A Dangerous Society

If the conditions of treatment in NHS hospital leaves a lot to be desired the position of patients with learning difficulties is even more alarming. 'Research commissioned by Mencap last year estimated that 1,200 people with learning disabilities are dying "needlessly" in the NHS each year, largely due to delays or problems in investigating illnesses.' (Independent, 3 November) A shortage of specialist nurses trained to care for people with learning disabilities is putting the lives of thousands of vulnerable people at risk, the leading charity Mencap has warned. No NHS hospital in England has 24-hour learning disability (LD) nurse cover and more than 40 per cent of NHS trusts do not even employ a single LD nurse, according to Freedom of Information requests from the charity. NHS workforce figures show that there has been a 30 per cent cut in the number of LD nurses employed in the health service over the past five years. 1,200 needless death is just another example of the callous welfare cuts justified by capitalism's needs for economy.  RD

Fracking Scotland

“The IPCC [UN climate science panel] is quite clear about the need to leave the vast majority of already proven reserves in the ground, if we are to meet the 2C goal. The fact that despite this science, governments are spending billions of tax dollars each year to find more fossil fuels that we cannot ever afford to burn, reveals the extent of climate denial still ongoing within the G20,” said Oil Change International director Steve Kretzman.

The most detailed breakdown yet of global fossil fuel subsidies has found that the US government provided companies with $5.2bn for fossil fuel exploration in 2013, Australia spent $3.5bn, Russia $2.4bn and the UK $1.2bn. The government money went to major multinationals as well as smaller ones who specialise in exploratory work, according to British thinktank the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Washington-based analysts Oil Change International. The report found that  four times as much money was spent on fossil fuel exploration as on renewable energy development.

It shows an extraordinary “merry-go-round” of countries supporting each others’ companies. The US spends $1.4bn a year for exploration in Columbia, Nigeria and Russia, while Russia is subsidising exploration in Venezuela and China, which in turn supports companies exploring Canada, Brazil and Mexico.

Britain, says their report, proved to be one of the most generous countries. In the five year period to 2014 it gave tax breaks totalling over $4.5bn to French, US, Middle Eastern and north American companies to explore the North Sea for fast-declining oil and gas reserves. A breakdown of that figure showed over $1.2bn of British money went to two French companies, GDF-Suez and Total, $450m went to five US companies including Chevron, and $992m to five British companies. Britain also spent public funds for foreign companies to explore in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Ghana, Guinea, India and Indonesia, as well as Russia, Uganda and Qatar, according to the report’s data, which is drawn from the OECD, government documents, company reports and institutions.

“The evidence points to a publicly financed bail-out for carbon-intensive companies, and support for uneconomic investments that could drive the planet far beyond the internationally agreed target of limiting global temperature increases to no more than 2C,” say the report’s authors.

“This is real money which could be put into schools or hospitals. It is simply not economic to invest like this. This is the insanity of the situation. They are diverting investment from economic low-carbon alternatives such as solar, wind and hydro-power and they are undermining the prospects for an ambitious UN climate deal in 2015,” said Kevin Watkins, director of the ODI.

The above should be noted regards to the latest development to frack beneath the Firth of Forth in the already well-polluted Grangemouth/Kincardine area. Cluff Natural Resources [what an environmentally sounding company name that is] said plans are being drawn up to extract coal from under the Firth of Forth following a large discovery.  The company is seeking permission to build the UK’s first deep offshore underground coal gasification (UCG) project to extract it. Cluff said two of the coal seams identified have 43mln tonnes of coal in place (CIP), or the equivalent of 1.4 billion cubic feet (BCF) of natural gas-in-place. For context, 1bn cubic feet of gas could serve 11,000 homes for one year. The process of gasification involves drilling horizontally into a seam and then injecting air and oxygen to produce syngas - a mixture of combustible gases which include hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane and carbon dioxide.

WWF Scotland director Lang Banks said Scotland needs to rely more on electricity and renewables rather than coal and gas. “Plans to ‘burn’ coal under the Firth of Forth will not deliver that aim and should therefore be a complete non-starter,” he said. “In a worst-case scenario, proposals such as this one could even extend our use of fossil fuels, locking us into a high carbon world. Just over a week ago, scientists from the United Nations issued their latest predictions of the growing threat from global climate change and the need to be rapidly phasing out our use of fossil fuels. Since the developers themselves have admitted that carbon dioxide will be emitted by their plans, from a climate change perspective this scheme is nothing short of irresponsible.”

There is no peoples’ mandate for the fossil fuel industry to unleash and bring on runaway global warming that will bring humankind to its knees, sink whole island countries, and may eventually cause the death of half or more of the species on the planet and billions of human souls. Politicians  have ignored the damage to sustainable world resources, and have invited chaos. Instead of being acquiescent, we should all be angry.  Our children and their children's future depends on it.

Is ‘real’ capitalism the answer

In board-rooms the belief has taken root that the advance of capitalism is irreversible. The market-based system that developed in the West has spread to nearly every country in the world. Faced with the near-universal triumph of market forces, many have concluded that capitalism has won out in a process of evolution like that which occurs among species. Intensely innovative and enormously productive, capitalism seems to have driven every other type of economy to extinction.

The problem is the capitalist system, not the capitalists. Capitalists, big and small, are like everybody else. Much that they do is distinctively noxious, but the economic structure makes them do it. In an age when the very idea of class struggle is widely disparaged, a healthy animosity towards the few who own almost everything should not be dismissed out of hand. In one way or another, hatred of capitalism’s high-flyers, not just capitalism itself, played a positive role in every progressive social movement of the past two centuries. But class hatred is hard to maintain towards a few very conspicuous late model capitalists: the kind behind iPhones and Google searches and social media. They seem too hip to hate. Many in Occupy Wall St took part in the mourning Steve Jobs rather than celebrating the demise of another capitalist. Unlike the Koch brothers Gates and Buffet  hardly seem like the unprincipled, cutthroat bastards of capitalism’s dark past even if they are still part of corporate America. They are rich beyond measure and they are a leading force behind corporate domination of everything. They can’t help it; they are too damned smart. It doesn’t look like they are exploiting anybody or doing anyone (except their competitors) harm goes the story. Yet, they are the modern day counterparts of the tycoons workers used to hate, the same robber barons in jeans and open-necked shirts. They treat their workers in Silicon Valley very well it seems. This makes business sense: it would be counter-productive to super-exploit the creative types upon whose ingenuity tech corporations depend. The others, the ones who do the ‘manual work’, are another story. Many of them toil out of sight halfway around the world, and the miseries they endure hidden.

We need to restore perspective, therefore, remember Wall Street and its corporate boardrooms where sharks abound everywhere, buying political influence at local, state and national levels.  We must not forget the hordes of lesser, but still filthy rich wannabes who serve themselves and Mammon.

In capitalist economies, the way to acquire untold riches is to gain monopoly, or near monopoly, control over something for which there is a great demand. The “invisible hand” of the market then does the rest. The invisible hand of the market is seen to be benign. Warlords, nobles and kings relied on visible hands to establish and secure their riches. Their wealth was based on plunder and theft and the ex post facto justification than for securing wealth directly. For that, the use or threat of state force was essential. Nevertheless, the difference between the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the state is not as great as is commonly supposed. Market allocations are unintended consequences of multiple, uncoordinated exchange relations, each of which is entered into voluntarily – without express coercion. Pro-capitalists take this to mean that they are free. Their guiding idea being that individuals have private property rights to do what they want with the resources they own, provided only that they do not use them to harm identifiable others. Market-generated distributions of income and wealth in private property regimes are, in the libertarian view, beyond reproach. Therefore if, on this basis, the very few end up with everything or almost everything, while the vast majority have nothing or almost nothing, no one can justifiably complain on grounds of freedom or justice. The capitalist case is not to blame capitalists for any harm they do, provided they play by the accepted rules.

