The Possibility of Post-Capitalism

Capitalism must be removed and replaced with the post-capitalist majority revolutionary alternative. It can't be reformed in any major way, Swedish and Labour Party models do not impinge in any way upon capitalism' rapaciousness. Its is like trying to make a vegetarian out of a tiger.

Lenin's model was a Jacobin one to win power. Lenin wasn't trying to make socialism, but to make state capitalism, not because socialism was impossible or an impossible dream, but because of the fact, as real Marxists told him at the time, socialism is a post-capitalist society and not a post-feudal one, which Russia was becoming.

Capitalist development creates the tools to eradicate poverty and an educated workforce to create and run ever more of it (the capitalist class are a redundant class now inasmuch as they are not needed for wealth production), (which is why Marx supported capitalist revolutions to overthrow feudalism), but then it has to increase or curtail production to satisfy an artificial 'market' demand in the interest of the minority classes profit accumulation.

The minority class has become a fetter upon the realisation of the productive potential of the technological capabilities of the potential productive capacitive process capitalism has bequeathed to the 95% wealth producers.

It can not distribute resources to satisfy human needs without destroying itself in the process and it also doesn't lift us out of the relative poverty, but retains it as a necessity, to ensure a constant supply of waged slaves. as Voltaire wittingly put it, "The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."

The comparison is not with early capitalism nor today's version, but between the social and economic position of the immense majority relative to the wealth they collectively produce. The needs of industry demands an educated , fed workforce in many instances, as workers also run capitalism from top to bottom, the diseases of poverty can jump class barriers, so self preservation of the system requires different scenarios to early developmental models but can revert to smokestack circumstances and shanty towns also, as the developing world shows us.

Poverty in those twin senses relative and absolute, is entrenched forever if capitalism is retained, as is war (business by other means), trade wars, war over resources and geopolitical interests.

Don't forget also the horror of two world wars for economic dominance and the war science upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the kind hearted capitalist class as they currently pick sides for another go.

To say that 'true socialism is impossible' is akin to a person in feudal times expounding against the coming impossible capitalist revolutions. Nothing will stop social change or an idea which time has come.

The post-capitalist revolution has of necessity to be a majority one. The first time ever for majority revolution and not some vanguardist, Leninist-style minority putsch as all previous revolutions have been minority led, 'meet the new boss' ones.

Using the Achilles heel of bourgeois democracy a politically aware immense majority, conscious of their class interest in abolishing the last great slavery that of wage slavery, can transform the world into a commonly owned, production for use , free access socialist society without elites and change the operating tenet from a minority "Accumulate, accumulate" into a majority one of, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

It will not happen by gradually reforming capitalism,nor by premature nationalist adventures or mislabelling state capitalist monstrosities, but the primary task of socialists these days is education.


If you open any textbook on economics you will find the definition at the beginning as to what economics is will include the concept of ‘scarcity’. On the one side, it is taught, there are scarce resources and, on the other side, unlimited wants, and that economics is the study of the choices people make (as individuals and societies) to deal with this.

However, the concept of ‘scarcity’ used in these definitions is an abnormal and circular one and human wants are not unlimited. The relationship between scarce resources and unlimited wants is not what economics actually studies. The definition above is an ideological construct to justify one particular way of organising the production and distribution of goods and services – the capitalist system of production for profit, involving markets, money, prices, profits, wages, interest, banks, etc. That’s what economics really studies.

The technological means of the modern age make it possible for everyone in the world to live a comfortable, safe, interesting and happy personal and social life, with all our needs provided, and totally free from hardship, misery and the constant frustration, worry and embarrassment of not being able to afford what we require.
Modern production techniques are entirely capable of providing an abundance of nutritional food for many times the present world population. There is no need for anyone anywhere to starve, to lack nourishment or even to make do with cheap substitutes.

There is enough raw materials, knowledge and manpower in the world to ensure comfortable hygienic accommodation for everyone everywhere. It is possible for everyone to live in houses which are safe, weather-resistant, fitted with up-to-date appliances and decorated and furnished according to individual taste. There is no need for anyone anywhere to be homeless or to live in poor, dangerous and ill-equipped accommodation.



