A WORLD TORN APART

Reflection and Analysis from a

World-Socialist Perspective

Stefan (Stephen D. Shenfield)

56 articles, 2006—2010

Wage slavery * Non-profit production * Patents * Looters

Land * Paying for air * Working hours * Sulphur mining

Global warming * Childen’s TV * Arctic * Moon *

Asteroids

Gods * Maoist China * 9/11 * Globalisation * Ghettoes

The war business * Congo * Opium * Georgia * Zionism

Gaza * Iraq * Iran * South Africa * Utopias * Why

smile?

Malawi * Afghanistan * Obama * Charity * Swine flu

Christian fascism * waste and want * Russian

“Communists”
Introduction

I greet and address you as a fellow earthling and human being!

This is a crucial time for our species and for the planet that remains
our only home. New global dangers loom while old problems remain
unresolved. The world continues to tear itself apart. Our survival has never
been more in question.
Shall we allow a system of power and profit inherited from the
barbaric past to devour what still remains of our home? Or shall we combine
our efforts to replace that system by world socialism – the common
ownership and democratic control of the means of life by the whole of the
world’s people?
I present this e-book (thanks to Scribd) without charge to readers
throughout the world. In this sense, it prefigures world socialism in form as
well as content. It brings together under nine thematic headings forty articles
that I have written over the last three years.
All but three of the articles appeared in The Socialist Standard,
journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), which is one of the
companion parties of the World Socialist Movement (WSM). One article
appeared in The World Socialist Review, published by another WSM
companion party, the World Socialist Party of the U.S. (WSPUS). Two
articles have not been published before.
In the process of re-reading the articles I made minor changes to some
of them, mostly of a stylistic nature.
Let me explain that I have not been a socialist my whole life. I
belonged to the SPGB in my youth and in recent years have been a member
of the WSPUS. For a long time in between I was either “non-political” or
involved in various sorts of reform politics. In two of the articles included
here I criticise my own thinking during this period.
Although the articles are on diverse topics, I would not claim that they
provide a fully balanced picture of socialist thinking. To some extent they
reflect my academic experience in the field of international relations.
However, these articles may serve as a starting point. I hope they will
whet your appetite and tempt you to explore the writing of other world
socialists. For this purpose I recommend the WSM site
www.worldsocialism.org, which has links to many other relevant sites and
blogs in various languages, and also www.worldincommon.org.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some
day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one” (John Lennon, Imagine).
I have provided some introductory comments on specific articles
under section headings.
You are welcome to reproduce whole articles for non-profit purposes,
provided that you indicate the original source.
I would appreciate any kind of feedback – well, almost any kind! My
e-mail address is shown below. Please inform me about any links,
references, reproductions, etc. Any of this will give me encouragement.

Stephen D. Shenfield (Stefan)

Summer 2009
sshenfield@verizon.net

Second edition (Fall 2009): Six articles have been added to the first edition,
bringing the total to 46.
 I would like to add another recommended site, that of the World
Socialist Party of the United States (of which I am a member) at
www.wspus.org

Third edition (Spring 2010): Five more pieces (four new and one that I had
mislaid) bring the total to 51.

Fourth edition (August 2010): Now 56.

Contents

Section 1. Profits versus needs

Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited

This land is their land

Non-profit production: wave of the future?

Patents and the suppression of inventions:

capitalism versus technological advance

Who are the looters? New Orleans in the wake

of Hurricane Katrina

Paying for air: why not?

Evil people or evil system?

 Why they keep piling up manure: the psychology of
wealth accumulation

Dedicated to serving the rich: the reality of aid

Unemployment – is it really the problem?

Section 2. Working to survive

Labour without end? The rise in working hours

Is wage labor really a form of slavery?

“Better I die of radiation than my children of hunger”

Labour in hell: mining sulphur in Indonesia

Malawi: children of the tobacco fields

Are you a human or a robot?

Section 3. Politics in various countries

Selecting a U.S. president: the invisible primaries

Obama: whose president?

American public opinion and the S-word: weakening of a

taboo?

Christian fascism: the best response

Fascists take over Russian Communist Party

Still in chains: South Africa after apartheid

 Zionism and antisemitism: two dangerous ideologies
that thrive on each other

Sliding into the abyss: the Gaza Ghetto

Maoist China as a class society: illusion and reality

Section 4. Popular culture

Smile, smile, smile! But why?

The play world and capitalist reality

Section 5. International relations

The end of national sovereignty?

Globalisation versus national capitalism

Latin America: the changing geopolitical context

The scramble for the Arctic

The next capitalist frontier – the moon

Asteroid wars

Antics in the South China Sea

Section 6. War and peace (mostly war)

The war business: why do capitalist states

prepare for and wage war?

Campaigners for humanitarian intervention:

“useful idiots” of militarism
 Nuclear weapons are still there

September 11, 2001: reflections on a somewhat

unusual act of war

Iran in the crosshairs

Iraq: violence without end or purpose?

War in Georgia

Congo: the mobile phone war

Opium wars, old and new

War in Gaza: propaganda and realities

Israel’s state piracy: warding off the threat of peace

Ten good reasons why we are fighting in Afghanistan

Section 7. Non-military global threats

Global warming: is it (or will it soon be) too late?

Mystery of the pig/bird/human flu virus

Section 8. Historical reflections

Driven from Eden: was the Neolithic Revolution

entirely a good thing?

Camouflaging class rule

The trouble with gods

The fall of “communism”: why so peaceful?

Section 9. Thinking about socialism

Evo Morales: a call for socialism?

Socialism: class interest or human interest?

Was nowhere somewhere?

More’s Utopia and the meaning of socialism

Bogdanov, technocracy and socialism

Free access to what?

Some problems of consumption in socialism

Section 1

PROFITS versus NEEDS

These articles focus in different ways on the contrast

between “production for profit” as the dominant form of
economic activity under capitalism and “production for
need” as a guiding principle of socialism.
Waste and Want: Grapes of Wrath revisited

In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck

described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:

Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come for

miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy

oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with

hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges... A million people hungry,

needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships... Dump potatoes in the rivers

and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from

fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them...

And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot

be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates –

died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.

A few more facts. In 1933 alone, the federal government bought 6

million hogs and destroyed them. Vast quantities of milk were poured down

the sewers. 25 million acres of crops (the area of a square with sides 200

miles long) were ploughed under. In Brazil, 69 million bags of coffee,

equivalent to two years’ output, were destroyed. All to keep up prices.

What about this time round?

The current depression is the deepest since that of the 1930s, and its

end is not yet in sight. As real wages continue to fall and austerity measures

bite harder, more and more goods will remain unsold. Falling prices and

profits are already leading to scenes reminiscent of those portrayed by

Steinbeck.

Leaving strawberries to rot. In March 2010, reports appeared that

Florida strawberry growers, faced with a flooded market and a sharp

collapse in wholesale prices, were leaving huge tracts to rot in the fields.

Most of these farmers did not allow people in to pick fruit for themselves.

They were afraid that cucumbers and other new crops they were planting

between the rows might be harmed.

Not only the strawberries went to waste but also the water used to

grow them. Cultivation of the wasted strawberries drained the groundwater

and caused local water shortages.

Bulldozing houses. There have been reports from around the United
States of the destruction of houses, many of them newly built. Most

foreclosed houses can no longer be sold at auction, even for prices as low as

$500. They end up in the hands of banks that see no medium-term prospect

of reselling them and conclude that the cheapest solution is to tear them

down. This happens not only to individual houses but often to whole streets.

In May 2009, a bank decided to bulldoze an almost finished housing

complex in California rather than spend the few hundred thousand dollars

needed to complete it.

Meanwhile the ranks of the homeless continue to swell. They are in

desperate need of housing but generate no “effective demand”.

Slashing clothes and shoes. In early January 2010, The New York

Times ran a story about two major retail chains, H&M and Wal-Mart,

throwing out unsold clothes in trash bags. First they are made unwearable:

employees are told to slash garments, slice holes in shoes, cut sleeves off

coats, fingers off gloves, etc..

The response to this article included internet testimony from ex-

employees of other large stores, revealing how widespread these practices

now are.

Cheryl: “I worked at Dillards for several years. They do the same

thing. Their logic was that if they donated it [to charity] people would try to
bring it back to exchange for other merchandise.”

Martha: “Yeah, I used to work at a store where they would rip the bed

sheets, blankets and pillow cases if they couldn’t sell them, then throw them

away... I thought it was dumb. I wanted to take it and donate it, but they

didn’t let me.”

Nat: “I used to work for H&M and hated to cut the clothing [that] I

knew we could have given away to those who needed it. We destroyed

EVERYTHING and I found it so stupid. It was such a waste and sad!”

Maryliz: “This just makes me sick. How terrible, especially right now

with people freezing to death. They could have been saved if they had

sufficient warm clothing. Shame on the companies that do this.”

Maggie: “I got so mad that my managers wouldn’t box up [unsold

food] and take it to shelters that I called corporate headquarters... They

wouldn’t let the food be donated! Some blather about how that would

devalue the brand, because people would just go to that shelter to eat the

food instead of coming and paying for it.”

The vintage

Steinbeck finishes Chapter 25 with the passage that gives his book its
title:

“In the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the

people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for

the vintage.”

There is ample cause for wrath. But wrath is not enough. The

managers who got Maggie so angry have to act as they do. (Otherwise they

won’t remain managers.) The things that Maggie and the others naively see

as use values they have to view solely as potential exchange values. They

have to pursue the commercial logic of maximising profit or minimising

loss. The idea of giving people what they need, simply because they need it,

is inconsistent with this logic. It expresses a different, human logic, which

will come into its own once we reorganize society on a different, human

basis.

August 2010

This land is their land

You must have heard the song by Woody Guthrie that begins: “This land is
your land, this land is my land.”

Well, no doubt it should be, but it isn’t. Many millions of working

people own no land at all. Those who are a bit better off own the small plot
on which their house stands — a fraction of an acre.

So who does own the land? Over 95 percent of the privately held land
in the United States is owned by just 3 percent of the population. These are
the people who own the land, the industry, the technology — all the means
of life on which we depend. This land is their land.

A land survey conducted in 1999 found that the 53,000 largest

landlords — those owning 2,000 acres (3 square miles) or more — own a
total of 350 million acres, worth $366 billion. On average each of these
people owns about 7,000 acres (11 square miles), worth some $7 million.

Even this is quite modest by comparison with the largest landowners.

King Ranch (Texas), owned by the Kleberg family, is worth about a billion.
At 825,000 acres or 1,300 square miles, it is larger than the state of Rhode
Island. Besides 60,000 head of cattle, the ranch includes farmland and game
preserves.

There are whole towns that belong to a single individual. The

“developer” Ben Carpenter owns the town of Las Colinas near Dallas, with
12,000 acres, about 20,000 residents, and about a square mile of office
space. Country and western singer Loretta Lynn owns Hurricane Mills,
Tennessee.

It is also possible to buy an island — if you have the money, of

course. In 1919 William Wrigley, Jr. (of chewing gum fame) bought the 74
square miles of Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles offshore from Los Angeles.
There are quite a few privately owned islands scattered around the world.
Even Josip Broz Tito, ruler of the so-called “Socialist” Republic of
Yugoslavia, hadone — Vanga in the Adriatic, home to his three palatial
villas.

Apparently Woody Guthrie did know whose land this really is. One
verse of the original song went:

Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.

A sign was painted, said “Private property.”

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.

That side was made for you and me.

This was one of two verses that were later suppressed, turning a protest
against private property into yet another piece of patriotic drivel.

John Lennon’s “Imagine” is more difficult to distort:

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of Man.
 WSPUS website, November 21, 2005

Non-profit production: wave of the future?

Each year half a million people in India and other tropical countries catch
visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. Infected by the bite of a
sand fly, they rapidly weaken and lose weight before dying with painfully
swollen livers and spleens.
A safe and effective treatment for black fever was found long ago: the
antibiotic paromomycin (cure rate 95%). But the firm that developed it --
Pharmacia, a precursor of Pfizer – shelved it in the 1960s for lack of a
"viable market." What that means is that the people who need it cannot
afford to pay for it. It is simply not profitable for pharmaceutical companies
to fight diseases that afflict the poor. Less than 1% of the new drugs
developed in 1975–99 were for tropical diseases (Joel Bakan, The
Corporation, p. 49).
Lack of effective demand is not the only thing that makes many useful
drugs unprofitable. In general, a capitalist firm can only make big profits by
selling drugs on which it has a patent – that is, an exclusive right to make,
use, and sell a new product for a certain period (in Britain and the US it is 20
or even 25 years). Firms are not interested in making drugs that cannot be
patented, and indeed will go to great lengths to suppress them.
Cancer provides a striking example. The established treatments for
cancer — surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy — are destructive, usually
ineffective, and weaken the body’s natural resistance. Many alternative
therapies that are demonstrably safer and more effective are denounced as
“quackery” and often banned under pressure from those with a vested
interest in the established treatments. One is amygdalin (laetrile), a
carbohydrate that occurs in some 1,200 plants throughout the world. Another
is the simple off-the-shelf chemical hydrazine sulfate (Ralph W. Moss, The
Cancer Industry, Ch. 8, 10). It is precisely the wide availability of such
substances that makes them unpatentable and therefore unprofitable.

An interesting recent development is the emergence of a new kind of

charity that raises money not just to distribute but to produce things that
people need but can't afford. One such organization is the Institute for
OneWorld Health (IOWH), founded in San Francisco in 2000 by Dr.
Victoria Hale (http://www.oneworldhealth.org). A pharmaceutical chemist,
Dr. Hale had felt frustrated watching the industry abandon badly needed and
promising but unprofitable drugs. At about the same time, James
Fruchterman, an electrical engineer, set up Benetech, another "nonprofit
company," in Palo Alto, California, to produce new types of equipment for
the disabled.
The first program of IOWH aims to make paromomycin available to
black fever sufferers in the north Indian state of Bihar. The program is being
funded (to the tune of $4,700,000) mainly by Bill and Melinda Gates. The
Indian government has given its approval and an Indian firm (Gland Pharma
of Hyderabad) has agreed to manufacture the drug at cost. Other
programmes are planned to tackle Chagas disease, malaria, and diarrhea.
It is hard not to sympathize with well-meaning projects of this kind.
But we also have to consider the problems faced by nonprofit organizations
as they operate under the constraints of a profit-driven economy.
The first problem is how to raise enough money. IOWH is asking the
Gates for another $30 million. They can't take out loans or raise funds on the
capital market because that would force them to operate on a profit-oriented
basis. But unfortunately only a few of the very wealthy are willing to give to
charity on a really major scale and the demands made on those few are
legion. And doesn't it seem perverse first to accumulate profit and then use it
to ameliorate the ills constantly generated by that same profit-making
process? Does the left hand know what the right hand is up to?
It also bears noting that the paromomycin is not going to be provided
free of charge. The aim is only to make it as affordable as possible. Dr. Hale
hopes to keep the cost down to $10 for a 21-day course of treatment, but the
website of the World Health Organization merely says "below $50." We
shall see. The point is that in the context of India – and especially in that of
Bihar, India's poorest state – these are by no means paltry sums. The average
per capita income in Bihar is $120 (5,500 rupees) a year. As the distribution
of income is highly unequal, even $10 will be well beyond the means of
many sufferers.
In his enthusiastic report in the Guardian Weekly (October 20-26,
2006, p. 29), Ken Burnett asks why nonprofit pharmaceutical companies
should not be followed by nonprofit seed companies, water companies,
travel companies, and so on. Why not, indeed? But if this is supposed to be a
process that develops under capitalism, we can't avoid asking: "Where is the
money coming from?" So far all we have is one small nonprofit
pharmaceutical company and one small nonprofit engineering firm.
Nevertheless, it is encouraging to see people trying to move in this
direction, people who crave meaningful work for the benefit of the
community. The very existence of nonprofit companies is a protest against
and challenge to the system of production for profit. We would only take the
argument to the next logical step. Why not extend the principle of
production for need to the world economy as a whole?
January 2007

Patents and the suppression of inventions:

capitalism versus technological advance

Capitalism has been widely celebrated for its capacity for rapid
technological advance. Thus Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848:
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production.” A century later Joseph Schumpeter declared that
“creative destruction” is “the essential fact about capitalism” (Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, 1942). And surely this fact has never been truer
than it is today, in the age of microelectronics and bioengineering?
The technological dynamism of capitalism is undeniable, especially in
comparison with earlier historical formations. This, however, is only half the
story. The functioning of capitalism also entails the shelving or suppression
of many useful inventions. One common cause of neglect is the limited
purchasing power of those who stand to benefit from some discovery, as in
the case of drugs to treat tropical diseases. Another key factor behind the
non-use of inventions is the patents system.
A patent is a legally protected exclusive right to use a new product or
process, valid for a fixed period of time (typically 20—25 years). Patent
rights supposedly belong to “inventors” and promote technological advance
by giving inventors a substantial material interest in the results of their work.
It’s a dubious rationale because most inventors are members of the working
class and the patents on their inventions, like the windfall profits from them,
belong not to them but to their employers. If they’re lucky they might get a
small bonus. They go on inventing things because it gives them satisfaction.
That’s human nature.
Nevertheless, the patents system does encourage companies to employ
research scientists and engineers and in some cases to exploit patented
inventions or license other companies to exploit them. In many other cases,
however, a particular invention is viewed primarily as a threat to profits
from the sale of an existing product, demand for which it would undercut. It
will then seem more profitable not to make the new product while using the
patent to prevent anyone else from making it. According to various studies,
anywhere from 40% to 90% of patents are never used or licensed.
But what if the patent on the unwelcome invention is already owned
by a competitor who plans to exploit it? Even in this situation there is often
some action that can be taken to ward off the threat. Firms interested in
developing new technologies tend to be financially weak and vulnerable.
They may be threatened, paid not to use their patents, or simply taken over,
patents and all. The permutations are endless. There are many ways to skin a
cat, as they say.
Let’s consider a few examples. They are taken from articles by Kurt
Saunders, an expert on business law at California State University, and
Linda Levine, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. (The articles are
available at http://www.mttlr.org/voleleven/saunders.pdf and
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v15/15HarvJLTech389.pdf)
 * * *

Anemia is a worldwide scourge, with a disproportionate impact on

women, children, and poor people (due to iron-deficient diet). Even in the
US it affects an estimated 3.5 million people. It is treated with a drug called
erythropoietin (EPO), which promotes the formation of red blood cells. A
big problem with EPO is that the body secretes it almost immediately, so
doses have to be very high. That makes EPO very lucrative for AMGEN, the
company that owns the patents, while the patient suffers distressing side
effects and foots the bill. Thus, a person on dialysis for kidney failure
requires lifelong EPO at $10,000 a year. Most of the world’s sufferers, of
course, have no access to such costly treatment.
In 1997, Gisella Clemons, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, discovered a protein binding factor for EPO—that is, a
protein that sticks to it and blocks its excretion. Combining this protein with
EPO increases take-up by 10—50 times, vastly reducing the dosage required
and making the drug both safer and more affordable.
AMGEN was not interested. The company refused to make the more
effective form of EPO themselves or to allow others to make it by giving
them access to the patents in its possession. Martha Luehrmann, a colleague
of Clemons, gave vent to her frustration: “A wonderful advance that could
save hundreds of thousands of children from anemia and death stays on the
shelf because the patent system protects a company that doesn’t want to see
any risk to its bottom line.”
Another example from the pharmaceutical industry. Bloch, a medical
researcher employed by Smith-Kline UK, devised a new dietary supplement
for use in diuretic therapy. His supplement, a balanced combination of
magnesium and potassium compounds, overcame the main defect of existing
diuretic drugs, including Smith-Kline’s own Dyazide—namely, potassium
depletion and its effects (fatigue, dizziness, confusion, etc.). In 1974 Bloch
and Smith-Kline concluded a licensing agreement by which Smith-Kline
undertook either to develop the supplement itself or to surrender its
exclusive rights to Bloch. In the event it did neither. Bloch went to court,
where his claims were accepted but no effective action was taken.
Many inventions have been suppressed in the motor vehicle industry.
Several of these could have greatly improved the efficiency of fuel use and
reduced or even eliminated polluting emissions. In 1936, for instance,
Charles Pogue invented a carburetor that enabled a car to run over 200 miles
to the gallon at speeds of up to 70 mph. More recently, Tom Ogle designed a
car in which a series of hoses fed a mixture of gas vapors and air directly
into the engine. Tested in 1977, it averaged 100 miles per gallon at 55 mph.
It is the oil corporations rather than the automobile manufacturers
themselves that have the strongest interest in suppressing inventions that
improve fuel efficiency and thereby reduce gasoline consumption. Thus,
Exxon is said to have purchased and buried the design for a “momentum
engine” with high fuel efficiency.
Patents do not last forever. For that among other reasons, many new
products do eventually see the light of day, even if only two, three or four
decades after being invented. Patent owners imposed such long delays on the
appearance of many now familiar products. Thus, the fluorescent light bulb
was patented in the 1920s but kept off the market until 1938 in order to keep
energy efficiency low and demand for electricity high. A “safe” (or at least
safer) cigarette, from which much carcinogenic material had been removed,
was invented in the 1960s but suppressed in favor of the more dangerous
kind until the last few years. The same thing happened to the telephone
answering machine, the plain paper photocopier, the auto-focus camera,
emission control devices for motor vehicles, the electronic thermometer, and
artificial caviar.

* * *

There are two divergent tendencies in patent law. On the one hand,
patents are recognized as a form of property. An owner of property has the
right to use that property or not at his or her discretion, and this applies to
patents as it does, say, to land. On the other hand, legislators created patent
law for the purpose of promoting technological advance in the public
interest, so should the courts not try to discourage its misuse for the opposite
purpose? Legal reformers like Saunders and Levine advocate changes to
patent law that will strengthen the “public interest” tendency and impede the
suppression of useful inventions.
The provisions of patent law do matter. The law already places certain
restrictions on the rights of patent owners; otherwise inventions would be
suppressed even more thoroughly. So legal reform might have a beneficial
effect. But, as in other areas of industrial regulation, companies will find
means of complying with the letter of any new requirements while thwarting
their spirit. Let us suppose that the owner of a new patent is required to put it
to use within a fairly short time interval or otherwise forfeits the patent (and
Saunders and Levine do not suggest anything nearly as drastic). Could he
not start production of the new product while “sabotaging” it to make sure
sales of the old product would not be affected? For instance, the new product
could be produced on a small scale and in deliberately slipshod fashion, sold
at a very high price with hardly any advertising, and so on.
How much does it really matter if an invention has to wait a few
decades before it is widely applied? Not very much, perhaps, if it’s a new
kind of camera or photocopier. The delay is harder to tolerate if it’s an
effective treatment for a previously incurable disease. And, with global
warming upon us, new sources of environmentally harmless energy and new
devices to raise energy efficiency are a matter of life and death for the
planet. We can’t afford to wait until capitalists finally find it profitable to
make the switch to new technologies. It is high time to put knowledge and
human creativity at the direct disposal of the community.

February 2007

Who are the looters?

New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

What is the first priority of government in the wake of disaster? Saving

lives? Looking after the survivors? Disposing of the dead and preventing
epidemics? Think again. At best these things come second. The first priority
of government in the wake of disaster is exactly the same as its first priority
at other times: maintaining or restoring "order" -- that is, its powers of
coercion.
Moreover, the first purpose of "order" is to protect and enforce
property rights. From this point of view, the main threat posed by disasters
like Hurricane Katrina is not the threat to human life and health, to the
environment, or even to the economy. It is the threat of "chaos," the threat to
"order" and "civilization," but above all to property, arising from the
temporary breakdown of government.
The "looter" symbolizes and dramatizes this threat, conjuring up
images of Viking warriors on the rampage, barbaric violence, evil incarnate.
Of course, these particular "Vikings" were all the more terrifying for being
black. In the days that followed the hurricane, the media stirred up racist
fears of the poor black people ofNew Orleans, spreading rumours (the
fashionable expression is "urban myths") later shown to be exaggerated out
of all proportion, if not completely unfounded. For example, in the week
following Katrina the number of murders was average for the city (four) (see
Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan, The Storm, pp. 124-8).
All in all, we shouldn't be too shocked or too surprised to learn that at
7 p.m. on Wednesday August 31, 2005 martial law was declared in the
flooded city. Mayor Ray Nagin told police officers to stop rescuing people
and focus solely on the job of cracking down on looters. This was just two
and a half days after the hurricane made landfall and with thousands of
people still stranded in attics and on rooftops.
In one typically heroic encounter, police officers chased down a
woman with a cart of supplies for her baby, handcuffed her - and then didn't
know what to do with her. All the jails were flooded. By the end of the week
that problem was solved. A new makeshift jail was set up at the Greyhound
bus terminal, with accommodation for 750 prisoners. This was the first
institution in the city to resume normal functioning.
True, it could have been worse. After the San Francisco earthquake of
1906 people were shot dead as looters while foraging in the wreckage of
their own homes (see G. Hansen and E. Condon, Denial of Disaster, 1989).
So why did people loot? Or to use less loaded language, why did they
take things that didn't belong to them without paying for them?
One man answered a TV interviewer who had asked him why he was
looting by asking in turn: "Can you see anyone to pay?" The stores had been
abandoned by their operators, but people still needed the things stored there.
They needed food andfresh water, dressings for their wounds, new clothes to
replace those ruined by exposure to the "toxic gumbo" of the floodwaters.
Most of the so-called looting was of this kind - for the satisfaction of
desperate need. In any sane society that would be a good enough reason for
taking things.
Two paramedics from San Francisco who found themselves trapped in
New Orleans wrote about the Walgreens store on the corner of Royal and
Iberville Streets in the French quarter. The owners had locked up and fled.
Milk, yogurt, and cheese could be seen through the window in the dairy
display case, spoiling in the heat.
Should we expect the parents of hungry and thirsty children not to
break in, even at the risk of being pursued by the police? Would they have
been good parents had they failed to do all in their power to see to their
children's needs? And what of storeowners who choose to let food go to
waste rather than give it to needy neighbours?
My first impulse is to wax lyrical about the sheer meanness of their
behaviour. But probably they made no such conscious choice. As
businesspeople they must have thought of the food and drink in their store
not as products for assuaging hunger and thirst, but merely as commodities
for profitable sale. If they could no longer be sold they might just as well go
to waste.
 There were looters who acted not just for themselves and their
families but for the benefit of the local community. For instance, the young
men who collected medical supplies from a Rite Aid for distribution among
elderly neighbours. Or the man who distributed food from a Winn- Dixie
store to the 200 or so people holed up at the Grand Palace Hotel. "He was
trying to help suffering people, and the idea that he was looting never
crossed his mind."
Socially responsible people of this kind are sometimes described as
"commandeering" or "requisitioning" the goods they seize. That may well be
how they view their own actions. In legal terms, however, only government
officials, as representatives of duly constituted authority, have the right to
commandeer or requisition property in an emergency. Private citizens who
do so, whatever their motives, are engaging in theft and may be penalized
accordingly.
Consider the feat of Jabar Gibson. This resourceful young man, purely
on his own initiative, found a bus that was still in working order (the city
authorities assumed that all buses had been ruined by the floodwater), took
charge of it, filled it up with evacuees, and drove them to Houston.
This was the first busload of evacuees to reach Houston after the
storm (at 10 p.m. on Wednesday August 31). The police were forewarned
that a "renegade bus" was on its way; if they had intercepted it Jabar might
have been arrested and charged with theft. Fortunately he was in luck: he got
through to his destination, to be greeted by Harris County Judge Robert
Eckels. Presumably his crime has been forgiven.
Of course, not all looters were responding to real personal, family, or
community needs. Some were simply taking a rare opportunity to acquire
coveted though non-essential consumer goods. For others looting (and
shitting in) fancy stores was a form of social protest or "empowerment," an
outlet for pent-up anger against the endlessly advertised world of affluence
from which they felt excluded. Finally, there was a phenomenon that I
propose calling "entrepreneurial looting."
Entrepreneurial looters gathered assets with a view to later sale. As
they got stuff for free, they could sell at any price and still make a profit. For
example, "urban foresters" went after valuable lumber. Other entrepreneurs
sold looted liquor. The cases of large-scale organized looting by armed
groups (their weapons also probably looted) that received so much publicity
must, I think, have been of this character. Brinkley reports an interesting
conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Bernard McLaughlin of the
Louisiana National Guard and a man selling liquor at a makeshift bar. When
McLaughlin tells the bartender he is shutting him down, the man replies that
he is "just being entrepreneurial."
Why shouldn't he make some money? McLaughlin gets angry at this
appeal to "true American values.” "This is looting. You looted that... That's a
15-year felony. That's a 3-year mandatory minimum sentence." The man
submits and McLaughlin proceeds to smash his bottles one by one.
And yet the preceding account makes clear that McLaughlin's real
objection to such bars has nothing to do with the provenance of the alcohol.
He doesn't want the locals drinking alcohol because it makes them more
quarrelsome and disorderly as well as further dehydrating their bodies.
Would he have allowed the bar to stay open if it was selling - or giving away
- only looted fruit juice, soda, and bottled water? Legally, however, looting
remains "a 15-year felony," be its social consequences good or bad. Property
is sacred.
The bartender might also have tried to point out in his defence that
historically all capitalist enterprise is based on looting.Early capitalism
looted land and other resources from peasants (in Europe) and from
indigenous peoples (throughout the Americas and other colonial
territories).The looting even extended to the kidnapping and enslavement of
millions of human beings, such as the ancestors of most victims of
Hurricane Katrina. Marx called it the primitive accumulation of capital.
Looting is as American as cherry pie; the looters of New Orleans are
keeping up an old American tradition and should surely receive all due
credit as good patriots. But... it depends on whose possessions you loot,
doesn't it?

August 2006

Paying for air: why not?

Introductory note. As a researcher, I am swamped by a constant stream of

Working Papers, Discussion Papers, Position Papers, Occasional Papers and
Miscellaneous Papers that all sorts of schools, networks, institutes,
foundations, and centres are kind enough to send my way. Most of them go
straight on a pile for later transfer to the green recycle bin, but now and then
one catches my eye. I was so impressed by the sheer brilliance of this
“Thought Paper” by a junior economist at the Centre for Research, Analysis
and Policy (CRAP) that I decided to share it with readers of The Socialist
Standard. The author wishes to remain anonymous. — Stefan
 Optimal efficiency in the use of any resource requires the functioning
of an effective market in that resource. Everyone (that is, everyone who
matters) accepts this thesis in principle, but proposals to put the principle
into practice still run up against irrational fears and prejudices, hidebound
attitudes and vague moral reservations. This applies especially to the still
controversial issue of establishing a market in air.
That no doubt explains why the published literature on air
marketisation and privatisation is so scanty, although these topics have been
the object of lively discussion among economic policy specialists, and not
only at our centre.
And yet, as people are beginning to realise, the air in the earth’s
atmosphere is a limited resource like any other. If its use is to be
rationalised, the consumption of air must be subject to the discipline of the
market. As in the case of wood, water or any other resource, free access to
air is a flagrant invitation to profligacy and waste. Studies by physiologists
in several countries have revealed that surprisingly large proportions of
individuals breathe more deeply and/or at more frequent intervals than
strictly necessary for adequate body maintenance.
Many of these irresponsible “free riders” encourage their children to
follow their own bad example. Indeed, there are even misguided physicians
who in deference to the latest health fad promote “deep breathing” practices
among their patients.
In the past, the purely technical difficulties of controlling air
consumption confined discussion of air markets to the realm of futurological
speculation. Thus, the writer Herbert George Wells, in a story that has for
some reason been considered “dystopian,” imagined a future in which the
majority of the population live and work underground and, in addition to
rent, pay private companies to ventilate their quarters. If they fall into arrears
with their air payments the air supply is turned off until the next tenant
resumes payment.
Recent developments in pharmacology give reason to hope that in the
not too distant future it will be feasible to control air consumption above
ground. In the most plausible scenario, a legally mandated annual dose of a
paralytic agent makes respiration impossible without subsequent weekly
injection of an antidote, the market in which serves as a proxy air market. Of
course, the first dose of the paralytic agent has to be combined with the first
dose of the antidote; it is only from the second dose that the consumer starts
to pay for the antidote – that is, for air access.
The right to sell the antidote to different sections of the population
could be sold at auction to the highest bidders. Those who feel that such an
arrangement is morally repugnant usually justify their stance in terms of the
naive idea that a person’s access to a vital necessity like air should not
depend on how much money he or she has. Presumably it is acceptable to
regulate access to luxuries by means of money, but not access to the
necessities of life. But this idea makes no sense in the real world. Consider
what absurd conclusions would follow if we applied it consistently.
It would mean that there should be free access to food just because we
have moral qualms about people starving to death. It would mean that there
should be free access to housing, heating, and warm clothing just because
we shrink from the sight of people freezing to death in the winter cold. It
would mean that there should be free access to medical care just because we
feel people should not die for lack of the money to get treated. After all,
besides breathing, people need to eat and drink, keep warm, and so on. To be
sure, asphyxiation is a quicker way to die than most. But that makes it more
humane, not less.
What has this sort of fuzzy thinking got to do with economic
rationality?

April 2007

Evil people or evil system?