Socialists point out that, even were the pro-capitalist case sound, it would apply only to ideal capitalist markets and nothing like them has ever actually existed, except in highly artificial conditions, and nothing like them ever will. The capitalist downplay the importance of the difference between the ideal and the actual because they think that actual cases approximate the ideal closely enough. They do not.  Their assumption that force plays no determinative role, is profoundly unrealistic because real world capitalist markets do not, and probably cannot, exist outside a coercive infrastructure.  The old way of accumulating great fortunes is still with us. Force is no longer all there is, but it is as important as it ever was. This is especially evident in places where capitalist markets impinge on pre- or alternative capitalist economic structures.  They ruling class still  rely on the states they control to create and sustain their claims to the resources that markets then generously reward. State power underlies the legal framework within which markets operate; and is indispensable for securing the level of social order that is necessary for markets to function and flourish.  The forms and limits differ, but the reality is everywhere the same. The robber barons who made off like the bandits figured this out a long time ago. Their later-day counterparts know it too. The old time robber barons were inclined, when convenient, to pollute recklessly and to lay waste to the rivers and fields around their factories and mines. Their successors in the industries they pioneered are still at it.

Rand Paul, can be relied on to talk complete sense about the madness of war, right up until people get scared by beheading videos, and then he’s in favor of the madness of war. He has backed canceling all foreign aid, except for military foreign “aid” up to $5 billion, mostly in free weapons for Israel. He used to favor serious cuts to military spending, but hasn’t acted on that and now has John McCain’s support as a good “centrist.” He supports racist policies while hoping not to be seen doing so, and was against the Civil Rights Act before he was for it. He thinks kids should drive 10 miles to find a good school or get educated online.

John D. Rockefeller’s advisors had him make good public relations – for himself and for his class. The idea was to get people to stop hating capitalists and to love capitalism. He would pass out shiny new dimes to street urchins.  But the method was demeaning. It was charity, at best; at worst, it was a desperate effort to buy love. These are not winning strategies. Gates and Buffet now have their elaborate foundations to perform essentially the same purpose, pennies for Africans. The very existence of so-called well-meaning capitalists is indeed one of the evils of the capitalist system!

Adapted from this

Who owns the North Pole (part 77)

The Arctic has attracted an increasingly intense gaze from the powerful nations that border it in the past decade, not least because it is thought to contain up to 30 percent of the world’s oil and gas. As technologies have advanced, more and more of those hydrocarbons have become recoverable and viable. The stretch of sea can also provide new shipping lanes for goods traveling between Asia and America and Europe. Russia already has rights to any territories located within 370 km of its border, but has lodged claims on a much bigger part of the territory with the UN, due to the existence of an underwater shelf, which would make a sizeable portion of the Arctic an extension of Russian territory. Canada and other Arctic powers have followed suit, with the exact divisions of territories expected to be decided over the course of the next decade.

Russia will have military control of the entirety of its 6,200 km Arctic coastal zone by the end of 2014, just a year after Moscow announced its plan to build military presence in the region, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has announced. Many of the sites in the region have to be repaired. In fact, a lot of them, such as airfields, logistics facilities, water intakes, power stations will have to be built from scratch, which is what we are doing right now.”

Two Borey-class nuclear submarines, which will form the spine of the refurbished fleet, have been armed this year, and a third one has just completed trials. In total, eight Borey vessels are expected to be built by the end of the decade, though some of them may be re-deployed with the Pacific fleet. Russia is also in the process of unsealing at least seven airstrips that were shut down following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Tiksi in Yakutia expected to house the bulk of the Arctic air force. Work also began in September on a permanent base located on the New Siberian Islands in the Laptev Sea. A military group consisting of two brigades will be stationed in the far North as part of the new military district.

Short Changed By The Banks

The London living wage, the pay level calculated by the Greater London Authority as being the minimum on which people in the city can have a decent life is currently £9.15 an hour. But the snag is that it's entirely voluntary. Anyone who lives and works in London will tell you that £9.15 an hour does not go far. 'Pressure is building for it to be mandatory. That demand would ease if the living wage had been embraced wholeheartedly, but it hasn't been. Among the worst offenders are the banks. Of the 240 members of the British Bankers' Association, only a small fraction have signed up to the wage.' (Independent, 9 November) This is typical of how capitalism works. High ranking banking executive enjoy bloated incomes, moan about caps on their bonuses yet won't even pay their cleaners and support staff the pittance of £9.15 an hour. RD

National Ill Health Service

It used to be that British politicians claimed that  their NHS was the best in the world, but drastic cuts in the service has led to less boasting about it. 'A shortage of doctors in Scotland threatens to have "dangerous consequences" for the health of patients, one of the country's most senior medics said this weekend. The warning by Dr John Gillies, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in Scotland comes amid fresh research suggesting that one in four Scots is unable to obtain an appointment with their GP within a week' (Sunday Times, 2 November) The report goes on to report that one in 10 of these patients abandons their efforts to seek medical advice, prompting concern that serious illnesses and potential life-threatening underlying health problems are being missed. Hardly a service worth boasting about is it? RD

A Grim Future

From time to time supporters of capitalism tell us the present production for profit set up is the best possible society, but now and then we hear a different story about how that society is developing. 'The gathering risks of climate change are so profound they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report. Despite rising efforts in many countries to tackle the problem, the overall global situation is growing more acute as developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.' (New York Times, 2 November) Future disasters means nothing compared to bigger profits today for the owning class. RD

Constantly Unemployed

Under the headline 'Million Brits on benefit found "fit to work" in crackdown', the following was reported. 'Work and Pension Secretary Ian Duncan has spearheaded benefits reforms. Earlier this year he said ending "cycles of worklessness and dependency" had been his one aim. ESA claimants can receive up to £108.15 a week from the Government after a 13-week assessment period. The report has drawn criticism from disability support groups, who claim that those carrying out the assessment were under-qualified or overtly harsh with their decisions.' (Sunday Express, 2 November) Needless to say this crackdown on disabled and unemployed does not apply to the owning class who are constantly unemployed and enjoy an income of somewhat more than £108.15 a week. RD

The end of utopia?

From the December 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

NO MORE UTOPIAS—this was the bold headline above an article in the European section of the Guardian on 27 September written by Norberto Bobbio and which had originally appeared in the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Bobbio thinks that the collapse of what he calls "the communist regimes" in eastern Europe and, particularly Russia, means the end of communism as an idea which has persisted in one form or another for 2000 years.

And he seems to know what communism (we also call it socialism—the two words mean the same) means:

"The communist ideal is about forming a society which is radically different from any that has gone before, a society based on the elimination of private property. The latter is condemned as being the cause of all the ills afflicting mankind, from minor disputes over boundaries to the great wars that have turned the whole world upside down. It is also about setting up a regime based on common ownership, if not of all goods, at least of those that form the major source of wealth and of man's dominion over man. Right or wrong this is communism".

That is sound enough but he then spoils it by claiming that the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 was "the first major attempt to achieve a communist society in the genuine sense of the term, a society in which private property would be abolished and replaced by the almost total collectivisation of a country with a population of millions".