Real socialism is a post-capitalist society where waged slavery will have been abolished. As capitalism is run from top to bottom by the working class, 95%, so it can be replaced by a commonly owned, production for use, free-access,society with no elite access to its products. The capitalist class, liberals or neo-cons, are an economic parasite class. All government, however well meaning politicians are, whether Leftist, Rightist, Centrist,or "Can't make up their minds", to win power, are governments over us in the interests of the dominant economic capitalist parasite class. Capitalism cannot be reformed into some kind of egalitarian system. It cannot be managed in some state-capitalist, soviet-style system, nor can it end the cycles of boom and bust with waged slavery driving the production of wealth. The cause of the Labour Party is not the cause of socialism and never was. It's original reason for existing was to get reforms for working people. Damn all to do with socialism. “The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England.” (Tony Benn)
 There is no such thing as a middle class. It is a conceit. Class is a person's relation to the means of producing an ddistribution of wealth. If one HAS ot work for a wage or salary in order to receive a rationed access ot wealth then one is by definition working class. The phrase working class was, as we saw, originally “working classes”, but this usage is loose and theoretically wrong since there is only a single working class. But there is another confusion arising out of the phrase’s association with “working man” and “workman” which refer to manual labour, so that it is often assumed that the working class is confined to manual workers, in the factories and mines', on the railways and docks, etc. This mistake is made not only by those who do not want to be considered as members of the working class, but also by manual workers who do not consider civil servants, clerks and other “pen-pushers” as real workers. But it is a mistake and arises from an alternative and inadequate definition of class in terms of social status rather than relationship to the means of production.

But it is clear that, as far a relationship to the means of production is concerned, office workers (including managers) are in precisely the same position as shop floor workers: they are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and are forced to obtain a living, by selling their mental and physical energies to an employer. This in fact is our definition of working class: all those who are forced to sell their mental and physical energies in order to live. It would have been convenient to use some phrase such as “wage-earning class” in order to make our point of view clear at first sight, but unfortunately not only does a section of the working class call itself the “middle class" but even denies that it is paid wages as workers are and insists on calling them a salary instead. In fact a salary is equally a price for the sale of a person’s mental and physical energies, but this snobbery means that in order to make ourselves absolutely clear who we mean by working class we have to say “those forced to work for a wage or salary” or, less adequately but more simply, “wage and salary earners”. 



The society of today is a capitalist society and the classes that face one another are the capitalist class and the working class. The form of bondage is different from the forms that prevailed formerly, but it is still bondage.
The wealth producers of today are not bound to a lord or master as were the serfs and slaves. They may refuse their services to this or that capitalist. But they cannot escape from the capitalist class. They must deliver their abilities to some member or members of that class. In no other way do they have access to the things needed to preserve life.
And in spite of the often repeated claim in various circles that the classes of today have mutual and harmonious interests, the facts show a struggle between these classes as grim as any that preceded it. From the beginning of the existing form of society down to the present day there has been a never-ending conflict between the capitalists and the workers: on the part of the capitalists to squeeze every possible ounce of energy from the workers at the lowest possible cost; on the part of the workers to check these efforts and to try in turn to gain bearable living and working conditions for themselves.

Wee Matt

Problems That Can't Be Solved

Canadian officials are now seeing a sharp increase in the amount of refugees illegally crossing the U.S. border to avoid deportation from the U.S. In Quebec alone, the amount has tripled in the last year to 1,280 from 424.

Some who crossed into Manitoba in freezing weather have been treated for frostbite. A pregnant woman said she was afraid to deliver in the U.S. Under the U.S. - Canada pact introduced in 2004, refugees cannot make asylum claims in both countries.

As the weather gets warmer more are expected to cross into Canada.

So too put it bluntly, Canada will soon have a refugee crisis like some European countries have now. 

Once again, capitalism creates problems it can't solve. 

Steve and John.

Treating The Symptons Not The Cause.

Soon it will no longer be a crime in Russia to beat a family member, as long as you don't cause bodily harm.

On January 27, 2017, the state duma, voted 380 - 3 to decriminalize battery on family members that doesn't cause bodily harm. Instead it will mean a fine, or a 15 day sentence. Critics of the new law, said it would encourage domestic violence, (no kidding). Statistics show that 40% of all violent crimes in Russian, are within the family. Russian police are reluctant to react, regarding their intervention as meddling in family matters. 