The Guardian (5 June) ran a story by George Monbiot about pharmaceutical

companies’ promotion of baby formula in the Philippines.
As in other underdeveloped countries, the majority of the population
in the Philippines has access only to polluted water. As formula has to be
mixed with water, its widespread use instead of breastfeeding kills
thousands of children every year. Nevertheless, the corporations promote it
in the most ruthless fashion. For instance, they encourage their saleswomen
to dress as nurses to gain the confidence of young mothers. The Philippines
government has tried to restrict the promotion of baby formula, but the
Pharmaceutical & Healthcare Association of the Philippines (PHAP),
representing the manufacturers and backed by the US government and
Chamber of Commerce, has led a campaign to thwart the attempt, using
lobbying, diplomatic pressure, legal action and (apparently) targeted
assassinations.
All this is, indeed, horrifying, and indignation is a natural and healthy
reaction. But against who or what should we direct our indignation?
Often enough, indignation expresses itself as national hatred, typically
as anti-Americanism. America Puts Profit Above Babies’ Lives – runs the
headline over the print version of the article. Of course, the American
government and American business do put profit above babies’ lives (and
above everything else). But the same is true of other countries. Ordinary
Americans tend to feel that accusations against “America” are aimed at them
too and respond in like manner: “You British are just as bad!”
Nothing could be more irrelevant to the issue than nationality. The
first target of activists opposing the promotion of baby formula in
underdeveloped countries was Nestlé – a Swiss company. The members that
PHAP represents include European, Australian, and Japanese as well as
American companies. They are equally ruthless.
Blaming “America” – or the Jews or the Japanese, perhaps, or some
other nation or ethnic group -- is a form of the broader phenomenon called
moralism. Alternatively, we might call it “blaming the bad guys.” Track
down the “baby killers,” the evil people responsible for the evil deeds and do
something about them. Do what exactly? Here things generally get fuzzy,
but one Guardian reader has an answer: “The world right now needs
another Revolution like the Bastille when all these greedy, unprincipled,
corrupt and criminal politicians and industrialists are rounded up and
summarily executed.”
That should do the trick! Or would it? The “revolutionary”
remedy has already been tried – in France, Russia, China and other
countries. And yet there are still plenty of “bad guys” around, in those
countries as elsewhere. Why should more shootings help? The more
adaptable “bad guys” survive the “revolutions” by switching to the winning
side in good time, and any who do get shot are readily replaced. What we
have here is obviously an expression of extreme feeling, a fantasy of
revenge, rather than a carefully thought-out solution. The moralistic
approach stirs up emotions so powerful that thinking is paralysed.

Really evil people – people who obtain satisfaction from hurting

others -- are few and far between. Their existence is not the crux of the
matter. Most of the people involved in making and selling harmful products
are not intrinsically evil. The saleswoman dressed as a nurse to sell more
baby formula and earn her commission, the Chinese tobacco farmer, the
Afghan poppy grower, the armaments worker making landmines that will
maim and kill children as they play – they are all doing evil things. Their
deeds are evil, but they themselves are not, for they have to make a living
somehow. They have to feed and clothe their own children.

Even the corporate executives who organize the evil deeds are not
doing evil as a free and deliberate choice. They are required by law to do
whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their shareholders. They
could, of course, give up their positions and join the working class, but you
can understand why so few of them would want to do that! The
shareholders, in turn, do not feel obliged to concern themselves with the
morality of the businesses that provide their dividends. Everywhere we look
we find moral ambiguity. Evil is certainly being done, but no one is clearly
to blame – only the social arrangement that we refer to as a system.

Some of us are lucky enough to come by paid work that allows us the
luxury of a relatively clean conscience. Some are not so lucky. The
appropriate target of our indignation is the system that places people in such
excruciating dilemmas, penalises altruistic impulses, rewards ruthless
egoism and inexorably turns “good guys” (or potential “good guys”) into
“bad guys.” It is only by understanding and changing the system that we can
build a way of life in which heeding the voice of our conscience will not
jeopardise our livelihood and the wellbeing of our families.

August 2007

Why they keep piling up manure:

the psychology of wealth accumulation

Money is like manure. If you spread it

around, it does a lot of good, but if you
pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.

I can’t trace the original author, but it seems to be a popular motto among
rich “philanthropists”. It has been attributed, in slightly variant wordings, to
steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, New York
“socialite” Brooke Astor, Clint W. Murchison (chairman of Tecon
Corporation) and Kenneth Langone (founder of The Home Depot).
Two questions spring to mind.
First, if these people so hate the smell of manure, why do they keep
piling it up? After all, they are free to stop at any time.
Second, what do they want all that money for anyway? Surely a few
hundred million should suffice to buy all the luxuries anyone could want? So
why chase after the billions?
 An addiction to extravagance. One answer is offered by Eric
Schoenberg of Columbia Business School (on the site of Forbes magazine).
Driving your first Rolls Royce is a fantastic experience, he explains, but as
you get used to it you no longer enjoy it so much. So you have to look for
new experiences, which for some reason are always more and more
expensive.
Presumably, an obsession with money spoils the enjoyment of
anything that does not cost a lot of it. The result is an addiction to
extravagance that reinforces the drive to make more money.

Kudos. Besides addiction to extravagance, the most common motive

for accumulating wealth appears to be simply the desire to be admired by
others. Kudos, however, depends less on absolute wealth than on place in
the pecking order, as indicated by lists like the Forbes 400. Only Number
One can feel fully confident of his superior status – and even he must
beware of rivals overtaking him.
Astonishing but true: many people honestly think – indeed, assume –
that being rich is something worthy of pride and admiration. They consider
having more money than anyone else the greatest of all conceivable human
achievements. Never mind where the money came from, how it was
acquired. To be a “winner” is glorious, to be a “loser” shameful and pitiable.
They were brought up to think so, and can hardly imagine that anyone might
be sincere in thinking otherwise.
We might expect there to be an element of subtlety or mystery in the
driving impulse at the core of a dynamic that spawns so much evil. Instead,
we find something insufferably boring and trivial, the ultimate in banality.
 The “philanthropists”

And yet the worship of wealth need not wholly exclude other social
values. Many people feel that just being rich is not sufficiently glorious in
itself: in addition, one should “do good”. As a result, some wealthy
individuals wish also to be “great humanitarians and philanthropists”.
There is actually a special business that makes money by selling
“philanthropic” fame. For a fixed sum you can have a concert hall, museum,
hospital, college or whatever named after you (or a relative of yours). For
example, Brown University named its Institute of International Studies,
where I used to work, in honour of Tom Watson of IBM in exchange for $25
million.
The publicity given to large “philanthropic” donations suggests that in
certain circles kudos may now depend on how much money you give as well
as how much you have. It is like the potlatch among the Kwakiutl of western
Canada, where the wealthy gain kudos by making generous gifts.

Guilt feelings?

While “philanthropy” is often just a means of cultivating a favorable

public image, some wealthy people may be sincere in wanting to “do good”.
Some authors even attribute the giving of certain individuals to guilt feelings
about how their fortunes were made.
Thus, it is claimed that Brooke Astor was ashamed of her family’s
reputation as New York’s biggest slumlords. Carnegie, we are told, felt guilt
over the workers killed in the suppression of the Homestead strike of 1892.
Yet he also wanted “Carnegie Steel to come out on top” – and that feeling
proved stronger than any sense of guilt.
Ashamed or not, Astor gave nothing to the victims of her family’s
rack-renting. Instead, she gave $200 million to cultural institutions.
Similarly, Carnegie endowed the arts and academia, but gave nothing back
to the workers who slaved in the heat of his steel mills at poverty line wages
– twelve hours a day, every single day of the year except July 4.
The ruthless capitalist precedes, makes possible and is vindicated by
the “generous philanthropist”. The capitalist drives the system that causes
the misery; the “philanthropist” then does a little to ameliorate that misery.
Strangely enough, the capitalist and the “philanthropist” turn out to be one
and the same person.

Piling up and speading out

Why keep piling up manure just to spread it out again? It seems

senseless – even if the manure does not end up exactly where it was before.
Yes, it seems senseless when we focus on outcome. But when we shift
our attention to process, it starts to make more sense.
Piling up brings one sort of kudos, then spreading out brings another.
One sort does not cancel out the other.
Both piling up and spreading out give the satisfaction of exercising
power, making decisions that affect millions of lives – on the sole
qualification of the possession of wealth.
So it all makes perfect sense. From a certain point of view.
Dedicated to serving the rich: the reality of aid

“CARE: Dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor.” So reads a wall

poster at the Haiti offices of the “humanitarian” agency CARE International.
The offices are housed in a mansion in a wealthy district up in the hills
above Port-au-Prince, at a hygienic distance from the poor people they are
“dedicated to serve”.
Well, you can’t expect the respectable ladies and gentlemen who
administer aid to live and work down in the filth and stench of the
shantytowns. Of course, you can’t blame the poor for the lack of sewers, but
still...
The aid administrators realise that they need the assistance of people
who do know something about the poor and are capable of interacting with
them. So they hire specialists called anthropologists, who acquire the
requisite knowledge and skill as trainees by living for a time among poor
people (formally in order to gather material for their Ph.D. theses).
But some trainees “go native”. They come to sympathise with their
temporary neighbors and feel the urge to talk about inconvenient realities
that they have discovered. This annoys the administrators, who label them
“idealists” and say they have “a negative attitude”. It would be quite
unsuitable to appoint them to responsible positions in aid agencies.
An eye-opening book has just appeared, written by just such a
chatterbox: Timothy T. Schwartz, Travesty in Haiti. No publisher would
touch it, so he published it himself.
 Charity for the rich

Very little aid ever reaches the poor, let alone the poorest of the poor.
This is partly due to the practical difficulty that the poorest areas also have
the poorest infrastructure (roads, storage facilities, etc.). But mainly it is
because those who are supposed to distribute the aid sell most of it and
pocket the proceeds.
In some cases, aid goes directly to the rich. Schwartz describes an
“orphanage” run by an American reverend where the “orphans” have parents
who could easily afford to provide for them. The place is really an elite
boarding school. Meanwhile, naïve churchgoers back in the States, most of
them ordinary working people, fork out to support the “poor orphans” they
have “adopted”, send them gifts, and even pay for their college education.
The poor in rich countries give charity to the rich in poor countries.

The more aid, the more misery

Schwartz’ most important finding is this. When the flow of food aid
into Haiti increases, the overall result is that malnutrition becomes more
widespread, not less. Why? The great majority of Haitians are small farmers,
dependent on selling food to meet their non-food needs. Typically, natural
disaster prompts the decision to send food aid, but by the time it arrives the
emergency is over and the country may well be right in the middle of a
bumper harvest. The effect is to drive prices down further, causing enormous
misery throughout the rural areas.
It seems commonsense. If you see hungry people on TV, so you give
money to buy and send them food. But capitalism has a perverse logic of its
own that has nothing to do with commonsense. Reactions that ignore that
logic are liable to do more harm than good.
Some experts and charities – notably, Oxfam – advocate aid in the
form of cash transfers. Then food for distribution can be bought locally
instead of imported, strengthening rather than undermining the local peasant
economy. Local supply would also be quicker and easier to organise.
Nevertheless, most aid agencies, and especially those like CARE that
are dependent on Western governments, keep on shipping in food. They
even require their national affiliates to cover operating expenses by selling
part of the food received locally (“monetised food”).

Expanding export markets

US overseas food aid began in 1954. Until recently it was openly

justified as a foreign policy tool and means of promoting American business
interests. In particular, it has expanded export markets for US agriculture.
Dumping surpluses abroad has helped the US and the EU maintain prices
and profits on their domestic markets.
According to the website of the US Agency for International
Development, aid was used to transform Egypt from a food exporter in
competition with the US into a net importer of food with a low-wage
industrial sector. Since the 1980s Western governments and financial
institutions pursued the same strategy in Haiti. The country was turned from
an exporter into an importer of rice, sugar, and other crops, while 100,000
peasants abandoned the land to work for $2 a day in assembly plants, mostly
US-owned, making T-shirts, jeans, and the like for the American market.
This new industrial sector has now also largely collapsed, leaving Haiti to
depend increasingly on the Columbian drugs trade.
A striking illustration of the commercial interests underlying aid is the
fate of the Haitian pig. Farmers used to rely on a small black pig well
adapted to conditions in rural Haiti. USAID had these pigs exterminated
under the pretext of fighting a swine fever epidemic. The Haitian pig was
replaced with a large white pig from Iowa that had to be fed large quantities
of imported US corn.

Do they know?

Do the aid administrators understand what they are doing? It is clear

from Schwartz that they understand very well. When he “reveals” his
sensational findings, they do not argue that he is wrong. They just advise
him that if he wants a job he should stop saying things that the US
government does not want to hear. They know who they really serve.

March 2010

Unemployment – is it really the problem?

Is unemployment really the problem?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to play down the misery of the
millions who have lost their jobs – or the millions more who are going to
lose their jobs – as the world slides deeper into the next Great Depression. I
know very well what losing your job so often means. Losing your home
(well, you thought it was yours!). Losing medical coverage (if you had it).
Even losing your family.
But think. If not being employed was really the problem, wouldn’t
you expect everyone without a job to be in misery? But there are many
people who don’t have jobs and yet live well enough. People who don’t
need jobs.
Native people in the Amazon rainforest, for so long as they manage to
preserve their old way of life, don’t need jobs. They have access to land,
food, wood, medicinal herbs, other resources they need – to their means of
life. When the logging and mining companies move in, they lose access.
Sure, then they need jobs.
Most of us in the “developed” countries lost access to the means of
life long ago. They no longer belong to us. They were seized by a small
minority who claim to own them. These owners allow us access to things we
need only in exchange for money. If we can’t pay, they would sooner have
things go to waste – sooner leave houses empty, for instance, than shelter the
homeless. They allow us access to productive resources only when they hire
us to work for them. If we try to get access without their permission, they
call us criminals and send their police and jailors to punish us.
These people – the employers, the owners of the means of life – are
unemployed, every one of them. But it doesn’t bother them a bit! They live
on the income from their property. They too don’t need jobs.
So unemployment is a problem only for people who depend on being
employed in order to live. That situation of dependence is what I mean by
the real problem.
Some of us try to escape from the situation of dependence by going
into business for ourselves. But chances of success are small – even in good
times, let alone during a slump. Many don’t seek escape at all but appeal to
the government to create more jobs, hoping to go back to slaving away for
others.
We socialists don’t appeal for jobs. We don’t want jobs. That doesn’t
mean we’re lazy! We thirst for the opportunity to do useful work as free,
equal, and dignified human beings – work to satisfy our needs and the needs
of others. We want to be rid of an absurd system that artificially creates
misery and wastes vast material, natural, and human resources. That is why
we demand restoration of access to the means of life – their common
ownership and democratic control by the whole community.

Section 2

WORKING TO SURVIVE

Most of us under capitalism are legally free, but what sort of

“freedom” is it when just in order to survive we have to
devote most of our time and energy to labour that is
alienated, meaningless and often dangerous to our health?

Labour without end?

The rise in working hours

Futurologists, Alvin Toffler being the best known, used to herald the
imminent arrival of the "post-industrial society" – an arcadia in which
automation has almost done away with work and our main problem will be
how to cope with an excess of leisure. Indeed, labour productivity has risen
steadily and at an accelerating rate throughout the last century, except for a
blip in the period 1975--85, when labour productivity in the US (though not
in Western Europe) fell slightly. But it is only in a rational (i.e., socialist)
society, where the means of life serve the community as a whole, that higher
productivity will equal less work.
It is not widely recognized that since the 1970s working hours have
tended to rise. There appear to be only two books about recent trends in
working time: Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure (BasicBooks, 1992) and Pietro Basso, Modern Times,
Ancient Hours. Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century (translated from
Italian by Giacomo Donis; Verso, 2003). Schor is concerned with the U.S.
and has a reformist approach, while Basso attempts a Marxian analysis and
focuses more on Europe.
Today's young wage and salary workers work longer hours than their
parents and grandparents did at the same age. There is less time not only for
relaxation, hobbies, self-education, and political activity, but even for
parenting, family life, sleep, socializing, and sex – much to the detriment of
our quality of life and physical and emotional health.
It isn't just a matter of the number of hours per day, week, or year.
Working time has been "rationalized" as well as increased. That means
greater intensity of effort and reduced opportunity for rest, social interaction,
and even going to the toilet during the workday (zero "dead time," also
known as the Toyota system). It means "variable" or "flexible" schedules –
flexible for the boss, not the worker – with more night and weekend work to
keep costly machinery in nonstop operation. Many couples now meet only to
hand over the kids as they change shifts. And while some are mercilessly
overworked, others are thrown out of work altogether, all in the name of
profitability.
Working time has gone through some dramatic ups and downs in the
course of history. Chattel slaves, of course, were forced to work long hours,
though not always as long as wage slaves in the early days of capitalism,
when 14 or even 16-hour days and 7-day weeks (i.e., 5,000 hours a year or
more) were imposed on children and adults alike. Medieval peasants, by
contrast, had led a more leisurely life. Thanks largely to the numerous
holidays of the church calendar, according to four studies of Britain in the
13th to 16th centuries they typically worked 2,000 hours a year or less. The
working hours of "primitive" tribal people also tend to be relatively short.
Capitalist "progress" put paid to such idleness.
In the mid-19th century working hours stood at about 3,500 hours a
year (according to studies of Britain in 1840 and the U.S. in 1850). In
England the Ten Hours Bill (May 1, 1848) brought the work week down to
60 hours in the countryside (where the Sabbath was enforced) and 70 hours
in the cities (where it was not). For decade after decade the working class
movement struggled for the 8-hour day, but it was not achieved until after
World War One. Children were finally taken out of the mines and factories
and put in school. Eventually the weekend and annual vacation came
(though not for all). By the late 1940s the typical work year in most
"developed" countries was down below 2,000 hours – just about where it
had been in the Middle Ages.
After this the story varies somewhat from country to country. In
France and Germany, where the trade unions fought for "work sharing" and
the 35-hour week, the postwar decades saw a further modest decline in
working hours. Paid vacations are much longer in these countries than in the
U.S. and Japan. In the U.S. working hours were stable in the 1950s and
1960s, only to start rising again in the 1970s: the average work week
increased by almost three hours between 1973 and 1997. In Britain the rise
in hours appears to have levelled off in recent years. According to the U.K.
Labour Force Survey, the proportion of employed persons usually working
over 45 hours a week rose from 21% in 1991 to 24% in 1997 and then fell to
19% in 2003.
American activists make a great deal of the contrast between the U.S.
and Europe and point to Europe as a model for the U.S. to emulate.
However, the same processes are underway in Europe, and indeed
throughout the world, even though they are more advanced in the U.S. and
Japan. (And in China the 11 or 12-hour day is standard.) Only certain groups
of European production workers ever won the 35-hour week. For example,
German metalworkers and typographers won an agreement for the 35-hour
week in 1984, though it did not come into force until 1995. In exchange they
had to accept intensified work regimes and "flexible" hours, including
weekend work. Moreover, the employers have since launched a largely
successful counteroffensive against reduced working hours.
Why are working hours rising and what can we do about it?
Some commentators blame "consumerism" and the "work and spend
cycle". No doubt there are those who overwork, often in two full-time jobs,
for the sake of conspicuous consumption – "to keep up with the Joneses".
But the usual pattern is probably for people to work more in an effort to
preserve their accustomed standard of living despite another trend of the last
quarter century: the decline in real wages. Many overwork to save for their
children's education or for retirement, although the overwork makes it much
less likely that they'll survive to enjoy their "nest egg". And many have to
overwork just to make ends meet or under pressure from their employers
(e.g., compulsory overtime). Managers are especially vulnerable to such
pressure: thanks to the cell phone, they can be called upon at any time and
are thereby deprived of any guaranteed non-working time.
One important part of the explanation must be that it is cheaper for
employers to hire a small number of employees to work long hours than it
would be to divide up the available work among a larger number of
employees. Many labour-related costs – training, administration, fringe
benefits – depend on the number of employees, not total employee-hours. So
"downsizing" is always an appealing way of quickly improving a firm's
profitability and competitive position. Long hours also have the advantage
of making workers more dependent on a specific employer and therefore
easier to control.
So could reforms change the incentive structure for both employers
and employees in favour of shorter hours? Suggestions include improving
the status of part-time work, abolishing higher rates for overtime, and
banning compulsory overtime. Tax incentives could be devised for
spreading available work more thinly. In principle such changes might have
a certain effect. But if capitalists were to come under strong pressure from a
reformist government in one country to shorten hours, they would surely
move their assets elsewhere, as they already do to escape unwelcome
regulation of other kinds.
 Historical evidence does point to a clear relationship between working
time and the willingness of workers and their organizations to fight for its
reduction. Reduced hours have never flowed automatically from increased
productivity. They have been won though long and intense struggle. And in
today's world the struggle has to be waged on a global scale – not for the
"right to work" but for the right to live, which includes the right to leisure.
Or, to borrow the title of a classic pamphlet by Marx's son-in-law Paul
Lafargue, the right to be lazy.

May 2006

Is wage labor really a form of slavery?

We socialists like to refer to wage labor as “wage slavery” and call workers
“wage-slaves”. Non-socialists may assume that we use these expressions as
figures of speech, for rhetorical effect. No, we use them literally. They
reflect our view of capitalist society.
Socialists use the word “slavery” in a broad sense, to encompass both
chattel slavery and wage slavery as alternative ways of exploiting labor. We
are aware of the differences between them, but we also want to draw
attention to their common purpose. Capitalist language conceals this
common purpose by equating chattel slavery with slavery as such and by
conflating wage labor with free labor. Socialists regard labor as free only
where the laborers themselves individually or collectively own and control
the means by which they labor (land, tools, machinery, etc.).
 Why chattel slavery was abandoned

The connection between chattel slavery and wage slavery as

alternative modes of exploitation is visible in the debates within the British
and American ruling class that led up to the abolition of chattel slavery.
While religious abolitionists condemned slave-holding as a moral sin, the
clinching argument against chattel slavery was that it was no longer the most
effective way of exploiting the laboring population. It was abandoned
because it was impeding economic and especially industrial development –
that is, the accumulation of capital.
The legal, social and political status of wage-slaves is superior to that
of chattel slaves. However, when we compare their position in the labor
process itself, we see that here the difference between them is not a
fundamental one. They are all compelled to obey the orders of the “boss”
who owns the instruments of production with which they work or who
represents those who own them. In a small enterprise the boss may convey
his orders directly, while in a large enterprise orders are passed down
through a managerial hierarchy. But in all cases it is ultimately the boss who
decides what to produce and how to produce it. The products of the labor of
the (chattel or wage) slaves do not belong to them. Nor, indeed, does their
own activity.

The secret abode

An obvious difference between chattel slavery and wage slavery is

that as a chattel slave you are enslaved – totally subjected to another’s will –
at every moment from birth to death, in every aspect of your life. As a wage-
slave, you are enslaved only at those times when your labor power is at the
disposal of your employer. At other times, in other aspects of your life – as a
consumer, a voter, a family member, a gardener perhaps – you enjoy a
certain measure of freedom, respect and social equality.
Thus, the wage-slave has some scope for self-development and self-
realisation that is denied the chattel slave. Limited scope, to be sure, for the
wage-slave must regularly return to the cramped world of wage labor, which
spread its influence over the rest of life like a pestilential mist.
As a result of this split, capital confronts the worker in schizophrenic
style, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The same
person whom capital sedulously flatters and courts as a consumer and voter
is helplessly exposed to harrassment, bullying, yells and insults at the place
of employment.
Capitalist ideologists focus on the “public” spheres of life in which
people are relative social equals and do their best to ignore what happens
inside the “private” sphere of wage slavery. Thus, economists analyze the
exchange of resources among “market actors”, while political scientists talk
about relations between the state and an imaginary classless community of
citizens that they call “civil society”. Even children’s television programmes
display the same bias. For instance, most of the human characters in Sesame
Street earn their living through small individual and family businesses (a
corner store, a fix-it shop, a dance studio, a veterinarian clinic, etc.).
So there is a wide gap between superficial appearances and deep
reality. The servitude of the wage worker is not visible on the surface of
capitalist society; to witness it the investigator must enter “the secret abode
of production, on the threshold of which stands: ‘no admittance except on
business’” (Marx, Capital).
 Who is the master?

It may be objected that wage workers are not slaves because they have
the legal right to leave a particular employer, even if in practice they may be
reluctant to use that right out of fear of not finding another job.
All that this proves, however, is that the wage worker is not the slave
of any particular employer. According to Marx, the owner of the wage-slave
is not the individual capitalist but the capitalist class – “capital as a whole”.
Yes, you can leave one employer, but only in order to look for a new one.
What you cannot do, lacking as you do all other access to the means of life,
is escape from the thrall of employers as a class – that is, cease to be a wage-
slave.

Is wage slavery worse?

Some have argued that – at least in the absence of an effective social

security “safety net” – wage slavery is even worse than chattel slavery. As
the chattel slave is valuable property his master has an interest in preserving
his life and strength, while the wage-slave is always at risk of being thrown
out of employment and left to starve.
Actually, the severity with which the chattel slave is treated depends
on just how valuable he is. Where chattel slaves were in abundant supply
and therefore quite cheap – as in San Domingo, where a slave rebellion in
1791 led to the abolition of chattel slavery and the establishment of the state
of Haiti (C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins) – they were commonly worked,
whipped, or otherwise tortured to death. How the wage-slave is treated
similarly depends on the availability of replacements. For instance,
capitalists in China see no reason why they should protect young peasant
workers in shoe factories from exposure to toxic chemicals in the glue,
because plenty of teenage girls are constantly arriving from the countryside
to replace those who fall too sick to work (Anita Chan, China’s Workers
Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy, M.E.
Sharpe 2001).

Intermediate forms

As alternative modes of exploitation, chattel slavery and wage slavery

are not separated by a Chinese Wall. Under conditions unfavorable for the
working class, wage slavery can easily degenerate into an intermediate form
that more closely resembles chattel slavery.
It is common for desperately poor people in underdeveloped countries
to be induced to sign a labor contract (which, being illiterate, they cannot
read) by lies about the atrocious conditions that await them. By the time they
discover the truth it is too late: they are forcibly prevented from running
away. Such, for example, is the plight of the half million or more Haitian
migrants who toil on plantations in the Dominican Republic (see
http://www.batayouvriye.org/English/Positions1/dr.html).
Comparable but more formalized was the system of indentured labor
that prevailed in colonial America in the 17th and 18th century and was
gradually displaced by black chattel slavery. In exchange for passage across
the Atlantic, poor Europeans undertook to serve a master for a set number of
years (typically seven). Some survived their temporary servitude, others did
not.
 Slavery and violence

The word “slavery” conjures up the image of the cruel overseer on a

plantation in the Caribbean or the old American South, wielding a whip over
the heads of his helpless victims. The lash is rightly regarded as a symbol of
chattel slavery.
Yet here again no Chinese Wall separates one mode of exploitation
from another. The lash has also been widely used against indentured laborers
and certain categories of wage-slaves. Only in 1915, for instance, was a law
passed in the United States (the La Follette Act) to prohibit the whipping of
seamen. Even after that a sailor could still be placed in irons or put on
reduced rations for disobeying orders.
Children in the textile mills of 19th-century Britain were hit with
leather straps for not working hard enough. In China, abolition of corporal
punishment was one of the demands made by Anyuan coal miners in the
strike of 1923. As Anita Chan shows in her book, it is in widespread use
again today in factories owned by Taiwanese and Korean capitalists.
Even in the developed countries, many people are bullied and
tormented at work, usually by a person standing above them in the
hierarchy. Some are driven to suicide. Many suffer serious physical or
sexual assault. On one of many websites devoted to this problem
(www.worktrauma.org) we find the story of a bookkeeper at a power tool
company whom a manager kicked in the buttocks with such force that she
was lifted off her heels, causing severe back injury as well as shock. While I
was at Brown University, a laboratory assistant was raped in the lab by her
supervisor.
 Such acts of violence against employees are no longer sanctioned by
law, but they happen all the time. The victim is sometimes able to win some
compensation, but criminal charges are rarely made against the perpetrator.

It doesn’t apply to me

If you are fortunately situated, you may feel that my argument doesn’t
apply to you. Your boss or manager treats you well, you do not suffer insult
or assault, you are satisfied with your working conditions, and the work
itself may even give you satisfaction. You at least are not a wage-slave.
Or so you imagine. Some chattel slaves – in particular, the personal
servants of kind masters and mistresses -- also had the good fortune to be
treated well. But they had no guarantee that their good fortune would
continue. They might be sold to or inherited by a cruel new master following
the old master’s death, departure or bankruptcy. You too may suddenly find
yourself with a nasty new boss or manager. The matter is out of your hands,
precisely because you are only a wage-slave.
If you are a technical specialist, a scientist or analyst of some kind,
you may even say: “What sort of slave can I be? I am not ordered about all
the time. On the contrary. I was hired for my expertise and I am expected to
think for myself, solve problems and offer suggestions. True, I can’t make
important decisions by myself, but my bosses are always willing to listen to
me. And they are always polite to me.”
You are deluding yourself. I know because I have been in a similar
situation and deluded myself. Your bosses listen to you before they come to
a decision. Once they make a decision, they expect you to accept it. But
suppose you once forget yourself (which means -- forget your place) and
continue to argue against a decision that has already been made. Then you
are in for a rude shock!
What makes your delusion possible is that you have grown
accustomed to analyze problems from your employer’s point of view. You
are every bit as alienated from your own thinking as the assembly line
worker is from his or her physical movements. And if a process that you
think up is patented, do you imagine that the patent will belong to you?

May 2010

“Better I die of radiation than my children of hunger”

In the village of Orlovka, in the Chui region of Kyrgyzstan, there used to be

a uranium mine. Its closure in the early 1990s led to massive local
unemployment. But the desperately poor residents have found a new way to
survive.
They sift through the waste dumped near the disused mine – "a
moonscape of grey slag" – in search of material that they can sell to scrap
merchants. There is iron and other metals, and graphite, but most valuable is
silicon, which fetches $10 per kilo and ends up at electronics plants in
neighbouring China.
About a third of the diggers are children. There too are some of their
teachers, who can't get by on the pittance called a salary. Injuries are
frequent. Some people get buried alive when the holes they are digging cave
in.
There are many such places in the "undeveloped" countries. But this
one has an additional hazard. The waste is full of radioactive gas (up to 400
micro-roentgens per hour). The diggers, their bodies covered with festering
sores, are dying of radiation sickness. They are aware of the fact, but as one
man said: "Better I die of radiation than my children of hunger."
Now just suppose these people had been rounded up at gunpoint and
forced to do this work on the orders of some military junta or Islamist or
"communist" dictatorship. Just imagine the furore that human rights
organizations would raise against the regime committing such atrocities.
But they were not rounded up at gunpoint, and no armed guards are
needed to keep them at their labours. They are "independent market actors"
– "entrepreneurs," indeed, legally free to leave the scrap collecting business
whenever they like.
So none of their "human rights," as the term is usually understood, has
been violated. They are lucky enough to live in a country that is praised as a
model "democracy" with an excellent "human rights record" – the
“Switzerland of Central Asia.” And yet they are not a whit better off for all
that.
For there is one human right that they lack, and without it other
human rights are not worth very much. They do not have the right of access
to the means of life. "I wanted to work on the land," another digger
remarked, "but unfortunately I don't have any." Quite so. And back into the
radioactive gas...

(Source. Institute of War and Peace Reporting (London), Reporting Central

Asia, No. 438, March 10, 2006.)

May 2006
Labour in hell: mining sulphur in Indonesia

“A man labours in hell.” So opens an article on the work of artist Darren

Almond (Guardian Weekly, 25 January), referring to his video about
workers who extract sulphur from the Kawah Ijen volcano in eastern Java.
Imagine the scene. We are standing on the inner slope of the
volcano’s crater. Below lies a spectacular and extremely acidic turquoise
lake. Hot sulphurous gases (300º C+) rise through an opening in the earth’s
crust (a solphatara) and hiss through fissures into the crater. Some of the gas
passes through pipes that have been driven into the solphatara. In the pipes it
starts to cool and condense. Molten sulphur trickles out of the pipes and
solidifies on the slope.
Here the miners, working with hammers and metal poles, break the
deposits up into chunks and load them into baskets. Balancing a pair of
baskets on a bamboo pole over his shoulder, each man makes his way over
the crater rim and down 3 km to the collection point on the road below. The
sulphur is then weighed and awaits delivery to the processing plant 19 km.
away. Near the collection point is a row of shacks, used by miners who live
too far away to return home every night.
A load is typically 50 – 70 kg., though according to some sources it
may be 80 or even 100 kg. The purchasing cooperative pays 350 rupiahs
(almost 2 p.) a kilo, so for delivering two standard loads a day – some
deliver three – a man earns the princely sum of 42,000 rupiahs (£2.31).
The miners have a life expectancy of “not much over 30 years.”
Carrying heavy loads up and down steep slopes progressively cripples them.
They are constantly exposed to sulphur – both the solid sulphur on the
ground and in their baskets and the acidic sulphurous fumes that
intermittently waft their way. Their only protection is a rag stuffed in the
mouth and the temporary shelter offered by a few big rocks along the path.
Sulphur is a corrosive irritant. It smells of shit – though a chemist
would say that shit smells of sulphur. It gets all over the skin and into the
eyes, mouth, teeth, nose and lungs, damaging everything it touches. It makes
you dizzy, so maintaining your balance is a constant struggle. So is
breathing. A tourist remarks in a blog that his exposure inside the crater was
worse than getting tear-gassed.
Miners’ reports of day-to-day changes in the severity of these effects
are used in assessing the risk of an impending eruption.
Why does the metaphor of hell come so readily to mind when
describing this environment? I strongly suspect it is because the very idea of
hell has its origin in people’s experience with volcanoes. The bible refers to
hell as a place of “fire and brimstone” and it was with a rain of fire and
brimstone that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Brimstone is just an
old name for sulphur.

* * *

The conditions of many jobs are rarely if ever witnessed by outsiders.

Many people from various countries, however, have seen the miners of
Kawah Ijen at their labour. The volcano is a tourist attraction and tour
advertisements mention the miners as part of the exotic scenery of the area.
When they get the chance, miners take time off to hire themselves out as
tourist guides at the rate of 20--30,000 rupiahs (£1.10--£1.65) for half a day.
 A fair bit can be learnt from the accounts that tourists place on the
internet, though perhaps more about the tourists than the miners. An
Australian student has posted an unusually sensitive essay. He recounts his
conversation with a young man reluctantly going to the volcano for the first
time. He has no choice, he explains. His family is poor and landless. His
father, apparently already dead, had also mined sulphur, leaving home well
before dawn to walk the almost 20 km. from their village – although
sometimes he would rent a place in one of the shacks and stay at the volcano
for two weeks at a time. As a child he used to see his father in daylight only
on days when he was too sick or tired to work. Now the young man is taking
his father’s place.
The student does not think to ask when or how the family had lost its
land. Landlessness in Indonesia has its origin in the nineteenth century,
under Dutch rule, when the land of farmers who could not pay the land tax
was stolen from them and handed to colonists for plantations of export
crops. The tax, of course, was imposed precisely for this purpose. (The
British played the same trick in their African colonies.)
When Indonesia gained independence in 1945, the land was not
returned but claimed by the state, which took over the role of the plantation
owners. That is why the bus to the volcano passes by coffee and mango
plantations. Now the government is promoting the cultivation of an oilseed
plant called jatropha for biofuel exports, despite its toxic nuts and leaves.
The landless will labour in hell in order to keep filling the voracious maw of
the motor car as the oil runs out.

