exploitation. With the exception of a brief attempt at a counter-revolution in 1688, which was easily crushed, capitalism was established and the liberation of the productive forces was unleashed.

This ‘Industrial Revolution’ is what Marx refers to in his praise of capitalism. To him the creation of an educated working class together with the explosion of production (which made such education necessary) were the requisites of socialism. Capitalism was, for him, just a stepping stone towards socialism. Those who thought that socialism could be imposed without going through this capitalist stage have only to look to the tragedy of Bolshevik Russia to find their answer.

Today after unprecedented acceleration and change we find that capitalism has developed to a stage where automation, computerisation and organisation have the potential to liberate humanity from hunger, disease, ignorance, superstition and cultural isolation but instead we see food destroyed because it cannot be sold at a profit, medicine being priced beyond the means of those who need it most, systematic subversion of education into ideological conditioning, rising religious intolerance and the turning of information into fake news on the internet. Why? Because capitalism, like feudalism before it, has become a fetter on production. Production for profit necessitates buying power to create viable markets but also partly negates this consumerism by continually seeking to hold back the wages of those who produce the commodities that they are obliged to buy back! Today’s historical context renders capitalism irrational and anachronistic.

In the movie Kingdom of Heaven the character Balian asks Saladin: ‘What’s Jerusalem worth?’ The Saracen leader turns and says ‘Nothing’ but after a pause he turns again and says, with a smile, ‘Everything’. The same reply would be relevant to the question that is the title of this article. Capitalism and socialism are not involved in an eternal struggle resembling positions of ‘right or wrong’ or ‘good or evil’ but rather one of the recognition or otherwise of historical inevitability. The tiny parasite class and their ideological lickspittles of the mass media would still have us believe that in the midst of economic crises, war, pandemics, poverty, racism, genocide and crime that capitalism is still ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

Wez.

Proper Gander: Lights . . . Camera . . . Political Action? (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The response to Mr Bates vs The Post Office was a surprise reminder that TV programmes can still have an impact, even with so much else on our screens competing for our attention. The four-part series shown on ITV dramatised the campaign by ex-Post Office staff against their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were prosecuted, with thousands more suspected of fiddling their accounts. Consequently, many lost their homes as well as their jobs, fell into debt and some ended their own lives because of the pressure. Their convictions were based on discrepancies and shortfalls recorded on their Post Office branch’s accounting software, Horizon. When some sub-postmasters realised there was a pattern of innocent people being convicted, they grouped together and formed The Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance to co-ordinate their campaign. In 2019, England’s High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty, acknowledging the real source of the accounting discrepancies. So far, only 93 sub-postmasters have had their convictions overturned. In 2020 the government established a public inquiry which was ongoing while Mr Bates vs The Post Office was being broadcast.

Toby Jones portrays Alan Bates, who founded the campaign group and persistently worked to persuade lawyers and MPs that the convictions were unjust. The story is one of ‘skint, little people’ as Alan says, who found themselves victimised by the rules, procedures and economic prerogatives of powerful institutions, and who are fighting back. The Post Office is represented and defended by then-Chief Executive Paula Vennells and Head of Partnerships Angela van den Bogerd, both played as shifty and conspiratorial. The IT company behind Horizon, Fujitsu, is depicted as a cold, shadowy institution, but perhaps with less emphasis than might be expected. While the drama ends with a call for the government to take more responsibility, it puts Conservatives such as James Arbuthnot and Nadhim Zahawi (who appears as himself) in a very good light. Blame is placed on the Post Office rather than the economic and legal framework which allowed for the whole situation.

While Mr Bates vs The Post Office has raised awareness of the scandal beyond its 10 million viewers, it has been reported extensively before. Problems with the Horizon system were first highlighted in 2009 by Computer Weekly magazine, which has since published hundreds more articles, alongside investigations by Private Eye, Panorama (see Proper Gander June 2022) and journalist Nick Wallis, whose 2021 book The Great Post Office Scandal was serialised in the Daily Mail. The issue has been in the background for years, but Mr Bates vs The Post Office has managed to give it unprecedented attention. After its episodes were first screened in early January, a different angle on the topic was reported on news media each day: the way that suspects were interrogated, the millions paid to Fujitsu, the petition to strip Paula Vennells of her CBE, new legislation to quash the convictions, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak supporting a knighthood for Alan Bates.