It would be easy enough for socialists to advocate harsher measures in dealing with those guilty of spousal and child abuse, but that wouldn't be the point; which is the establishment of a society where the economic pressures that cause families to break down (of which this is a symptom) won't exist. 

Steve and John.

A Good Question?

The Canadian capitalist class, is not optimistic about Ontario's economic future. The annual report of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, released on February 7, 2017, said, "There is a confidence gap between our members organizational and provincial economic outlooks". Only 24% of their members, who were surveyed last fall, expressed optimism; to quote, "Diminished profitability, lower labour market participation and sluggish market activity have resulted in a risk-averse atmosphere in which businesses are disinclined to grow production."

So if the capitalists have little optimism, why should we have any? 

Steve and John.

Overpopulated world, or not?

Many people have come to see the tragic refugee situation as though it were more a problem for us than for the migrants. We have stopped caring about them. The reality of this on-going crisis is nothing short of a modern-day slave trade, with migrants treated as commodities. It’s as though nothing has changed in the 300 years since desert tribes used the very same routes to bring slaves to north Africa: Nigerian women told they are going to Italy to work as housemaids only to be trafficked into desert brothels with no idea when they might leave, young men cruelly beaten and held captive for months until their families pay a ransom

Three rival governments preside over the failed state of Libya, and the real power lies in the hands of armed militias. Libyans may rely on their own militias for protection, the migrants have nothing and no one to protect them.  Not only are desperate migrants at the mercy of people smugglers but also the authorities themselves – in the main, armed militias with no one to hold them to account and few other sources of income apart from the migrant trade. 

In the Libyan detention centres, migrants are locked up and left to rot. It’s a humanitarian disaster with barely any humanitarian organisations there to help. For tens of thousands of migrants in the country at the moment, they have no means of escape.   EU leaders have signed a deal with Libya. Far from helping people escape, this deal is aimed at keeping them there. The next step is to forcibly returning asylum seekers in Europe to Libyan prisons.

Despite the illusion of diversity we do all have more in common with workers worldwide than with the capitalist class as 95% of the worlds population own little more than their ability to work for a wage or a salary and the 5% capitalist class constitute a parasitic class to whose ends the diversity propaganda serves.. The overpopulation myth threatens to overtake the human nature myth as the chief explanation for the evils of the modern world where hunger, disease, the retarded development of backward countries, social unrest, political instability, urban sprawl, destruction of wildlife, city squalor, crowded mental hospitals, violence, all kinds of pollution and ecological upset, the shortage of housing and the desecration of the countryside are all confidently attributed to the problem of an excess of human beings. The readiness to accept the "overpopulation" argument arises from a lack of understanding of the way capitalism works.

The "overpopulation problem" is really a misuse of resources problem. Capitalism, as a system of rationing via the market, is justified in people's minds by a belief in scarcity. "There isn't enough to go round", so we must be restricted in what we are allowed to consume. It has become a cliché to speak of "this overcrowded planet” yet if, for example, the entire world's population were now placed in the United States, the population density in that country would still be little more than that of Holland.

It is not overpopulation is the problem but the private, corporate or state ownership of the means of production and distribution with its competitive ethos and accumulative 5% minority parasitic profit system allied with the coercive state apparatus and war machines to aid , back-up its plundering and wasteful use of nature given raw resources as well as the exploitation of the 95% human resources in pursuit of accumulation of profits.

We are more than capable, with a commonly owned world, of sustaining a superabundance of the necessities of life with production for use and not for sale, allied to free access to them, with democratic control exercised by all through delegation, not government or states allied to a self-regulating equilibrium of virtuous, holistically sustainable and ethical environmental standards. Poverty is caused in the developed world by capitalism, it takes place at the point of production. It is INEVITABLE. The political differences are small between the governing and aspirant governing parties and in the less developed world poverty is caused by the same capitalist exploitation of resources in which tribal and other organised clan, family or ethnic differences are exploited to capital's advantage in power grabs over natural resources and raw materials.


Each new mouth to feed produces a pair of hands to be exploited by the parasite class.
All wealth springs from labour. A democratic, post-capitalist, commonly-owned, production-for-use society can utilise resources and technology to introduce a fully automated luxury communism with free access to the wealth thus socially produced. We can run society ourselves, rid the planet of government over us, war between rival capitalist concerns over, trade routes, raw materials, markets and spheres of geopolitical interests.