* * *
 Why, in our high-tech age, does a horrible job like sulphur mining
have to be done by such primitive means, by the hard labour of “human
donkeys”? Surely it could be mechanized? I see no technical barrier. A
socialist society, to the extent that it needed to mine sulphur at all, would
certainly mechanize the process.
One idea that springs to mind is to use specialized robots. A major
advantage of robots is that they can be designed to function in environments
hostile to human beings, such as the surface of another planet. And being
inside a volcanic crater is rather like being on another planet. In both cases
the atmosphere is unsuitable for human respiration. In fact, there are thought
to be “solphatara-like environments” on Mars.
Probably sulphur could be extracted from volcanoes perfectly well by
much less sophisticated mechanical means. It would suffice to extend the
pipes over (or, if necessary, through) the crater wall and empty them into
sealed tanks mounted on trucks. Possibly some pumping would be required.
The engineers installing the system would be properly equipped with
protective clothing and oxygen cylinders. Such an investment is evidently
considered unprofitable. That reflects the low value – close to zero – that the
profit system places on the health, welfare and lives of the poor.
Despite its enormous and growing potential, the scope for applying
technology within capitalism is limited. A key constraint is the availability
of cheap labour, which reduces the savings from mechanization below the
level of its costs. When operations are transferred to regions where labour
costs are lower, the result is likely to be regression to more primitive
technologies.
One striking example is shipbreaking – the dismantling of
decommissioned vessels to recover the steel. In the 1970s this was a highly
mechanized industrial operation carried out at European docks. Ships are
now broken at “graveyards” on beaches in countries such as India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Turkey, where workers labour with rudimentary tools,
wearing little or no protective gear despite exposure to toxic fumes, gas
explosions and fires, asbestos dust and falling pieces of metal.

* * *

In the previous article I wrote about other desperately poor people

engaged in hellish labour – scavenging for saleable items in a radioactive
dump in Kyrgyzstan. Clearly these situations are not all that exceptional.
The most remarkable thing is that although these jobs are at least as
horrible as the tasks imposed on prisoners in Nazi and Stalinist labour camps
people do them of their own “free” will, without the least hint of physical or
legal compulsion. They can leave at any time. No one will stop them. But
they don’t.
Their freedom is illusory because the consequence of leaving would
be starvation for themselves and their families. And yet the illusion – the
economists’ fiction of the “free market actor” – suffices to dull perception of
their plight. If the miners at work in the crater were prisoners labouring
under physical compulsion, the tourists observing them would surely be a
little less complacent. Perhaps some human rights organization would even
get angry on their behalf.
And so the sulphur miners keep going. Because capitalism denies
them all other access to the resources they need to live. And they want to
live. Even knowing that they will be dead by their early thirties. Even if their
lives seem – to those of us whose choices are less stark – hardly worth
living.

March 2008

Malawi: children of the tobacco fields

We all know that tobacco harms those who smoke it. Few are aware of the
damage it does to those who pick and process it.
The “children’s organisation” Plan International recently issued a
report about children in Malawi, some as young as five, who toil up to
twelve hours in the tobacco fields for an average daily wage of 11 p. (Hard
Work, Long Hours and Little Pay: Research with Children Working on
Tobacco Farms in Malawi).
The finding that has attracted most attention is that these children are
being poisoned by the nicotine “juice” they absorb through the skin – and
also ingest, as they have no chance to wash hands before eating. Many of the
ailments that plague them -- headaches, abdominal and chest pain, nausea,
breathlessness, dizziness – are symptoms of Green Tobacco Sickness.
But much of their suffering has nothing to do with nicotine. All have
blisters on their hands. All have pains – in the shoulders, neck, back, knees –
caused by overexertion of their immature muscles. About a third of the
children are coughing blood, which suggests TB.
Many of the children examined had been beaten, kicked or otherwise
physically abused by estate owners or supervisors. Many of the girls had
been raped by them. One boy had deep knee wounds as a result of being
made to walk across a stony field on his knees as punishment for “laziness”.
 Who are these estate owners?
Commercial tobacco farming in Malawi began late in the 19th century,
when it was the British colony of Nyasaland. White settlers seized much of
the best arable land for plantations of tea, coffee, tung trees (for their oil,
used as a wood finisher) and – mostly -- tobacco. Even today the majority of
owners of large estates are descendants of the colonial settlers, although now
there are also black owners.
In 1948 some tung and tobacco plantations (estates) were taken over
by the Colonial Development Corporation, funded mainly by the British
Treasury. After Malawi gained formal independence in 1964, these came
under state ownership. Later they were reprivatised. Another recent change
is the direct acquisition of some estates by international tobacco companies.
The estates were established on land stolen from traditional peasant
communities. The process began in colonial times but continued even after
independence, under the Banda regime. Land theft impoverishes local
communities and compels those worst affected to offer themselves – or their
children! – to the estate owners as wage slaves.
Tobacco is also grown on many small family farms. Here too,
children work and suck in nicotine juice, alongside their parents.
Malawi’s tobacco market is dominated – through subsidiaries -- by
two international corporations, Universal Corporation and Alliance One
International. These corporations operate a cartel, refusing to compete and
colluding to keep tobacco purchase prices low. This in turn intensifies the
pressure on farm owners to minimise costs by exploiting cheap or free child
labour – a practice that the corporations hypocritically claim to oppose.
Representatives of the corporations sit on several committees that
advise the government of Malawi on economic policy. By this means they
ensure that their interests are served and block any initiatives to diversify the
economy and reduce the country’s dependence on tobacco.
The main reason why child labour is so prevalent in Malawian
agriculture is the poverty – in particular, land hunger -- of most of the rural
population. This reflects not any absolute shortage of land but rather the
highly skewed pattern of land ownership. Large tracts of land lie fallow on
the big estates.

How does Plan International propose to help the children on the

tobacco farms?
Well, it will “educate farm owners and supervisors” and persuade
them to provide the children with protective clothing. Taking the tobacco
companies’ PR at face value, it will urge them to “scrutinise their suppliers
more closely”. It will not, however, support a ban on children picking
tobacco because that is “unrealistic” – as indeed it is if you refuse to
challenge underlying social conditions.
But what a pathetic contrast such “realism” makes with Plan
International’s “vision” of “a world in which all children realise their full
potential in societies that respect people’s rights and dignity”!

Environmental degradation

Besides ruining people’s health, tobacco degrades the environment.

The tobacco monoculture that dominates much of Malawi depletes the soil
of nutrients. It also causes extensive deforestation, as trees are felled to
provide firewood for curing the tobacco leaves, and this in turn further
erodes the soil. Water sources are contaminated. After over a century of
tobacco cultivation, all these processes are already far advanced.
(For fuller analysis, see the chapter by Geist, Otanez and Kapito in
Andrew Millington and Wendy Jepson, eds. Land Change Science in the
Tropics: Changing Agricultural Landscapes, Springer 2008.)

Tobacco in socialist society?

Will tobacco be grown in socialist society? On a small scale, possibly,

by addicts for their own use. But it’s hard to imagine socialist society
making planned provision, within the framework of democratic decision-
making, for tobacco production. People aware of all the harm caused by
tobacco will surely prefer to halt cultivation of this noxious weed. They will
seek to restore soil fertility, reverse deforestation and enhance local food
supply.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we suppose that the decision is
made to continue producing tobacco, will it be implemented? Will the free
people of socialist society, no longer spurred on by economic necessity,
voluntarily poison themselves just to feed others’ addictions?

Are you a human or a robot?

Do you too get annoyed at unsolicited and unwelcome calls from

telemarketers? Not only do they call at the most inconvenient moments.
They always start with a tedious verification of your identity, so it takes a
while before you’re sure what kind of call it is.
Unless, that is, you interrupt and ask: “Excuse me, are you an
advertisement?” If you’re from Britain they probably won’t understand the
question because you’ve forgotten to stress the third syllable instead of the
second. But even if they do understand you won’t get a straight answer.
They are following a prepared script that doesn’t make provision for
impertinent interruptions.
Anyway, by this time you know it isn’t a long-lost friend or relative
trying to trace you. The easiest thing is to hang up. That’s what I did –
usually.
Unless I happened to be in an especially irritable mood. Then I would
tell the hapless telemarketer off for invading my privacy, demand an
immediate apology, and urge him or her to stop bothering people. I might
even inquire: “Are you a human or a robot?” Reactions varied. The most
common one was to terminate the call. Sometimes the caller would turn
nasty. Once the poor woman at the other end was clearly upset.
That stopped me short. I really didn’t want to upset or antagonize
anyone. After all, they were only members of the working class trying to
earn a living by selling their labor power – their talking power in this case.
They were not robots, but neither were they allowed to be fully human. They
were robotized, alienated human beings. One man said: “I’m doing my job.
If you can get me another job I’ll give it up.” I reflected that it was largely a
matter of luck that I wasn’t in the same plight myself.
Since then I’ve tried not to be too rude to telemarketers. On occasions
I’ve been quite nice. But that too is problematic. You see, even when I’m
trying to be nice I can’t bring myself to stick to the script. Once I made a
joke about the spiel. The talk-seller laughed and responded in kind. That was
pleasant for us both, but if a monitor had been listening in she would have
got into trouble for abandoning the script. And it would have been my fault.
I decided that I did, after all, want to complain. But I would direct my
complaint higher up. I would call the company CEO or, failing that, the
marketing director. At home. At 3 a.m.
But I got no further than the telemarketer’s immediate supervisor,
who adamantly refused to put me in touch with anyone above her. Those
responsible for bothering so many people make damn sure they don’t get
bothered themselves – cowardly hypocrites that they are!
Well, here’s my new line. “I don’t like getting your call, but rest
assured I understand your position. You don’t really want to bother strangers
all day and endlessly repeat this crap, but you can’t find a better way of
earning a living. I really sympathize.”
I wonder what response that will get. An eloquent silence, I expect.
They have to stick to the script.
And yet what a futile waste all this advertising is – not only of
material resources, but of human time, energy, talent, nerves and good
feeling! All those thousands of people employed as robots and robot-
controllers to do nothing better than pester and manipulate millions of other
people into buying things they don’t want or need. Just one part of the waste
constantly generated by the money system.

Section 3
 POLITICS IN VARIOUS
COUNTRIES

(United States, Russia, South Africa,

Israel/Palestine, Maoist China)

Selecting a U.S. president: the invisible primaries

The expression “invisible primary” comes from Arthur T. Hadley, The

Invisible Primary (Prentice-Hall, 1976). A more recent study refers to the
“money primary” (Michael J. Goff, The Money Primary, Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004). The two terms refer to the same process: the efforts of
would-be candidates to gather support, raise funds and cultivate the media in
the year before a presidential election, before the “visible” primaries begin.
Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, defines the
phenomenon as “a private referendum in which the wealthiest Americans
substantially preselect and predetermine who our next president will be…
The hottest candidate in the check-writing sweepstakes is deemed ‘worthy’
by the major media via hundreds of news stories… All others are dubbed
losers before the first [public] votes are cast.”
This slightly overstates the case. The number of candidates deemed
worthy may, as this time round, be two or three. But the great majority of
would-be candidates are indeed thrown out.
So to get through the invisible primary you need two things: money
and media coverage (lots of both). Let’s look at this a bit more closely.

Money and media coverage are closely connected – partly because

money can buy media coverage in the form of political advertising, partly
because (as Lewis notes) the media treat fundraising success as an important
criterion of “credibility.” And also because both money and media coverage
are allocated mainly by members of the same class, the capitalist class. They
make most of the large financial contributions and some of them own and
control the media.
This is not to say that money and media coverage are perfectly
correlated. A candidate needs money for many other purposes besides media
coverage, such as to hire staff, pay travel expenses, and bribe uncommitted
convention delegates. Nor does media coverage depend solely on
fundraising success. For instance, the bosses of Fox, CBS, and NBC also
take into account candidates’ political positions when deciding who will be
allowed to take part in televised “debates” (actually, grillings by TV
journalists) and what questions, if any, each participant will be asked.
In terms of the analogy of a referendum of the capitalist class, it is a
referendum in which the media owners have the casting vote.

* * *
 What makes the political positions of a candidate acceptable or
unacceptable to the media owners?
They would certainly judge any opposition to the capitalist system
unacceptable. But the limits are in fact much narrower than that. In order to
pass the test a candidate must not convey an “anti-corporate message” or
challenge any significant corporate interest. That means in effect that he or
she cannot advocate any serious reform.
I reached this conclusion by observing what happened to the most
“left-wing” of the Democratic Party candidates – Dennis Kucinich, the
Congressional Representative for Cleveland. Kucinich is not against
capitalism, though unlike the general run of American politicians he appears
to be independent of specific business interests. (As mayor of Cleveland he
resisted pressure to privatize the city’s public utility system.) Like Franklin
D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, with whose tradition he associates himself, he
aspires to “save capitalism from itself” by instituting long-overdue reforms.
He was the only candidate to stand for a “single-payer” system of healthcare
finance that would eliminate the parasitic health insurance companies.
Similarly, he was the only candidate to challenge the military-industrial
complex by calling for big cuts in “defence” spending. These reforms are
readily justified in capitalist terms, as essential to restore the
competitiveness of U.S. civilian industry.
The media did their best to ignore Kucinich, except to ridicule him as
a “kook” because, like Carter and Reagan, he says he once saw a UFO. The
networks excluded him from TV debates, even when that required changing
their own rules. (He sued NBC, but the courts upheld its right to exclude
him.) As a result most Americans were unaware of his candidacy, although
polls indicate that the policies he advocates enjoy wide support. In January
he withdrew from the race, but has managed to hold onto his seat in
congress.

* * *

In order to get through the invisible and visible primaries, a candidate,

and especially a Democratic Party candidate, has to engage in vague and
deceptive rhetoric. Obama and Hilary Clinton talk endlessly about change
because that is what the voters to whom they appeal are looking for. They
are fed up with sending their children to war, with layoffs and home
foreclosures, with escalating health costs. Obama repeats the word “change”
so often that it has been called his mantra. But just check out what specific
changes Clinton and Obama have in mind and you can count on being
underwhelmed. They would not have got through the invisible primary had
they been determined on serious change.
For example, Obama and Clinton convey the impression that they are
finally going to make proper healthcare available to everyone. But this turns
out to mean only that everyone will have access to health insurance. You
will still have to pay for it. Well, in that sense the U.S. already has
“universal healthcare”! OK, they will make the health insurance companies
introduce a wider variety of more affordable schemes. That may reduce the
number of uninsured somewhat. But cheaper schemes are schemes with
poorer coverage and/or higher co-pays and deductibles. (A co-pay is the part
of a charge for services that is paid by the patient, not the insurance
company. A deductible is the amount that the patient has to pay before the
insurance company starts to make any contribution at all.) And some people
won’t be able to afford even the cheapest schemes on offer.
 The media and the candidates themselves relieve the strain and
frustration of trying to assess and compare policy positions by distracting us
with trite pseudo-issues such as the relative merits of “youth” and
“experience” and whether the U.S. is “ready” for a nonwhite or female
president.
Socialists consider most of what passes for “democracy” in the U.S.
and other “democratic” countries to be phoney and corrupt – “the best
democracy that money can buy.” But we do not deny the existence of some
democratic elements in the political system of these countries. One such
element is the suffrage itself, which we hope will eventually play a role in
establishing the fuller democracy of socialism. The strength of these
democratic elements changes over time, and the direction of change cannot
be a matter of indifference to socialists.
A crucial factor is the extent to which the capitalist class is able
effectively to silence critics of capitalism by monopolizing control over
communications media. Until the middle of the twentieth century outdoor
public speaking was an important medium of free political discussion,
through which socialists could reach quite a large audience. This democratic
medium was displaced by television, to which socialists had virtually no
access. Now the internet is starting to undermine the monopoly of the
corporate mass media, although its impact so far has been modest.

April 2008

Obama – whose president?

Whose president is Barack Obama?
He would have us believe that he is president of “all Americans.” But
how is that possible when there are such sharp conflicts of interest in
American society? Does the business owner have the same interests as the
workers he hires at or below the minimum wage? Or consider the health
insurance company assessor whose pay and prospects depend on how many
claims she denies. Does she have the same interests as those whose survival
depends on her decisions?
Is Obama president of the millions of “black” Americans who voted
for him with such pride in their hearts? He has not addressed the specific
problems that face “black” people. True, he has raised their status simply by
being president. By the same token, he provides a pretext for pretending that
the issue of racism no longer exists. If he can make it, why can’t they?
Is Obama president of the millions of working people of all colors
who voted for him because they hoped he would make their lives easier and
more secure? Because they hoped he would stop layoffs, foreclosures,
military adventures?
Look at the military budget. Look at Afghanistan. Look at the huge
bank bailouts – with no relief for mortgage holders.
This is not to say that nothing Obama does will be of any benefit to
working people. But of one thing you can be sure. Obama’s bosses will not
allow him to push through any far-reaching reform. That is, any reform that
threatens important corporate interests.
Excuse me, what was that you just said? Obama’s bosses? Does the
U.S. president have bosses? Isn’t he the boss?
Well, yes, formally he’s the boss. But – like every ambitious politician
with his eye on the Oval Office – he went through a long process of vetting
by potential wealthy sponsors. Without the backing of such individuals, he
could not have got the money and media coverage he needed to run for
president. (For a fuller explanation, see the preceding article “Selecting a
U.S. President: The Invisible Primaries.”)
Even now he is beholden to his sponsors. In the (admittedly unlikely)
event that they decide they have made a mistake, they have the means to
undermine or even destroy him.
For example, one of Obama’s biggest backers was the commodity
trader – that is, financial speculator – Paul Tudor Jones, whose fortune is
estimated at $3.3 billion. He was instrumental in mobilizing the hedge fund
business behind Obama.
Naturally, that has absolutely no connection with those unconditional
bank bailouts.
Like all his predecessors, Obama is president of the U.S. capitalist
class.

Are they all the same?

Does that mean that all American politicians are the same? That there
is no significant difference between Democrats and Republicans, “liberals”
and “conservatives”?
Not at all.
Different politicians rely on different sponsors. Each represents a
specific mix of big business interests. In general, for instance, Republicans
have closer connections with the oil corporations, Democrats with Wall
Street.
 Different politicians also use different kinds of rhetoric and have
different approaches to government. Conservative Republicans ignore
popular grievances and try to distract people by exploiting their fears (of
“communism,” “socialism,” “radicalism,” terrorism, Islam, foreigners, etc.)
and by waving the U.S. flag. Democrats, especially liberal Democrats,
convey the impression that they understand and care deeply about the daily
troubles of ordinary people – perhaps even deeply enough to do something
about them (that’s where things start to get fuzzy). Some of them maintain
links with trade unions. For them too, however, business connections are
more important.

Escaping from the trap

Where does this leave us? It is tempting to support liberal Democrats

because they seem to be – and to some small extent really may be – the
lesser of two evils. But that offers us no hope of ever escaping from the trap.
Politicians who promise change inevitably fail to deliver most of what they
promise. Then their disappointed supporters relapse into apathy and the
Republicans come back. And so on and on.
It makes more sense to work toward a fundamental change in the
social system. To build up media and organizations independent of capitalist
control, and eventually use our votes as part of a strategy to introduce the
fuller democracy of socialism. It’s a long and uphill struggle. But what real
alternative is there?
American public opinion and the S-word:
weakening of a taboo?

In April 2009, interviewers working for the Rasmussen agency asked 1,000
people: ‘Which is a better system – capitalism or socialism?’ 53% said
capitalism, 20% socialism, and 27% were not sure.
Although ‘capitalism’ came out the clear winner, commentators were
shocked that almost half the respondents failed to give the ‘correct’ response
on a matter so crucial to the dominant ideology.
The interviewers did not define ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’, so we are
left to guess what respondents understood by these words. No doubt most of
those who answered ‘socialism’ did not have a clear or accurate idea of what
it means. Nevertheless, socialists can take encouragement from the evident
ability of a sizeable proportion of people to resist indoctrination by the
corporate media, which never have anything good to say about any kind of
‘socialism’. Even the fact that so many Americans do not react negatively to
the S-word itself is significant: people who do not take fright at the word are
more likely to be open to consideration of the idea.
A clue to how Americans interpret ‘capitalism’ is found in another
Rasmussen poll (May 2009). Here people were asked: ‘Is a free market
economy the same as a capitalist economy?’ 35% replied yes, 38% no. This
result puzzled the hired ideologists of capital, who do equate the two
concepts and like to use ‘the free market’ as a euphemism for ‘capitalism’.
Yet another poll (December 2008) asked: ‘Which is better – a free
market economy or a government-managed economy?’ 70% preferred a
‘free market economy’ and only 15% a ‘government-managed economy’.
This implies that there is a substantial body of people (about 17%) who are
in favour of ‘the free market’ but against ‘capitalism’.
In the US ‘capitalism’ is widely associated with big business and ‘the
free market’ with small business. Hatred for big business commonly goes
along with admiration for small business. In the frequent polls that compare
the approval ratings of various occupational groups, small business owners
regularly come out on top, while corporate CEOs (together with politicians)
end up at the bottom.
Those who are ‘against capitalism but for the free market’ are,
perhaps, still influenced by the old populist idea of the good society as a
relatively egalitarian community of small independent producers – farmers,
fishermen, craftsmen, doctors, etc. This utopia has its roots in an idealised
image of early rural colonial society in New England and Pennsylvania,
before its transformation by industrial capitalism.

Young people more inclined toward ‘socialism’

The proportion of respondents who say that ‘socialism’ is a better

system than ‘capitalism’ varies with gender, age, race and income. Women
are slightly more likely than men to prefer ‘socialism’; people with low
incomes (under $40,000 per year) more than twice as likely as people with
high incomes (over $75,000); and blacks almost twice as likely as whites,
with equal proportions favouring ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ (31% each).
Variation with age is especially striking. Proportions preferring
‘socialism’ in the older age groups (40 and over) are well below average. In
the 30 – 39 age group the proportion rises to 26% and in the 18 – 29 age
group to 33% (with 37% favouring ‘capitalism’). If we focus specifically on
women aged 18 – 29, we again find an equal division of opinion: 36% for
‘capitalism’ and 36% for ‘socialism’.
So young people seem to have a greater ability than their elders to
resist brainwashing by the lie machine. Some other polls support this
hypothesis. In recent years, for instance, media efforts to discredit and
ridicule warnings about climate change have had considerable success. The
proportion of respondents in Gallup polls who agree that ‘the seriousness of
global warming has been exaggerated’ rose from 30% in 2006 to 33% in
2007, 35% in 2008 and 41% in 2009. This regressive shift, however, is
confined to people aged 30 and over. The distribution of views in the 18 –
29 age group has not been affected.

Why?

How might these very hopeful findings be explained?

If we believe widespread stereotype, nothing needs explaining: young
people are ‘naturally’ rebellious and older people ‘naturally’ conformist. In
fact, this is far from always the case. Rebellious and conformist generations
tend to alternate. The young rebels of the 1960s gave way to the young
conformists of the 1980s. The pendulum is now swinging back.
I suggest three reasons.
First, deteriorating economic conditions. This is the first generation of
young people since the Great Depression who have no hope of maintaining,
let alone improving on, their parents’ standard of living. They face a grim
and uncertain future.
Second, an increasing number of young people pay less attention to
the corporate media, preferring to rely on the Internet. This exposes them to
a broader range of ideas, including socialist ones.
 Finally, the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, ‘socialism’
and ‘communism’ were associated with a forbidding external enemy.
Advocating them marked you out as a traitor. We protested that what we
stood for was something quite different, but our voice was barely audible.
We hoped that with the end of the Cold War it would become easier to
spread socialist ideas. We felt disappointed that this did not seem to happen.
The disappointment was premature. Attitudes do change in response to
circumstances – but only when a new generation comes of age. For today’s
young Americans the Cold War is ancient history.

Christian fascism: the best response

In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free

Press, 2006), Chris Hedges warns of the danger presented by the section of

the U.S. political spectrum usually known as the Christian right – a danger

to democracy, tolerance, science and intellectual freedom. His warning

concerns not Christian revivalism in general (traditional evangelists like

Billy Graham, he points out, were concerned with saving souls not politics)

but a specific highly political tendency called “dominionism” that aims to

establish the world empire of a reborn “Christian America”.

Dominionist preachers like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James

Dobson, R.J. Rushdoony and Rod Parseley propagate their worldview

through a vast array of “megachurches” and publishing houses, home

schools and universities, museums and broadcasting outlets. (The

programming of Paul and Jan Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network is

carried on over 6,000 television stations at home and abroad.) Theirs is a

relentlessly simplistic worldview, supposedly based on the Bible as the

literal Word of God, that denounces all opponents as servants of Satan and

eagerly anticipates the miraculous horrors of the Apocalypse.

The dominionists are hostile to real science and deny global warming

as well as evolution. Their “Gospel of Prosperity” celebrates unbridled

capitalism and extravagant consumption. A long-term aim is government

based on biblical law.

A purely American Fascism

Hedges makes out a convincing case for regarding dominionism as a

variety of totalitarianism and fascism. In certain ways, however, the

dominionists differ from earlier generations of fascists in the United States,

even though they too used the Christian label. Dominionist symbols are

purely American; they admit to no connection with classical foreign

fascisms (Italian, German, etc.).

Comparing the new Christian fascists with the Ku Klux Klan, for

instance, we find that each focuses on a quite different set of enemies. They

renounce hatred for blacks, Catholics and Jews – the three bugbears of

WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) bigotry. Instead, they appeal to

Christians across racial lines, work with Catholics on issues such as abortion

and prayer in schools, and cultivate a close alliance of convenience with the

Zionist religious right, despite the divergent apocalyptic expectations of the

two groups. The main targets of their hostility are those they call “secular

humanists” – a catch-all for all who oppose them, non-fundamentalist

Christians as well as atheists and agnostics – and also Islam.

A highly lucrative business

How do the dominionist preachers finance their activities? Partly by

fleecing their flocks, who pay a “tithe” of 10% of income in addition to other

donations. Other money comes from sympathetic capitalists, including

Amway founder Richard DeVos and beer baron Joseph Coors. Finally, the

Bush Administration, with which they had close ties through the Council for

National Policy, enabled them to tap federal funds for “faith-based” social
service initiatives – an arrangement that Obama has left intact.

We may reasonably doubt whether the big capitalists and politicians

who support the dominionists care all that deeply about religious dogma.

Their main interest presumably lies in the prospect of intensified control

over and exploitation of the working class.

Indeed, for the preachers themselves religion is, apart from anything

else, a highly lucrative business. Their opulent lifestyles suggest that they

divert a significant portion of the various cash flows into their own bank

accounts. Evidently they have overlooked certain biblical passages – for

instance, Jesus’ well-known remark about the camel who tried to pass

through the eye of a needle.

Our attitude as socialists

The danger presented by “Christian fascism” is a real one. It threatens

us as socialists at least as much as it threatens all other “servants of Satan”.

Our ability to spread our ideas depends on tolerance of minority opinions.

Moreover, people whose minds have been addled by belief in magic,

miracles and divine texts are unlikely to be receptive to socialist ideas.

So we cannot say: “It doesn’t matter which group of capitalists have

the upper hand; they are all equally bad because they all represent

capitalism.” Of course it matters.

Faced with the threat of fascism, socialists share a certain amount of

common ground with non-socialists concerned to defend democracy and

science. Both, for example, seek to debunk “creationism” and explain

current scientific thinking about evolution.

However, we must not jeopardise our identity as socialists by joining

broad “anti-fascist” blocs that inevitably accept the continued existence of

capitalism. One reason is that as socialists we have a unique contribution to

make to effective action against fascism.

Real versus illusory community

In his book Hedges describes how vulnerable people are recruited into

dominionist churches. The target of “seduction” is someone whose history

and circumstances (family breakdown, abuse, addiction, isolation, etc.) make

it especially hard to bear the absence of community in capitalism. The

church offers an illusion of community and the victim snatches at the bait,

only later to discover, when escape has become very difficult, that he or she

has paid a high price in submission for yet another illusion.

 The soil in which fascism grows is the impersonal and alienating

conditions of life under capitalism, especially at times of crisis. Hedges

appears to understand this. But there is a disconnect between analysis and

conclusion. He calls for more determined resistance to Christian fascism, but

offers no hope of a more communal way of life that might counter the

emotional appeal of fascism. Only socialists, by holding out the prospect of

real community, can act effectively to undermine the illusory community of

fascism.

Fascists take over Russian Communist Party

In a Russian-language document now circulating on the internet, Yevgeny

Volobuyev, a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation

(CPRF) in St. Petersburg, “sounds the tocsin to warn of the danger of the

CPRF finally turning into a fascist party.”

Volobuyev explains that Russian fascists have been arguing for a long

time on their websites about “what to do with the CPRF.” Some said that

they should just put communists “up against the wall”, but others argued that
they should first join the CPRF and take over its structures. In recent years,

with openly fascist organizations like Russian National Unity fragmenting

and losing legal status, “fascists and people inclined toward fascism

streamed into the CPRF.” There they found many party leaders “demoralised

by the collapse of the Soviet Union” and sympathetic to their cause. With

the help of these leaders, they “were able to create an unofficial fascist

faction inside the CPRF” (officially the party does not allow factions). They

also managed to gain control of the party’s internet sites.

The infiltrators would have been less successful had the ground not

been so well prepared for them. Ever since the CPRF was founded in 1993,

it has been dominated by the Russian nationalist (“patriotic”) tendency led

by Gennady Zyuganov. Until now, however, the party also had a place for

people who still call themselves “internationalists” and “Marxist-Leninists”.

(For an analysis of tendencies within the CPRF, see Chapter 3 of Stephen D.

Shenfield, Russian Fascism, NY: M.E. Sharpe 2001.)

Mass expulsions

That is now changing. The fascist faction, acting through its allies in

the party leadership, is carrying out individual and mass expulsions with a
view to purging the CPRF of all opponents of Russian nationalism: “The

party organizations of entire regions are being destroyed.” Some local

branches, such as the one to which Volobuyev belongs, have been targeted

simply because of their multiethnic composition. “The situation has

descended to the point of measuring skulls.” Only people of pure Russian

descent are wanted.

The “internationalists” are accused of refusing to participate in the

“national liberation struggle” against Jews and other ethnic minorities

branded as enemies of the Russian nation. Many party members are also

accused of “neo-Trotskyism” – on the face of it an absurd accusation, as

Volobuyev remarks, because with hardly any exceptions they have never

read Trotsky and have no idea what Trotskyism is, let alone neo-Trotskyism.

But the Russian nationalists know that Trotsky was the most prominent

opponent of Stalin, whom they count as one of their own. And they know

that Trotsky was a Jew.

“Communist” oligarchs

The nationalists and fascists in the CPRF are allied with various party

figures – all of ethnic Russian origin, of course – who are also big
businessmen (“oligarchs” in current Russian parlance). One such figure is

Alexander Afanasyev, owner of a chain of parmacies. According to

Volobuyev, the motive underlying the destruction of 22 of St. Petersburg’s

29 district party organizations was to clear a space on the CPRF list of

candidates for Afanasyev to get a seat in the State Duma (parliament).

Another “communist” oligarch is the CPRF functionary and insurance

and vodka tycoon Sergei Shtogrin, currently deputy chairman of the Duma

Committee on Budgetary and Tax Issues. Shtogrin has argued in favor of

encouraging greater alcohol consumption in order to increase state revenues.

The Leninist organizational model

Most of the fascists’ victims do not understand what is happening.

They believe that a “mistake” has been made and that “if they appeal to

Zyuganov and the Central Committee truth will triumph”. As “disciplined

and law-abiding communists”, they are reluctant to consolidate their forces

by creating an “internationalist” or “Marxist-Leninist” faction, because this

would mean breaking party rules.

This sense of “discipline” reflects the basically undemocratic structure

of the CPRF, which remains wedded to the Leninist organizational model of

“democratic centralism”. It is clear from Volobuyev’s account that ordinary

members and even branch organizers still look to leaders for guidance and

initiative. They take pride in the awards they receive from the leaders and

are chastened by their reprimands – just like in the good old days of the

“Soviet” regime.

The undemocratic structure of the party facilitates the fascist takeover

in other ways too. Arbitrary decisions can be made to expel members and

whole branches even without clarification of the reasons.

What next?

Assuming that no effective moves are made to block the fascist

takeover of the CPRF, what are the likely consequences for Russian politics?

The CPRF will lose many of its local activists and depend increasingly on

funding from oligarchs. It may end up with little to distinguish it from

Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, competing with the

LDPR for the same extreme Russian nationalist electorate.

Some new organizations may be formed by “internationalists”

expelled from the CPRF. These people do not share the same views except

on the admittedly important issue of nationalism. Some would like to restore

some version of the “Soviet” system. Others think in terms of reforming

private capitalism or envision some kind of “market socialism”. Perhaps at

least a few will be prompted by their experience in the CPRF to move

toward a more democratic mode of organization and conception of

socialism.

Still in chains: South Africa after apartheid

They never freed us. They only took the chain

from around our neck and put it on our ankles.