This is nonsense because even Lenin recognised that socialism was impossible in such a backward country as Russia. All the Bolsheviks could do was to hope that revolutions in the developed European countries would come to their aid and, in the meantime, they would begin to modernise Russia by introducing state capitalism. They certainly didn't think that socialism could be established in one country. That idea came later.

So there was no attempt by the Bolsheviks to abolish private property. Even their promise of equal wages, which has nothing to do with socialism anyway, was quickly dropped and large differentials in income were encouraged instead, while the Bolsheviks (who became the Communist Party) made sure that all property came under their direct control and, in effect, ownership.

Bobbio's unhistorical approach is clearly shown when he compares Thomas More's Utopia with state capitalist Russia. He recounts how in Utopia the traveller who has discovered "the happy island where common ownership is rigorously observed" defends it from sceptics who argue that it cannot work because of human nature—greed, laziness, etc—by telling them "you talk like that because you haven't seen what I have seen". It is impossible now, says Bobbio, to give such a reply any more because "no one who has visited a communist country can now say come and see, then you can talk". What connection can there possibly be between Thomas More's 16th century ideal society and 20th century Russian state capitalism?

To those who insist that there has never been communism in Russia Bobbio replies that it is not enough to say this:

"You have to say why it is so, and suggest which other paths you can follow in order to avoid past mistakes. I don't know of there is anyone around today who can provide answers to these uncertainties".

Yes, signor Bobbio, there are and we will! The Socialist Party and its companion parties overseas have always insisted that communism/socialism can only be established when the essential conditions for it are present. For one thing, the productive forces of society must be developed to the point where they can provide plenty for all. Capitalism itself has long ago solved that problem for us. For another, the majority of the world's workers—all the people who have to work for a wage or salary and in whose interests socialism will be—must agree that it is both possible and desirable. Socialism could not possibly have come about in such an economically undeveloped country as Russia where the vast majority of the population neither understood nor desired it.

The Socialist Party welcomes the collapse of Russian-style "communism" as a significant step in clearing the way for genuine communism to which it has been a serious obstacle for over 70 years. And the idea of a classless, moneyless, worldwide society of production for use will not go away because something entirely different has failed. The proof of this is—and will be—the existence of its advocates in many parts of the world.

Vic Vanni,

Glasgow Branch

Another Political Blunder

No doubt the politicians concerned thought it was a good vote-catching dodge, but it turned out to be just another blunder. 'T-shirts proudly worn by Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Harriet Harman are made in sweatshop conditions by migrant women paid just 62p an hour, a Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed. The women machinists on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius sleep 16 to a room and earn much less than the average wage on the island. The T-shirts carry the defiant slogan "This is what a feminist looks like. But one of the thousands of machinists declared: "We do not see ourselves as feminists. We see ourselves as trapped". (Daily Mail, 1 November) Capitalism often  exposes politicians lack of understanding of how it operates and this was a particular howler. RD

Another Failure

When Mrs Thatcher was the prime minister she introduced legislation that allowed council tenants to buy their rented houses. She announced this change as making Britain "a property owning democracy", but that has turned out to be empty boast. 'In echoes of Margaret Thatcher's drive to force local authorities in the 1980s to sell their properties at a cut price, the Government's new initiative to encourage councils to sell their houses is having a disastrous effect in allowing social housing to be exploited for personal profit. Councils are selling off their already limited supplies of housing stock and allowing former council tenants to profiteer as buy-to-let landlords. That is forcing local authorities to pay more to place deprived families in properties that used to be council-owned. (Independent, 31 October) Another political promise bites the dust. RD

The Killer Society

Socialists cannot foretell the future, but we do know that inside a socialist society that one of the priorities would be to feed the hungry throughout the globe, not as at present to build more and more devastating ways of destroying life. Here is one of capitalism's priorities. British defence and engineering companies including BAE Systems and   Rolls-Royce have been given a boost after the Ministry of Defence struck a  deal to order the first production batch of F-35 fighter-bombers. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said the MoD had reached an agreement in principle to buy four F-35 Lightning II stealth aircraft. 'About 15pc of each aircraft is manufactured in Britain and BAE is the only tier one partner in the F-35 programme, which is headed by Lockheed Martin  and is the biggest-ever defence project. The US company expects the estimated 3,000-aircraft programme to cost a total of $1.01 trillion (£620bn) over its 55-year lifespan when development and support costs are included.' (Daily Telegraph, 28 October) Over a trillion of dollars spent on destruction and nothing for the world's hungry - that is capitalism for you. RD

One Solution - Revolution

The latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can be summed up quite briefly: attain near zero emissions by 2100 or billions of our descendants not yet born will be in deep shit. It is the most comprehensive assessment on climate change to date, conducted by more than 800 scientists, amalgamating their findings into one document, aimed to provoke politicians to end international inaction and get a global treaty signed and sealed in Paris in 2015. There is currently no global agreement on how to tackle climate change. Every year there’s little to report but failure on international negotiations.The target is to stop the average temperature rising beyond 2C. If nothing changes?  Hurricanes and typhoons will become more powerful, floods and drought will be more frequent, there’ll be food insecurity, and sea levels will rise (Florida, for example, is already seeing record high tides, to say nothing of the problems being faced by the low-lying islands of the Pacific). Many institutions outside the scientific field are also acknowledging the dangers - insurance companies, financial centres and not least the military. The US Pentagon issued a report asserting that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security with "increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, poverty and food shortages."

If we don’t achieve socialism in the very near future it won’t be the end of the world — the planet will carry on with or without us. But it may mean the end of the human species if we do not  oppose the profit-based economic and social system that wages war on our climate. If you aren’t worried about climate change, you are ignoring what is going on around you. The impact of global climate change concerns nothing less than the future of humanity’s existence. The mass of humanity is threatened by the results of its own economic activity over which, however, it has no control, under the present social system. If the current situation is not rapidly reversed, then the peoples of the world faces a catastrophe.  It is now too late to stop global warming. If emissions continue at today’s levels, catastrophic climate change is inevitable. At the very least, large parts of the world will be inhabitable, and conditions in the rest will be harsher than humans have ever experienced. It is becoming abundantly clear today, the Earth cannot sustain this system’s plundering and poisoning without humanity sooner or later experiencing a complete ecological catastrophe.The survival of our species, and of the millions of animal and plant species we share this world with, is at stake. The problem is global and no national solution is possible. The world economy must be brought under the democratic control of the associated producers.

Our critics in the green capitalist movement tell us socialism may be desirable, as a general and ultimate aim, but climate change has to be tackled immediately. Such is the arguments of “realism" . Indeed, we too agree something must be done as soon as possible, perhaps another scientific fact-finding conference, another policy discussion summit, yet one more agreement in principle to do something...sometime in the future...and as long as it isn’t obligatory.  For sure the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society will not be easy but just how realistic to expect the capitalist system can be reformed in such a way as to provide a future for the next generation and whatever generations still to come any hope of survival. Any serious proposal to remedy the effects of climate change and halt and reverse global warming runs up against two insurmountable problems: private ownership of the means of production by a handful of capitalists and the division of the world into rival capitalist nation-states. Many well-intentioned  environmental activists argue that with the right mix of taxes, incentives and regulations, everybody would be winners. Big Business will have cheaper, more efficient production, and therefore be more profitable, and consumers will have more environment-friendly products and energy sources. In a rational society, such innovations would lower the overall environmental impact in terms of materials and energy used per unit of output, when substituted for more harmful technology. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a rational society. Tax rates, charges or fines are set well below the level that would impact seriously on profits; so more often than not it is cheaper for big business to go on polluting. Capitalism, an economic and political system based on the never-ending expansion of production of commodities for sale, is incompatible with the basic ecological cycles of the planet.