Why has it taken Mr Bates vs The Post Office, rather than any of the previous exposés, to galvanise this action? As Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’, and the docudrama format of Mr Bates vs The Post Office enables it to have more of an impact than a straightforward documentary or written article. All these formats are interpretations of research into what happened, with the difference between them being in how this research is presented. In re-enacting what happened, a docudrama can employ the techniques used in filmed drama to engage the viewer. Dialogue is carefully chosen by the writer and rehearsed by the actor, often working with the real people being portrayed. Scenes are lit, filmed, scored and edited in ways intended to draw in the viewer to how the producers want the story to be told. When this is done proficiently, the re-creation of an event can have more of an emotional impact than being told about those events or even watching real footage. This gives docudramas an advantage in making the viewer feel emotionally invested in an issue, which is needed to fuel any political action. Only knowing that something is wrong or needs changing isn’t enough.

Previous docudramas have succeeded in shaping prevailing attitudes to events. The most well-known remains 1966’s Cathy Come Home, which showed a family becoming homeless and then being further persecuted by the state machinery and lack of adequate support services. The script was based on thorough research and largely filmed on location (a rarity at the time) with hand-held cameras and improvisation, giving additional authenticity. While Cathy Come Home drew attention to homelessness and led to the formation of the charity Crisis, the only reform to legislation it prompted was to allow husbands to stay with their wives and children in homeless hostels. As for wider change, director Ken Loach said that the film hasn’t achieved this: ‘it all gets smothered in this bear-hug of approbation, so that the energy of it is dissipated’ (tinyurl.com/3uasacat). A docudrama which had a particular impact on policy was The Day After, broadcast in America during 1983. This prediction of what a third world war would be like convinced then-president Ronald Reagan to pull back on nuclear proliferation. Hillsborough, shown on ITV in 1996, took a different approach to these by portraying real people, as does Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Hillsborough dramatised the campaign by the families of those who died during the Sheffield Wednesday football disaster to overturn the official verdicts of accidental death. When the deaths were instead ruled unlawful in 2016, MP Steve Rotheram stated the docudrama was ‘massively influential’ in the outcome (tinyurl.com/yeyucap4).

The momentum generated for a couple of weeks in January by Mr Bates vs The Post Office looks like it will speed up a resolution for the sub-postmasters which will hopefully improve their situations. However, the government’s apparent enthusiasm for the convictions to be overturned is perhaps due more to them wanting to attract support in a general election year than to them being concerned that the campaign will develop further if they don’t take action. Still, Mr Bates vs The Post Office has reminded us that TV has some strength, especially in the format of a docudrama, and the programme also optimistically shows how people driven by a common cause can self-organise and co-operate.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Correction from the March 2024 Socialist Standard

February's Proper Gander (print version) stated that Shelter was founded as a result of Cathy Come Home. The programme in fact inspired the creation of the charity Crisis. Apologies.

Vague and Vacuous (2024)

Book Review from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Values, Voice and Virtue: the New British Politics. By Matthew Goodwin. Penguin £10.99.

Goodwin was co-author of National Populism, reviewed in the March 2019 Socialist Standard, which was largely an unconvincing and unpleasant defence of a xenophobic form of nationalism. His latest book is no better.

The basic argument is that, since the 1970s, there has been a revolution or re-alignment in British society and politics. Thatcher supposedly emphasised family values and individual responsibility, but also ‘ushered in the new era of hyper-globalization’, as if this was government policy rather than part of the way that capitalism works; this involved, for instance, selling off ‘many of Britain’s assets’. The former ruling class of industrialists and landowners was replaced by ‘a new middle-class graduate elite’. The latter attended top universities, and were not just journalists, politicians and broadcasters, but also academics, doctors and architects. They have allegedly made it much harder for white boys from a manual working-class background to get into university. They control Britain’s main institutions, and a third of MPs have postgraduate degrees. Many of the elite are radical ‘woke’ progressives, a group that apparently constitutes about one in six of the population.

It is noted that Britain has become more unequal, and there are some passing references to very wealthy people, such as the ‘international jet-setting elites’ who have homes in London but also in New York and so on. Yet overall the author has not the slightest idea of how capitalism operates, of the division between a tiny minority who own and control the planet’s resources, and the rest, who have to work for them. The decline in manual jobs is noted, and much is made of the geographical divide between London and the rest of the country. But in London a quarter of the population live in poverty and one in fifty are homeless, though the reader would not gather this from Goodwin’s treatment.

It is correct to say that choice was reduced in politics as Tories and Labour grew closer together. However, the book’s focus is very much on England, with no discussion of parties such as Plaid Cymru or the SNP. The claimed counter-revolution against the new rulers involved three revolts: populism, Brexit and Boris Johnson. Brexit, we are told, was intended to reduce immigration and ‘restore Britain’s national sovereignty’ (whatever that is). Despite his privileged background, Johnson was ‘a renegade member of the elite’ and became leader of the non-graduate majority who supported the counter-revolution. But Partygate derailed this, and Truss’s ‘small-state, low-tax’ vision of Brexit failed as it had little popular support (nothing to do with market reactions, then).