Anti-apartheid activist Rassool Snyman to Naomi Klein

(The Shock Doctrine, NY: Henry Holt, 2007, p. 203)

The fight against the system of racial segregation and white supremacy
called apartheid (“apartness” in Afrikaans) was one of the great liberal and
left-wing causes of my generation. It was a fight not only for political
democracy in South Africa but also for socio-economic reform. The
Freedom Charter, adopted by the African National Congress in 1955
(www.anc.org.za), called for “restoring national wealth to the people”
(understood as nationalization of the mines, banks and “monopoly
industry”), “re-dividing the land among those who work it to banish famine
and land hunger,” improved pay and working conditions, free healthcare,
universal literacy, and decent housing for all.
 Apartheid as a political and legal system was dismantled in the early
1990s. South Africa’s capitalists did not on the whole object. Apartheid had
brought them immense profits from the exploitation of a cheap captive labor
force. But it had its drawbacks. By denying training and advancement to a
large majority of the workforce, it created a growing shortage of skilled
labor. Capitalists are often willing to accept a measure of social change,
provided that they can set its limits.
Although apartheid is gone, economically South Africa is still one of
the most unequal countries in the world. Almost all the land, mines and
industry remain in the same (mostly white) hands. Almost half the
population lives below subsistence level. Unemployment is widespread;
children scavenge on dumps and landfill sites from sunrise to sunset seven
days a week. Life expectancy is falling (a drop of 13 years since 1990) as
AIDS, drug-resistant TB and other diseases spread.
Even segregation still exists in practice. The wealthy take shelter in
“gated communities” from the violence pervading the shantytowns. As the
wealthy are no longer exclusively but only predominantly white, the proper
name for this is class rather than race segregation.
True, efforts have been made to improve living conditions. Close to
two million new homes have been built. Whether they count as “decent
housing” is another matter.) Water, telephone and electricity networks have
been expanded. But while millions were rehoused, millions were also
evicted for rent arrears. Nine million people were connected to the water
supply, but during the same period ten million were disconnected as the
price rose out of their reach.

* * *
 How did the main reform goals of the Freedom Charter come to be
abandoned? Political journalist William Mervin Gumede tells the story in his
book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Cape Town:
Zebra Press 2005).
While political negotiations, conducted in the glare of publicity,
moved the ANC toward government office, parallel and almost unpublicized
economic negotiations, led on the ANC side by Thabo Mbeki (now
president), ensured that when the ANC did take office it would be unable to
act against white business interests. A new clause of the constitution made
all private property sacrosanct. Power over economic policy was ceded to an
“autonomous” central bank and international financial institutions.
“The ANC found itself caught in a web made of arcane rules and
regulations. As the web descended on the country only a few people even
noticed it was there, but when the new government tried to give its voters
the tangible benefits they expected the strands of the web tightened and [it]
discovered that its powers were tightly bound” (Klein, pp. 202-3).
The ANC hierarchy came under “relentless pressure” from local and
international business, the (business-controlled) media, foreign politicians,
the World Bank and IMF, etc. It was “an onslaught for which the ANC was
wholly unprepared” (Gumede, p. 72). This does not mean that crude
demands and threats played a crucial role. It was a process more of
seduction than intimidation, aimed at integrating a set of new partners into
the institutional structure and social milieu of the global capitalist class.
This meant providing opportunities for ANC officials to go into
business or train at American business schools and investment banks.
Leading figures were lavished with hospitality: “Harry Oppenheimer
[former chairman of Anglo American Corporation and De Beers
Consolidated Mines] was eager to entertain Mandela at his private estate,
while Anglovaal’s Clive Menell hosted him for Christmas (1990) at his
mansion… While separated from his wife, Mandela’s home for several
months was the palatial estate of insurance tycoon Douw Steyn… His
daughter Zinzi had a honeymoon partly financed by resort and casino king
Sol Kerzner, and Mandela spent Christmas 1993 in the Bahamas as a guest
of Heinz and Independent Newspapers chairman Sir Anthony O’Reilly”
(Gumede, p. 72).
It seems churlish to begrudge Mandela a little luxury after 27 years in
prison. But what were his benefactors’ motives?
However, the most effective form of capitalist influence was the
impersonal pressure of “the markets.” As Mandela told the ANC’s 1997
national conference: “The mobility of capital and the globalization of the
capital and other markets make it impossible for countries to decide national
economic policy without regard to the likely response of these markets”
(Klein, p. 207). And the markets punished the slightest sign of deviation
from the “Washington consensus” with capital flight and speculation against
the rand.
Mbeki was the first to grasp what was needed to win the markets’
confidence. Precisely in order to live down its “revolutionary” and “Marxist”
past, the ANC leaders had to prove themselves more Catholic than the pope.
“Just call me a Thatcherite” – quipped Mbeki as he unveiled his new “shock
therapy” program in 1996. South Africa could not afford the protectionist
measures with which Malaysia, for instance, warded off the Asian financial
crisis of 1997. Orthodoxy, however, was never rewarded with the hoped-for
flood of foreign investment. The markets are stern taskmasters: they demand
everything and promise nothing.
It is not altogether fair to say that Mandela or Mbeki “sold out.” They
simply saw no escape from the “web” spun by global capital. Indeed, at the
national level there is no escape. Reformers in other countries, such as the
Solidarity movement in Poland and Lula’s Workers’ Party in Brazil, have
gone through much the same experience on reaching office. Socialists have
long said that socialism cannot be established in a single country. Now we
also know that under conditions of globalization even a meaningful program
of reform cannot be implemented in a single country.
Capital is global. That is its trump card against any attempt to defy its
dictates that is confined within national boundaries. The resistance to capital
must also be organized on a global scale if it is to have any chance of
success.

March 2008

Zionism and antisemitism:

two dangerous ideologies that thrive on each other

It's now 110 years since Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The State of
the Jews) and launched the Zionist movement, nearly 60 since the state he
envisaged came into being. Upset by the Dreyfus case (Dreyfus was a
French Jewish army officer framed as a spy for Germany), Herzl had
concluded that Jews would only be safe when they had a state of their own.
As they ran for the shelters during the war with Hezbullah, Israelis
may well have wondered whether there is any country in the world where
Jews are less safe. And although the Israeli government keeps emigration
statistics secret, it is estimated that since 2003 more Jews have been seeking
refuge by leaving Israel than by entering it. Thoughtful Israelis may also
wonder how much of the antisemitism in the world today is generated by
Israel itself through its mistreatment of Palestinians and Lebanese.
Zionists are always complaining about antisemitism, real or
imaginary. They use such complaints especially as a gambit to de-legitimise
criticism of Zionism and Israel. From the start, however, Zionist opposition
to anti-semitism has been superficial and selective, because Zionism is itself
closely connected to anti-semitism. Zionists need antisemitism like heroin
addicts need a fix.
That’s how it’s been from the start. Herzl realised that if his project
was to succeed he had to seek support wherever it might be found. And who
was more likely to back his movement than the antisemites? Not the most
extreme antisemites, who wanted to exterminate the Jews, but "moderate"
ones who would be content to get rid of them. And so Herzl set off for
Russia to sell his idea to the tsar's minister of police, Plehve, a notorious
antisemite widely regarded as responsible for the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
An opportunistic alliance with another antisemitic ruler of Russia –
Stalin – was crucial to the establishment of the state of Israel. On Stalin's
instructions, Czechoslovakia provided arms and training that enabled the
fledgling Zionist armed forces in Palestine to win the war of independence
in 1947-48. Stalin's motive was to undermine the position of Britain in the
Middle East. For some years the Israeli government continued to rely on
Soviet military and diplomatic support, while keeping silent about the
persecution of Soviet Jews, then at its height. (For more on this episode, see
Arnold Krammer, The Forgotten Friendship: Israel and the Soviet Bloc,
1947-53, University of Illinois, 1974.)
In 1953 the Israeli-Soviet alliance finally broke down. Israel switched
to the other side of the Cold War, obtaining aid first from France and then
from the US. Alliance with "the West" also entailed maintaining good
relations with antisemitic regimes, notably in Latin America. Consider
Argentina: a disproportionate number of Jews were among those killed,
imprisoned and tortured by the military junta that ruled the country from
1976 to 1983. Given the "anti-democratic, anti-semitic and Nazi tendencies"
of the Argentine officer corps, we may assume that they were persecuted not
merely as political opponents but also as Jews. Meanwhile a stream of
Israeli generals passed through Buenos Aires, selling the junta arms. (See
http://www.jcpa.org/jpsr/jpsr-mualem-s04.htm and
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/Argentina_STATUS.html;
also Jacobo Timmerman's book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a
Number.)
But it is not just a matter of Zionists and antisemites sometimes
having strategic or business interests in common. There are ideological
affinities. Zionists, like antisemites, are mostly racists and nationalists for
whom it is abnormal that an ethnic group should live dispersed as a minority
in various countries. It is therefore natural and only to be expected if the
majority reacts badly to such an anomaly. There is a strong tendency in
Zionism to agree that Jews have objectionable traits, which are to be
overcome as they turn themselves into a normal nation by settling in
Palestine "to rebuild the land and be rebuilt by it."
What if the Jews in a given country are well integrated, face no
significant antisemitism, and show no interest in being "normalized"?
Originally Zionism was conceived as a means of solving the problem of
antisemitism. From this point of view, where the problem does not exist
there is no need for the solution. However, ends and means were inverted
long ago, and Zionism became an end in itself, with antisemitism a condition
of its success. Antisemitism might still be regarded in principle as an evil,
but as a necessary evil. Often it was also said to be a lesser evil compared to
the threat of assimilation supposedly inherent in rising rates of intermarriage.
Against this background, it seems a trifle naive to ask why Israel's
ruling circles don't realise that by their own actions they are generating
antisemitism. They realise. But they make it a point not to give a damn what
the world thinks of them.
There is nothing unique about the affinity between Zionism and
antisemitism. Russian nationalism thrives on Russophobia (the denigration
of Russians), Irish nationalism on anti-Irish prejudice, Islamism on hatred of
Moslems, and so on. To escape the vicious circle, we must respond to ethnic
persecution not by promoting "our own" brand of nationalist or religious
politics, but by asserting our identity as human beings and citizens of the
future world cooperative commonwealth.

January 2007

Sliding into the abyss: the Gaza Ghetto

In my childhood I suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from

the Warsaw Ghetto through labour camps to Buchenwald. I hear too many
familiar sounds today.. I hear about 'closed areas' and I remember ghettos
and camps. I hear 'two-legged beasts# and I remember Untermenschen. I
hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into
submission, and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and
murder... Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my
childhood.
Shlomo Shmelzman
Ha'aretz, 11 August 1982

In March a coalition of humanitarian and human rights organizations

reported that the situation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was "worse now
than it has ever been since the start of Israeli military occupation in 1967"
(www.oxfam.org.uk).
Since June 2007 the strip has been under near-total siege - fenced and
walled in on land, the five border crossings mostly closed, the shoreline
patrolled by the Israeli navy. Together with the sanctions imposed by the
United States and the European Union, the siege has progressively paralyzed
public utilities and economic activity. Without fuel to generate electricity,
wells no longer pump water for drinking or irrigation and sewage is no
longer treated. Bakeries have run out of flour. Gunboats sink any fishing
boats that are still able to put to sea. The Israeli army conducts repeated
cross-border raids with tanks, bulldozers and helicopters, demolishing
houses, razing crops, shooting and abducting civilians (Dr. Elias Akleh,
'Gaza's Imminent Explosion' at wcnews.net/content/view/23006/26).
The untreated sewage is dumped into the sea. The smell and the
mosquitoes and other insects it attracts make life very unpleasant for people
living near the shore. Another threat to health arises from the use of cooking
oil as a substitute fuel in vehicles: its combustion releases carcinogenic
hydrocarbons into the air.
As unemployment approaches 50% and food prices rise rapidly, the
proportion of families dependent on food aid has reached 80%. On April 24,
UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the
Near East) announced that due to lack of fuel food aid is no longer being
distributed. The problem, as Erik Johnson explains, "is not yet a lack of
food, but of money to buy it" (www.roadjunky.com/article/1612).
True, with no fertilizer or seeds being imported, there is no new
planting, so the outlook for the future is grim. But there is fresh produce of
the kind that is usually exported but cannot be exported now because of the
siege. The trouble is that local residents do not have enough money to buy it
all. So much of it - if the money system is allowed to function in its
normally perverse manner - will go to waste in the midst of growing
starvation.

* * *

Observers have called the Gaza Strip "the world's largest open-air
prison" (360 square kilometres), a cage, a concentration camp, now even a
death camp. But a more accurate term for it, as well as for certain areas
administered by the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, is ghetto. As in
the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied or late medieval Europe (the first was
established in Venice in 1516), the inhabitants of the Palestinian ghettoes are
confined to closed areas but not directly governed by the dominant power.
They have their own semi-autonomous though dependent institutions. This
usage requires only expanding the concept to cover rural and mixed rural-
urban as well as urban ghettoes. Another parallel that many draw is with the
Bantustans of apartheid South Africa.
While officially Israel indignantly rejects the comparison with
apartheid, former Italian premier Massimo D'Alema revealed that Israeli PM
Sharon had stated at a private meeting that he took the Bantustans as his
model (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19256.htm). There is no
conflict between the two parallels, as the Bantustan too may be regarded as a
form of ghetto.
Besides its basic political function of confining and controlling a
stigmatized group, a ghetto may perform economic functions. It may provide
capitalists with a captive and therefore cheap labour force. This used to be
an important function of the Palestinian ghettoes. But as 'closure' has
tightened they have lost this function. Palestinians have been replaced in
menial jobs by workers from Romania, Thailand, the Philippines, and West
Africa. The number of unemployed among Israelis has also increased (to
about 200,000). So Palestinian ghetto workers are increasingly superfluous
to the labour needs of Israel's capitalist economy. This gives even more
cause for concern about their fate.
One of the worst miseries inflicted on the hapless residents of the
Gaza Ghetto is sonic booming. The Israeli Air Force flies U.S. F-16 fighter
planes low and fast over the ghetto, generally every hour or two from
midnight to dawn, deliberately creating sonic booms. The noise and the
shockwaves prevent people sleeping, shake them up inside, make their
pulses race, ears ring and noses bleed, cause miscarriages, crack walls, and
smash windows. Children, especially, are terrified and traumatized: they
suffer panic and anxiety attacks, have trouble breathing, wet their beds, lose
appetite and concentration. Many are thrown off their beds, sometimes
resulting in broken limbs. The sonic booming began in October 2005, after
the Jewish settlements were evacuated from Gaza. Since then it has been
periodically suspended but always renewed. An anonymous IDF source
described its purpose as "trying to send a message, to break civilian support
for armed groups." And yet the first wave of booming was followed by the
victory of Hamas in the Palestine Legislative Council elections of January
2006. (The U.S. had ordered free elections, but neglected to give clear
instructions on who to vote for. In view of the harsh punishment for voting
incorrectly, that was most unfair.)

* * *

A key test of intelligence in monkeys is whether the monkey goes on

using a means that has repeatedly failed to achieve its purpose. By this
criterion, Israeli generals and politicians appear to be very stupid, even for
monkeys. But perhaps they are not so stupid. Perhaps their true purpose is
something else. In the opinion of Professor Ur Shlonsky, that purpose is to
"terrorise" the Palestinians and make "daily life ... unbearable" for them in
order to "encourage emigration and weaken resistance to future expulsions"
('Zionist Ideology, the Non-Jews and the State of Israel,' University of
Geneva, 10 February 2002). Some do emigrate, but for the great majority
that is not a viable option. As for expulsion, how will the Palestinians of
Gaza be expelled? Will they be pushed into the Sinai desert? Will Egypt be
compelled to accept them? It seems more likely that in the absence of strong
countervailing pressure they will simply be abandoned to perish where they
are, of disease, starvation and thirst - a direct consequence of Israeli,
American and European policy.
 July 2008

Maoist China as a class society: illusion and reality

The image of Maoist China conveyed in the poster art and other propaganda
of the regime was that of a regimented and spartan but egalitarian society,
without hierarchical class distinctions. Curiously enough, anti-Maoist
propaganda conveyed a very similar image: several authors, for instance,
dehumanized the Chinese under Mao as “blue ants.” In accordance with its
egalitarian image, Maoism is commonly classified as a leftwing – indeed,
“extreme left” or “ultra-left” – ideology. The blatant inequalities of post-
Mao China have served only to enhance the image in retrospect.
And yet the image was always an illusion, a meticulously maintained
lie. The rich memoir literature that has become available since the “thaw” of
1978 begins to dispel the illusions and portray the realities of Maoist China.
And one of those realities turns out to be a class structure that differs in
detail but not in broad outline from that of the “old China.”

* * *

In Daughter of the River, Hong Ying gives a moving account of

growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a working class family in the
provincial city of Chongqing. She maps the local landscape into three
sharply divided domains.
First, the hilly slum district on the south bank of the Yangtze River,
where the author used to live – “the city’s garbage dump,” its “rotting
appendix,” crowded with ramshackle wooden sheds and with hardly any
sewers. The residents are mostly “coolies” – unskilled labourers; it is very
rare for a youngster to pass the college entrance exams. So it was before
“liberation”; so it was in her time; so, judging by the photos in the book, it
remains today.
Second, on the north bank, the city proper. “The centre of the city,”
she observes with bitter irony, “might as well be in another world, with red
flags everywhere you look and rousing political songs filling the air [and]
youngsters reading revolutionary books to prepare themselves for the life of
a revolutionary cadre” – like the cadres (officials) who ridicule and
humiliate her when she tries to get her father the pension to which as a
disabled sailor he is entitled.
And third, though she has never set eye on them, “the summer houses
of the rich and powerful, hidden amid the lush green hillsides surrounding
the city.” Here, it must be admitted, a minor change has occurred: “Once
occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s closest aides and his US advisers
[Chongqing was the Kuomintang capital in 1937--45], they now
accommodated high-ranking Communist Party officials.”

* * *

So China under Mao was, like China before Mao and China after
Mao, a class-divided society. And, as in any other class-divided society,
class struggle existed in various forms. However, the real class struggle
between the real classes that made up the society was obscured by
unrelenting official propaganda about an illusory “class struggle” (“Never
forget class struggle!”) that was actually something else entirely.
 In Maoist China the authorities assigned every citizen an official
“class” label or political “hat.” A great deal depended on this label, from
political influence and social respect to work assignments and access to
medical care – not to mention the chance of ending up in a labour camp or
on an execution ground. Most labels referred not to current social position
but to the alleged former status of the person or of his or her parents and
grandparents in the old society. Thus, “poor and lower middle peasants”
(“red” categories), “upper middle peasants” (an intermediate category), and
“rich peasants” and “landlords” (“black” categories) were currently all
collective farmers. The harshest treatment (justified as “class struggle”) and
worst jobs were reserved for “landlords,” who became a hereditary caste of
pariahs like the Indian untouchables.
The real function of the labels was to measure the presumed degree of
loyalty to the regime. Party leaders in good standing, irrespective of family
background, belonged to the “red” category of “revolutionary cadre.” Both
prime minister Zhou Enlai and secret police chief Kang Sheng were sons of
big landlords and Mao’s own father was a small landlord, but that did not
count against them. Conversely, worker or poor peasant origin provided very
limited protection to those who challenged party policy: a “class” label
could be arbitrarily changed or the malcontent could be dumped in the catch-
all category of “bad element.”
So we must decode the official “class struggle” as a continuing
campaign to crush all actual and potential dissent. In official discourse
“proletariat” (working class) was a codeword for the regime (or whichever
faction controlled the regime at any given time). When workers in Shanghai
went on strike in 1966--67, they were accused of falling under the influence
of “class enemies wielding the weapon of economism.” In other words, they
were tools of the capitalist class striking against themselves!

* * *

Many Maoist sympathizers acknowledge that China under Mao was a

highly unequal society, but put the blame on Mao’s opponents within the
leadership – the notorious “capitalist roaders” supposedly headed by Liu
Shaoqi. Mao himself and those who helped him launch the Cultural
Revolution were, they ask us to believe, fighting against the party
bureaucracy for a classless society.
This “anti-bureaucratic” interpretation of the so-called Cultural
Revolution is at variance with the official definition of its purpose. It was
basically a brutal witch-hunt, assisted and supervised by the secret police,
against anyone suspected of disloyalty to the “Emperor.” So intended targets
did include many specific bureaucrats suspected of opposing Mao’s policies,
but not the bureaucracy as a whole.
True, in some places control over the movement was lost for a time,
and Red Guards started deciding for themselves whom to attack. One
organization even denounced the “butcher” Kang Sheng, who acted
promptly to isolate and arrest its activists. In Hunan a Red Guard alliance
called Sheng-wu-lien published a manifesto redefining the enemy more
broadly as “the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie.” Denounced as a “counter-
revolutionary” by Mao himself, Yang Xiguang, author of the manifesto, was
jailed for ten years and narrowly escaped execution. (For more on Sheng-
wu-lien, see http://www.marxists.de/china/hore/03-cultrev.htm. On Yang
Xiguang, who died in Australia in 2004, see
http://www.csaa.org.au/news11.04.html#Vale and his book Captive Spirits:
Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution.)
At least since 1949, all top party leaders have lived and worked under
extremely privileged conditions and in virtually total isolation from ordinary
people. In Beijing they cloister themselves (and their servants) inside the
Zhongnanhai complex, while in summer they vacation together at the
seaside resort of Beidaihe. We get a sense of the unhealthy, claustrophobic
and paranoid atmosphere of this environment from the memoirs of Mao’s
personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui (The Private Life of Chairman Mao). Jiang
Qing, Kang Sheng, and other members of Mao’s faction were certainly no
less privileged, corrupt or cynical than his opponents. It is absurd to cast
them as champions of the people.
The Red Guards appeared to be attacking privilege, but appearances
were deceptive. First, they only attacked the privileges of those who had
already been identified as “class enemies” on other grounds. Second, the net
result of their rampage was merely the redistribution of privilege and
property within the elite. Some individuals temporarily or permanently lost
positions of power, while others – favoured Red Guard leaders and assorted
opportunists – were elevated into the nomenklatura. The numerous antiques
that Red Guards confiscated from well-to-do homes ended up not in public
museums and art galleries but in storerooms where army generals and their
wives took their pick -- as did Kang Sheng, himself a keen collector (John
Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon).
What then were the real policy differences between Mao and the
“capitalist roaders”?
Any state capitalist regime must pursue the long-term goal of capital
accumulation within the context of great-power competition. In this respect
there is no difference between Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958--61) and
the “Four Modernizations” of the post-Mao period.
But there is an important difference in strategy and style of
management. Mao, a romantic with a pre-scientific mentality, relied on
unrealistically ambitious and consequently disastrous campaigns. Aiming to
overtake Britain in steel production, he forced the peasants to neglect
agriculture and build small “backyard” furnaces that produced junk,
plunging the country into history’s greatest famine. The “capitalist roaders”
wanted a more rational, steady and sustained strategy for the accumulation
of national capital. Mao’s idiosyncratic impulses kept on messing things up
for them.
What did Maoism mean for ordinary people? Some of Mao’s policies
may have been of benefit – for example, the (now defunct) “barefoot doctor”
program that attempted to make basic medical care available to the rural
population. On balance, however, the modest positive impact of such
policies was surely outweighed by all the suffering, repression, waste and
disruption for which Mao was responsible.

June 2007

Section 4
 POPULAR CULTURE

Smile, smile, smile! But why?

We are under a constant onslaught of propaganda to keep smiling – or, in

fancier language, to maintain a “positive outlook”. TV gurus and song lyrics
drum the demand into our heads, and we echo them, telling ourselves things
like “Mustn’t grumble!” and “Look on the bright side!”
The “keep smiling” agitprop goes back a long way – at least a century.
In 1914 men were marched to the slaughter like docile lambs to the cheerful
strains of Pack All Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile,
Smile! And in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, another hit
snarled: Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!!!
Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People
appeared in 1936. His first two pieces of advice were “don’t criticize,
condemn or complain” and “give honest and sincere appreciation.” How can
you always be honest and sincere if you have to be appreciative, whatever
your true feelings may be? Don’t ask me!
The entertainment industry is celebrated as the pacesetter of nonstop
smiling in the Irving Berlin song There’s No Business Like Show Business:

There's no people like show people.

They smile when they are low.
The second verse elaborates:

You get word before the show has started

That your favorite uncle died at dawn.
Top of that, your ma and pa have parted
You're broken-hearted, but you go on.

From this I infer that you might be let off smiling duty if a parent rather than
just an uncle has died. You might get a few days’ “family leave.” But when
you return your smile must be firmly back in place.
Besides show business, smiling is a condition of employment in all
service jobs involving contact with the public (and to a lesser extent in many
other jobs). A waiter, air steward, hotel receptionist or croupier, for example,
is expected to keep smiling, however irritating, rude or unpleasant a
customer may be to him or her. “I am just not as good at faking that smile as
I used to be,” bemoans one service worker. So why do we have to smile?
The song lyrics don’t really explain. Smiling is simply required by
fashion:

Don’t start to frown; it’s never in style…

Just do your best to smile, smile, smile!

We are also told: “Smile and the world smiles with you.” In other words,
look unhappy and the world will give you the cold shoulder. I suppose it’s
true to some extent: I have enough troubles of my own, thank you, don’t
burden me with yours! But what does that say about our way of life?
 One curious rationale for smiling is the “urban legend” that more
facial muscles are used in frowning than in smiling (exact figures vary).
Smiling saves effort. According to Dr. David H. Song, the claim is false: a
smile uses twelve muscles, a frown only eleven
(http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040116.html). In any case, isn’t
exercising as many different muscles as possible supposed to be good for
us?
If you take Dale Carnegie’s advice and “don’t criticize, condemn or
complain” about anyone or anything, then you will never develop a critique
of the social system or an aspiration to change it. Ultimately, I suspect, that
is what the smile propaganda is about. It serves the interests of those who do
not have much to complain about themselves but who are natural targets of
others’ complaints. That means: the most privileged and powerful section of
society.

August 2007

The play world and capitalist reality

As a parent of a mentally retarded daughter whose mental age is stuck

permanently at two, I get to watch a lot of TV programs and videos designed
for young children.
While many parents may try to protect their children from the realities
of life under capitalism, those realities inevitably start to intrude at quite an
early age. Children become aware, for instance, that a mysterious thing
called money is needed to get things and that some people have much more
of it than others. However, many of the programs they watch present an
ideal play world in which a benevolent parental figure like Barney or the
Bear in the Big Blue House looks after all their needs and teaches them an
egalitarian ethic of give and take, taking turns, and fair shares. The most
isolated and self-contained play world is, no doubt, that of the Telly
Tubbies, who play together harmoniously in an empty idyllic landscape, fed
and kept clean by the hardworking and uncomplaining robot Noonoo.
Some programs do set the children’s play against a sporadically
glimpsed background of adult life. Some attempt may even be made to
reassure children regarding some of the adult problems that affect them, such
as divorce. And yet the most discomfiting realities remain concealed.
You would never guess from Sesame Street, for instance, that the
great majority of Americans live in racially segregated areas. Although
Sesame Street is evidently an inner city neighborhood, everyone seems to
live in modest comfort, no one is on drugs, and any hint of violence is taboo.
The employment relationship, which dominates most people’s lives, is
relegated to the margins of awareness by making most of the main adult
characters self-employed (Maria and Louis have a fixit shop, Alan has a
store, Gina is a vet, etc.). Other programs are set in a community of family
farms, achieving the same effect.
Rather than avoiding the issue of employment, one British series
openly glorifies the institution. Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends are
trains and other animated machines on the Island of Sodor. They all work for
a man named Sir Topham Hatt, who is forever telling them off for “causing
confusion and delay” when they forget his instructions and follow their own
inclinations.
The most honest children’s program I have seen is a cartoon named
after its central character, Arthur, an eight-year-old anthropomorphic
aardvark. It confronts the viewer with social inequality as a problematic
phenomenon, featuring characters in families at various economic levels,
from Buster and his impoverished single-parent mother to Muffy, the
spoiled daughter of a wealthy businessman. When Francine is embarrassed
at having a trash collector as her father, he demonstrates to her and her
friends the social value of his work. And Arthur himself learns that injustice
is also a real problem when he is unjustly accused of stealing money that
belongs to his school. Of course, he is vindicated at the last moment. As in
films for the adult mass market, a happy ending is obligatory. After all,
certain proprieties have to be observed when broaching the sensitive issue of
injustice.

Section 5

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The first article in this section is devoted to the issue of
globalisation. The other four articles examine how the
shifting pattern of international relations affects different
regions of the world – and outer space! The pattern changes,
but not the dynamic of great power rivalry – until we block it.

The end of national sovereignty?

Globalisation versus national capitalism

In 1648 the first modern diplomatic congress established a new political

order in Europe, based for the first time on the principle of “national
sovereignty.” This principle drew a sharp dividing line between foreign and
domestic affairs. Each “national sovereign” was given free rein within the
internationally recognized borders of his state. No outsider had any right to
interfere. Recognized borders were inviolable. The “sovereign” was
originally simply a prince; later the term was applied to any effective
government.
National sovereignty facilitated the undisturbed development of
separate national capitalisms – British, French, German, American, and so
on. Interstate boundaries were stabilized. Governments were able to take
protectionist measures to defend home manufacturers against foreign
competition.
 Even today the principle of national sovereignty is far from dead. It is
enshrined in the United Nations Charter: Chapter VII authorizes the Security
Council to impose sanctions or use armed force only in the event of a “threat
to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.”
In practice, however, national sovereignty has been deeply
undermined – first of all, by the emergence of a global economy dominated
by huge transnational corporations. International financial institutions such
as the World Trade Organization and IMF have largely taken over economic
policy making. Indebtedness leaves many states with merely the formal husk
of independence.
Some groups of states have “pooled” part of their sovereignty in
supranational regional institutions. The prime example is the European
Union.
The old interstate system has also been destabilised by the breakup of
Yugoslavia and the USSR into 26 new states, four of which lack
international recognition. The decision of the West to recognize the
independence of Kosovo from Serbia has set a precedent that makes it easier
to carve up other states. Of course, the “independence” of Kosovo –
occupied by NATO forces, governed by officials from the European Union,
its constitution drafted at the U.S. State Department – is purely notional.
Russia has now retaliated by recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Although this will encourage secessionist movements inside Russia,
blocking Georgia’s accession to NATO is evidently a higher priority.

* * *

National sovereignty is not only undermined in practice, but also

contested in theory.
Thus, in recent years the United States and its closest allies have
sought to legitimise their military attacks on other states. True, such attacks
are nothing new. What is new is open advocacy of the principle of
aggression. The main rationales used are the prevention of nuclear
proliferation, counter-terrorism and humanitarian intervention.
It is instructive to compare the Gulf War of 1991 with the current war
against Iraq. The Gulf War, at least ostensibly, was launched in defence of
the principle of national sovereignty, violated by the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait. The elder Bush resisted pressure to “finish the job” – occupy Iraq
and throw out the Ba’athist regime – out of concern that it would lead to the
breakup of Iraq and, in particular, a new Kurdish state that would destabilise
the whole region. Such considerations have not deterred his son.
Paradoxically, the fragmentation of states is a natural corollary of the
globalisation of capital. From the point of view of the transnational
corporations, states no longer have important policy-making functions. It is
enough if they enforce property rights and maintain basic infrastructure in
areas important for business. Small states can do these jobs as well as large
ones. In fact, they have definite advantages. They are more easily controlled,
less likely to develop the will or capacity to challenge the prerogatives of
global capital.
All the same, there is nothing inevitable about globalisation. It has lost
impetus recently, and may even have passed its zenith. One sign is the
disarray within the WTO. Another is Russia’s change of direction: in
contrast to the Yeltsin administration, which was politically submissive and
kept the country wide open to global capital, the Putin regime reasserted
national sovereignty, expelled foreign firms from strategic sectors of the
economy, and ensured the dominant position of national (state and private)
capital.
Global versus national capitalism has emerged as an important divide
in world politics. This divide exists, first of all, within the capitalist class of
individual countries. Thus, even in the U.S., the citadel of globalisation,
some capitalists – currently excluded from power – are oriented toward the
home market and favour national capitalism. And even in Russia some
capitalists support globalisation.
Nevertheless, the pattern of political forces differs from country to
country, and as a result the global/national divide is reflected in international
relations. Here the “globalisers,” led by the U.S., confront in the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (Russia, China and the Central Asian states) an
embryonic alliance of national capitals bent on restoring the principle of
national sovereignty to its former place in the interstate system.

* * *

This context clarifies the difference between our perspective as

socialists and the attitude of anti-globalisation activists. Being against
capitalist globalisation is not the same as being against capitalism in general.
We have ample past experience of a world of competing national capitalisms
– quite enough to demonstrate that there is no good reason for preferring
such a world to a world under the sway of global capital. The main problem
with the movement against globalisation is that it can be mobilized so easily
in the interests of national capital, whatever the intentions of its supporters.
To be fair, some anti-globalisation activists are aware of this danger.
Acknowledging that humanity faces urgent problems that can only be
tackled effectively at the global level, they emphasize that they are not
against globalisation as such: they are only against the sort of globalisation
that serves the interests of the transnational corporations. This then leads
them to explore ideas of globalisation of an “alternative” kind. These ideas
at least point in the right direction. Socialism is also an alternative form of
globalisation – a globalisation of human community that abolishes capital.