In socialist society, on the other hand, the means of production would be held in  common  by majority. Humanity would no longer be at the mercy of market forces; a world-wide plan of production could redirect  resources to those regions worst damaged by climate change, and a democratically planned economy would allow the needs of the environment to be taken into account as a serious matter, so that climate change could finally be stopped. Green environmentalists need to be socialists. Just imagine the vast amounts of wasteful production of pointless commodities produced solely for sale that could be eliminated. Without the cynical manipulation of people’s insecurities and vanities by the billion-dollar advertising and marketing industries. As we build the new society, wants and needs will inevitable alter, and so too will consumption habits. Capitalism as a system thrives on the cultivation and celebration of the worst aspects of human behaviour; selfishness and self-interest; greed and hoarding; the dog-eat-dog mentality. Built-in obsolescence would end as products would be built to last, designed to be repairable and when they eventually are due for replacement they would be recyclable. Such basic practices would save massive amounts of materials and energy, all along the production chain. Right now, the technology is available to theoretically generate all the clean electricity we need.

 We do not need any more research or studies. We need action. If you want to eliminate a problem or an evil, you must get to the root of it. You cannot get rid of a poisonous plant and create something healthy in its place just by pulling off the top of the plant. You have to pull it up from the roots and then grow something completely different. That is what a radical solution is. Radical means having to do with the root. And this is why a real revolution is needed and this is what it’s all about. In a society that is organised first and foremost to work together to produce enough to comfortably ensure people’s physical and mental well-being and social security — abundant food, clothing, housing, furniture and appliances, cultural pursuits, and lifelong education and training, and health-care — and in which technological advances benefit everybody without costing the environment, a new social definition of wealth will evolve. It won’t be measured by personal wealth, or by how much “stuff” you’ve got.

  

Work Longer, Risk Dismissal

Whenever a major fire breaks out and firemen get injured or killed politicians are effusive in their praise, but when it comes to conditions, pay and pensions they reflect their real feelings. At present the firefighters across England are in dispute with their employers over pensions and what is the government's response? Fire Minister Penny Mordaunt said fire and rescue authorities have "robust" plans in place for the proposed strikes. 'Union officials say that under the government's proposals firefighters will have to work until they are 60 instead of 55, pay more into their pensions and get less in retirement. The proposals will leave firefighters at risk of dismissal as their fitness declines into their 50s, the FBU said.' (BBC News, 1 November) No mention of gallantry or firefighters devotion to duty when it comes to pay or pensions from the usually verbose politicians during an industrial dispute. RD

Chinese Deception

Some "expert" political commentators, journalists and politicans still refer to China as a communist country despite these officially reported economic facts about that country. 'More than 82 million people in China live below the poverty line, a senior official has said.   Zheng Wenkai said that poor Chinese people live with less than $1 (£0.63) a day and added that the number would rise to more than 200 million if international standards of poverty were applied.   "The poverty-stricken population not only suffer from low income but also face various difficulties in getting drinking water, roads, electricity, education, medical care and loans," news agency AFP quoted him as saying during a press conference.' (International Business Times, 16 October) This is in a country that has Jack Ma with a reputed fortune of over £6 billion.  RD

Creating Change (3)

In the advanced countries, dissatisfaction with government stems from its inability to deliver effective economic policies for growth and inclusion. In the newer democracies of the developing world, failure to safeguard civil liberties and political freedom is an additional source of discontent.

It is hardly news that the rich have more political power than the poor. When the elites’ interests differ from those of the rest of society, it is their views that count – almost exclusively. A study of American federal policy by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, point out, “it makes very little difference what the general public thinks” once interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans are taken into account. The political system is tilted in favor of the economic elite. Politicians play second fiddle to powerful financial CEOs and more often than not also to supra-national bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. The overwhelming strength of capital in markets sets the political agenda for the economy.

A politician who represents the interests primarily of economic elites has to find other means of appealing to the masses. Such an alternative is provided by the politics of nationalism, sectarianism, and identity – a politics based on cultural values and symbolism rather than bread-and-butter interests.  As a result, the representatives of the ruling class have been able to retain power despite their pursuit of economic and social policies that are opposed to the interests of the working class. Identity politics is malignant because it tends to draw boundaries around a privileged in-group and requires the exclusion of outsiders – those of other countries, values, religions, or ethnicities. This can be seen in Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. In order to solidify their electoral base, leaders in these countries appeal heavily to national, cultural, and religious symbols. In doing so, they typically inflame passions against religious and ethnic minorities. The ploy pays off handsomely at the polls but it also fosters a poisonous politics of sectarianism. One consequence, however, has been the rise of extremist groups while at the same time, regional separatist movements such as those in Catalonia and Scotland challenge the legitimacy of nation-states as they are currently configured and seek their breakup. Populism is not the answer. The emergence of a xenophobic right should serve as a warning that a lack of real democratic alternatives makes extremist alternatives attractive.

  It could be argued that members of low-income households should reasonably vote for political parties that fight for economic redistribution. Data tell us a different story: low-income households, much more so than those of the wealthier tend to abstain from going to the polls altogether.  In the US, people with a disposable annual household income of more than US$100,000 are more likely to vote than those with an income of US$15,000 or less. The proportions who vote are 80% versus 30%. As Gilens and Page explain, we should think of the preferences of the top 10% as a proxy for the views of the truly wealthy, say, the top 1% – the genuine elite.

The platforms of social-democrats and other left-winger still claim to represent the interests of low-income classes. This is, however, more a public relations device to pay lip-service to  anachronistic image as defenders of “social justice”. When in office, however, reformist parties face a paradoxical dilemma: to effectively support redistributive policies such as minimum wages, maintenance of the welfare state and taxation of higher incomes would likely harm their historical constituency, low-income households. Such policies would result in threats by investors to move capital and investments abroad. That, in turn, would cost jobs in the national market and result in less economic growth, less public revenue, less social investment and, eventually, fewer votes. To remain in government depends on the performance of their real economies and on the confidence of financial markets.
Left parties have hardly profited from the socio-economic destruction that has ravaged a large part of the European continent. Left-wing parties, like the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) or the French Left Front (FdG), are only “far left” in the minds of conservative pundits. As the right became more and more enthralled with deregulation and privatization, the  left response is essentially not much more than asking for less of the same and offering a weak form of Keynesian investment politics, devoid of an alternative, deprived of principles and denying the class struggle.

Since the late 1970s protest movements began to focus more on cultural than on economic issues. The importance of trade unions steadily declined. In countries like France or Spain, once home of powerful unions, less than 10% of the workforce is unionised. Their importance notwithstanding, environmental organisations  main goals are far removed from economic equality and redistribution.

When democracy fails to deliver economically or politically, perhaps it is to be expected that some people will look for authoritarian solutions, delegating economic policy to technocratic bodies in order to insulate politicians from the “folly of the masses” almost always is the preferred approach. Businessmen look wistfully at China and wish their leaders could act just as boldly and decisively – that is, more autocratically – to address the country’s reform challenges.  In countries like Egypt and Thailand, military intervention is viewed as a temporary necessity to keep commerce running smoothly.