The whole book is a fantasy, with no arguments to show how the supposed former ruling class have been replaced by the graduate elite, and no understanding of how politics under capitalism is driven by economic interests and the need for profit.

Paul Bennett

Clubbable (2024)

Book Review from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain. By Pete Brown. Harper North £10.99.

The author describes working men’s clubs as ‘the biggest ever working-class social movement’. He provides an entertaining description of their history, enlivened by accounts of visits to specific clubs. One of these is the Red Shed in Wakefield, where the Wakefield Socialist History Group has hosted talks by Socialist Party speakers.

Clubs originated under paternalistic attitudes of people who wanted to provide male workers (industrial workers, originally) with an alternative to the pub. The Club and Institute Union (CIU) was established in 1862, and had a number of rich and often aristocratic patrons. Gradually, though, clubs became more democratic, run by committees of their own members, and in many cases it was the members who maintained and refurbished the buildings, without being paid for this work.

Clubs benefited from the licensing laws that applied to pubs but not to private clubs. They were not just about serving beer, as they also provided facilities such as snooker tables, reading rooms, concerts and lectures by invited speakers. In 1887 William Morris spoke on ‘Monopoly’ at the Borough of Hackney Club, but was taken aback at all the coming and going in the audience, waiters serving food and so on. Brown describes the Bloody Sunday demonstration that year, which was attacked by the police, as being held by ‘the London radical clubs’ (though some accounts mention others that contributed to organising it). Political activity gradually shifted to other locations, however. Many well-known names began their careers performing in clubs, such as singer Tom Jones, racist ‘comedian’ Bernard Manning and snooker-player Steve Davis.

An obvious question is the status of and attitudes to women in these working men’s clubs. Women were originally not allowed to join, but gradually things began to change and by the 1950s most clubs had ‘lady members’. The clubs could hardly survive without the income from and practical contributions by women, but it was only in 2007 that women achieved equal rights in clubs, after various campaigns and shortly before the 2010 Equalities Act. Bingo made clubs even more appealing to women.

The clubs have of course had their ups and downs over the years. The breathalyser and the smoking ban hit attendance and bar takings. Musical styles such as glam rock and punk were hardly suitable for them. In 1922 there were 1,150,000 members in over two thousand clubs. Nowadays 1500 clubs are affiliated to the CIU, with around a million members, though there are also clubs which are unaffiliated. The north-east of England is ‘the undisputed heart of clubland’.

An informative account of an institution that figures little in most social histories.

Paul Bennett

What to do about the Property Speculators (1974)

From the February 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whichever party wins the coming General Election will have had to promise to curb the property speculators. In the arguments over the three-day week, fuel shortages, and the belt-tightening enforced to try to deal with British capitalism’s troubles, they have become the universal bêtes noires. Why, it is said, should the miners be denied a modest wage-increase when the speculators roll in unearned riches ? Who is going to be impressed by the Government’s call for sacrifices while Harry Hyams swells his fortune by keeping a mammoth office-building vacant for years ?

These are the voices of common-sense and fair play — and the sad truth is that they are irrelevant. If the appeals to run speculators out of town were responded-to, no difference would be made to the situation. That is why the present Government or its successor will not mind responding to them, if it has to. The Left, with its unvarying stupidity, has been demanding that “something be done” for years; in the agitation over housing and homelessness Hyams’ Centre Point remains an obligatory gathering-place and his name daubed on protest banners galore. A recent newspaper report showed the ultimate cure for profiteering in the Land of the Left:

Two directors of a Soviet drinks factory have been shot for leaving the fruit out of the fruit juice they were producing. The newspaper Babinski Rabochi says the two from the Southern Republic of Azerbaydzhan, sold a mixture of water, citric acid and sugar, pocketing more than £400,000. Their appeal was rejected and they were shot.

(Guardian, 3rd Jan. 1974)

No doubt this sounded, to some, like the way to treat them. But will it stop privileged sections raking-in in Russia ? Not likely. Will it make a single worker better off? Of course not.

Profits Galore

Property developers have indeed had a bonanza in Britain since the war. Joe Levy’s profit from the development of the Euston Centre in 1967 was estimated at £22 million (Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom). In September 1972 it was said that sales of land in the Tolmers Square Development Area of London had “been taking place at the rate of £800,000 to £1,000,000 per acre’’ (Town Clerk’s report to Camden Council, 28th Sep. 1972). Of Hyams, The Observer on 23rd December said that his personal fortune

has increased by £300 million in the past six years — at a time when he has hardly been engaged in active development at all, but simply sitting on his steadily appreciating portfolio of office blocks.