October 2008

Latin America:
The Changing Geopolitical Context

For close on 200 years the main geopolitical fact about Latin America has
been the overwhelming economic and political domination of the United
States—or, more precisely, of its ruling capitalist class. The wide range of
instruments used to enforce this domination has included frequent direct and
indirect military interventions. One source lists 55 such interventions since
1890.1 Another important instrument has been the foreign policy known as
the Monroe Doctrine, first proclaimed by the U.S. president of that name in
1823.
The gist of the Monroe Doctrine is that the U.S. regards Latin
America as its own exclusive sphere of influence and will not tolerate the
interference of “outside” powers in its affairs. The doctrine was initially
directed against the colonial claims of Spain and France. For most of the
twentieth century it was directed first against Germany and then against
Russia (the USSR). But does it still have any relevance now that Russia’s
ambitions are confined to regions nearer home?
In fact, as the Russian threat to U.S. hegemony in the Americas
receded the doctrine was overtly redirected against another Eurasian
challenger—Japan. On December 20, 1989, the U.S. bombed and invaded
Panama, ostensibly in order to arrest the country’s president, Manuel
Noriega, on drug trafficking charges. The real reason was that Noriega, who
had earlier been willing to serve as an agent of the CIA, had begun to act in
ways that the U.S. considered contrary to its interests.2
One example concerns the School of the Americas, where the U.S.
army trains military officers from all over Latin America as torturers and
assassins. The school had been based in Panama from 1946 to 1984, when it
was withdrawn from the country at the demand of Noriega’s predecessor,
Omar Torrijos.3 Noriega refused to accede to a request from the Reagan
administration to allow the school to return.
Noriega committed an even graver offence in U.S. eyes by entering
into negotiations with a Japanese consortium that the businessman Shigeo
Nagano had put together (with his government’s approval) for the purpose of
financing the construction of a new and better sea-level canal between the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans or of a new land-based inter-oceanic
transportation system.4 The old Panama Canal, opened in 1914, has
inadequate capacity for the current volume of traffic and cannot
accommodate the largest of today’s seagoing vessels. It was, above all, the
Japanese threat to its control of a strategic transportation route in its
“backyard” that prompted the United States to intervene.
China’s economic penetration of Latin America has been even more
striking than that of Japan. As recently as 1995, for instance, China’s trade
with Brazil was a mere 6% of U.S. trade with Brazil; by 2005—6 it had
reached 39%. In the case of Argentina the corresponding rise was from 15%
to 70%.5 China is still some way behind but catching up fast. Chinese firms
are also investing on a large scale in some countries. Their Brazilian
investments include metals, consumer electronics, telecommunications
equipment, and space technology. China and Brazil are jointly developing
two satellites.
Judging by the whole history of capitalist great power rivalry, we can
expect that sooner or later the shifting pattern of economic relationships will
change the military power equation, with a progressive dilution of U.S.
domination over Latin America. Suppose that at some point in the future
Japanese capitalists and a new Panamanian government revive the scheme
for a new canal. But this time round, learning from experience, they press
the Japanese government—no longer, perhaps, shackled by the “peace
constitution”—to extend Panama military aid and a security guarantee.
Of course, no other state is likely to replace the U.S. as the clear
hegemon in the region. Like Africa and Central Asia today, Latin America
will be an arena in which a number of outside powers compete for influence.
As a declining global power, the U.S. will have to reconcile itself to the new
situation and finally bury the Monroe Doctrine.
For Latin American governments the new geopolitical context will
have certain advantages. They will have more room for maneuver and be
able to play off one outside power against another. Latin American workers,
however, will discover that their basic position remains unchanged despite
the new mix of nationalities among their employers.
Workers in some African countries have already learnt this lesson. In
Zambia, copper mines bought up by Chinese companies provided even
lower pay and even more hazardous working conditions than mines owned
by other foreign companies. Following an explosion in which 49 miners
died, five protestors were shot dead by police. The government temporarily
closed down one mine after men were forced to work underground without
boots or safety gear.6
Social protest in Latin America has traditionally targeted “Yanqui
imperialism,” just as social protest in Eastern Europe used to be aimed
against “Soviet imperialism.” Both are understandable responses to real
oppression—but also parochial and superficial responses. The source of the
oppression is capitalism itself, not the various national flags under which it
operates.

World Socialist Review, no. 21 (2008)

(http://www.scribd.com/doc/2781501/World-Socialist-Review-US-Latin-
America)

Notes

1. http://www2.truman.edu/~marc/resources/interventions.html. The most recent

instances were the sponsorship of a (failed) military coup to overthrow President Chavez

in Venezuela in 2002 and an occupation of Haiti to remove President Aristide in 2004.

Both presidents had been democratically elected.

2. On the background to the U.S. invasion, see Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisner, The

Memoirs of Manuel Noriega, America’s Prisoner (NY: Random House, 1997).

3. In 2001, the school, now at Fort Benning, Georgia, was renamed the Western

Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Torrijos died in a plane crash under

suspicious circumstances.

4. Or, alternatively, a new land-based inter-oceanic transportation system. See Noriega’s

remarks to the Japan-Panama Friendship Association (a front for the consortium) in

Tokyo on December 12, 1986 (Noriega and Eisner, pp. 271-5).

5. Comparing total value of imports and exports in 1995 and in 2005 and the first 9

months (Brazil) or 8 months (Argentina) of 2006.

6. Guardian Weekly, February 9—15, 2007, p. 9.

The scramble for the Arctic

On August 3, the oceanographer and polar explorer Artur Chilingarov

descended 14,000 feet in a mini-submarine and dropped a titanium capsule
containing a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. “The Arctic is
Russian,” he declared.
In fact, the Russian government is laying claim not to the whole
Arctic, but “only” to the Lomonosov Ridge, a wedge about half the size of
Western Europe that it considers an extension of Siberia’s continental shelf.
According to the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea, the five states with
coastlines on the Arctic Ocean – Russia, Norway, Denmark (through
ownership of Greenland), Canada and the United States (Alaska) – are
entitled to 200 miles of territorial waters, but can claim more distant chunks
of Arctic seabed by demonstrating links to their continental shelves.
This, of course, is a game that not only Russia can play. All the other
Arctic states have advanced counterclaims or are preparing to do so, all on
the basis of the same vague legal provision.
Why is this carve-up happening now? Apart from people concerned
with the deployment of nuclear submarine forces, the native Inuit (Eskimos),
and a few scientists and explorers, no one used to care much about the
Arctic. Vast quantities of oil, gas and other minerals might lie under the
frozen wastes (up to 10 billion barrels of oil under the Lomonosov Ridge,
for instance), but extracting them was not a practical proposition. So it did
not matter if borders and exploitation rights were not very clearly defined.
Now, however, it is starting to matter. In part this is due to advances
in extraction technology, but the main reason is the rapid melting of the
icecap under the impact of global warming. The extraction of all those
underwater resources is no longer a pipedream, and the big oil and gas
companies and the governments that back them are jockeying for position in
the new arena.

* * *

From the perspective of survival of the planetary ecosystem, the rush

to grab Arctic oil and gas is grotesque in the extreme. After all, it is largely
the burning of oil and gas that is melting the ice, thereby opening up the
prospect of extracting and burning yet more oil and gas and further
accelerating global warming.
The capitalists, however, have a quite different perspective. For them
the overriding imperative is to be sure of making every last cent, penny and
kopeck of profit from selling hydrocarbons before finally proceeding to
exploit the next source of profit – solar energy and other “alternative”
energy sources. By then, unfortunately, it may well be too late to prevent
runaway global warming from turning Earth into a second Venus. But that is
something the capitalists do not want to know.
The melting of the ice will also have a huge impact on shipping. Over
the next few years, expanding areas of the Arctic — and within a few
decades all of it — will be navigable to commercial shipping throughout the
year. The Northeast Passage through the Russian Arctic and the Bering
Strait is expected to be open within eight years, greatly reducing the distance
and cost of sea transport between Europe and the Far East. The Northwest
Passage through the Canadian Arctic will provide another link between the
Atlantic and the Pacific, competing with the Panama Canal. New deepwater
ports are planned to support trans-Arctic trade. Finally, a continuing rapid
growth in Arctic tourism is anticipated.

* * *

The alarm with which the media have reacted to the Russian claim on
the Lomonosov Ridge is reminiscent of the Cold War, especially in the
context of other recent tensions between Russia and “the West.”
Nevertheless, it is misleading to talk about a new Cold War or, indeed, about
“the West.” We no longer live in a world of bipolar confrontation between
“East” and “West.” We now live in a multipolar world of fluid alliances
among a fairly large number of powers, some of them rising (e.g., China)
and others in decline (e.g., the U.S.). In certain ways the early twenty-first
century resembles the first half of the twentieth century much more closely
than it does the second.
Nothing illustrates the new-old pattern of multipolarity more clearly
than territorial disputes in the Arctic. Several important disputes do not
involve Russia at all. They are between the other Arctic states, all of which
are still formally allies, fellow members of NATO.
The potentially most serious disputes are, perhaps, those between
Canada and the United States. One concerns the offshore Canada/Alaska
boundary, which traverses an area thought to be rich in oil and gas. The
other dispute is over the straits that separate Canada’s Arctic islands from
one another and from the mainland. Last year the Canadian government
declared that it regarded these straits, which together make up the Northwest
Passage, as Canadian Internal Waters. The US government has made clear
that it still regards the straits as international waters by sending its navy to
patrol them.
Lord Palmerston is famous for his remark that “Britain has no
permanent allies, only permanent interests.” Evidently the same is true of
any capitalist state.
The behaviour of the Arctic states also debunks the widely held idea
that some states are inherently peace-loving and others inherently
militaristic. Many people think of Canada as being in the first category.
They might be perturbed to come across the following Guardian headline:
“Canada flexes its muscles in scramble for the Arctic”
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/11/climatechange.climate
change).

As Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper observed in this

connection, “the world is changing.” It is changing in ways that on the
surface seem quite dramatic. But there is a deeper level at which, as the
French saying has it, “the more things change, the more they remain the
same.” The scramble for the Arctic in the twenty-first century is a
phenomenon of the same general kind as the nineteenth-century scramble for
Africa. Both are cases of commercial and military rivalry between the
capitalist classes of different countries to open up for plunder and
exploitation a region that was previously closed to them.
True, these scrambles now entail dangers that were unknown in the
past. The 19th century knew nothing of either nuclear weapons or global
warming. It is high time to move on.

September 2007

The next capitalist frontier – the moon

Over the last few centuries, one region of the planet after another has been
“opened up” to capitalist plunder. Often rival capitalist powers fought over
the spoils of conquest. In the nineteenth century they had the “scramble for
Africa.” In the twenty-first they are scrambling to control the resources of
the Arctic, which global warming and technological advance are making
accessible to exploitation.
Once the Arctic and Antarctic are brought fully under the sway of
capital, what next? Won’t that be the end of the story, the closing of the last
frontier? There remains space, to be sure. But won’t the costs of extracting
resources and transporting them to earth be prohibitive? So you might think.
In fact, the strategists of the six powers that now have active space
programs – the United States, Russia, the European Union, China, India, and
Japan – already have their sights on the commercial and military potential of
the cosmos.
On 22 October India launched the Chandrayaan-1 satellite, and on 11
November it entered moon orbit. One of its main tasks is to map deposits of
Helium-3 (He-3). This isotope, used together with deuterium (H-2), is the
optimal fuel for nuclear fusion: in particular, it minimises radioactive
emissions. It is very rare on earth – according to one estimate, only 30 kg is
available – because the solar wind that carries it is blocked by the earth’s
atmosphere and magnetic field. The dust and rocks in the moon’s surface
layer contain millions of tonnes of the stuff.
It has been calculated that a single shuttle flight bearing a load of 25
tonnes (currently valued at $100 billion) would meet energy demand in India
for several years or in the U.S. for one year, while three flights a year would
suffice for the world (Guardian, 21 October; Tribune, 23 October).
The main problem is extracting the He-3 as gas from the lunar soil.
This requires heating the soil to a temperature of 800º C. in furnaces or
towers, using solar power. (Silicon for solar cells is also abundant on the
moon.) To collect enough gas for one load, it would be necessary to process
360,000 tonnes of soil. Nevertheless, technologically this is believed to be
feasible; modern furnaces do actually process such huge quantities of
material. Some specialists question whether it would be economically
feasible to strip mine the moon in this way.
Despite uncertainties, Indian strategists hope that the Chandrayaan-1
satellite will enable India to “stake a priority claim” on He-3 resources when
lunar colonization begins (SkyNews). India’s main rivals in this field appear
to be the U.S., which has “re-energised” its moon program and plans to
establish a manned base by 2020, and also China.
Given the abundant supply of He-3 relative to foreseeable demand,
why should India need to compete with other space powers for preferential
access? Surely there is more than enough for everyone.
Yes, but some locations on the moon’s surface are much better for
mining than others. Finding the best locations is the main aim of satellite
exploration.
First, the nature of the terrain will obviously matter when building
bases and installations, whether operated by human workers or robots. It will
be a great advantage to have water (ice) available nearby.
Second, it will be least expensive to work in areas where deposits are
richest, where the smallest amount of soil has to be processed for each unit
of gas extracted.
Third, reliance on solar power for soil heating (and other purposes)
puts a premium on those parts of the lunar surface which are exposed to
sunlight for most of the time.
These are also the warmest regions (by lunar standards). An example
is the Shackleton Crater at the South Pole. India is especially interested in
this area, and it is also here that the U.S. wants to establish its base.
Certain places on the moon are already thought of as “strategic
locations.” Thus, the topography of Malapert Mountain makes it an ideal
spot for a radio relay station. Near the Shackleton Crater, it enhances the
strategic value of the crater area.
Considerations of this kind will become more important in the event
of the moon’s militarisation. This may happen as a result of competition for
land and resources on the moon itself. Or it may happen simply as an
extension of existing military preparations: lunar stations may serve as
reserve command centres for wars on earth.
Even if international agreements are reached to constrain the process
of militarisation and divide the lunar surface into zones belonging to the
various space powers, military threats may arise from “dual use”
technologies. Let us suppose, for instance, that instead of mining He-3 a
space power decides to generate electricity on the moon using solar cells and
transmit it on microwave beams to a receiving station on earth. The problem
– under capitalism – is that these same beams may equally well be used as
powerful weapons against earth targets.
There will also be potential conflict between the space powers and
other countries that for one reason or another are unable to compete in this
sphere. Like the club of nuclear weapons states, the space powers may
constitute themselves as an exclusive club and think up a rationale for joint
efforts to thwart “space power proliferation,” that is, to prevent other
countries from acquiring space capabilities. The two clubs will, of course,
largely overlap.
It is absurd and presumptuous for humanity to venture into the cosmos
while still divided into rival states and still dominated by primitive
mechanisms like capital accumulation. Even the first people in space, almost
half a century ago, could see that our planet is a single fragile system.
A world socialist community will have to decide which elements of
existing space programmes to retain and which to freeze or abandon.
National programmes that are retained will be merged into global
programmes, eliminating the wasteful duplication inherent in the
competition among space powers. Ambitious programs of purely scientific
interest may be deferred pending the solution of more urgent problems.
Attitudes in a socialist world toward reliance on space activities may
diverge quite widely. Some people may wish to enjoy the benefits of a
complex high-consumption lifestyle made possible by He-3 fuel for nuclear
fusion and other off-earth technologies. Others may prefer to avoid the
irreducible risks of a space-dependent strategy and solve earth’s problems
here on earth, at least to whatever extent this proves possible.

December 2008

Asteroid wars

On April 15, in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, President

Obama outlined plans for the U.S. space program. He rejected proposals to

“return” to the moon in favor of a plan to develop by 2025 new spacecraft

for manned missions into deep space. The first destination will be “an

asteroid”, followed by Mars in the mid-2030s.

So perhaps I was wrong when I called the moon “the next capitalist

frontier” (MW, December 2008). Why is an asteroid landing being given top

priority?

Near-earth asteroids
 Obama was certainly referring to one of the “near-earth asteroids”

(NEAs). These are asteroids that have been dislodged, usually by the

gravitational pull of Jupiter, from the main asteroid belt between Mars and

Jupiter into orbits that approach or intersect the orbit of the earth. About

7,000 NEAs have been discovered so far. Some are known to be

fantastically rich in valuable metals and other minerals. In fact, many metals

now mined on earth originated in asteroids that rained down on our planet

after the crust cooled.

Consider, for instance, the NEA known as 1986 DA. A mile and a half

in diameter, it is estimated to contain ten billion tons of iron, one billion tons

of nickel, 100,000 tons of platinum and over 10,000 tons of gold. The

platinum alone, at the current price of £35 per gram, is worth £3.5 trillion.

True, the price would fall rapidly once exploitation was underway, but at

first the profits would be truly astronomical.

Given the scale of expected revenues, costs are unlikely to be

prohibitive. Mining asteroids may even be more competitive than mining on

the moon. Thanks to the very low gravity, a round trip to an NEA passing

nearby will require less energy than a round trip to the moon. Processing

might be carried out on site and only processed materials brought back to
earth. True, a way will have to be found to “tether” machinery to the asteroid

so that it does not drift off into space.

Window of opportunity

Aanother problem with mining an NEA is that operations will have to

be confined within a “window of opportunity” – that is, the few weeks or

months when it is passing close enough to earth, for it may not return our

way for many years to come (if ever).

However, there is a way around this problem. Because NEAs are at

most 20 miles in diameter, nuclear explosions can be used to change their

course. This might be done if one were on a collision course with earth. (The

Russian Space Agency is considering an attempt to deflect the asteroid

Apophis, which has a tiny probability of hitting earth in 2036 or 2068.) A

resource-rich NEA could be “captured” – that is, transported into earth orbit,

where mining could continue for as long as it remained profitable.

Recalling Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”), I

shudder at the thought of the calamities that may descend on us from above

as a result of accident or miscalculation.

 An asteroid war?

For a socialist world community, mining asteroids might be an

attractive option. It would offer not a supplement but an alternative to

mining on earth, with its attendant ecological and work-related costs (costs

in the sense of consequences running counter to communal values, as

opposed to financial costs). Of course, a socialist world would have no use

for the gold.

Under capitalism, however, the approach of a resource-rich NEA

might well be an occasion for conflict between the U.S. and another space

power (Russia, China or India), precisely because of the enormous profits at

stake.

With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will
ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce
eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a
crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the
chance of its owner being hanged.

Marx quoting P.J. Dunning, Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 31

 The use of celestial bodies remains unregulated by international law.

There is a treaty designed for this purpose (the Moon Treaty of 1979), but it

has never come into force because only a few states – not one of them a

space power – have ratified it. An attempt in 1980 to get the U.S. Senate to

ratify the treaty was defeated following lobbying by activists of the L5

Society, which was formed in 1975 to promote space colonization and

manufacturing on the basis of private enterprise.

The danger of war over a resource-rich asteroid may well be greater

than the risk of war over lunar resources. First, the moon is large enough to

accommodate rival mining, processing and transport operations, but a small

asteroid may not be. Second, an NEA will have to be exploited while it is

within easy reach, so there will be little time for maneuvering, negotiations

and the application of indirect pressure.

An asteroid war need not be waged openly. It is more likely to take

the form of covert and deniable efforts to sabotage rival operations by

various means (laser and other rays, radioelectronic warfare, etc.).

Simultaneous attempts by different space/nuclear powers to capture an

asteroid may have the unintended consequence of the asteroid hitting the

earth.

May 2010
Antics in the South China Sea

The recent incidents in the middle of the South China Sea, in which a large
American ship was “harassed” by various Chinese boats, have a comical
aspect. The “harassment” seems to have been mostly a matter of
uncomfortably close approaches, flag waving, and beaming lights. The most
violent moment was when the Americans used fire hoses to drench the
sailors on a boat that had come too close, inducing them to strip to their
underwear.
These antics, however, may be the prelude to more serious conflict.
An armed clash between China and the U.S. is, perhaps, more likely to occur
in the South China Sea than in the context of a putative Chinese invasion of
Taiwan.
Many reports have described the American vessel, USNS Impeccable,
as a “survey ship” or “ocean surveillance ship.” This creates the misleading
impression that such ships exist for the purpose of oceanographic mapping
or scientific research.
In fact, although they are unarmed and have civilian crews, the
“survey ships” belong to the U.S. navy and their function is to collect
military intelligence. They are really spy ships.
The main job of the survey ship deployed in the South China Sea is to
track the Chinese submarines that patrol there, operating from a base at the
southern tip of Hainan Island. These are nuclear submarines carrying
intercontinental ballistic missiles – that is, they constitute China’s “nuclear
deterrent.” The tracking is done by means of underwater sonar arrays
attached to the ship by cables. There was some attempt by Chinese sailors to
sever the cables and set the arrays adrift.
It is true that USNS Impeccable, lacking armaments more powerful
than fire hoses, does not by itself pose a direct threat to the submarines. But
the data it collects could be passed on to another vessel equipped with anti-
submarine missiles. In other words, the spy ship is a key component of anti-
submarine warfare capability. It is therefore no surprise that the Chinese
government should want it to leave the area.
It is in large part with a view to securing a sanctuary for its nuclear
submarines that China asserts the right to control most of the South China
Sea, an area of some 2 million square kilometres – to turn it into a “Chinese
lake.” The legal case cooked up by its diplomats involves claiming the three
main archipelagos in the sea as Chinese territory and then demarcating an
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 200 miles (320 km.) wide around them as
well as Hainan Island and along the shore of the mainland.
Finally, China seeks to erase the distinction between territorial waters
and an EEZ. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)
prohibits the presence of a spy ship in territorial waters, but not in an EEZ.
The U.S. position is that USNS Impeccable did not enter China’s territorial
waters – it was 75 miles (120 km.) off the coast of Hainan at the time of the
incidents – so its activity is perfectly legal.
Of course, it does not matter to us as socialists which side has the
better case in terms of international law. The whole world is the common
heritage of mankind, and we do not recognize the right of capitalist powers
to carve it up among themselves.
While the military issue is the direct cause of the current clash
between China and the U.S., as it was of a similar clash involving aircraft in
1991, there are also other major issues at stake.
First, rights in the South China Sea are crucial to control over vital
shipping lanes. The shortest route between the Indian and the Pacific Ocean
passes through the sea. This, for instance, is the route taken by tankers
transporting crude oil from the Gulf to East Asia. One rationale for the U.S.
presence is to keep the sea routes open: if China were allowed strategic
dominance it could close off the Malacca Strait, which connects the South
China Sea with the Indian Ocean.
There are also plenty of resources to fight about in and under the sea,
including valuable fishing grounds and still unexploited oil and gas fields.
This is the underlying reason why it is so difficult to unravel the complicated
tangle of territorial disputes over the sea and its islands among the six
coastal states: China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and the
Philippines. In 1974 and 1988 these disputes led to military clashes – in both
cases between China and Vietnam.

April 2009

Section 6
 WAR AND PEACE

(mostly war)

The first article in this section is a general analysis of the

causes of war in today’s world. The next two look at the
specific issues of nuclear disarmament and humanitarian
intervention. The articles that follow are about specific wars
(or in the case of Iran -- a war that was prepared for but
averted).

The war business: why do capitalist states prepare for and

wage war?

As we socialists never tire of pointing out, the primary function of military

power in capitalism is to protect and expand control over resources, markets
and transport routes on behalf of the capitalist class of the country
concerned. However, the costs and risks that wars and armaments entail for
the capitalists themselves often outweigh the benefits to them.
For example, while the U.S. did have real interests at stake in Vietnam
in the 1960s and 1970s, those interests were hardly commensurate with the
enormous costs of the war it was waging there. Growing awareness of this
fact within the capitalist class eventually led to withdrawal.
In other words, states have a tendency to act in ways that appear to be
irrational even in terms of the capitalist interests that they are supposed to
represent.
There are various reasons for this apparent irrationality. But the main
reason is this. War is not only a service that the state provides to the national
capitalist class as a whole. War is also – and increasingly – a massive
capitalist enterprise in its own right, a “war business” that wields
considerable political clout and has special interests of its own.
The core of the war business, of course, is the so-called military-
industrial complex. Arms manufacturers, like other capitalist firms, seek to
maximise their profits. It does not concern them whether the weapons they
sell have a cogent strategic rationale.
The military-industrial complex has a direct interest not only in the
build-up of armaments but in war itself. War is the only way of testing
weaponry under battlefield conditions. It uses up and destroys old stocks that
then have to be replaced – rearmament is now, for instance, the top priority
of the Georgian government – and stimulates demand in general.
But nowadays arms firms are not the only large-scale “merchants of
death.” Companies like Blackwater sell combat capability directly as the
labour of hired mercenaries. Other companies, such as Halliburton, sell
logistics and other war support services.

* * *

My argument is not that all armed conflicts are irrational in terms of

the costs and benefits accruing to national capital. Some undoubtedly make
good sense in these terms, as when valuable resources can be acquired at
moderate expense. One example might be the “cod wars” of the 1970s
between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
Another, perhaps, is the ongoing conflict over the Spratly Islands in the
South China Sea, whose oil and gas deposits are coveted by China, Taiwan,
Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.
At the other extreme, some wars have no discernible connection with
the control of markets and resources. The recent war in Georgia was in this
category. Although important oil and gas pipelines run through the south of
the country, Russia did not contest control over them. Russia’s rationale for
war was “strategic” – that is, getting into a better position to fight future
wars.
Again, Israel’s wars are senseless from the point of view of the Israeli
capitalist class as a whole, which has a clear interest in a peace settlement
that will give it full access to the markets and cheap labour of the Middle
East. This interest, however, seems unable to prevail against the political
stranglehold of Israel’s military-industrial complex.
The nature of the wars that the U.S. and its allies are currently fighting
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is less clear-cut. Control of resources,
markets and transport routes is certainly an important factor, especially in
Iraq, but the likely outcome is hardly such as to justify the enormous costs
involved. While the ultimate motive for war may be to arrest the decline in
the competitive position of the U.S. in the world economy, the actual effect
is to accelerate that decline.
So we end up with two contrasting models of the relationship between
capitalism and war. In the first model, war appears as an instrument in the
hands of the state, which acts as the “executive committee of the (national)
capitalist class as a whole” (Marx). The second model, unlike the first, takes
into account the fact that war is evolving from an instrument at the service of
the national capitalist class as a whole into a capitalist enterprise in its own
right -- what we might call the war business. The war business has special
capitalist interests of its own, so it cannot function simply as an instrument
of more general capitalist interests.
Does the first model represent capitalism in its “normal” form, while
the second model represents an “abnormal” ultra-militaristic mutation of the
capitalist system? Is the first model rational, in capitalist if not in human
terms, while the second model is irrational? At first sight that seems
reasonable.
But is there in fact any good reason to regard one model as any more
irrational than the other? Each model represents a possible variant of
capitalism and a possible form of capitalist rationality. The difference is that
the first model assumes the existence of such a thing as “national capital as a
whole,” while the second model envisions only separate capitalist
enterprises. Some firms sell sausages, some sell computers – and some sell
war.

November 2008

Campaigners for humanitarian intervention:

“useful idiots” of militarism
There is nothing new in governments claiming to be motivated by
humanitarian concerns when they go to war. To take a couple of old
examples: tsarist Russia supposedly fought the Ottoman Empire in order to
rescue Armenians from massacre by the Turks, while British intervention
following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 was justified by lurid
drawings of “Huns” skewering babies on their bayonets
(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWatrocities.htm). The enemy atrocities
might be real, as in the first example, or imaginary, as in the second, but in
both cases the claim of humanitarian motivation was fraudulent.
Governments decided for or against war on the basis of (sometimes
erroneous) calculations of economic and strategic interest.
That remains true today. Never, however, has it been so important for
governments to win public support for wars by claiming humanitarian
motives. As in the past, some of the “facts” underlying the claims are
fabricated. Thus, Tony Blair repeatedly claimed that 400,000 bodies had
been found in Iraqi mass graves, although the number of corpses uncovered
was only 5,000.
But again, the claims are false even when the facts are true. Often this
is obvious because the atrocity occurred long before foreign governments
expressed any outrage over it. Why bring the matter up just now? Britain and
the U.S. had no objection when Saddam used poison gas on Kurdish villages
in 1988 because at that time he was their ally. The weeks preceding the
dispatch of British troops to Afghanistan were marked by a media campaign
against the oppression of women in that country, with even Cherie Blair
roped in. The issue was then dropped as suddenly as it was raised.

* * *
 What is new is the emergence, within the broader human rights
movement, of a loosely organized network that campaigns for military
intervention wherever that seems to be the only effective means of halting or
preventing genocidal atrocities against some ethnic group. Currently, for
example, there is an international campaign for intervention in Darfur
(Sudan).
During the period when I was not a socialist, I was involved for a
while in one of the organizations that makes up this network: the Institute
for the Study of Genocide (ISG). My research, publicized through the ISG,
helped to bring the massacres of Bosnian Moslems by Serb militias to the
attention of the U.S. media and politicians – including, notably, Bill Clinton,
who at that time was campaigning for president. Later Clinton did intervene
militarily in Yugoslavia, though over Kosovo rather than Bosnia.
Unlike governments, anti-genocide activists like the ISG have quite
genuine humanitarian motives. They recall how “the world sat by” and
allowed the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to proceed. (Though at
war with Nazi Germany, the Allied command turned down pleas to bomb
the railway lines leading to Auschwitz.) They are determined to establish
humanitarian considerations as an integral part of policy making, so that
“we” will not let such terrible things happen again.
Any decent person will sympathize with this line of thought. But there
is a problem with it. Let us shift our focus from the moral imperative of
effective action to the political forces capable of such action. Who is “the
world”? Who is “we”? The only “we” capable of intervening is governments
with their armed forces. But governments do not exist for humanitarian
purposes. They are therefore loathe to intervene for humanitarian reasons,
and it is close to impossible to compel them to do so.
From the point of view of governments, the existence of a public
movement for humanitarian intervention has both pros and cons. It is
irritating and embarrassing to have to face down emotional public demands
to intervene in places where no important “national interests” are at stake –
in Rwanda, for instance, or Darfur. On the other hand, when you are inclined
to intervene anyway for other, more “important” reasons it is extremely
convenient to have a public movement pressing for intervention. That makes
it much easier to drum up public support for war, and at the same time you
can enhance your democratic credentials by “responding to public opinion.”
In the case of Yugoslavia, the demand to intervene effectively over
Bosnia was resisted, but the campaign in which I participated prepared the
ground for intervention over Kosovo. The evidence now available suggests
that in Kosovo, in contrast to Bosnia, there was never any real danger of
genocide (as opposed to the usual ethnic cleansing). In Kosovo, however,
and again in contrast to Bosnia, significant interests were at stake, such as a
major oil pipeline and metal-mining complex.
It may appear to campaigners for humanitarian intervention that they
have a certain limited success. They “win some and lose some.” But if we
look more deeply into the real interests involved we see that their success is
largely illusory. It is by no means clear that their efforts have the net effect
of reducing the amount of suffering in the world. In fact, by supporting and
helping to legitimize brutal and devastating wars they may well increase the
total of suffering.
The epithet “useful idiots” (or “useful fools”) was used to pillory
Western pacifists who supposedly served the interests of the Soviet Union,
though without intending to do so and for the best of all possible motives.
Jean Bricmont borrows the expression for a different purpose, calling
campaigners for humanitarian intervention the “useful idiots” of Western
militarism and imperialism (Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human
Rights to Sell War, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2006). Again, this is not
meant to cast any aspersions on their motives.
As socialists we would only question the stress on “Western.” In
principle such people could equally well serve as useful idiots for non-
Western (Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc.) militarism and imperialism, though
in practice they are active mostly in Western countries.
Calls for humanitarian intervention only make sense in terms of a
false conception of the nature and functions of government. They feed a
delusion that obscures the reality of our capitalist world, thereby making it
harder to overcome that reality.

August 2008

Nuclear weapons are still there

Who protests against nuclear weapons nowadays? People seem to have half-
forgotten them.
But they are still there, patiently lying in wait. In The Seventh
Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 2007),
Jonathan Schell even speaks of a “nuclear renaissance” in the new century.
True, there are fewer nukes than there used to be. The number of
active nuclear weapons has declined from a Cold War peak of some 65,000
to below 20,000. In another decade it may fall to 10,000. But this is scant
consolation, for several reasons:

* Many decommissioned weapons are not destroyed, but only

partially dismantled and placed in storage.

* The 10,000 remaining nukes will still suffice to wipe out the human
race many times over. Even the use of 100 would cause disaster on an
unprecedented scale. Atmospheric scientists at UCLA and the University of
Colorado modeled the climatic effects of the use of 100 Hiroshima-type
bombs – just 0.03% of the explosive power of the global arsenal – in a
nuclear war between India and Pakistan. These countries have fought four
wars and now have about 75 nukes each. Direct fatalities would be
comparable with World War Two, while millions of tons of soot borne aloft
would devastate agriculture over vast expanses of Eurasia and North
America.

* Nuclear weapons do not serve merely as status symbols or for

mutual deterrence. Resort to them remains an option for the contingency of a
serious setback in a conventional war, and new types of high-precision
nukes, such as the so-called “bunker busters”, have been designed for that
purpose. Nuclear weapons may even be used to stop a state acquiring
nuclear weapons, or to suppress nuclear capacity that is in danger of falling
under “terrorist” control (say, in the context of a disintegrating Pakistan).

* Finally, the number of nuclear weapons states has increased and is

likely to increase further. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is gradually
losing its ability to inhibit the chain reaction. The double standard on which
it is based – one rule for members of the nuclear club, another for the rest –
is (as Schell argues) no longer viable. If all states with the requisite
economic and technological capacity are not to acquire nuclear weapons,
then they must all agree to renounce them.

The numerical decline might be cause for optimism if it could be seen

as progress toward nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, there are no
grounds for such an interpretation. Nuclear weapon states are determined to
maintain and upgrade their arsenals. Total numbers are falling as Russia and
the U.S. shed what they consider excess capacity, but they are restructuring
their nuclear forces, not giving them up. Once this process is complete the
decline in numbers will level off.

* * *

So why have people half-forgotten the nuclear threat?