From “Indignados” to  “Occupy” the new social movements also no longer see elections  as a sufficient source of legitimacy. Nevertheless, direct democracy and citizen participation, however, are anathema for the ruling technocrats. Yet, still have to answer the question of how we organise our decision-making processes. Even though elections are no longer the only strategy – without an electoral mandate, our struggles would be doomed. What appears to be missing are the common platform, the shared goals  and solidarity links which can bind us all together in protest movements, both inside and beyond national boundaries, to form a powerful catalysts of change.  People tend to wrap meaning into narratives.  We make sense of the chaotic world by rooting phenomena in emotions, experiences and intuitions. We have forgotten that we need myths, emotions, images, and dreams.  A utopia is needed. Utopia describes a better tomorrow. Utopia provides the compass for the direction we should be taking. The Socialist Party’s commitment to its social democratic vision enables all people to make an informed judgement on whether a path leads into the right or wrong direction.

Without the ability to mobilise, without that passionate hope in a common vision people do not come together in great numbers. Only a positive promise for a better world can end the paralysing fear of the pending end the World as we know it.  Only if enough people believe that a better life is possible, they are willing to struggle for change.  Utopian aspirations allows imagining a different world  and reminds us that the present society is not set in stone but can be moulded into a different future. When people join their forces in their  communities there is a powerful awakening which can create change. The possibility for a better tomorrow gives people the courage to rebuild the world from the ground. The World Socialist Movement can join together isolated struggles across social or national borders in solidarity for everybody’s emancipation. Only through debates, discussions and discourse can we give credibility to utopia, making it a feasible and realistic alternative.

Creating Change (2)

All those groups who seek a just and sustainable society should and must come together to share and structure a common vision of change, where common sense and goodwill will be the norm in our relationship with each other and to the world.  Let us identify ourselves with the concept of  one humanity. We are not only fighting for the sake of our children and future generations, but also because we yearn for something better for ourselves. We are protesting the extremes of poverty and wealth that has divided us from one another in a world of plenty, where millions starve while a few live in excessive luxury. Rather than engage in an endless fight against policies of this or that government in office, we assume a position of anti-capitalism, against the entire capitalist system. It is our revolutionary ideas that unites us.

We shall ignore the intellectuals and professors who say we have no leadership or pose clear demands. Scientists and technicians have in their hands the knowledge and the wherewithal to take humanity in any direction they choose to take, but like the rest of us they are constrained by the system we live in. They are not directed by the wishes, needs and aims of society as a whole but have to follow the logic of their master, the market. Everything becomes possible when the tools are in the right hands, the hands of the producers. It becomes a matter of organisation to bring in the new society. There is plenty of work to be done to achieve the satisfaction of everyone's basic needs, but is deliberately left undone as the profit motive dictates. It takes a fundamental shift of emphasis away from the dictates of a small minority to the wishes and needs of the overwhelming majority.

 A bottom-up, proactive, participatory democracy at all levels: local, regional and world has its power at the base with delegates elected to carry forward the message and speak for the whole community. It's difficult to find other expressions away from the hierarchical ones we're so bound up in; the idea here is simply a logistical one.

To attain the the full development of creative human potential is widely recognised as being the goal of life for human beings: this is the change we need. Not achieving parity or possessions, or even getting out of poverty or beating hunger. We have to have a vision far beyond this stage, to see beyond the intellectual paucity that drives current day society to crave the material above the cerebral or philosophical, favouring or craving things above thoughts and ideas. Ending poverty, hunger, preventable or treatable diseases and enabling all to have adequate living conditions – all this goes without saying; these goals are all part of what is to be achieved in the period of social re-organisation and will be planned for in full consultation with local communities.

 Workers are forced, under capitalism, to fight the same battles over and over again without resolving issues. The political limitations of social reform which follow from the economic limitations of capitalism in general. To speak of the limitations of working class action is to lay this down only within the productive relations of capitalism. Outside this, the working class has immense power -  the power to change society. Workers already run the apparatus of production, produce goods and maintain services, but they do it for the capitalist's profit. The straightforward issue which should be kept crystal clear is that socialism is nothing less than the working class taking over the entire apparatus of production and the earth's resources and organising production solely for need. On the basis of common ownership and production for use socialism could immediately find the freedom to expand all its activities in response to need.

A reformist formula of workers collaborating with the employers in exchange for concessions including, for example, high redundancy payments, retraining schemes, housing allowances, capital injections for the setting up co-operatives, workers' delegates on boards of directors, some control of over management appointments, profit sharing schemes. These are the messages of despair which provides as much hope as would advice to the condemned man that he should help organise his own execution in exchange for an easier death. The re-organisation of capitalism  is the surest guarantee of continuance of social problems and not a working class issue.

Creating Change (1)

There is an entire range of horrendous and growing problems we face locally and globally every day. It is not just climate change, or war, or poverty and homelessness. It is much, much more. It is things getting worse and we, the people, are losing badly by virtually every measure. We are up to our necks in debt. We can’t find a job and if we do find a job, that job is insecure, low-wage, with few if any employee benefits. This is a world in which union-bashing, out-sourcing,  temporary work, zero- hour contracts, stagnant wages, and growing inequality are the norm.

76 percent of respondents in a Wall Street Journal poll did not feel confident that their children’s generation will have a better life than they. Over the past 15 years there was more than a 50 percent increase in people thinking there is a lack of opportunity in America (it is now just about half of all Americans). And 59 percent of Americans believe the American Dream is impossible to achieve for most people. We don't have to read Thomas Piketty to understand how much worse the currently unacceptable inequality is going to be ten years from now, or to even try to guess how many trillions of dollars of wealth are sitting hidden off shore, or in countries like Ireland, where Apple keeps billions to avoid paying taxes.

These pessimistic views of the future are rational, as their lives have become so much more difficult and depressing.  People are working longer hours, working far past previous retirement age—if they can retire at all. Many Americans do not take vacations. And many Americans of all ages can't find good jobs, or can only find low-paying and often part-time work, which causes their lifestyles to plummet. College graduates are burdened with heavy debt. More than 45 million people, or 14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line last year, the  Census Bureau reported. The annual income threshold for being counted as living in poverty was $11,490 last year for a person and $23,550 for a family of four. Poverty is particularly dire for single mothers: A third of all families headed by single women were in poverty last year—that's 15.6 million such households. The black poverty rate was 27.2 percent. More than 11 million black Americans lived below the poverty level last year. About 42.5 percent of the households headed by single black women were in poverty. The Hispanic poverty rate was 23.5 percent. The number of American children with chronic illnesses has quadrupled since the time when some of their parents wer kids, portending more disability and higher health costs for a new generation of adults, a study estimates. An almost fourfold increase in childhood obesity in the past
three decades, twice the asthma rates since the 1980s, and a jump in the number of attention-deficit disorder cases, according to researchers .

There is often what seems like police-state repression and the criminalization of poverty, homelessness, drug use, and of immigrants, people of color, and often those who venture to protest and express their constitutional rights. Things may feel relatively fine for many educated white folks living on the coasts and in cities and university towns, but this will not last. Sooner or later the rising tides of massive inequality and increased repression will affect most of us.

The corporate, business-state power nexus use their massive money, infrastructure and energy to turn the existing propaganda, political and business lobbying machine into a juggernaut.  There are large numbers of organizers, highly visible gatherings of the faithful, and a powerful media and online presence—complemented by an eagerly compliant corporate media which repeats reactionary and business talking points like stenographers. There are thousands of paid pro-capitalist talking heads on all the media, as well as lavishly funded think-tanks which all hugely dominates the news and influences public attitudes. They now can pretty much stop any major laws from passing in America on the national level. They have tilted politics far enough in their favor, that people at large lacks the power to regain the balance. There is massive lobbying budgets (analyst James Thurber estimated that the actual number of working lobbyists in Washington was close to 100,000 and the industry brings in $9 billion annually) and corruption on many levels. For them it is a class war; and they are not interested in compromise. We do live in a complex society where the occasional success gets appropriately celebrated, like gay marriage, which is seen as proof of how things are going to change, and not as an anomaly that it is, which doesn’t threaten corporate power and profit since gay marriage has been somewhat of a boon for the business sector, and many corporations support it.