Astronomical as figures like these may seem, it is absurd to imagine they are unique to property development and dealing. The same page of the Observer business section on 23rd December reported that the British Leyland motor company’s profits for the year had risen to £51.3 millions, and a race-horse owner was offering to give Cambridge University £10 million. A “Guide to Property’’ recently distributed by the First National Finance Corporation contains graphs of Financial Times Share Indices that put this in perspective. The all-share index includes property. It will be seen that while property in its recent boom period has been the best investment, other shares rise proportionately; and at other times have compared favourably. Incidentally, Counter Information Services have just issued (16th Jan.) a report on the enormous profits of insurance companies and pension funds, of which £4,000 million is estimated to have gone to back property developers—including substantial support for Hyams by the Co-operative Insurance Society.

Someone to Hiss

Supporters and revisionists alike of the capitalist system love a scapegoat. There is nothing admirable about the speculators. The illustrations to Marriott’s book are mostly portrait photographs of well-known property tycoons, and it would be hard to find another collection of faces of such ugliness and vulgarity. Nevertheless, they are only the latest in a succession of ogres but for whom, it is conveyed, the capitalist system would make us all as happy as kings. Their place in the nineteen-twenties was held by “the hard-faced men’’ who had done well out of the 1914-18 war. In the ’thirties it was the arms manufacturers. Malcolm Muggeridge says in his autobiography:

Armament manufacturers — commonly known among us as merchants of death — were a godsend in the way of providing us with an identifiable villain; one of the great needs of the political left being to be able to point an accusing finger at someone, or some corporate body, as being responsible for public and private wrongs and misfortunes.

It is part of the same tradition that the property speculators’ diabolic reputation rests largely on their immunity, so far, to legislation. Laws aimed at quelling them have helped them boom again. The post-war Town and Country Planning Acts, intended to snuff out speculative building, created favourable new conditions for it. The taxation laws in force till 1965, by assuming the developer who did not sell to be making no profit, gave him a magnificent advantage. Most uproarious of all was George Brown’s 1964 prohibition of office-building in London, which pushed up rents and profits and earned Brown the title of “the developers’ best friend”.

The most recent piece of legislation was Antony Barber’s taxation measures in his budget of 17th December 1973. The chief provision was to tax first lettings of new buildings as equivalent to outright sales. Financial writers like Bennie Gray and Christopher Booker in The Observer (as well as Labour critics) were quick to point out that applied to established examples this was anything but crippling, and concluded:

In other words, the situation whereby property profits have generally come to be regarded as the most conspicuous example of economic injustice in pur society is likely to remain.

It is interesting that Oliver Marriott, when his book appeared in 1967, thought the property boom had been demolished. He wrote at the end:

The era of the property tycoon as the arch-symbol of capitalism is over. Forces of competition and taxation have ended the days when an individual could rapidly amass a fortune with a few well-chosen deals and developments.

A Simple Answer

The rise of the office-building tycoons has been a direct outcome of the workings of capitalism. Its main sources have been wartime destruction; obsolescence; amalgamations of companies and the growth of fresh forms of commerce; the spread of administrative machinery; and the compulsion to rebuild town centres on account of road traffic. Given that proliferation of causes, there is no difficulty in seeing why fortunes have been made and why legislation has failed. Indeed, the motives of such legislation are always contradictory ones — acquiescing in the need for more development while hoping not to be shown the “unacceptable face” it inevitably wears.

It is worth remarking also on the belief that little or nothing is done about the speculators because Conservatives in government will not harm their capitalist friends. This could apply to Labour also. But the capitalist class is not united in its commercial interests; at any time, a section will be sent to the wall to suit the more vital needs of other sections. An example is the Act of 1915 which smothered landlords in the interests of industrial capitalists and the war. If the need were strong enough, any government would come down on property speculators. What must always be borne in mind, however, is that legislation is enacted for severely practical purposes and hardly ever for moral ones.

The contrast between poverty and plenty is an inevitable feature of capitalism: a class-divided society cannot help but display it. Likewise, in a society built round production for profit, it is no use lamenting that excessive profits are made. One can imagine fat capitalists tittering behind their hands at the naiveté of “radical” sentiments like Michael Duane’s in a letter to The Guardian on 7th January:

In the national emergency of war it was found impossible to create the unity necessary for survival until, by rationing food, clothing and fuel, we had demonstrated the good faith of our democratic protestations.

That is the kind of assurance rulers want. Given it, they know a few sops and humbug-gestures of “good faith” will quieten the murmurs — and the system will go on as before.

Rather than talking of injustice as if there were an alternative to be had, working men and women should ask why the benefits of their labour are unfailingly taken by somebody else. When the working class decides that this state of affairs can continue no longer and capitalism must go, the end of speculation in property, shares and lives will have come at last. The sight of vast wealth being accumulated by parasites who simply happened to be in the right place at the right time, understandably makes people sick; but none of us will feel better until we have established Socialism.

Robert Barltrop