For one thing, it has been overshadowed by another threat to the
human species – global warming.
Even before people became fully aware of this new peril, however,
the end of the Cold War had largely dispelled the fear of nuclear war. A
reformist at the time, I was closely involved in the peace and disarmament
movements of the 1980s. With benefit of hindsight, I realize now that these
movements did not perceive the nuclear threat in its broadest sense because
they were too preoccupied by the specific context of the superpower nuclear
confrontation of that period. This was especially true of European Nuclear
Disarmament (END).
 Western governments told us that “we” needed nuclear weapons to
deter the Soviet threat. We anti-nuclear campaigners did not believe they
were right, but we were naïve enough to believe that they believed what they
told us. We drew the logical implication that they would become favorably
disposed to nuclear disarmament if relations with the Soviet Union could
only be sufficiently improved. So we hopefully looked forward to the new
and deeper East-West détente heralded by Gorbachev.
Not only did the Cold War come to an end; the Soviet Union itself
collapsed. No more “Soviet threat” to worry our rulers! But did they heave a
sigh of relief and rush to dispose of their nuclear weapons? No, they started
to come up with substitute rationales for keeping the things. Blair,
announcing renewal of the Trident program in 2006, explained that nuclear
confrontation with another major power “remains possible in the decades
ahead.” Schell sums it up nicely: “By reviving and refurbishing their
arsenals, the nuclear powers signal that they expect that great-power rivalries
will return” (p. 210).
The unpredictability of the future, they tell us, is itself a good reason
to hold on to nuclear weapons. And the future is always unpredictable.
The world is dominated by a system based on conflict – conflict over
resources of all kinds, conflict between competing property interests and the
states that represent them. Once nuclear weapons were discovered and
became tools in this conflict, they were bound to threaten human survival.
The threat only seemed to have a necessary connection with the specific
pattern of global power that happened to exist at the time. That pattern has
started to change, there are new potential adversaries, but the conflict-based
system remains. So does the nuclear threat.
 * * *

Schell calls for “action in concert by all the nations on Earth” (p. 217)
to abolish nuclear weapons, halt global warming, and tackle other urgent
global problems. His eloquence is moving, but his vision is only very briefly
sketched and lacks substance. True, he has some technical and
organizational proposals. Like IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei, for
instance, he would revive the Baruch Plan put forward by Truman in 1946
and place all nuclear fuel production under the control of an international
agency. But he fails to consider what political, social and economic changes
might be necessary to create and sustain the international trust and
cooperation that he seeks.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that nuclear disarmament
were somehow to be achieved within the existing conflict-based system.
Many states would still have the technological capacity to make nuclear
weapons again if they so decided. This is known as the “breakout” problem.
It is hard to imagine countries resisting this temptation when at war or even
under conditions of acute military confrontation. As we need not just to
achieve but maintain nuclear disarmament, we therefore also need to abolish
war in general, together with all weapons that can be used to threaten war. A
close reading of Schell suggests that he accepts this point, though he does
not spell it out.
But take the argument a step further. Wars arise out of conflicts over
the control of resources. Doesn’t this mean that an end has to be put to such
conflicts? And how can this be done without placing resources under the
control of a global community – that is, without establishing world
socialism?
 Socialists are not against nuclear (or general) disarmament within
capitalism. We know that the world faces problems of the greatest urgency
and we know that the global social revolution is not an immediate prospect.
We have no wish to hold human survival hostage to the attainment of our
ideals. Please go ahead and prove us wrong by abolishing nuclear weapons
without abolishing capitalism. Nothing, apart from socialism itself, would
make us happier. The trouble is that we simply don’t understand how it can
be done. That is why we see no alternative to working for socialism.

February 2008

September 11, 2001:

reflections on a somewhat unusual act of war

As an act of war, the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade
Centre was somewhat unusual, though not unprecedented, in three respects.
First, the method used was non-standard. Standard military practice is
to blow things and people up by dropping bombs or firing shells and
missiles on them. But flying planes right into the target has been done
before. Japanese kamikaze pilots used the technique against U.S. warships in
the Pacific during World War Two.
Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor. Such actors rarely have the
capacity to carry through such a complex and costly operation. Therefore al-
Qaeda must have had financial backing from wealthy sponsors - Osama bin
Laden himself comes from an extremely wealthy family - and the support, or
at least complicity, of one or more powerful states. In general, arranging
wars is a pastime for members of the capitalist class, though they get
hirelings to do the dirty work for them. Working people don't command the
necessary resources.
Finally, it is a little unusual for the U.S. to be on the receiving end of a
military assault from abroad. For a comparable attack on the continental
United States, you have to go back to 1814, when the British army entered
Washington and burned down the White House and the Capitol.
In other ways the attack was not unusual in the least. As an atrocity it
was par for the course. The death toll, initially estimated at 6,500, was later
revised downward to about 2,800. Atrocities on a similar or larger scale are
committed routinely by the U.S. in other countries.
To take just one example, 3--4,000 civilians were killed in the
invasion of Panama in December 1989. Even if we start the reckoning with
September 11, we find that the U.S. was quick to even the score. According
to an independent study, 3,767 Afghan civilians (hardly any of them
connected with al-Qaeda) had been killed inbombing raids by 6 December,
2001. This figure does not include the far more numerous indirect casualties
resulting from the creation of refugees and the disruption of food and other
supplies.

* * *

The attack should not have been a total surprise, a bolt out of the blue.
After all, it was merely the next step in a war that Osama bin Laden had
formally declared on the United States in August 1996. He had built up a
far-flung network of front companies, banks,"charities," and NGOs (e.g., the
World Union of Moslem Youth) to raise funds and recruit young fighters for
the war. He had already attacked American assets abroad, notably the
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, and there was ample
intelligence warning that a major attack on US soil was in the offing. So the
parallel with Pearl Harbor is pretty weak.
And yet September 11 clearly did come as a shock to Bush. That was
because the attack came from forces that the U.S., its sidekicks Britain and
Israel, and the Bush family in particular had long regarded as friends, allies
and partners. This explains why Bush ignored the warnings - just as Stalin
ignored warnings of impending attack by Nazi Germany in 1941 and felt
"betrayed" by Hitler when the attack came.
American, British, and Israeli ruling circles saw the main threats to
their economic and strategic interests in the Moslem world as coming from
"communists" and secular nationalists backed by the Soviet Union (e.g.
Nasser in Egypt, Ghaddafi in Libya, the PLO). When Khomeini's theocracy
took power, Iran was added to the list of enemies, together with associated
Shi'ite Islamist movements in other countries. Sunni Islamist movements,
however, were encouraged - largely on the principle that "the enemy of my
enemy is my friend," although also because they seemed more interested in
imposing ritual conformity on their own communities and in fighting
"communism" than in challenging the substantive interests of the "infidel"
powers.
The Islamists were also beneficiaries of the "neo-liberal" economic
policies of Western institutions. In Pakistan, for example, the secular state
schools collapsed in the1980s as a result of public spending cuts imposed by
the IMF. This left the Saudi-financed religious schools (madrassas) as the
only educational option available to boys who were not from wealthy
families. (Girls, needless to say, didn't even have that option.) It was from
these madrassas that the Taliban drew its recruits.
Moreover, relations with the leading Sunni Islamist power, Saudi
Arabia, were and still are vital to Britain and the US in economic terms. The
Saudi capitalist class, led by the royal family and influential families like the
bin Ladens, not only sells these countries' oil but uses much of the proceeds
to buy arms from them and invest in their economies.
There are close and long-established personal and business ties
between wealthy Saudis and British and American capitalists and politicians,
including the father of the current US president and several members of his
administration.
The Saudi—U.S. alliance also entailed close military cooperation,
above all in the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden
went to Pakistan in 1979 as an official of the Saudi intelligence service to
finance, organize, and control the anti- Soviet Afghan resistance in
collaboration with the CIA. It was here that Osama, who had trained as an
engineer and economist with a view to taking part in the family business,
acquired his taste for war. Osama fell out with the Saudi royal family in
1991 when they allowed the US to set up military bases on the "holy" soil of
Arabia following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
But even in exile Osama received frequent visits from relatives, who
provided a channel of communication between him and the royal family. An
understanding appears to have been reached. Osama would abstain from
attacking targets inside Saudi Arabia and in return no action would be taken
against his Saudi supporters, who included various members of his own and
of other wealthy families (such as Khalid bin Mahfouz, the "banker of
terror") and even certain royal princes. And the Saudi authorities did protect
these people, refusing to provide U.S. intelligence agencies with any
information that might compromise them. So September 11 originated in a
"betrayal" by the Saudi capitalist class of their American friends, allies and
partners.
How can we account for such strange ingratitude to those to whom
they owe their vast riches? It probably has to do with the circumstances in
which the Saudi capitalist class came into being. They did not make
themselves into capitalists. It was done for them when oil was discovered in
Arabia (in 1938) and property rights in that oil were vested in the royal
house. The Saudi capitalists are a class of bedouin patriarchs turned rentiers,
who became capitalists by investing their revenue. So they retain to some
extent a pre-capitalist mentality and have a deeply ambivalent attitude to the
capitalist world in which they now operate.
* * *

Despite the shock effect, U.S. ruling circles did not necessarily regard
9/11 as an unalloyed evil. In his book The New Crusade, anti-war analyst
Rahul Mahajan draws attention to a document entitled Rebuilding America's
Defenses, issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American
Century, a neo-conservative think tank with links to the Bush administration.
The authors call for increased military spending to preserve US "global pre-
eminence," but add that such a programme will be politically impossible
unless there is a "catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl
Harbor."
 The purposes for which the fear generated by the al-Qaeda attack was
exploited suggest that it filled this bill. The threat of "terrorism" has been
used to push through military programs ranging from anti-missile defence to
germ warfare. Thus, a vast lab is being built near Washington called the
National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Center, where in
violation of the1972 biological and toxin weapons convention the most
lethal bacteria and viruses are to be stockpiled (Guardian Weekly, 4-10
August 2006). What a tempting target that will make for terrorists to
infiltrate or attack!
The "war on terrorism" unleashed in the aftermath of September 11,
against first Afghanistan and then Iraq, is not - so Mahajan argues - a war on
terrorism, just as the
"war on drugs" is not a war on drugs. Combating terrorism and drugs are
both low priorities, and the "wars" against them are covers for the pursuit of
higher-priority interests.
In Afghanistan the U.S. had turned against the Taliban (previously
welcomed as a force for "stability"), mainly because they were unwilling to
host oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Pakistan, and was looking for
a pretext to overthrow them. Capturing Osama was that pretext, for it was
obvious that the chaos of war would create ideal conditions for him to
escape.
Iraq was invaded to secure control over its oil and in the hope of
establishing a new strategic beachhead in the Middle East. Saddam had no
ties with Islamic terrorism, just as he had no nuclear weapons. To the likes
of Osama he was not even a genuine Moslem. Bush demanded of his experts
that they find ties between Iraq and terrorism; when they replied that there
were none, he pretended not to hear and reiterated his demand. In October
2001 Vice President Dick Cheney declared that the war on terrorism"may
never end -- at least, not in our lifetime" (Washington Post, 21 October,
2001). Am I alone in finding this suspicious? Ordinarily in a war it is
considered important for morale to hold out some prospect of victory,
however remote. Does Cheney want and need the "war" to go on forever?
* * *

To sustain the facade of the "war on terror" it is necessary to arrest

lots of people. As there is no real evidence against most of them, they are
held without trial in secret facilities scattered throughout the world, where -
like the victims of Stalin's purges - they are tortured to extract the
“necessary” evidence. In her book The Language of Empire, Lila Rajiva
describes for us the sickening tortures at Abu Ghraib, the prison complex
outside Baghdad that the U.S. occupation authorities took over from
Saddam. The accounts and photos (some taken as exposés, others as
souvenirs) are monotonous in their sameness. This suggests that the torture
is not a spontaneous practice of jailers and interrogators, but a system
designed by government experts and approved at the top.
The system goes by the code name R21 and is taught to British and
U.S. military intelligence personnel at the British Joint Services
Interrogation Centre at Gilbertine Priory, Chicksands, near Bedford (The
Guardian, 8 May 2004). It is designed to shock Moslem cultural
sensibilities. Victims are stripped naked and hooded, savaged by dogs, and
forced under threat of beatings to masturbate and simulate sexual acts in
front of sniggering female soldiers (another triumph for sexual equality).
That's just for starters; it gets worse. I leave it to the reader to ponder what
this may imply about “Western values” and “Western civilization."
 And yet those who order these horrors know very well who is
responsible for terrorism (the Islamist variety) and where they are. But no
bombs have been dropped on the palaces of Riyadh. No scions of the bin
Ladens and bin Mahfouz or princes of the House of Saud have been stripped
naked, set upon by dogs or sexually humiliated. There's class justice for you!
A few regrettable incidents can't be allowed to spoil British and U.S.
relations with a vital ally and business partner.

September 2006

Iran in the crosshairs

Preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran are well advanced. Planes probe the
country’s air defences. Commandos infiltrate Iran on sabotage and
reconnaissance missions. A new military base is built close to the Iraq/Iran
border at Badrah. The Fifth Fleet patrols in the Gulf and along Iran’s
southern coast.
Political preparations also continue. Accusations against Iran are
elaborated and repeated ad nauseam. Pressure is exerted (with variable
success) on other countries to assist in the war plans. Aid and
encouragement are given to separatists in ethnic-minority areas of Iran: Arab
Khuzestan in the southwest, “southern Azerbaijan” in the northwest.
Resolutions are pushed through at the U.N. Security Council and in the U.S.
Congress to create a “legal” justification for aggression.
Why are the dominant capitalist interests in the U.S. so bent on war
with Iran? The war propaganda provides a highly distorted and incomplete
picture of the real reasons.

* * *

An attack on Iran will be sold as the next stage, after Afghanistan and
Iraq, of the “war against terror.” What does this mean?
As with the attack on Iraq, the claim may be made, explicitly or
implicitly, that the Iranian regime is connected in some way with Al-Qaeda.
This time round the claim would be even more deceptive, as Iranian leaders
denounced 9/11 and helped the U.S. depose the Taliban in Afghanistan. The
terrorism charge is also based on the real Iranian support of Hizbollah in
Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. This, however, means enlarging the
meaning of “terrorist” to cover any armed movement that opposes the
regional interests of the U.S. and its allies. Finally, the U.S. Congress has
passed a resolution – supported, incidentally, by leading Democratic
presidential contender Senator Hilary Clinton – declaring Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards (an elite section of its armed forces) a terrorist
organization. This justifies military action against them as part of the “war
against terror.”
Above all, the Bush administration claims that Iran is very close to
acquiring nuclear weapons and that a nuclear-armed Iran would be an
unprecedented threat to world peace. The same claim was used to justify the
attack on Iraq. No nuclear weapons capability was discovered after the
invasion, but the claim had served its purpose. Iran is enriching uranium for
a civilian nuclear power program under IAEA supervision, but there is no
evidence that its leaders seek nuclear weapons and it will not be in a position
to produce them for several (perhaps ten) years. This is a consensus view of
specialists not only at the IAEA but also at the CIA and Pentagon.
Nevertheless, Iran is a rising power with ambitions of exerting
influence in a region crowded with nuclear powers (Israel, Pakistan, India,
Russia and China, not to mention the U.S. nuclear presence). As such it is
very likely to acquire nuclear weapons at some point. It might be willing to
barter the nuclear weapons option for international recognition of its status
as a regional power, but that is precisely what the U.S. and its allies are
unwilling to grant.
While the risk of accident or miscalculation does increase with the
number of nuclear powers, there is no serious reason to suppose that Iran
would be more dangerous than any other state with nuclear weapons. All
nuclear states are prepared to resort to nuclear weapons under certain
circumstances.
“Nuclear non-proliferation” started as an international agreement to
confine nuclear weapons to the members of a small exclusive club. It has
now come to mean “disarmament wars” to deny nuclear weapons status
selectively to regimes considered hostile to U.S. interests (listen to an
interview with Jonathan Schell on www.therealnews.com). The U.S. seeks
to prevent Iran from going nuclear because it would shift the balance of
power in the Middle East, making American nuclear capabilities less
intimidating and depriving Israel of its regional nuclear monopoly.

* * *
 While the U.S. does want to prevent Iran from eventually acquiring
nuclear weapons, this does not explain the urgency of the preparations for
war. The key factor is control over resources, in particular oil and natural
gas. The U.S. seeks to restore and maintain control over the hydrocarbon
resources of the Middle East, a region that contains 55% of the world’s oil
and 40% of its gas.
The occupation of Iraq marks an important step toward this goal. The
petroleum law that the U.S. is imposing on Iraq will give foreign companies
direct control of its oilfields through “production sharing agreements”. Iran,
which alone accounts for 10% of world oil and 16% of world gas, is the
main remaining obstacle to regional domination.
Control over oil has various aspects. One is control over price –
gaining the leverage to ensure the continued flow of cheap oil to the
American economy. Another is control over who buys the oil. The country
that buys the most oil from Iran is now China, a situation that upsets those in
the U.S. who view China as a major rival and future adversary. Arguably,
however, the most important issue is which currency is used to price and sell
oil.
As the position of the dollar in relation to other currencies weakens,
the dollar is ceasing to function as the world’s main reserve currency.
Countries are shifting their foreign exchange reserves away from dollar
assets toward assets denominated in other currencies, especially the euro.
Dollar assets now constitute only 20% of Iran’s reserves.
Similarly, oil producers increasingly prefer not to receive dollars for
their oil. In late 2006 China began paying for Iranian oil in euros, while in
September 2007 Japan’s Nippon Oil agreed to pay for Iranian oil in yen.
Continuation of this trend will flood the U.S. economy with petrodollars,
fuelling inflation and further weakening the dollar. It is feared that the result
will be a deep recession.
Occupying oil-producing countries may seem like an obvious way to
buck the trend, although the effect is bound to be temporary. In 2000 Iraq
began selling oil for euros; subsequently it converted its reserves to euros.
Since the U.S. invasion it has gone back to using dollars. This may be an
important motive for attacking Iran too.

* * *

The collapse of the Soviet Union enabled the U.S. to establish a

temporary global geopolitical predominance, though at the cost of enormous
military expenditure that exceeds that of all other countries combined. Like
the dominant position of the dollar, this cannot last very much longer in
view of the progressive economic decline of the U.S.
The geopolitical map of the world has begun to shift, and Iran
occupies a central place in this process. The framework of a potential anti-
U.S. axis exists in the shape of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
which brings together Russia, China and post-Soviet Central Asia. American
strategists fear further consolidation and militarization of the SCO and its
expansion to draw in other major Asian states and, first of all, Iran, which
already has close ties with both Russia and China. (India, though for the
time being firmly aligned with the U.S., may follow.) So here too attacking
Iran may be seen as a way of averting a threat to U.S. predominance.
There is a certain logic to the motives that drove the U.S. to war in
Iraq and may drive it to war with Iran. Nevertheless, these wars make no
sense even in capitalist terms (let alone from the working class and human
point of view). It is not just that costs are likely to exceed benefits, as was
the case in Vietnam, for instance. They are senseless because under current
world conditions the goal of securing long-term U.S. predominance is
unattainable. At most, the loss of economic and geopolitical primacy may be
deferred for a few years, but it will be all the more precipitous when it does
come.
The faction of the American capitalist class currently in power refuses
to recognize this reality. Even their “mainstream” opponents in the
“Democratic” Party are rather reluctant to do so. Admittedly, the top brass
do not want another quagmire. Perhaps their resistance will save the day.

January 2008

Iraq: violence without end or purpose?

Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up

some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show the world we mean business.

Michael Ledeen (American Enterprise Institute)

Last month 100 U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan held
hearings in Washington to describe their experience. Named Winter Soldier
after a similar meeting of Vietnam veterans in 1971, the event was ignored
by the major corporate media outlets. In contrast to Vietnam, media
coverage of these wars is sanitized. Viewers see no scenes of carnage, hear
no cries of pain. No publicity accompanies the coffins on their return.
 On the internet, however, there is uncensored testimony, including
videos and personal blogs (e.g.: ivaw.org, indybay.org, therealnews.com,
5yearstoomany.org, aliveinbaghdad.org). These are the sources on which I
draw here.
Let’s start with the army recruiter who inveigles the naïve youngster
into the inferno. A sinister figure? Or just another victim? After all, he didn’t
seek transfer to the Recruitment Command. Now he has to make his quota or
else endure constant humiliation, weekends in “corrective retraining” and
the threat of the sack. So he works himself to exhaustion, answers the kids’
questions with lies, and recruits anyone he can, whether or not they meet
official standards of health, education or “moral character” (i.e., no criminal
record).
Few now join for “patriotic” reasons. Most are bribed with the
promise of financial benefits, often payment of college fees. Many foreign
residents sign up as a way of becoming U.S. citizens. Over 100 have been
awarded citizenship posthumously.
A few weeks of basic training and the new teenage soldier, who has
probably never been abroad or even in another region of the U.S., suddenly
finds himself in a strange, uncomfortable and disorienting environment. He
does not understand the language, nor can he decipher the Arabic script. He
has been taught to fear every haji -- the term used to dehumanize Iraqis – as
a possible enemy. He starts to kill and goes on killing, usually with the
connivance of his superiors, often with their open encouragement. He kills in
blind fear, or on orders, or even out of boredom. Most likely he feels no
shame: his mates take souvenir photos of him standing by his “trophies.”
It is not necessarily only Iraqis who he kills. When Marines find their
forward movement blocked, one blogger tells us, they “start using their
training ‘to destroy the enemy’ on civilians or other Marines.” Violence and
degradation pervade relations not just between the military and Iraqi
civilians but also within the military. Soldiers are abused and humiliated by
officers. Rape is commonplace.
It is hard to see what purpose all this violence can possibly serve. The
U.S. government would like to suppress all resistance to the occupation and
stabilize a client regime that can be trusted to keep Iraq open to plunder by
Western (mainly U.S.) corporations. But the more people are killed the more
of their relatives and friends will take up arms to avenge them. Various
militias temporarily ally themselves with the occupation forces in order to
eliminate their rivals, but later they too will fight the Americans (as well as
one another). And the persisting “instability” and destruction of resources
make Iraq less appealing to corporate investors.
So the chances are that the U.S. will cut losses and give up, although
the process will no doubt drag on for years. Otherwise the fighting will
continue until the whole population is dead or has fled the country. In that
case there will be no one left to run the puppet government or work for the
corporations. Of course, the chore of administration could be dumped on the
UN and workers brought in from abroad.
Amid the bloody mayhem, measures are still taken to preserve the
sanctity of property – or at least of American property. One soldier tells of
being sent with others to guard a military contractor’s truck that has broken
down on the highway. After hours of warding off hungry Iraqis who want to
take the food stored inside, they received the order to destroy the truck
together with its contents. On another occasion they were ordered to destroy
an ambulance.
When capitalists are forced by circumstances to abandon their
property, they evidently prefer to have it destroyed rather than permit its use
to satisfy the needs of desperate people. That is the true face of our real,
class enemy.

The cost of this futile war to American society can hardly be compared with
the damage inflicted on a devastated and shattered Iraq. It is quite substantial
nonetheless. As always, the working class pays by far the highest price for
their masters’ insane adventures.
Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far. This may
seem quite modest in view of the 50,000 killed in Vietnam. However, the
number killed is a misleading indicator of the amount of suffering. Due to
medical advances, the ratio of wounded to killed, which was 3:1 in Vietnam,
is 7:1 in Iraq. Many soldiers who in previous wars would have died of severe
brain injury, loss of limbs or extensive third-degree burns have been “saved”
– not restored to health, but salvaged to live out the rest of their lives in pain
and discomfort.
Even more numerous are the psychological casualties. Apart from
those who serve in office jobs and rarely if ever leave the Green Zone (the
specially secured part of Baghdad where the U.S. embassy and military
headquarters are located), there can be few who return from Iraq free of
psychological trauma -- “post-traumatic stress disorder” as the psychiatrists
call it. (Over 100,000 are seeking treatment, but there must be many more
who do not seek treatment – and, indeed, it is doubtful whether any effective
treatment exists.)
Many veterans feel unbearable guilt for what they have done,
although it is those who sent them who are mainly responsible. So it is not
uncommon for a young soldier to return home “safe and sound” only to hang
himself the next day. Besides suicide, the veterans are prone to alcoholism
and depression, homicide and domestic violence.
And there are so many of these brutalized and traumatized veterans!
While “only” about 175,000 troops are deployed at any one time (currently
158,000 in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan), at least 1,400,000 soldiers have
fought at some time in one or both of these wars. The damage to the social
fabric is therefore enormous -- in the same way that the social fabric in
Russia, for instance, has been torn by its wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
And a new war against Iran is still on the cards. Nor can we exclude a
U.S. military intervention against pro-Taliban forces in northwestern
Pakistan.
May 2008

War in Georgia

The war in Georgia seems to be over.

How it began is still not clear. The first major military action was
Georgia’s bombardment of Tskhinval, but some claim that this was itself a
response to escalation in the low-intensity fighting in the villages of South
Ossetia that has been going on for many years. In any case, the Georgian
assault on South Ossetia gave Russia a golden opportunity to pursue its own
goals under cover of humanitarian intervention.
In general, both sides have excelled in hypocrisy. Russia as the
protector of small peoples – after Chechnya? The United States as the
champion of national sovereignty against foreign aggression – after Iraq?
And yet there are always people prepared to take such guff seriously, or
pretend to.
The context of the war needs to be understood at three levels:

Level 1. The struggle within Georgia for control over territory, waged
by ethnically based mini-states (Georgian, Abkhaz, Osset).

Level 2. The confrontation between Georgia and Russia.

Level 3. The renewed great power confrontation between Russia and

the West, especially between Russia and the U.S.

The West in its propaganda stresses Level 2, casting Russia as

aggressor and Georgia as victim while obscuring its own role. Russian
propaganda stresses Level 1, casting Georgians as aggressors and Abkhaz
and Ossets as victims, and also Level 3, casting the U.S. and its allies as
aggressors and Russia as their victim.
Only by focusing on Level 3 can we grasp what the war is really
about.
The rulers of great powers often regard the areas immediately beyond
their borders as their rightful “sphere of influence.” Thus, the U.S. calls
Central America and the Caribbean its “backyard,” while Russia refers to
other parts of the former USSR as its “near abroad.” They are especially
concerned to prevent military ties between outside powers and states in their
sphere of influence. Recall the outraged response of U.S. politicians when
the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.
After a period of weakness, Russia is now reclaiming great power
status and a sphere of influence. In the military field, the main goals are to
prevent Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO and block the deployment of
ABM systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. In addition, Russia will
not allow post-Soviet states to cooperate with the U.S. in any attack on Iran.
The Russian operation has succeeded in keeping Georgia out of
NATO for the foreseeable future: it has demonstrated the risks involved and
several of the existing European member states are unwilling to take those
risks. Another Russian goal – not yet achieved – is to oust Saakashvili, who
is rightly viewed as an American client. (The “rose revolution” that brought
him to power in 2003 was funded by the U.S. government, through such
agencies as the National Endowment for Democracy.)

* * *

It would be a mistake to interpret even the knee-jerk support of the

American media for Georgia as indicative of unequivocal support. The U.S.
and its allies (with Israel playing a major role) did create the conditions for
war by encouraging their client and by arming and training his forces.
However, it appears that Saakashvili started major hostilities on his own,
without seeking prior approval from Bush, who was enjoying the Olympics
at the time. This evidently caused some annoyance. The U.S. refused him
the practical support on which he was counting. Like many ambitious but
inexperienced politicians before him, he overplayed his hand.
We must bear in mind that the Western ruling class is deeply divided
concerning policy toward Russia. Certain forces, especially in the U.S., are
upset that Russia is no longer subservient to the West and regard it once
more as an adversary. Other forces have a more realistic view of the shifting
balance of world power, are wary of making too many enemies and fighting
too many wars at once, and want to maintain a more cooperative relationship
with Russia. These forces are particularly strong in West European countries
that are dependent on Russian gas.
The dominant view among our masters, fortunately, is that they have
no interests at stake in Georgia worth the risk of war with Russia. They have
only one really important economic interest in Georgia: the pipelines
connecting the Caspian oil and gas fields with Turkey’s Mediterranean coast
(Baku – Ceyhan), which pass through the south of the country. Significantly,
although Russia bombed many valuable assets in Georgia care was taken not
to bomb these pipelines. Perhaps secret assurances were given that the
pipelines would not be damaged.
The Russian rulers too have no really vital economic (as opposed to
strategic) interest in Georgia. Abkhazia has long been their favorite vacation
spot and still has considerable tourist potential. Western Georgia is a
traditional source of tea, tobacco, walnuts and citrus fruit.

* * *

Our hearts go out to the many thousands of ordinary working people

who have borne the brunt of suffering in this war, as they do in every war –
cowering terrified in basements as the shells burst above them, jumping to
their death from burning buildings, trudging along the roads tired, hungry
and thirsty in the summer heat.
And yet we also have to say something that must sound heartless in
the circumstances. The majority of these ordinary working people – of the
adults among them – share responsibility for their current plight. Because it
was they who demonstrated and voted for the politicians who ordered the
shelling and the bombing. And most of them, it appears, are still ready to
demonstrate and vote for the same politicians. Because they still believe that
the location of state borders matters more, infinitely more than their own
lives or the lives of their children. Because they still view as their enemy
ordinary working people who happen to be of different descent and speak a
different language. These delusions, for so long as they persist, guarantee
that this will not be the last war.

September 2008

Congo: the Mobile Phone War

Although the peace accord of 2003 ended five years of war in other parts of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fighting has continued intermittently
in the eastern Kivu region. The latest bout began on October 25, when the
rebel forces of Laurent Nkunda resumed their offensive, accompanied by the
usual atrocities against civilians, burning villages, and floods of starving
refugees.
What is this war about?
At first sight, it looks like spillover from the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in
neighbouring Rwanda. General Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi and Christian
fundamentalist, says he is protecting his people from the Interahamwe, the
Hutu militia that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and later fled
over the border. He is backed by troops of the current Tutsi government of
Rwanda, which the Interahamwe seeks to overthrow.
 This version is a smokescreen. Nkunda has shown much less interest
in pursuing the Interahamwe than in seizing control of Kivu’s rich mineral
resources – partly on behalf of Rwandan business interests, partly perhaps
for his own enrichment. He exploits the memory of genocide to mobilize the
Tutsis in his support and win foreign sympathy, much as Israel exploits the
memory of the Holocaust for its purposes. Control over resources is also the
main concern of the Congo government in Kinshasa and its armed forces.
The most valuable minerals in the Kivu region are two metallic ores
called cassiterite and coltan. These contain substances whose special
properties are ideally suited to various high-tech applications. Niobium
alloys are used in jet and rocket engines because they remain stable at very
high temperatures, while tantalum and tin oxide are used in making
electronic circuitry for devices ranging from computers to DVD players and
MRI scanners. In particular, the rapidly rising demand for mobile phones has
pushed up the price of coltan, fuelling the fight to control and mine its
deposits. So we could call the war in eastern Congo “the mobile phone war.”
On both sides, part of the proceeds from selling resources (through
chains of middlemen) on the world market goes to finance military
operations, which in turn secure access to the resources. This is an example
of the “war as business” model, which arises in this case from the weakness
of state institutions in Central Africa.

* * *

In the Congo it is especially difficult for the government to exercise

sovereignty over “its” territory, which is roughly the area of Western Europe
(2.34 million km2). The transportation and communications infrastructure is
extremely underdeveloped; no road or rail link traverses the whole country
from east to west. Under these conditions, it is quite impossible to defend
borders with nine neighbours that stretch over 10,744 km.
Neighbouring states can therefore invade Congo territory whenever
they like. No fewer than seven foreign armies fought in the “civil” war that
began in 1998. In the background, the old colonial powers – France,
Belgium and Britain – and two players newer to the region, the United
States and China, jockey for position, assiduously promoting the interests of
their corporations while carefully concealing how these corporations hire
private armies and fuel the conflict. All these governments, armies and
corporations are after the same things, the vast resources that lie on – and
especially under – Congolese soil: various metals, diamonds, uranium,
potash, timber, wildlife, oil and gas, etc.
Then there are the “peacekeeping” forces of the United Nations, even
though there is no peace to keep. The real reason for their deployment is, in
fact, to protect the interests of French and other foreign capital. It is this that
explains the apparently odd fact that most of the “peacekeepers” are kept
well away from the areas affected by the current fighting. Those who do
enter the combat zone make no effort to assist relief work or protect
civilians, who vent their anger by yelling and throwing stones at the UN
vehicles.
Torn apart by rival predators, there is a striking parallel between
today’s Congo and another “helpless giant” – China in the second half of the
nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.
In a different system of society, many resources in central Africa
could be utilized for the purpose of ecologically sustainable development for
the benefit of local communities. The natural products of the rainforest could
be preserved and harvested for dietary and medicinal use. There is a vast
potential for hydroelectricity and, of course, solar power.
But in a capitalist world Congo’s resources have been a curse not a
blessing for the overwhelming majority of its people, bringing them
invasion, enslavement, starvation, war and upheaval. European capital first
descended on the country in 1885 in the horrific form of the Congo Free
State, a corporate state controlled personally by King Leopold II of Belgium,
who made money from it by exporting rubber collected under compulsion by
the indigenous people. Those who failed to meet their quotas were
mutilated; those who refused to work for the conquerors were killed.
This reign of terror, which would have done the Nazis proud, led to a
population loss of some ten million (see Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s
Ghost). How many people must have wished that their country had no
rubber!
In 1908 the Congo Free State gave way to the Belgian Congo, which
gained formal independence in 1960. Mobutu’s kleptocracy followed in
1971 and lasted until 1997, when the recent period of upheaval began.
Regimes come and go, but the ravenous extraction of resources by foreign
corporations never stops.

January 2009

Opium wars, old and new

The phrase “opium wars” usually refers to the British military assaults of
1839-42 and 1856-60 that forced the Chinese emperor to allow British
merchants to sell his subjects opium. The opium was grown in India, where
the tax revenue from its sale maintained the colonial administration.
In 1839, imperial commissioner Lin Zexu wrote to Queen Victoria:
“By what right do the barbarians use the poisonous drug to injure the
Chinese people? Although they may not intend to do us harm, in coveting
profit to an extreme they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask,
where is your conscience?”
He never received an answer.
It was not only the Chinese who suffered at the hands of the profit-
coveting barbarians. They found it just as profitable to poison “their own
people.” Britain imported 200,000 pounds of opium from India in 1840. It
was consumed, quite legally, mostly mixed with alcohol in a flavoured
concoction called laudanum, as an all-purpose painkiller, tranquilliser and
sleeping potion. Society ladies used it to acquire the then-fashionable pallid
complexion associated with tuberculosis, while the neglected and
undernourished babies of the working class were dosed with it to keep them
quiet while their mothers toiled long hours in the mills.
Nowadays trading in opium is illegal. That, of course, does not
prevent its large-scale production, sale and consumption, mostly as heroin. It
merely raises prices and makes the business even more lucrative, though
some “drug lords” perhaps envy the respectability enjoyed by their Victorian
predecessors – and by pushers of currently legal poisons.