 It is a basic tenet of politics that corporate power rules the roost. Nothing significant that will become law if corporate power, profits, global competitive advantage, military might, national security and privatization are in any significant way threatened. Reformst optimists talk about how things are going to change: something better is right around the corner; the pendulum is going to swing back, what goes around comes around, etc. It ain’t going to happen. Every indicator signals that things are going to get much worse.

The problem is that people don't know what to do. They are asked to sign dozens of petitions, to give money to a myriad of uncoordinated, stand-alone one-issue causes. For most people elections change nothing. Rarely is there someone to vote for who might even try to shake up the system. As research has shown, the entire political apparatus serves the wealthy almost exclusively—and especially those who donate to the parties and politicians. The reformists continue to do the same thing over and over as if things will actually change by continuing along the same path. Einstein describes such repetitive compulsion "insanity," and he had a point. Year in and year out, the reformers write essentially the same books and articles, advocating for muc the same policies,  meeting with one other at the same conferences and seminars, discussing the same old issues.

Very little  power and energy is invested in serious organizing. We all can easily imagine many ways our world could be better. We have all the analysis we need. We have access to a tremendous amount of information to understand the cause and cure of virtually every social problem. Workers have great thinkers, comprehensive information, hundreds of compelling books about all of the horrors of the economic crises, of racism and sexism, of the climate change, and so much more. There are great people working on crucial issues.  But we do not have a clue how to address these myriad of problems in a political way. This is in stark contrast to the corporate state that dominates in order to relentlessly cut social programmes, lower taxes, privatize government, erode women's rights, and so on and so on. Yes, change will come, but it very well might not be the change we want. It might be a lot scarier than they are right now.

There has been both a sharp decline in union membership and influence, as anti-union campaigns have decimated the union movement. The State of Michigan, the birthplace of the auto-workers and the labour vision, is now a right-to-work state. The same can be said of those hosts of community organizers that they have moved away from efforts to exercise power, to make trouble and push for change. Instead, they “study” things and become  advocates for policy shifts that fits in too comfortably with the status quo, despite thousands of people within it who are unhappy with their feelings of impotence and lack of change. Cooperatives may sound very nice but their history is just as dismal as that of any capitalist enterprise in initiating change and
eliminating poverty.

The Socialist Party’s organising principle is to get people to change their consciousness and think hard about revolution. We need to get more radical. Higher levels of  political education and discussion is necessary. We have to sget down to the basics, not indulging in palliatives and patching-up but demanding a real difference. Let's stop fantasizing about how capitalist world should be in an ideal world when there isn't the remotest chance of those ideas coming to fruition. Let's focus on building local and regional strength, on organising thousands of activists and bringing people together in ways they do not feel they on their own. Flooding the airwaves with deceptive advertising only works on the uninformed. People who know what's going on are not deceived - in fact, are angered - by lies told to them. We win when we knock on doors and have conversations with those who don't vote and ask them what they care about. We need to educate ourselves and then we can engage with others in our families, with our friends and among  our  communities.

Today we witness the media providing Russell Brand with the platform of newspaper and television to espouse revolution and this access is offered because he is no threat whatsoever without a movement. Chomsky in an interview with David Barsamian said that “there is no real Left now” in the U.S... “If you are just counting heads,” Chomsky elaborated, “there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they…don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things.”

The Marxist Gramsci said
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” He rephrased it “This crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Dark shadows are already looming and a divided and disorganised movement will be all too easily defeated. What we require is inspiration to restore confidence.  We need Brand's ability to express hope, and acclaim the various recent struggles from the Zapatista's, Occupy, Rojava, which are constructing  the political spaces so we can raise the arguments of long forgotten or ignored people...Debs, Bookchin and Pannekoek, to name just a few and drawing on  their ideas and merging with our own case for socialism and the future. We must go beyond mere protest and to begin to build. We need to offer feasible alternatives that (for all their flaws) to serve as  examples of what we are trying to strive towards. If we ourselves keep offering nagativity, then that is what we will receive in return. This doesn't mean we are critical but it does mean offering  criticism in a comradely fashion. The reality is that wherever there is resistance we are ceding ground to the reformists. We saw it with Occupy, their lofty aims reduced to currency crankism and a return to one issue campaigns. We live in an enormously technological society where, if it was not for capitalism, we would all have more than enough to live long, healthy, interesting lives. Let us establish a community-based economic and political system, where we can all have satisfying jobs. We can all have food security and food safety. We can all have real education and real health care. And so, it remains for us, the people, to devise a system of self-government, a system of procuring community wisdom and of locking out every one of the exploiting class.

Finally to quote Rosa Luxemburg “The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history. Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”

Adapted from (and added to) here

The Anarchist Commune

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There is no better way to explore the weaknesses in one’s own views than to discuss a political opponent to find out any difficulties in our opinions. By considering the points they raise we hope to improve on our own ideas

The article is taken from the Libcom website

Mendel Dainov’s Ideas

Mendel Dainov’s name is almost forgotten today. Meanwhile, he stood at the origins of the Russian anarchist movement of the early 20th century. Information about Dainov can be found in the encyclopedia "Revolutionary Thought in Russia of XIX - beginning of XX Century" (article by D. Rublev). Dainov is interesting by his original thoughts, including those on the ideal of the future non-authoritarian socialist society.

In the late 19th century French workers who belonged to different factories and different unions began holding meetings (such gatherings were called "bourses") in order to share useful information about job offers and the situation of workers at various enterprises, as well as for preparing strikes together without the permission of union tops. This activity was attended by active supporters of anti-authoritarian socialism (anarchism, stateless self-governing society) like Fernand Pelloutier. Moreover, it was supported by radical leftist intellectuals such as Georges Sorel. The result was the formation of revolutionary syndicates – voluntary autonomous associations of workers’ bourses and other workers' organizations which considered direct action as the main method of struggle for better life. In other words, their strikes were not coordinated with the authorities (whether moderate trade unions bosses or factory bosses) nor with the current legislation which did not allow workers to achieve all their goals. Decisions about the course of the strikes and their demands were taken by assemblys of workers, not leaders. Direct action is direct democracy. Revolutionary syndicalists were aimed at the general strike, the abolition of capitalism and the seizure of all existing industry in the hands of the workers' unions through a general occupation strike. (As can be seen, the activity of the revolutionary syndicalists had nothing to do with the work of any modern union. All modern trade unions support the deal with the business, comply with government legislation, complain to the state court.)

Almost all the leaders of Russian anarchists: Dainov, Karelin, Novomirskii, Volin, Grossman-Roschin (from a certain moment) fell under the influence of revolutionary syndicalism. Its ideas and practices, according to Dainov, prepare the economic foundation of the future of society.

Economy of local communities (communes) will be organized on the basis of industrial "productive groups" created, in turn, by the revolutionary unions (syndicates). Moreover, thanks to the syndicates, in the course of their daily economic struggle, which begins still in capitalist conditions, workers prepare themselves for self-government. Arranging the strike for salary, people learn the collective interaction. On the other hand, using direct action, workers are destroying the state and, at the same time, overcoming their own fears of state power and respect for state laws. In the end, having united the majority of workers, syndicates capture and manage the industry.