* * *

At present the global centre of opium production is Afghanistan

(accounting for 93% of opiates sold worldwide in 2007). To be more
precise, production is concentrated in three border zones of Afghanistan: in
the northeast, supplying the post-Soviet region through Tajikistan; in the
west, for export through Iran; and above all in the south, for export through
Pakistan. Sales within the country have also grown rapidly.
Afghanistan’s annual earnings from opium exports are estimated at $4
billion. This is some 15 times larger than earnings from all legal exports
combined (nuts, wool, cotton, carpets, etc.). Thus, opium has greater
dominance over the Afghan economy than oil, for instance, has over the
economies of most oil-exporting states. The farmers who grow the poppies
get about a quarter of the money, $1 billion. The rest goes to traffickers and
to the politicians, officials and military commanders who control the
territory and protect the traffic (where they do not organize it directly).
As we know, Afghanistan and adjoining areas of northwest Pakistan
are at war. This is Obama’s favourite war, so we can expect it to intensify.
On one side: the U.S. and NATO, their client regime under President Hamid
Karzai in Kabul, their allies in Pakistan’s governing elite. On the other side:
the Taliban and their Islamist allies in Pakistan. In between, fluctuating in
their allegiance (depending on who pays more): the local bosses or
“warlords.”
What is the relationship between the war and the opium trade?
First of all, the predominance of opium in the Afghan economy is
largely a product of prolonged warfare. The many years of war disrupted
long-established patterns of food production and distribution. Unlike food
crops, poppies do not require much tending and so are better suited to
unpredictable and chaotic conditions.
All players, except possibly the U.S. and NATO, are closely involved
in the opium trade. This applies equally to the Taliban, the warlords, and the
regimes in Kabul and Islamabad. One of the biggest traffickers, for example,
is Karzai’s brother. All, to varying degrees, are financially dependent on
opium. Pakistan receives U.S. aid and has other sources of revenue, but it
too depends on opium money: the trucks that carry supplies over the border
for NATO forces in Afghanistan return loaded with opium.
To a large extent opium funds the war. It pays for weapons and hires
fighters. And, in turn, the fighting is not only for control over territory, but
also and especially for the control over opium production and exports that
goes with territorial control. As in Congo, war is simultaneously a means
and an end in the struggle to control a valuable resource – metallic ores in
Congo, opium in Afghanistan. If Congo is a “mobile war”, then
Afghanistan, to some extent at least, is a new opium war.
The role of opium in U.S. policy regarding Afghanistan is more
difficult to assess. The illegal status of the trade prevents opium interests
from exerting open influence on the U.S. government, although secret
influence – through links between politicians, officials and illegal business
(“organized crime”) – may be significant. However, the U.S. market in
illegal drugs is supplied primarily from other parts of the Americas, not from
Afghanistan.
Officially, the U.S. government conducts a “counternarcotics
strategy” in Afghanistan. Farmers have been offered assistance in switching
from poppies to wheat. In practice, even if the intentions behind such
programs are genuine and even if they were to be adequately financed, the
conditions of war and the reliance of U.S. allies on opium money would still
militate against their success. It may be worth noting that the CIA, which
has traditionally been quite willing to cooperate with foreign drug interests
(for so long as they served its purposes) and even sell drugs itself to raise
additional funds, plays no part in anti-opium measures.

March 2009

War in Gaza: propaganda and realities

According to Israeli propaganda, it was the only way to stop rocket attacks
on Israel from Gaza. Some are sceptical about this version of events. The
truce negotiated with Hamas last June held for four months, they say, and
could probably have been maintained and extended were it not for Israel’s
military incursion on 4 November and its continuing siege of Gaza.
There is some evidence to suggest that the operation was a “war of
choice,” planned well in advance for the purpose of destroying Hamas in
Gaza. Israeli military historian Zeev Maoz has traced a long history of Israel
using provocative measures to trigger reactions in order to create a pretext
for military action (Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s
Security and Foreign Policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006).
In a previous article I drew the distinction between “resource wars”
that are fought directly for control over specific resources and “strategic
wars” that reflect a long-term power struggle between rival capitalist states.
To take recent examples, the “mobile phone war” in eastern Congo was a
resource war while the war in Georgia was a strategic war.
The factors underlying this war have to do both with resources and
with strategic rivalry. Israel and the Palestinian factions are manoeuvring for
control over offshore gas deposits. But there is also a strategic dimension
that cannot be understood adequately at the local level.
 Hamas is an integral part of the Islamist forces in the Moslem world.
It arose as an offshoot of Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood, which now poses
the main threat to the U.S.-oriented Mubarak regime. That is a big reason
why this regime, like Jordan and the Palestine Authority, more or less
openly support Israel’s assault on Hamas.
Hamas also depends heavily on support from Iran. Like Hezbollah in
Lebanon and Iran’s clients in Iraq, it serves as a vehicle of Iran’s effort to
establish itself as the leading power in the Middle East. This helps to explain
the strength of U.S. and European support for Israel in this war. So there is
some basis to Israel’s claim that it is fighting on behalf of an international
“anti-extremist” – that is, anti-Islamist and anti-Iran – coalition.
As always, the physical war is combined with a propaganda war. The
message is drummed into people that “we” have no choice but to defend
ourselves against an enemy bent on genocide. In the Western media the
word “terrorist” routinely precedes any reference to Hamas. Of course, both
sides are terrorist in the sense of targeting civilians. Israel uses terror on a
much larger scale than Hamas, though that is solely because it has much
greater military capacity.
In principle, either side could have avoided the war by submitting to
the other side’s political demands. It was a war of choice on both sides.
Hamas could probably have saved “their people” from the fury of the Israeli
war machine by ceding power in Gaza to the Palestine Authority. I make this
point not to diminish Israel’s direct responsibility for its atrocities, but rather
to highlight how little all the Palestinian as well as Israeli leaders really care
about ordinary people.

* * *
 In demonizing Hamas the pro-Israel propagandists face a little
problem. Earlier they themselves reluctantly granted Hamas a certain
legitimacy in connection with its victory in the January 2006 elections to the
Palestinian Legislative Council. Now they just say that Hamas seized power
in a coup and delete any mention of the elections. In fact, it was the U.S. that
insisted on the elections, perhaps not anticipating the outcome.
Capitalism as a system is inherently undemocratic, because it
concentrates real power in the hands of a small ruling and owning class. In
general, elections may be welcomed as introducing a small element of
democracy into this undemocratic system. People in Gaza, however, have
been subjected to starvation, bombing, and other forms of harsh punishment
in effect for having voted for candidates that the sponsors of the elections
did not want. Under the circumstances, these elections were a nasty trick that
had little to do with democracy.
It appears that Obama will make another attempt to revive the “peace
process,” which is supposed to lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
But unless he is willing to put Israel under very strong pressure to withdraw
from all the territory occupied in 1967, such a state will amount to little
more than a string of ghettoes or, to use the official term, “cantons”. A two-
state solution on these terms would have to be imposed by force, and it is
doubtful whether the Palestine Authority is up to the job.
Yet another failure of the “peace process” could strengthen the
growing trend in Palestinian opinion to accept the reality of Israel’s control
over the whole of what used to be Palestine and demand citizenship rights
within a single secular state. This would be equivalent to the ending of
apartheid in South Africa but would not solve the problems faced by the
majority of the population. Not that the emergence of such a secular state is
easy to envisage at present in view of the prevalence of ethnic-supremacist,
sectarian and even racist outlooks in both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian
society.

February 2009

Israel’s state piracy: warding off the threat of peace

The immediate purpose of Israel’s state piracy and mass kidnapping in the

Eastern Mediterranean is clear. The aim is to maintain the siege (“closure”)

of the Gaza Strip that was imposed in 2007 to induce the Gazans to

overthrow the Hamas administration they had just elected. Of course, the

political effect of the blockade, which caused enormous suffering (see MW,

July 2008), was just the opposite.

But there is an even more important aim – to reassert Israeli control

over Gaza’s borders, airspace and territorial waters. This control was not

relinquished when PM Ariel Sharon withdrew ground forces and settlers in

2005. Keeping Gaza and the West Bank isolated from direct contact with the

outside world is crucial to Israel’s claim to continued sovereignty over the

occupied territories and preventing the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian

state (or two such states).

Some sections of the Israeli ruling class are prepared to accept a peace

settlement based on the “two-state solution”. Peace would give Israeli

business unrestricted access to Arab export markets and cheap labour. The

present government, however, is a creature of interests tied to the occupation

– above all, the military-industrial complex and the settlers’ lobby. The

parties of the governing parliamentary coalition are either (like PM Bibi

Netanyahu’s Likud) loathe to contemplate a genuinely sovereign Palestinian

state or (like Jewish Home) committed to Greater Israel and thus opposed to

a Palestinian state in principle.

For these people, peace is a threat to be warded off at all costs. A

danger that peace might be imposed emerged when the United States, on

which Israel is now totally dependent, elected a president who believes that

American strategic interests at the regional and global level demand urgent

resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why so violent?

This may help explain a somewhat puzzling aspect of Israel’s

response to the Free Gaza flotilla. Why was it so violent?

The Israeli navy could have maintained the blockade and its control of

Gazan waters simply by blocking the path of the aid ships until they gave up

and went away. This method had worked well in the past. By massacring a

dozen or so activists and hurting and humiliating many more – including

influential individuals such as parliamentarians, former diplomats, and film

makers – Israel has created a PR disaster for itself. It has strained relations

with countries around the world and alienated its main regional ally, Turkey.

Part of the explanation may be that key members of the Israeli cabinet

are ex-generals accustomed to tackling political problems by military means

(defence minister Ehud Barak) or simply thugs (foreign minister and former

bouncer Avigdor Lieberman). They seem to have thought that a brutal

reaction would deter future attempts to break the siege.

There is another plausible motive. An atmosphere of heightened

confrontation, making progress toward a negotiated settlement impossible,

may have been exactly what the Israeli government sought to achieve. And

if Israel’s state terrorism provokes a new upsurge in Palestinian terrorism,

that will serve even better to thwart Obama and ward off the threat of peace.

Offshore gas
 There is another aspect to the issue of control over Gazan waters –

one that commentators usually overlook. In 1999, the Palestinian Authority

(PA) signed a 25-year agreement with British Gas and the Athens-based but

Lebanese-owned Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) to

explore for oil and gas off the Gazan coast. Two wells were drilled in 2000

and, sure enough, a major gas field was found, not very far from the spot

where the Free Gaza flotilla was attacked. (Some offshore oil was also

found.) Rights to the proceeds were assigned: 60% to British Gas, 30% to

CCC, and only 10% to the PA. Nevertheless, the discovery enhanced

prospects for an economically viable Palestinian state.

When Sharon became prime minister in 2001, he challenged

Palestinian sovereignty over the gas field and declared that Israel would

never buy gas from the PA. The consortium made plans to pump the gas to

Egypt instead. But all plans were scuppered in 2006 when Hamas replaced

the PA in Gaza. Israel then tried to take over the negotiations, but British

Gas decided to put the whole risky project on hold. Presumably both Israel

and the PA still hope that eventually the gas will be theirs.

What next?
 Israeli state piracy did not have the desired intimidating effect. More

attempts to run the blockade followed. Iran and Turkey have offered naval

escorts for future flotillas. Conceivably this will broaden the war, though it

is more likely that the US will force Israel to abandon the siege. This is

likely to trigger the collapse of the current Israeli government and greatly

increase the chances of a peace settlement under its successor.

A settlement will not eliminate capitalist rivalry over resources and

zones of control. The seeds of future war will remain. Yet as socialists we

will welcome even a fragile peace that temporarily halts the horrors of

occupation and terror.

That is partly because we sympathize with the suffering of our fellow

workers, whatever their ethnic origin. It is always they who suffer the brunt

of their masters’ wars.

It is also because war provides an ideal opportunity and excuse to

suppress democratic rights on both sides. Peace will create better conditions

for democracy. No longer obsessed with ethnic conflict, “Jews” and

“Palestinians” will refocus on the social, economic and ecological problems

spawned by the “normal” peacetime functioning of capitalism. A space for

socialist ideas will open up in this corner of our world.

 July 2010

Ten good reasons why we are fighting in Afghanistan

1. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are loyal Americans. We have

unquestioning trust in the wisdom of our leaders.

2. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are devoted to the principles

of free trade and free enterprise. That is why we want to protect the heroin
export business of President Karzai’s brother and other Afghan warlords
against interference and unfair competition by the Taliban.

3. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to secure the route for a

pipeline to pump vast quantities of natural gas from Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.

4. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we need stability there. We need

stability to prevent the disruption of free enterprise (especially for the sake
of Reason 3). Previously we backed the Taliban as a force for stability. Now
we back the warlords as a force for stability. They too need stability (see
Reason 2). Stability is something you can never have too much of.
5. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we hope that we’ll be lucky
enough to survive unmaimed and then perhaps the army will pay for our
college education and then perhaps we’ll find one of the few well-paid jobs
that still exist by then.

6. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to be fair to our generals

and give them a chance to get it right this time and overcome the trauma of
their failure in Vietnam (the poor guys).

7. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to stimulate the

American economy by expanding the market for U.S. arms manufacturers.

8. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to capture Osama bin

Laden, who is no longer in the country.

9. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to show the world that

we are no worse than the British and Russians, who fought in Afghanistan
before us.

10. We are fighting in Afghanistan because President Obama is a

transformative and restorative national leader and we do not want to
undermine his position.
 Section 7

NON-MILITARY
GLOBAL THREATS

The articles in this section are about two of the major non-
military threats that our planet and species face – global
warming and trans-species pathogens. I realise that both of
these problems merit much more extensive analysis.

Global warming:
is it (or will it soon be) too late?

On 28 February, a sizeable chunk (400 sq. km.) of the Antarctic ice sheet
toppled into the sea. This was just the latest sign that the planet is heating up
more rapidly than the quasi-official forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) have led us to expect.
 Why does reality outpace prediction?
For one thing, scientists are trained to be cautious. Most are reluctant
to “speculate” – meaning to think a possibility through to its logical end
result. They are especially reticent when addressing a broad public. Those
who occupy positions in or close to government are under pressure to avoid
“alarmism” and be “politically realistic.” To preserve a modicum of
influence on the ruling class they must maintain an impression of
respectable complacency.
It is, of course, extremely difficult to form an adequate understanding
of such a complex interactive system as the global climate. Scientists rely on
computerised forecasting models to simulate such systems. But such models
can only incorporate factors that are already well understood and not subject
to excessive uncertainty. There is an inevitable lag, often a lengthy one,
between the discovery of a new danger or feedback mechanism and its
adequate representation in the models.
For instance, the usual prediction for rise in sea level by 2100 is a
little under one metre. We can cope with that, surely! But the only factor that
it takes into account is thermal expansion, which is fairly easy to calculate.
The big rise that will inundate coastal cities and vast lowland areas is that
which will follow collapse of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, but no one
knows when it will occur.
Standard mathematical models are designed to analyse continuous,
relatively gradual change. The greatest dangers, however, are posed by
abrupt changes that give further sudden impetus to climate change. The
collapse of ice sheets is one example. Another likely near-term event of this
kind is a conflagration, sparked by increasingly hot and dry summertime
conditions, that destroys much or even most of the remaining Amazonian
rainforest, turning an important carbon sink into yet another carbon emitter.
Probably less imminent but even more terrifying is the prospect of the
release into the atmosphere of massive amounts of methane as a result of the
breakdown of frozen gas-ice compounds in the permafrost as it melts and on
the ocean floor as it warms up. Methane is by far the most powerful of the
greenhouse gases. It is also poisonous to life, at least as we know it.
These dangers explain why some scientists fear that global warming
may reach a “tipping point” beyond which it will become irreversible – that
is, beyond all hope of effective human counteraction. Within a few
generations, “runaway” climate change would then generate extreme
conditions that human beings will be unable to withstand.
This fear is fuelled by our knowledge of the geological record, which
contains abundant evidence of past climatic disasters in which numerous
species became extinct. It seems that when the biosphere of our planet is
jolted out of its not very stable equilibrium – whether by collision with a
meteorite or asteroid, by a supervolcanic eruption or by the insanity of
capitalist production and consumption – it is susceptible to catastrophic
climatic upheaval.

* * *

Environmentalists often warn that unless adequate action to arrest

global warming is taken within a clearly specified and relatively short period
it will be “too late.” Some socialists say the same thing, with the important
proviso that “adequate action” must mean, above all, the establishment of
world socialism. The urgency of the warning, it is hoped, will rouse people
from lethargy to frenetic activism, though I suspect it is more likely to
reduce them to despair.
These warnings have been repeated for quite a few years now, so it is
natural that they should escalate. First, the time horizon shortens – from 15 –
20 years to ten or even five. Then the idea surfaces that time must surely
have run out by now. Is it not already too late?
In my opinion, the current state of scientific knowledge does not
permit us to make categorical declarations of this sort. We cannot exclude
the possibility that it will soon be, or already is, too late. Capitalism may
have set in motion processes – perhaps processes that we do not yet even
clearly perceive, let alone understand – on which no human ingenuity will
have a significant effect. But nor can we exclude the possibility that it is not
too late, that even 30, 40 or 50 years from now it will not be too late.
Discussions of runaway climate change rarely take into proper
consideration the potential of cosmic engineering projects such as giant
space mirrors to divert the sun’s rays. Although these projects may entail
risks of their own, the longer the transition to world socialism is delayed the
more urgently the space agency of socialist society is likely to pursue them.
For all the uncertainties, we can be certain that if we still have a
chance of survival, it depends on the establishment of world socialism. If
capitalism continues indefinitely, sooner or later we are doomed.
So the sooner we establish socialism the better -- but perhaps better
late than never.
The climatic and environmental threat to human survival will come to
occupy central place among the concerns that inspire people to work for
socialism, overshadowing all else.

May 2009
Mystery of the pig/bird/human flu virus

“Swine flu” is really a misleading term for the current pandemic, inasmuch
as no single species serves as host of preference for the new virus. It does
not need to mutate as it jumps from pig to human and back again. This is a
fully trans-species disease.
According to the findings of Canada’s National Microbiology Lab, the
genome of the new virus is a strange composite of eight segments from four
old viruses, associated with two distinct varieties of swine flu (North
American and Eurasian), a North American avian flu and a human flu (the
H3N2 strain last seen in 1993). New Scientist calls it “an unusually
mongrelised mix of genetic sequences.”
It is widely assumed that the virus evolved in a pig. Suspicion has
come to rest on a huge fly-infested lake of pig shit on the site of a pig factory
– calling these places “farms” creates quite the wrong impression – in the
central Mexican province of Veracruz. The pig factory (one of 16 in the
province) is owned by Granjas Carroll, which is itself half-owned by the
U.S. pork and beef conglomerate, Smithfield Farms. The idea that this
particular factory is the source of the outbreak is based on the fact that a
young boy living nearby is the earliest known case of infection with the
virus.
This explanation is certainly plausible. Pigs are susceptible to most if
not all of the main virus families, so different kinds of virus can easily
accumulate inside the cells of their tissues and exchange genetic material.
Pigs are therefore ideal incubators for the evolution and spead of viruses,
especially when their immune systems are weakened by being crammed
together in the filthy pens provided by profit-seeking agribusiness. Over the
years, many experts have predicted that the outcome would be pandemics of
new diseases.
Nevertheless, the evidence for this version seems far from conclusive.
There may well be earlier cases elsewhere that have not been traced.
Smithfield systematically obstructs all investigation into its operations, but
that proves nothing: no doubt there are many things that they want to hide.
So other possibilities cannot be ruled out. It is unwarranted to assume
that the virus must have originated in Mexico because conditions there are
more unhygienic than in the U.S. The pig factories in Veracruz and those in
North Carolina are owned by the same firms and run in the same way.
According to Online Journal, a “top UN scientist” believes that the
virus was released, accidentally or deliberately, from a biological weapons
lab, inasmuch as certain features of its highly unusual structure are
suggestive of genetic engineering. A possible source is the U.S. Army
Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. It was
from here, for instance, that someone spread anthrax germs in 2001.

* * *

When the pandemic first hit the headlines, scientists did not yet even
understand the nature of the new virus and it was impossible to assess the
severity of the danger. That did not deter some politicians and officials from
reassuring the public and others from voicing the most alarming predictions.
To a large extent, the mixed responses can be explained in terms of
divergent commercial and other interests. The reassurance is designed to
avert panic and unrest, safeguard sales and exports of U.S. and Mexican
pork, protect the tourist industry and maintain business confidence. The
alarmism serves the interests, above all, of the big pharmaceutical
companies that produce anti-flu drugs and vaccines.
Mass vaccination is not always an effective measure against
pathogens susceptible to rapid mutation. Moreover, the vaccine itself may be
contaminated with viruses. Thus, last December a lab of Baxter International
in Austria distributed vaccines contaminated with live avian flu virus to 18
countries. The same company has now been commissioned by the World
Health Organization to develop an experimental vaccine for the new flu.
Whatever the outcome of the current pandemic, it is safe to say that it
will not be the last. On the one hand, meat factories and biological weapons
labs continue to generate new pathogens. On the other hand, these pathogens
are increasingly drug-resistant due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics
and other malpractices. It is only a matter of time before we find ourselves
helpless in face of some new and much more fatal trans-species virus or
bacterium.

* * *

Eliminating the profit motive will remove the major obstacle to the
prevention of trans-species pandemics. Those responsible for food
production will be able to give proper weight to environmental and public
health considerations.
However, this may not suffice if socialist society were to commit
itself to providing a meat-rich diet for most of the population. (Some people,
of course, will not want such a diet.) Disease control may well require the
abandonment of animal factories and a return to a more traditional type of
farming. This is likely to reduce the supply of meat, although it will also
enhance its taste and nutritional value.
Besides change in patterns of production and consumption, a shift
away from reliance on air travel would help slow down the spread of new
diseases and allow more time for research and countermeasures. (It would
also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.) Work schedules might be
coordinated in such a way as to give people the time they need to use and
enjoy slower means of travel, interspersed as desired with participation in
the life of local communities, including farming.

June 2009

Section 8
 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

The articles in this section share a long historical

perspective. The first article reconsiders the transition from
the hunting and gathering way of life to agriculture-based
“civilization.” The second article reflects on how the political
expression of class rule has changed with the advance of
democracy. The third article analyzes the relationship
between class society and religion.

Driven from Eden:

was the Neolithic Revolution entirely a good thing?

Some 10,000 years ago – quite recently in the four million years of human
evolution – communities began to rely less on hunting, fishing, and foraging
for food and settled down to plant crops and rear livestock. This change,
known as the Neolithic (New Stone Age) Revolution, opened the way to
landed property, city life, patriarchy, slavery, imperial conquest, and all the
other delights of "civilization" – that is, class society. It has generally been
seen as a great step forward for humanity. This was the view was taken
Marx, who believed that the development of class society would eventually
lead to a return to communal life at a higher technological level.
And yet we inherit a myth that mourns the pre-Neolithic life as a
paradise lost. The Bible tells us that God drove Adam from the Garden of
Eden to till the accursed ground ("it shall bring forth thorns and thistles for
you") and eat bread in the sweat of his face. As for Eve, she was to bear
children in sorrow and be ruled over by her husband (Genesis 3: 17--19, 23).
If only they had played their cards right!
So what was life really like for our prehistoric ancestors? There are
two kinds of evidence. We can learn quite a lot about the material aspects of
their existence –what they ate, what tools they used, how often they moved
camp, how healthy they were – from the archeological record, although its
interpretation is sometimes open to dispute. We can also use information
collected in modern times about people still living by hunting and gathering,
such as Australian aborigines and South African bushmen, making due
allowance for change in environmental conditions. Thus, many
contemporary Stone Age groups have been pushed out into "marginal" semi-
desert environments. In prehistoric times people lived under a wide range of
natural conditions, often much more favorable to human life than the
Kalahari or the Australian outback.
Even in these marginal environments, however, surviving hunters
and gatherers live quite an easy life, working on average just two to four
hours a day. Many daylight hours are spent socializing, dancing or napping.
(See Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Tavistock Publications, 1974.)
Their diet is adequate in quantity, varied, and nutritious. For instance, the
Kalahari bushmen eat over a hundred varieties of plant, including fruits,
berries, nuts, gums, roots and bulbs, leafy greens, beans, and melons.
Archeological evidence suggests that our Stone Age ancestors were also
generally well fed and healthy. Late Paleolithic skeletons from Greece and
Turkey show an average height of 5' 9" for men and 5' 5" for women, as
compared to 5' 3" and 5' 0" for skeletons from a later agricultural period
(3,000 BCE).
At least until very recently, agriculture involved much more work
than hunting and gathering. Moreover, as God warned Adam, it was more
exhausting work than the activities it replaced. Farmers have typically
depended heavily on one or two species of grain or tuber (wheat, maize, rice,
potatoes). If the crop failed they starved: recall the potato blight that caused
the great Irish famine. As well as being less reliable, their food supply was
poorer in nutritional quality, with more carbohydrates and less protein and
vitamins.
Farming was also bad for people's health. Dense settlement
facilitated the transmission of disease and made it more difficult to dispose
of human waste away from the living area. The clearing of woodland for
habitation and cultivation created attractive habitats for mosquitoes.
Why then did our ancestors give up their customary way of life and
switch to agriculture? Mark Nathan Cohen (The Food Crisis in Prehistory,
Yale University Press, 1977) argues that for a long time they knew how to
plant, weed, and even irrigate crops, and, like many Amazonian groups
today, did so selectively on a small scale. Not only did they hunt, fish and
forage; they gardened too. But they chose not to farm until forced to do so
by the gradually rising pressure of population on resources. For all its
disadvantages, agriculture can yield more food per unit area, thereby
supporting a denser population.
Who would voluntarily exchange the excitement of the hunt and
easygoing companionship of the foraging expedition, let alone the creative
experimentation of rainforest gardening, for the monotonous, backbreaking
toil of tilling the soil?
The prehistoric development of gardening skills demonstrates that
technological progress did occur in "primitive" communities and, moreover,
that it tended to take more ecologically sustainable forms than it has in class
society. Thus the transition to agriculture did not mark the beginning of
technological progress.
The Neolithic Revolution may have been socially regressive in yet
another sense. Contemporary Stone Age groups are culturally open.
Intermarriage is common across the boundaries not only of local bands but
also of broader speech communities. Among bushmen, "individuals are free
to move from group to group, partake of local resources, and participate in
whatever cooperative social efforts occur wherever they are" (Cohen, p. 62).
The same will apply, we hope, in a future socialist society. In the view of
many though not all prehistorians, the wide geographical distribution of
identical sets of tools (e.g., the Acheulian tool complex) indicates a similar
cultural openness in the Stone Age. Only in the period immediately
preceding the shift to agriculture did Stone Age society fracture into closed
"tribal" groups.
It is not my argument that the Neolithic Revolution and the class
societies that emerged from it have been socially regressive in all respects.
Their cultural, scientific and technological achievements cannot be denied.
But as we contemplate the last few millennia, full of suffering, futility, and
moral and ecological degradation, we may well wonder whether the losses
outweigh the gains.
 December 2006

Camouflaging class rule

The story goes like this. Everyone is basically equal. There is no ruling class
as we are all citizens in a “democracy.” We live not in capitalism (that
outmoded concept) but in a classless “market economy” where we are all
consumers, taxpayers and investors (if only through our pension schemes).
In some countries the camouflage is taken one step further: the social system
is officially defined to be not just democratic but actually socialist. Those
who insist on pointing out the reality behind the camouflage are labelled
“extremists,” denied access to the mass media and banished from respectable
society.
This camouflage is so familiar to us that it is easy to assume it has
always existed. In fact, it is quite a recent development in historical terms.
Pre-industrial ruling classes never thought of pretending that they did not
exist. On the contrary, they glorified or even deified themselves as
intrinsically superior beings. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who for many
centuries was considered the fount of all wisdom, wrote that some people are
slaves and others masters in accordance with their natures. Feudal law
highlighted class by specifying in detail the dress appropriate to each class
and making it illegal for people to wear clothes inappropriate to their station
in life.
The situation started to change when the thinkers of the
Enlightenment (such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) questioned
the doctrine of natural inequality as well as other received ideas. In 1789
revolutionaries overthrew the French monarchy and aristocracy in the name
of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. But some of
them (Babeuf and his followers), disappointed that the revolution had failed
to achieve these ideals, wanted to go further and strike at the roots of
property itself. For the first time a ruling class felt the need for some
camouflage.
In Britain, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was
accompanied by less political upheaval, so the need for concealment was not
felt until later. Democracy was condemned as a dangerous extremist notion,
while the class structure continued to be sanctified by religion and custom.
Nineteenth-century economists like Ricardo and Adam Smith talked openly
about the division of society into classes. They were closer in this respect to
Marx than to their twentieth-century successors. Perhaps you also recall a
verse from the old hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,
He made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

British ruling class attitudes started to shift later in the nineteenth

century, in response to the grassroots movement of the working class
Chartists for universal male suffrage. The capitalists began to wonder
whether they had exaggerated the threat inherent in political democracy.
Perhaps it would not endanger class privilege all that much, provided that at
the same time they made greater efforts to indoctrinate the workers. That is
why the 1867 Reform Act, which first extended the franchise to part of the
working class (male householders), was followed by the 1870 Education
Act, which first made provision for general elementary education. “We must
educate our masters,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Lowe cynically
remarked.
By the early twentieth century the ideological transformation was
complete. Capitalist society could now be defined as “democracy” and its
demands imposed in the name of democracy, as when U.S. president
Woodrow Wilson christened World War One “a war to make the world safe
for democracy.” The class structure was henceforth to be camouflaged rather
than openly justified. It was also about this time that there appeared new
economic theories – in particular, the marginalist school – in which class
was no longer a central concept.
With the rise of the so-called “communist” regimes in Russia and
elsewhere, a similar fate befell the word “socialism.” The new class system
in these countries was defined as “socialism,” just as the old class system in
the West was defined as “democracy.” But the essence of the matter was the
same: in both cases, in mainstream or official discourse the real class
structure of the society simply did not exist. In the countries under
Communist Party rule, just to say that there was a ruling class was grounds
for condemnation as a “Trotskyite” or “counterrevolutionary.”
The camouflaging of class rule generates endless hypocrisy, and
hypocrisy is not one of the more appealing character traits. But as the poet
Matthew Arnold remarked, “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
The prevalence of hypocrisy is a sign that it is no longer possible openly to
justify certain evils, showing that there has after all been some progress in
human thinking. Class society is now on the defensive, and there is no way
to defend the indefensible.

June 2007

The trouble with gods

Gods do exist, in a certain sense (I use the word “gods” as a gender-neutral

term that includes goddesses). Humans create them in their own image,
though without being aware of doing so. The fact that gods are male or
female in itself strongly suggests that they are creatures of the human
imagination. But they infest the mind as powerful, capricious and mysterious
beings who demand endless worship and praise, reverence and obedience,
devotion and propitiatory sacrifice. The gods in the head of the believer
thwart the development of confidence, self-respect, rational enquiry and
independent judgment.
In this way the idea of domination and submission is imprinted in the
psyche as a model for relationships between beings. That model is then
readily applied to social relationships – to the relationship between man and
woman, master and slave, and so on. The Moroccan scholar Fatna A. Sabbah
has shown how this works in the case of Islam in her brilliant
(pseudonymous) study Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (Pergamon Press,
1984), but her analysis applies equally well to the psychology of “God-
fearing” Jews and Christians.
The imaginary world of the divine, in turn, draws its inspiration from
the real world of human power structures. God is “king of the universe”, the
archangels and angels are his ministers and officials, and the devil has the
job of running the Gulag.
My argument is that it is above all these psychological effects, and not
specific religious dogmas and practices, which make god worship a bulwark
of class society. That, surely, from the socialist point of view is the main
trouble with gods.
It may be objected that some religious beliefs do not seem compatible
with the division of society into classes. An obvious example is the idea that
“we are all equal in the eyes of God.” Beliefs of this kind have, indeed,
inspired peasant uprisings. “When Adam dwelled and Eve span, who was
then the gentleman?” asked John Ball in the fourteenth century.
This objection is not completely groundless. Submission to gods does
not always and automatically translate into submission to human masters.
But surveying the broad sweep of history, I still think that accepting divine
authority tends to predispose people to accept human authority as well.
Another possible objection is that belief in gods predates class society.
Primitive people already feared gods who embodied the uncontrollable
forces of nature. People were in thrall to gods before they were in thrall to
other people. And yet this made them especially vulnerable to oppression
and exploitation when other conditions were in place for the transition from
primitive communism to class society.
Many of the earliest rulers made the most direct use of their subjects’
belief in gods by demanding that they themselves be worshipped as gods
(the Roman emperors, for instance) or – more often – as descendants or
earthly manifestations of gods. Egyptian pharaohs claimed descent from the
creator sun-god Atum or Re. The Inca was descended from the sun god Inti,
while the Aztec king represented the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli (Bruce Trigger,
Understanding Early Civilizations). The Shinto belief that the Japanese
emperor was descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu held sway right up
to 1946, when Hirohito renounced divine status.
Some religions directly supported the class structure by sanctifying
the entire ruling class. The best-known case is the sanctification of the
priestly Brahmin caste in Hinduism, although the Indian caste system no
longer corresponds very closely to the class structure. Judaism also has its
“pure” priestly caste – the cohanim, who trace descent from Moses’ brother
Aaron.
By and large, however, the mechanisms through which religion
supports class society (capitalism) are nowadays indirect. It is still risky to
challenge the powers that be, but — except in a few countries like Iran — it
no longer counts as sacrilege. The image of God has even started to mutate
from that of the irate patriarch to that of the “sympathetic” social worker.
And yet in large parts of the world religion still occupies a very
important place in people’s hearts and minds. Those fortunate enough to live
in relatively secularized societies should not underestimate its global power.
The gods remain mighty foes of their deluded human creators.

January 2008

The fall of “communism”: why so peaceful?

In late 1989 and early 1990, in the space of a few months, the “communist”
regimes in a string of East European countries fell from power. They were
soon followed by the “Soviet” regime in Russia itself, which collapsed in the
wake of a failed coup in August 1991.
Almost everywhere the change occurred more or less peacefully. This
seemed especially remarkable in light of the history of these regimes, which
in the past had made ruthless use of violence to suppress opposition. In
Russia three anti-coup protestors were killed while trying to halt and disable
a tank. There was one major case of violent transition -- Romania, where
Ceausescu’s dictatorship was overthrown in December 1989 at the cost of
about 1,100 dead and several thousand wounded.
In Poland and Hungary, the ruling parties had already agreed to give
up their power monopoly in 1988, when they entered negotiations with
opposition forces to plan the details of the transition. In East Germany,
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, they were not quite so willing to give way, but
nor were they willing to do what was necessary to retain power – that is,
crush the rising wave of popular protest by force.

A lack of will

The crucial immediate cause of the demise of the “communist”

regimes was the fact that – except in Romania – they did not even make a
serious attempt at violent suppression of opposition forces. They lacked the
will to do so.
Consider, for instance, what happened at the Berlin Wall on
November 9, 1989. In response to a confusing announcement that the
regulations for through passage were to be relaxed, a crowd gathered and
started pushing their way past the guards. The guards, heavily outnumbered,
frantically telephoned various officials to ask whether they should use their
firearms, but no one was willing to give them instructions. So they did
nothing.
Even the coup plotters in Russia never gave the troops under their
command orders to shoot into the crowds that were blocking their way. They
too were reluctant to shed large amounts of blood, and that may well have
been their undoing.
Why were all these “communist” bosses so deficient in ruthlessness?
In a few cases, including that of Gorbachev, humanitarian scruples or
squeamishness seem to have played a part. This is a less plausible
explanation for the inaction of the East German leaders, who made plans for
a bloody crackdown – for instance, preparing hospitals to receive large
numbers of patients with gunshot wounds – but never carried them out.
The main factor for most officials was probably a loss of confidence
in the future of the state-capitalist system over which they presided. And
accepting the inevitable was greatly eased for many of them by the
expectation of doing no less well for themselves under private capitalism.

Nomenklatura capitalism

Historically, whether the transition from one type of class society to

another is predominantly violent or peaceful has always depended on the
ability of members of the old ruling class to adapt themselves to the new
socio-economic relations and merge smoothly into the new ruling class. In
the transition from feudalism to capitalism, for instance, the British
aristocrats merged into the rising capitalist class, while their French
counterparts had to be overthrown in a violent upheaval.
In most cases, the transition from state to private capitalism has been
closer to the “British” model. Many (though by no means all) “communist”
bureaucrats, both in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, welcomed the
privatisation of capital because they saw the opportunity to exploit their
official positions to establish themselves as private capitalists.
This applied especially to top managers in the state ministries in
charge of potentially lucrative industries like oil and gas, which could be –
and were – reorganised as private (or mixed state-private) capitalist
corporations. Lower-level managers and specialists were able to siphon off
resources for private businesses now legalised under the guise of
“cooperatives.” Quite a few Communist Youth League officials also found
ways to set up in business.
Far from all the “new” private capitalists were former members of the
party-state “nomenklatura” (bureaucracy). In particular, quite a few emerged
from the criminal underworld. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of
“nomenklatura capitalism” was widespread enough to disillusion many
activists of the “anti-communist” revolution, who concluded that there had
been no real “revolution” at all.

Between Moscow and Brussels

In the East European countries another factor was at work. For sudden
and unexpected as the “velvet revolutions” may have appeared at the time,
the conditions that made them possible had developed gradually over the
previous decade or so.
Above all, Eastern Europe was no longer strictly within the sphere of
Soviet influence. Soviet troops were being withdrawn from the region. The
“Brezhnev doctrine”, which had justified military intervention in
Czechoslovakia in 1968, was dead. Hard-line East European leaders could
no longer count on economic or military backing from Moscow: Gorbachev
had made that clear to them. Lacking confidence in their own strength and
accustomed to dependence on the Kremlin, they were not likely to act
decisively on their own.
Moreover, a number of the East European countries (especially
Poland) were deeply in debt – to the tune of over $100 billion – to Western
creditors, making them vulnerable to Western pressure. Their economic ties
were increasingly with Western Europe rather than with the Soviet Union or
one another. Close economic ties had developed between East and West
Germany. Hungary was already seeking to join the EEC.
Thus, in terms of great power alignments, Eastern Europe in 1989 was
a “grey zone” between Moscow and Brussels, in the middle of a process of
reorientation from east to west. At some point this external shift was likely
to trigger a corresponding internal change from state to private capitalism.
Awareness of this reality weakened the resolve of “communist” leaders to
struggle against the tide.

The counter-example of Romania

It is helpful to compare the cases of peaceful transition with the clear

counter-example of Romania. Here the army, police and special security
forces (Securitate) were ordered to disperse protesting crowds by force – and
did so. As the popular rising escalated, however, the defence minister
decided at a certain point to thwart Ceausescu’s orders and back his rival
Iliescu. This split the army and security forces into opposing factions, which
then fought one another until the capture, “trial” and execution of Ceausescu
finally decided the issue.
In contrast to the collective leaderships of the other East European
regimes, Ceausescu exercised a strict personal dictatorship. Thus, the views
of a broader power elite, many of whom might have accepted the transition
to private capitalism, carried little weight. And Ceausescu himself was
certainly not lacking in self-confidence or ruthlessness.
Moreover, he was largely independent of outside powers. He had
broken Romania’s ties of dependence on the Soviet Union long before. Nor
was he vulnerable to Western pressure: although he accepted loans from the
West in the 1970s, he repaid them in full in the 1980s by exporting
consumer goods (thereby exacerbating domestic shortages and discontent).

Would orders have been obeyed?

I have argued that the “post-communist” transition was peaceful

(except in Romania) because leaders did not try to retain power by force.
But would they have succeeded had they tried? Would their orders have
been obeyed?
It is impossible to be sure, but I think the answer is probably -- yes, on
the whole. Even a highly unpopular regime – and few can have been so
deeply hated as Ceausescu’s – can crush an unarmed (or even lightly armed)
populace so long as it has at its disposal disciplined armed forces equipped
with modern weaponry. This is confirmed by recent experience in Iran and
Honduras. As we have seen, the guards at the Berlin Wall were prepared to
use their firearms if ordered to do so.
The likely outcome is harder to predict in the case of Russia during
the attempted coup of August 1991. Soldiers and commanders were unsure
what to do, but that was because with the president (Gorbachev) removed
from the picture it was difficult to tell who constituted the legitimate
authority – the plotters’ emergency committee, Yeltsin, or perhaps neither?
(This created the possibility of civil war, as in Romania.) However, the duty
to obey orders that clearly did come from a legitimate authority was never in
question.

Implications for the transition to socialism

What implications does this have for the transition to socialism?

We might hope that when conditions are ripe the capitalist class will
cede power as readily as the “communist” regimes did in most of Eastern
Europe. If so, all the better. But there is reason to suspect that it might not
happen that way.
In some respects, the transition from capitalism to socialism may be
more difficult than past transitions from one type of class society to another.
Members of the ruling class in one class society, be they British aristocrats
or Russian bureaucrats, may accept the transition to a different class society
in the expectation of being able to convert their privileges into a new form,
but they can hardly hope to retain privileged status in a classless society.
In the World Socialist Movement, we consider it essential to aim at a
peaceful transition to socialism. This is not only because we shrink from the
prospect of bloodshed, though there is no shame in that. Above all, we
reckon that in any violent confrontation with the capitalist state the working
class faces the near-certainty of defeat and massacre – and the odds grow
steadily worse as military technology advances.
It is unrealistic to count on most or all of the soldiers defecting to the
side of the revolution. Special precautions will surely be taken to insulate the
armed forces from the contagion of socialist ideas and bolster their discipline
– that is, their readiness to obey orders.
Under these circumstances, it is a foolhardy and dangerous
anachronism to conceive of the socialist revolution in terms of a popular
uprising. Of course, a popular movement is essential, but that movement
must constitute itself as the legitimate authority in society through the
democratic capture of the state. Even then it is conceivable that some people
will try to take violent action against the socialist majority, but it will be
much easier to thwart such people – if necessary, by using the armed forces
against them.

Section 9

THINKING ABOUT SOCIALISM

The articles in this section discuss the meaning of socialism.
The first article considers what “socialism” means to
President Evo Morales of Bolivia. The next two articles focus
on a couple of literary utopias and their creators: Thomas
More in early sixteenth-century England and Alexander
Bogdanov in early twentieth-century Russia. Both utopias
reveal the tension between democratic and authoritarian
strands within the “socialist” (or “communist”) tradition.

The final article is a contibution to debate among world

socialists. World socialism is often described as a society of
abundance and free access to goods, made possible by
eliminating the waste inherent in capitalism and by making
full use of the potential of science and technology. I ask
whether there may in fact be limits to abundance and free
access.

Evo Morales: a call for socialism?

On 21 April, 2008, President Evo Morales of Bolivia delivered the opening

address to the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous
Issues in New York. His speech included the following passage:

If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a
duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the
capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and
justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put
an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural
resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials,
to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive
consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist
system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the
trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the
damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.

Despite the striking anti-capitalist content of most of this passage, the

last sentence reveals that Morales does not have a clear conception of the
socialist alternative. He still thinks in terms of the money system. The
accurate way of posing the problem focuses not on the waste of money but
on the waste of real resources of all kinds – the waste of nature and its
bounty, of human life and labour, of knowledge and its potential. True,
money represents or symbolizes some – far from all -- of these real
resources, but in a very inadequate and distorted manner. To substitute the
symbol for the reality is a mystification.
Nevertheless, I would like to argue that Morales is a good deal closer
to a true understanding of socialism than most of the so-called “left” in Latin
America or elsewhere. The very fact that he is addressing a world forum
about the future of the species and the planet suggests that he is seeking an
alternative at the global rather than national level. Although nationalization
forms part of his domestic policy (the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was
nationalized in 2006), he does not equate nationalization with socialism.
 In a number of interviews Morales has been asked what he and his
movement – the Movement for Socialism (MAS) – understand by socialism.
Thus, Heinz Dieterich of Monthly Review (July 2006) asks him what
country the socioeconomic model of the MAS most closely resembles.
Brazil? Cuba? Venezuela? Morales does not like the way the question is put.
(“[Socialism] is something much deeper. … It is to live in community and
equality.”) He talks instead about the traditional peasant commune or ayllu
of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, based on communal landholding and
“respect for Mother Earth.” He himself grew up in an ayllu of the Aymara
people in Oruro Province; in some parts of Bolivia such communities still
exist.
In another interview, to journalists from Spiegel, Morales says:
“There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal
property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to
the community. This way of life is more equitable.” As The World Socialist
Review, published by our companion party in the United States, comments:
“This is more than just a variation on the leftist cop-out that socialism is a
goal for the distant future; it is, on some level, an acceptance of it as a real
alternative to capitalism” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/2781501/World-
Socialist-Review-US-Latin-America)
Another indication that Morales is closer than most of the “left” to a
genuine understanding of socialism is his opposition to the Bolshevik idea of
the “vanguard party.” The MAS, he tells Dieterich, “was not created by
political ideologues or by a group of intellectuals, but by peasant congresses
to solve the problems of the people.” It has always rejected the pretensions
to “leadership” of Leninist groups of different varieties -- followers of
Stalin, Trotsky, or Mariategui (a Peruvian Bolshevik who has had great
influence on the left in Latin America).
Of course, Morales is not only a thinker with more or less clear ideas
about capitalism and socialism. He is also head of the government of an
underdeveloped country that has to operate within the parameters of a
capitalist world. As such he is no position to realize his more far-reaching
aspirations. At most, he has been able – like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela – to
divert some of the proceeds from the sale of oil and gas to making some
improvement to the life of the impoverished indigenous communities.
The fact remains that an internationally known figure has stood up at
the United Nations and called upon the world community to bring the
capitalist system to an end. Morales’ concept of socialism may be less clear
than we would like, but it does at least bear some relation to the real thing.
Viewed from the time when the UN and its specialized agencies are
converted into the planning and coordinating centre of world socialism, this
will, perhaps, be regarded as a milestone in its history.

June 2008

Socialism: class interest or human interest?

Sometimes socialists argue for socialism as being in the interest of the

working class. Sometimes socialists say that socialism is in the interest of
humanity as a whole. Surely there is a logical contradiction here? What
about the capitalist class? Is socialism in their interest too, or is it not?
I see no real contradiction. After all, what is an “interest”? The
dictionaries, rather unhelpfully, tell us that an interest is a benefit or
advantage. Short-term benefit or long-term? Self-perceived advantage or
advantage in some objective sense? How we understand all these words
depends on how we view human beings, on what we think makes them
happy or miserable.
Clearly, the great majority of capitalists do consider it in their interest
to preserve – and, indeed, expand – their wealth and all the privileges that go
with it. What many of them value is not so much a life of luxury and
indulgence (some prefer to live modestly) as power and superior status, the
sensation of towering way above the common herd (see: “Why they keep
piling up manure: the psychology of wealth accumulation” in Section 1).

Socialist capitalists

However, a minority of capitalists have been socialists. Some have

made important contributions to the socialist movement. The best known is
Friedrich Engels, the friend and collaborator of Karl Marx. Before Marx and
Engels there was Robert Owen, whose ideas had enormous influence on
socialist thinking and are still relevant today. There are quite a few others.
Did these socialist capitalists see themselves as altruists sacrificing
their own interests for the sake of higher ideals? Or did they think that
socialism was in some sense in their own interest? No doubt the answer
varies from case to case.
For the writer and artist William Morris, or the writer and playwright
Oscar Wilde (who inherited substantial property though he died in abject
poverty), the most important things in life were beauty and creativity. From
this point of view, they regarded the replacement of capitalism by socialism
as being in the interest of everyone, regardless of class. In his essay The
Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote:

The possession of private property is very often extremely

demoralising... In fact, property is really a nuisance. It involves ...
endless attention to business, endless bother... In the interest of the
rich we must get rid of it... [Under socialism] nobody will waste his
life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.

The interest in human survival

The emergence of weapons of mass destruction and the ecological

crisis have radically changed the calculus of interests. There is now a very
material sense in which all people and classes have a common interest in
socialism as the sole means of ensuring the survival of the human race.
Unfortunately, the common interest in human survival does not
eliminate the difference between the real interest of humanity and the
working class and the perceived interest of the capitalist class. The interest
in human survival is a relatively long-term interest, while capitalists tend to
focus on the short term. This tendency was reflected in a famous riposte that
the economist John Maynard Keynes once made to an argument about the
long term: “In the long run we are all dead.” In other words, the fate of
future generations counts for nothing.
In the short term the working class bear the brunt of environmental
degradation, while those who are the most responsible for causing it are the
best protected from its effects. It is working class areas that are exposed to
chemical and radioactive pollution from mining operations, factories, toxic
waste dumps and other sources. The capitalists maintain their country estates
in idyllic, unspoilt surroundings – although even they cannot escape the
ultraviolet rays that penetrate through holes in the ozone layer. In the
imaginary future world of Alexander Zinoviev’s The Human Anthill, nature
survives only in small enclaves that people must pay to enter, the price being
such as to exclude all but the wealthy.

Interests and interests

So there are interests and interests. In several very important senses,

socialism is certainly in the interest of every human being. In other senses
socialism remains above all in the interest of the working class. Both aspects
of the matter require emphasis. There is no conflict between them.

April 2010

Was nowhere somewhere?

More’s Utopia and the meaning of socialism

The word utopia, together with its derivatives utopian and utopianism, is a
familiar part of our political vocabulary. It originated as the title of a work
by the Tudor lawyer, statesman and writer Thomas More, first published in
Latin in 1516 as a traveller’s description of a remote island. Utopia is a pun:
it can be read either as ou-topos, Greek for ‘no place’, or as eu-topos, ‘good
place’ – that is, a good place (society) that exists in the imagination.
 More invented the word, but the thing it represents is much older.
Plato in his Republic discussed the nature of the ideal city state. Medieval
serfs took solace in the imaginary ease and plenty of the Land of Cockaigne.
More’s utopia, however, is the first to embody a response to capitalist social
relations, which in the early 16th century were just emerging in England and
the Low Countries (in agriculture and textiles). As the first modern utopia, it
has a special place in the emergence of modern socialist thought.
More’s Utopia consists of two ‘books’. Book I is his account of how
he came to hear of Utopia. Book II describes the Utopians’ way of life –
their towns and farms, government, economy, travel, slaves, marriages,
military discipline, religions.
More presents his story as true fact. Henry VIII sends him to Flanders
as his ambassador to settle a dispute with Spain – and we know that this is
true (it was in 1515; the dispute concerned the wool trade). During a break in
the negotiations he meets his young friend Peter Giles, who introduces him
to an explorer, Raphael Hythloday, just back from a long voyage. There
follows a long conversation between More, Giles and Hythloday.
Giles and More urge Hythloday to put the vast knowledge acquired on
his travels to use by entering the service of a king. Hythloday refuses,
arguing that no courtier dare speak his mind or advocate wise and just
policies. This exchange is thought to reflect More’s misgivings about his
own career in royal service.
The conversation then turns to the situation in England. They discuss
the enclosure (now we call it privatisation) of common land to graze sheep,
the consequent pauperisation and uprooting of the peasantry (“your sheep
devour men”), the futile cruelty of hanging wretches who steal to survive,
and other social ills.
 This leads them to the question of remedies. Hythloday declares that
the injustice, conflict and waste inherent in the power of money can be
overcome only by doing away with private property. More objects that this
would remove the incentive to work. (Sounds familiar?) Hythloday replies
that More would think otherwise had he been with him in Utopia.
Utopia is, indeed, a society without private property. Households
contribute to and draw freely on common stocks of goods. Money is used
only in dealings with foreign countries, while gold and jewels are regarded
as baubles for children and “fools” (i.e., the mentally retarded). In these
respects Utopia resembles socialism as we conceive of it.
In other respects, however, it does not. Decision-making procedures
are only partly democratic. A hierarchy of “magistrates” enforces draconian
regulations: travel, for instance, requires official permission. The main
penalty for serious transgressions is enslavement – not to individuals, of
course, but to the community. Thus, there is a class of slaves who do not
participate in common ownership but are themselves owned. Utopia is not a
classless society.

* * *

Almost all critics treat More’s factual presentation as a mere literary

device. They do not believe that he met an explorer while in Flanders or that
he was influenced in his description of Utopia by information about real
places. This is not to say that they attribute everything solely to More’s
fertile imagination. They often draw connections between his ideas and the
thought of Greco-Roman antiquity. In the foreword to an edition of Utopia
published in 1893, William Morris even calls Utopia ‘an idealised ancient
society’. More was one of the foremost classical scholars of his day, so it is
a plausible view.
Yet More always maintained, even in private correspondence, that
Utopia was based on fact. Was he joking? He liked a good joke.
Two researchers take More at his word. It is quite possible, they
argue, that he did meet an explorer who had encountered or heard about a
pre-Columbian society in the Americas that served More as a prototype for
Utopia. Arthur E. Morgan, an engineer who was chairman of the Tennessee
Valley Authority in the 1930s, takes the Inca Empire as the prototype
(Nowhere was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias
Make History, University of North Carolina Press 1946), while the
anthropologist Lorainne Stobbart identifies the Utopians with the Maya of
the Yucatan Peninsula in present-day Mexico (Utopia: Fact or Fiction? The
Evidence from the Americas, Alan Sutton 1992).
This approach cannot be dismissed just because it has only two
advocates. To detect parallels between More’s Utopia and the Incas or Maya
requires knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Academic
specialisation being what it is, scholars with such knowledge are few and far
between.
Nor is it valid to argue that Hythloday cannot represent a real person
because Europeans knew nothing of the Maya or Incas at the time when
More was writing Utopia (1515—16). This is true only if we accept the
conventional chronology that conflates discovery with the military
expeditions of the Spanish conquistadors (Cortes first landed in Yucatan in
1517; Pizarro entered Inca territory in 1526). But Morgan and Stobbart
demonstrate on the basis of old maps and documents that Portuguese
explorers reached the eastern shores of Central and South America as early
as the fourteenth century (Hythloday is Portuguese), while English sailors
were trading with the new lands by the 1470s. Whether any of these early
travellers got as far as Peru is less certain, though some may have obtained
indirect information about the Incas.
How closely does More’s Utopia resemble the Maya and Inca
civilizations? Morgan and Stobbart detail numerous similarities in political
and economic organization, dress, social customs, city layout, family life,
science and art, and so on – even down to such practices as the erection of
memorial pillars and ceremonial wearing of quetzal feathers. The Maya and
the Incas, like the Utopians, used money only in foreign trade and had
common stores from which officials distributed produce (except that, in
contrast to Utopia, it was rationed). It is extremely unlikely that so many
close parallels should arise purely by chance.
But there are also important differences. The most telling criticism
made against these authors is that they obscure a wide gap in social structure
between the aristocratic autocracies of the Maya and the Incas and the
basically democratic governance of More’s Utopia (see George Logan’s
review of Stobbart in Moreana, June 1994).
It is therefore doubtful whether Utopia is a direct representation of
any specific pre-Columbian society. Nevertheless, More’s account does
probably reflect the influence of knowledge of such societies that he had
somehow acquired, possibly from a Portuguese explorer he met in Flanders.

* * *

This conclusion has implications for our understanding of the

development of socialist ideas. For it means that a seminal work of modern
socialist thought bears the imprint of archaic societies that though not based
on private property were far removed from the classless democracy of
genuine socialism.
The Maya and Inca social systems are strikingly ‘pure’ examples of
what Marx called the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. In this mode, a royal
bureaucracy extracts and redistributes surplus from pre-existing peasant
communes and directs public works. The monarch is considered the owner
of land and resources. The word ‘Asiatic’ does not, of course, fit the New
World context (Marx had mainly India in mind). Karl Wittfogel, stressing
the centrality of water management, coined the term ‘hydraulic mode of
production’. Or we might call it the pre-industrial bureaucratic mode of
production.
Louis Baudin paints a vivid picture of what it was like to live under
this system in his Daily Life in Peru under the Last Incas (Macmillan,
1961). It was a hard life for the common people, but their basic necessities
were supplied: a small dwelling, two woollen garments each when they
marry, a patch of land, relief in the event of local famine. They were more
fortunate in this regard than poor people were in More’s England – or than
they themselves would be after the Spanish conquest. But they were victims
of class exploitation nonetheless.
It is understandable that the Incas and the Maya should have appealed
to early European critics of capitalism. Theirs, however, was not the only
alternative model that the pre-Columbian Americas offered to the reign of
private property. The New World was also home to the much more
egalitarian ‘primitive communism’ of peoples like the Iroquois who so
fascinated the 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and through
him Engels and Marx, influencing their conception of ‘advanced
communism’.

* * *

More’s utopia is a sort of compromise between the democratic and

authoritarian-bureaucratic conceptions of communal life. He omits important
information that would help us clarify the nature of the society that he is
portraying. In particular, how are the higher officials appointed or elected?
(We know that lower-level officials are elected.) Do they have material
privileges? Does Utopia have an aristocracy of any kind?
I interpret this ambiguity in light of More’s general attitude toward the
lower classes. He felt genuine compassion for the suffering of the poor. This
is clear not only from the sentiments he expresses through his alter ego
Hythloday, but also from his reputation as an upright and honest judge and
official. He did not take bribes from the rich and he patronised the poor. By
the standards of his day and age, he was open-minded and tolerant. He
belonged to the same social type as that other upright and honest official, his
near-contemporary in Ming China, Hai Rui.
But More, like Hai Rui, was no rebel. He was a “good servant” of
God and king, a member of the ruling class with a strong belief in order and
hierarchy. His ideal was not the fully democratic self-administration of
society, which he could hardly imagine, but rather paternalistic “good
government” by upright and honest officials like himself.

* * *

So what shall we make of More’s Utopia? It is, to be sure, an eloquent

critique of the cruelty and perversity of capitalism, all the more remarkable
for having been written at a time when that system had scarcely bared its
fangs. However, More – although he envisages the abolition of money –
does not provide a picture of what we now mean by socialism. But then that
could hardly have been expected of him.

July 2009

Bogdanov, technocracy and socialism

The terms “Bolshevism” and “Leninism” are usually treated as synonyms. In

view of Lenin’s enormous influence over the Bolshevik party, that might
seem fair enough. But in fact Lenin did have political and intellectual rivals
inside his own party. The most important of these non-Leninist Bolsheviks
was Alexander Bogdanov (1873—1928).
Bogdanov was a man of many talents and interests. His formal
training was in medicine and psychiatry. He invented an original philosophy
that he called “tectology” and is now regarded as a precursor of systems
theory (synergetics). He was also a Marxian economist, a theorist of culture,
a popular science fiction writer, and of course a political activist. Even today
most of his work is not available in English. The only book devoted to him
is Zenovia Sochor’s study of his ideas about culture (Revolution and
Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy, Cornell University Press 1988).
A volume of Bogdanov’s science fiction has, however, appeared in
English (Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, translated by Charles Rougle
and edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, Indiana University Press
1984). Here we have two novels set on Mars (Red Star and Engineer
Menni), a poem “A Martian Stranded on Earth,” and interpretative essays by
each of the editors. Red Star recounts how Martians take the Russian
Bolshevik Leonid to their home planet to learn about the communist society
there and act as a link between earth and Mars. Engineer Menni is also set
on Mars, but at an earlier stage, shortly before the transition from capitalism
to communism. Menni’s mission in life is to design Mars’ great canals—it
was widely believed at the time that there are canals on Mars—and organize
and manage their construction.

* * *

Both Russian and Western commentators have called Bogdanov an

advocate of “technocracy” and the promoter of a “cult of the engineer.” Thus
Richard Stites speaks of his “celebration of technocratic power [and] the
technical intelligentsia.” On the surface this assessment seems justified.
Engineer Menni was popular among Soviet planners at the time of the first
Five Year Plan, and Menni is certainly a heroic figure with whom any
aspiring technocrat might readily identify.
But you do not have to search very hard to find evidence that suggests
a different assessment. In Red Star Bogdanov presents communist Mars as a
society beset by serious problems—by no means a utopia. Technology is a
major source of these problems. Leonid discovers, for instance, that some
workers are so mesmerized by the machinery they operate that they refuse to
stop working and have to be forced to rest. And Nella, Menni’s abandoned
lover, sings a song in which she complains that for all his virtues Menni is
lacking in compassion:

His heart is of ice, no pain does it feel

For the creatures brought low by Fate…
The tears of the wretches cast into the fray
Warm not his heart of stone.

The Martian political system portrayed in Red Star—little explicit

detail is provided—does indeed seem to be technocratic rather than
democratic. Thus, the speakers at a conference convened to consider Martian
colonization of earth are an astronautical engineer, a physician, and a
mathematician (who argues in favor of annihilating all earthlings and is later
killed by a distraught Leonid). Martians in managerial positions move
around in flying “gondolas” that do not seem to be available to ordinary
Martians. (If they were, air traffic control would be a nightmare.) This is not
a society that I would wish to call socialist or communist even though the
exchange of commodities has been abolished and production is for use.
In Engineer Menni we find a clue as to why the revolution has given
birth to a technocratic society. A workers’ delegate at a trade union congress
bemoans the fact that the workers’ ignorance prevents them from judging
matters for themselves and puts them at the mercy of experts, whom they
have no choice but to believe.
Both Bogdanov’s fiction and his political writings as presented by
Sochor suggest that he expected the coming revolution against capitalism to
lead to a technocratic society. This was because the workers lacked the
knowledge and initiative to seize control of social affairs for themselves.
One reason for this situation was the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of
the capitalist production process. Another was the hierarchical and
authoritarian mode of organization of the Bolshevik party, although
Bogdanov considered such organization necessary and inevitable—he was a
Bolshevik, after all.
This, however, was not a prospect that Bogdanov welcomed or
idealized. He knew that real socialism (or communism) could only be a fully
democratic society. And he knew that only a highly cultured and
knowledgeable working class could achieve real socialism. That is why
questions of culture and education were so central to his thought and work.
The emphasis on knowledge and understanding as prerequisites for real
socialism (as opposed to technocratic pseudo-socialism) is common ground
that he shares with us in the world socialist movement.
While Bogdanov remained loyal to the Bolshevik regime in Russia
until the end of his life, his ideas were deeply subversive of the society over
which that regime presided. Bogdanov’s ideas were the inspiration for a
dissident group called “Workers’ Truth” that was active for a time in the
early 1920s (although it appears that Bogdanov did not have personal ties
with them). In their manifesto, “Workers’ Truth” declared that the old
bourgeoisie had been replaced as masters of production by “the technical
intelligentsia under state capitalism.” The Communist Party had become the
party of this intelligentsia, which was the nucleus of a rising new
bourgeoisie.

April 2007
Free access to what?
Some problems of consumption in socialism

We say that socialism will be “a society of free access.” However, one

obvious but rarely clarified question is: free access to what? Even if
everything produced is made freely available to people, how will the range
of goods and services to be supplied be determined?
One answer might be: if producing a thing is technically possible and
if someone somewhere wants it, then it will be supplied. But most people
might feel that a single individual should not have so much leverage over
others’ work. A rule might be established that a new product will be
supplied once a certain number of people have registered a request for it.
The number of requests required could vary, depending (say) on the
difficulties involved in providing the new product, but also on how essential
it was to those asking for it. Thus, specialised medications and prosthetics
would surely be prepared even for very small numbers of people suffering
from rare conditions – something that capitalist firms are reluctant to do
because it is unlikely to yield a profit.
However, it is possible that socialist society may decide, either by a
formal procedure or spontaneously, not to produce certain things even if
quite a few people want them. Such decisions might be made for a variety of
reasons, good and not so good.
First, the majority may vote against producing certain goods on the
grounds that they endanger the consumer and/or other people. Examples
might include guns for hunting, explosives for demolition, porn, and highly
addictive substances (which might be made available only through treatment
programmes). Conceivably, majorities might go too far and refuse to
authorise some goods and services on vague and inadequate grounds such as
being “inconsistent with socialist values.”
Second, the production of certain goods may be judged too unpleasant
or dangerous, to producers or to local residents, even after all possible safety
precautions have been taken. Consider bird’s nest soup, a delicacy treasured
by gourmets for its supposed medicinal and aphrodisiac properties.
Collectors stand on bamboo scaffolding to harvest swifts’ nests from high up
on cave walls, at considerable risk to their lives. Capitalism resolves such
conflicts of interest in favour of the consumer because people will do just
about anything to survive. But members of socialist society, like the wealthy
of today, will be free of economic duress: their needs will be met as of right.
This will not undermine their willingness to work, but they are likely to be
rather picky in choosing the work they do.
Few miners (to take a more important example) will be keen to go on
working underground. Whether or not society adopts a formal decision to
abolish the most unpleasant kinds of work, people will “vote with their feet”.
The issue is how society reacts. Unless people can be induced to continue
temporarily with work they want to leave, society may have to accept the
situation and adjust to the resulting change in the range of products
available.

* * *

What about goods that may not be dangerous to consume or produce

but do incorporate large amounts of labour, energy, and materials, with a
correspondingly large environmental impact? Will socialist society ensure
free access to luxury goods like those currently consumed by the wealthy –
for instance, the “off road vehicle” sold as a boys’ toy by Harrods (see
http://www.harrods.com)?
It may be objected that the members of socialist society will not want
to ape the lifestyle of the idle rich under capitalism. However, a demand for
highly intricate products need have nothing to do with frivolous self-
indulgence. It may arise from a spreading interest in artistic self-expression
and scientific exploration. There may be numerous amateur scientists
clamouring for the latest sophisticated equipment for their home labs. Will
socialist society provide free access to electron microscopes? Or to space
travel for the millions of people who dream of venturing into outer space?
(At present the Russian Space Agency offers trips to the International Space
Station for $1 million.)
There is also a class of “locational” goods that can never be supplied
in abundance because they are tied to specific locations. Whatever
precautions are taken, for example, the number of tourists allowed into
nature reserves must be restricted if ecologically sensitive habitats are not to
be degraded.
Another knotty question is how the principle of free access is to be
applied in the sphere of housing. One of the top priorities when socialism is
established will be to replace substandard housing stock so that everyone has
access to spacious and comfortable housing. Presumably certain standards
will be set for new residential construction – quite high ones, no doubt. But
surely the new housing will not be as spacious and luxurious as the most
expensive residences under capitalism. People will not have free access to
their own marble palaces.
In short, for certain categories of goods and services free access is
bound to be infeasible, certainly in the early stages of socialist society and
possibly even in its maturity. The real choice in these cases is between non-
provision and restricted provision. So alongside free access stores, there may
be restricted access outlets for various kinds of specialised goods, perhaps
using some sort of coupon system.
It is conceivable that socialist society will decide that things that
cannot – for whatever reason – be produced in abundance should not be
produced at all. Such a decision would have obvious disadvantages, but it
would preserve the principle of “free access to what has been produced” and
avoid the difficult problems associated with restricting access, such as
enforcement.
However, we can envision restricted access arrangements that
socialist society is much more likely to find acceptable and on which it may,
indeed, extensively rely. People may have free access to many facilities at
local and regional centres but without the option of taking equipment home.
Museums and art galleries that do not charge for entry exemplify this kind of
arrangement. Similarly, there could be community centres equipped for
specialised cuisine, exercise and sports, arts and music making, and
scientific exploration.
There could also be depots where people have access to specialised
goods – for instance, do-it-yourself and gardening equipment, and also
motor vehicles – on a borrow-and-return basis, as in libraries. The staff at
these depots would also maintain the equipment in good working order and
provide advice and assistance as needed. This would be much more efficient
than keeping machines like lawn mowers at home, where they stand unused
99% of the time.
To sum up, it would be wrong to play down the scope that socialism
offers for the solution of our problems. Enormous resources will be freed up
when we get rid of the waste inherent in capitalism. But the new society will
face urgent tasks that will also be daunting in their enormity. It is hard to
judge which enormity is likely to be the greater. Socialists should not
assume that socialism will quickly solve all the problems inherited from the
past, and need to think about socialism – and especially its crucial early
stages – in a practical and realistic spirit.

July 2007