But the work of production groups is not enough for the community. In addition to the production of goods, there are many other issues: education, housing, defense, local law. All these questions will be administered by local communities (communes), their assemblies and councils of delegates. Professional associations (industrial groups) within the community will be engaged exclusively in economies. In other words, Dainov proposed to organize society, combining two principles: territorial principle and production principle.

There are also economic and social issues that can not be solved at the level of a local community. For example, transport, railways, big ports and factories cannot be built and kept in working condition by the efforts of a local commune. So an important aspect of the new society will be the system of federal agreements between communes. For this people need federal congresses of the delegates.
Dainov believed that these congresses can have only temporary meetings. He feared for the concentration of power in the hands of centralized structures. During the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 representatives of other libertarian Socialist movement, the SRs Maximalists, promoted the idea of permanent Congress of delegates (1, 2). Members of the Congress must be in constant communication with their local communities.

Dainov believed that at the very beginning of the revolution, a society organized into a coherent whole state, inevitably breaks up into separate regions. This is a very accurate observation. That's how events unfolded in a series of the revolutions known to us.

Internal unity of the separated regions is provided by their geographical location, local customs and traditions, economic interests and common historic past. Then, in the case of successful development, regions will be transformed into self-managed communes. At the next step they will unite into large federations, and then into the international federation. It is clear, however, that if the workers do not have the experience of self-organization, such a development will be impossible.

Very interesting, in our opinion, is Mendel Dainov's critique of state socialism. In those days, many politicians and theorists on both the left and the right, for some reason, were convinced of the benefits of the economic system totally controlled by the centralized state (such ideas were associated with Marxism, but not only with it). Dainov, on the contrary, spoke about the inefficiency of the statist sector. He believed that the basis for the functioning of the statist economy will be two interconnected phenomena: corruption and inefficiency. This criticism was close to truth, anticipating the difficulties of the USSR economy.

"The total failure of the bureaucracy to seriously organize any industry and all disadvantage, all ruinousness of the centralized production are strikingly clear. Costs of starting the business are usually too large, the production is not regulated, the products are disgusting and their quality is much worse than that of the same products made by private producers. But whereas, under these circumstances, private enterprises usually stop working, state-run ones, very often in spite of everything, still continue to exist because this or that persona of the bureaucratic world is interested in it... "

"To take away all social wealth and all instruments of production from the ruling class and pass them to a collectivist administration: it is to actually provide it with all the might of the expropriated bourgeoisie ... It will be able to abuse its power because in its hands will be all, all the threads of the economic, and thus political life of the society, all the forces of the menacing, centralized state mechanism. [...] And it will abuse its power because its very position will push it for this. "

1) SRs Maximalists https://libcom.org/forums/history/socialist-revolutionaries-maximalists-srs-maximalists-24092014

2) Also here you can read materials on the practical experience of creating a libertarian socialist society in the Russian city of Kronstadt by the maximalist and anarchists. https://libcom.org/forums/history/practice-anti-authoritarian-socialism-kronstadt-republic-1918-02102014

Sharing our wave-length

Our ideas are shared by others even though we may not agree on every detail this article shows the overlap that exists.

The Economy of Freedom

The collapse of the state-capitalist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union proved that any attempts to combine a just social ideal with preservation of the state and commodity-money (market) relations are doomed to failure. Communist anarchism has always predicted that Marxist utopias would come to precisely such an end. It has not been discredited in the least by the experience of social democracy and party-state “communism”, and there is therefore no need to “supplement” it with borrowings from these doctrines, which have suffered complete collapse.

One such borrowing is the idea of “market socialism”. It was born in the heads of social-democratic theorists and taken on board by reformers in the ruling parties, who however did not save the “socialist camp” but hastened economic disaster. Nevertheless, many leftists, including some anarchists, have taken up the idea of combining socialism and the market, viewing it as an alternative to centralized “planning”.

However, attempts by anti-state, anti-authoritarian socialists to combine a just social order with market relations have always failed. They have led either to a sort of “collective capitalism” (as happened, according to the descriptions of Gaston Leval and D. Abad de Santillan, to certain collectivized enterprises during the Spanish revolution: they preserved money and the wages system and continued to conduct business egoistically, on their own responsibility) or to restricted self-management with expanded powers for managers (for the sake of faster and more “efficient” decision-making in the market, as has occurred in the kibbutzim).

Even the “freest” of market relations are completely incompatible with solidarity, ethics, and freedom itself. The French philosopher and ecologist André Gorz demonstrated in his book Critique of Economic Reason that under both the centralized bureaucratic and the market system man’s will is fettered and his activity and the entire life of society slip from under his conscious control. Thus, when people are subordinated to the impersonal laws of the market, which do not depend on them and cannot be controlled, the results of individuals’ uncoordinated activity do not correspond to their will and desire. These results are a matter of chance, as in thermodynamics. However, freedom is the possibility of conscious control over one’s own life (self-management).

The social psychologist Erich Fromm (To Have Or To Be) gave a brilliant analysis of the so-called “market character”, showing how market relations corrupt and deform the human personality: it turns into an object of commerce, a commodity that strives to sell itself to greater advantage and develops within itself only those qualities which can be “purchased”. All relations among people are subordinated to the egoistic, utilitarian principles of profitability, all activity becomes prostitution, and mutual aid and solidarity are replaced by a war of “all against all” waged by embittered and mutually envious individuals.

Market relations cannot exist in a truly free society based on solidarity. They will inevitably destroy such a society.

Some people propose retaining the market (“market socialist”) model only for a “transitional” period before anarcho-communism is established, with payment “according to the quantity and quality of work done”. They repeat Marxist arguments about the difference between “socialism” and “communism”, how the former will “grow over” into the latter, and the conditions under which this will take place, such as a higher productivity of labour, abundance and a higher level of consciousness.

These purely productivist arguments might still have been seriously discussed thirty years ago, before the onset of the ecological crisis. Today it is absolutely clear that a just society can be built only on the basis of ecological harmony. If humanity wishes to survive, then there can be no question of increasing – or in some sectors even of maintaining – the level of labour productivity of developed capitalism. And those who connect communism with “abundance” in the traditional sense of the word are at risk of missing the boat altogether: unlimited economic growth within the limited system of Planet Earth is impossible.

It is also hard to agree with the idea that “payment according to the quantity and quality of work done” is the most effective and acceptable way to avoid an unmotivated and passive workforce. People become indifferent toward their own work when they are unable to control its course and results and when they have no sense of its social significance or of the meaning and purpose of the labour process as a whole. This is natural given the alienation and detailed (“Taylorist”) division of labour of contemporary industrial production, and no “material incentives” can make the least difference to the situation. And yet in the agrarian communes of revolutionary Spain and in kibbutzim with a communist system of distribution people understood why and for whom they were working, and their work was no worse or less effective than in capitalist firms.

The idea of payment according to the quantity and quality of work done can be taken seriously only by those who follow the Marxists in supposing that the quantity and quality of work done can be measured. In reality this is impossible. All socially necessary work is of equal value: there is no way, for instance, to determine how much work by an engineer is equivalent to a certain amount of work by a farmer or a bus driver. The productivity of work may be influenced by chance or depend on numerous factors that cannot be taken into account. Finally, any manufactured product contains the work of many thousands of people, even of several generations. And who, indeed, is going to calculate this “quantity and quality of work”? A new state authority?

Attempts to establish a new social hierarchy on the basis of “work done” will undermine equality and solidarity and lead to the rise of an empowered and privileged elite of the most “highly skilled” and “successful” workers. And to defend the power and privileges of the new “Stakhanovites” a state will again be needed.

Of course, in a free anarcho-communist society there will at first still be individual household enterprises that do not exploit the labour of others – small farmers and people engaged in various crafts. They will not be forcibly expropriated, but will gradually form cooperatives of their own free will. But it would be a very grave error to build relations in the already socialized sector of the economy on the same basis as in the individual sector. If this is done, the individual sector will inevitably gain control over the economy as a whole. Until complete socialization is achieved, we shall be dealing with two quite different (though interacting) systems of production. In the larger, socialized sector, communist principles of distribution must be established from the very start – free access to those things which are available in abundance and social distribution of everything else in proportion to individual needs (Kropotkin): from each according to individual ability, to each according to individual need (the principle of the kibbutz).

Relations with individual household enterprises may be built on the basis of direct exchange of products, with access of these enterprises to socialized goods and services (transport, etc.) regulated by agreement. Cooperatives should be given preferential treatment in this respect.

From the very start, relations within the socialized (communist) sector will be not market relations but oriented toward the needs of real people. The economy of the free society will be planned in the true meaning of the word. “Planning” under the state-capitalist dictatorship was a sham, inasmuch as it was carried out not from below, “from the consumer”, but from above, by the Centre. In the free society of the future, by contrast, the associated producers and consumers, acting together in a spirit of solidarity, will be able to determine what, where and how to produce and consume and ensure – on the basis of free agreement “from the bottom up” – coordination between needs and production capacities.

The methods of such “planning from below” are suggested by the practical experience of really existing communes and consumer cooperatives. Consumers will aggregate their needs at regular general assemblies of local associations and then coordinate these decisions with production capacities in economic bodies of the communes or at their general meetings with delegates from the associated producers. The communes, united in regional and interregional federations, and the self-managing producers and consumers, aggregating and coordinating needs and capacities with the aid of statistics, acting through delegates at congresses of communes and in economic councils at various levels, will be able to develop larger-scale production facilities that will serve all or a number of communes.

“Planning” of the economy of an anarchist society must not be centralized. By no means everything needs to be coordinated at the regional, continental or planetary level. A different principle is appropriate here. A region must not assume responsibility for matters that a single commune can handle by itself without affecting the interests of others. Likewise, a region can resolve most of its problems for itself. The economy of anarchism will therefore be oriented toward the greatest possible (although, of course, not complete) self-provision. Among other things, this will mitigate ecological, raw-material and transport problems and bring production near to the consumer. Many of the economic and ecological problems of contemporary society arise because what is produced is not what is really needed by specific consumers but what dispersed producers think they might need. That is, no one knows in advance whether people need this or that product; this is determined after the fact by the market or by a bureaucrat.

In a free ecological society everything must be otherwise. In a free society, the economy begins with the consumer. Consumer and residents’ associations, together with the syndicates of the staff of distribution centres in urban districts and rural areas, assess the current and future needs of residents (something like the system of commercial orders) and transmit statistical data to the economic council of the commune, which together with delegates from the syndicates and from consumer associations and relying on statistics determine which of its necessities the commune can produce by its own efforts, which will require external inputs or participation, and what goods or services the commune can provide to the residents of other communes.

What the commune is able to do for itself by its own efforts is done at the local level and does not require coordination with others. Everything else is coordinated with other communes at the necessary level. Coordination is established with the aid of statistics at economic congresses of delegates from communes and then ratified by the communes themselves. (No one can compel a reluctant commune to participate in one or another joint project, but in that case no one can compel other communes to continue dealing with that commune.)

Thus, what is produced must be precisely what is really needed by specific people or groups of people. Distribution will be carried out through the same distribution centres that collect consumer information, without charge but upon the consumer presenting an individual card indicating that he or she has contributed the working time agreed by members of the commune, or a child’s card, or a pensioner’s card (for the sick and others unable to work).

As the new social relations develop, it will become possible to break up huge cities, ecologize social and individual life, and redistribute work within society (including between the sexes) so that gradually the rigid specialization of work will recede into the past and work will turn into creative and pleasurable play.

The economic system of the new society can only be an economy of universal self-management, an economy of freedom. Production should be regulated not by professional managers, bureaucrats or directors, but by working people themselves. General economic decisions will be taken by the whole population – at the general assemblies of consumer associations and communes or (through delegates with an imperative mandate) at their congresses, while the direct management of production will be concentrated in the hands of self-managing work collectives and technical councils and syndicates created by them, united in a dual (sectoral and territorial) federation.

These, of course, are only general and fundamental points. There are numerous details that cannot be anticipated, let alone discussed in a short article. Answers will arise out of the practice of a free society. For now it is important to recognize one thing: people who wish to survive under decent conditions will have to renounce dominion over nature and over their fellow humans. But this means a radical change in the methods and processes for taking social and economic decisions, the replacement of external regulation (by a bureaucracy or the spontaneous laws of the market) by self-management and “planning” from below on the basis of federative agreements.

In other words, an anarchist society will be a society without bureaucracy, without money and without the market – or it will not be at all.

VADIM DAMIER

(Translation Comrade Stephen Shenfield)

End capitalism before it ends you

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Socialists are told that capitalism is an efficient system of production and rational allocation of resources but is it really true? These facts from UNESCO web-site may have many doubting it.

Some 20% of the world's children go without basic immunization, most of whom live in remote and often impoverished areas where infection is more likely to lead to death.

Over 9 million children die each year from preventable causes, most of them from dehydration, routine infections, or one of several major diseases for which vaccines are available.

Some 500,000 women die in childbirth each year while over 3 million infants die from dehydrating diseases that could be eliminated through breast feeding or Oral Rehydration Therapy, a simple and cheap mixture of clean water, sugar and salts.

Over 17 million people die each year from curable infectious and parasitic diseases such as diarrhea, malaria and tuberculosis.

Over 500 million people are infected with tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness, and schistomiasis, all of which are now preventable.

Over 18 million people are infected with the AIDS virus.

More than a billion people lack access to any health-care.

There are 1.75 billion people without adequate drinking water.

A billion people are without adequate housing, and 100 million are homeless.

Nearly a billion people, mostly women, are illiterate, and about 130 million children at primary school age and 275 million at secondary level are not enrolled in school.

There are over 53 million uprooted people or refugees in the world, 80% of which are women and children.

There are over 110 million landmines scattered in 64 countries killing and maiming over 9,000 children, women and civilians of all ages each year, and over one million since 1975.

On top of these outrageous conditions are layered the alarming environmental problems confronting the world:

Around the planet, 26 billion tons of topsoil are being eroded per year from the world's farmland. That's 3 million tons per hour.

Deserts advance at a rate of nearly 15 million acres per year.

10 million acres of rain forest are destroyed annually.

Over 200 million tons of waste are added to the atmosphere each year.

Over six billion tons of carbon from fossil fuel burning were added to the atmosphere last year.

There is a 6 million square mile hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, and a 4.5 to 5% loss of ozone over the Northern Hemisphere.

The planet has warmed at least 1° C in the last century, and given the annual carbon, CO2, CFC, and methane transmissions into the atmosphere, it will rise another 2.5° to 5.5° in the coming century.

There are over 31,000 hazardous waste sites in the US alone, while in Europe, Estonia, and Lithuania acid rain has damaged over 122.6 million acres of forest.

There are over 130,000 tons of known nuclear waste in the world, some of which will remain poisonous to the planet for another 100,000 years.