 Housing and anything else in capitalism is produced to make a profit from market for a parasite class and not to satisfy human needs. Capitalism is responsible for this , deliberate creation and manipulation of markets in human misery and for driving down wages and reducing availability of essential commodities if profit is not derived form their production, not immigrants. We are quite capable of producing for use to satisfy all human needs and ushering in the post-capitalist future. If ownership and control of production and distribution was in the hands of all and production was for use instead of for profit, with free access,there would not be the same wasteful production in wasteful competition to satisfy markets with duplication of efforts, while human needs go unmet. Capitalism depends on poverty stricken workers selling their ability to work for a minimum ration of what they need to survive and reproduce future wage slaves and these conditions of waged slavery ensure a ready supply of workers to exploit now and in the future.


Wee Matt

Are You Really Your Own Boss?

For eighteen years, "Dangerous Dans" has been selling burgers in Toronto's east end, but will close on May 28, 2017, because its landlord, Pizza Nova, raised its rent 80%. To quote owner, James McKinnon, "If I opened seven days a week, four in the morning until late at night, I would generate enough revenue, but it would kill me." A spokesman for Pizza Nova said, "Any proposed increase is in line with market rates."

This writer is so bewildered. They told me, anyone can become his/her own boss, under capitalism and make it. Do you think I was conned? 

 Steve and John

Increased Technology/ Increased Want

On CBC News of February 8, 2017, they announced that in the last four years, seventy thousand jobs in manufacturing and farming, have been lost to technology, in Canada alone. One forty-seven-year old sheet metal worker, who had once made $37.00 an hour, was struggling to support his two daughters on Employment Insurance and struggling even more, with his self-esteem, or lack of.

As Charlie Chaplin said in, The Great Dictator, "Machinery that creates abundance has left us in want." 

The trouble is, it needn't be that way and we "can" do something about it.

 Steve and John

A movement of movements

Some of those who founded the Socialist Party in regard to trade unionism had a leaning towards industrial unionism, whilst others were inclined to view the trade unions unsympathetically as only another facet of capitalism. 

  The private and state ownership of the means whereby the people live produces in industry an unceasing conflict between the propertied parasite class and the property-less working class, a conflict manifesting itself in the form of strikes, work-to-rule go-slows and lock-outs. Workers in their endeavour to resist the encroachments of the exploiting class, and to secure higher wages, shorter hours, better conditions of labour, have largely organised themselves into Trade Unions. The capitalist class in its desire to wring more profits, rent, and interest out off the labour of the workers, has for years been organised into cabals, combines, and trusts with the object of controlling markets, raising prices, limiting production, reducing wages and intensifying labour.
 

The Socialist Party realising that this social conflict of hostile classes in society is preparing the way for the transformation of capitalist property into common ownership by limiting competition among the workers on the one hand and by combining and concentrating capital on the other, recommends its members to join the unions in their respective trades in order that by the spread of socialist enlightenment the members of the working class organised in trade unions may be enabled to carry out the class struggle with the efficiency which results alone from clearly defined class-conscious action and taught to translate the industrial conflict into the field of politics.

The Socialist Party urges upon the trade unionists and all other wage-workers to join the Socialist Party in order that they may proceed to the conquest of the powers of government as the indispensable preliminary to the overthrow and dispossession of the capitalist class and the establishment of a society in which the means and instruments for producing the necessaries, comforts and luxuries of life will be the common and democratically controlled property of the whole people.

The Socialist Party recognises that the working class must be organised both politically and economically for the safe-guarding of working class interests and the overthrow of capitalism, declares nevertheless the ultimate futility of any economic organisation not based on the principle of working-class solidarity and recognition of the class-struggle.

The Socialist Party seeing that the trade unions of this country are sectional in character and unconscious of the historic mission of the working-class, cannot give unreserved support to these organisations, which have been frequently manipulated to suit capitalist interests. Members of the Socialist Party are advised to form socialist groups inside their unions for the purpose of common counsel and joint action to counteract any abandonment of working-class interests and to educate their fellow members in the principles of the class-struggle.

The Socialist Party understands that the trade unions are essentially economic organisations and that when based upon and informed by correct principles they are capable of fulfilling their function as such. It demands from the Trade Unions a similar recognition that the political action of the working-class must be revolutionary, and the function of, and can only be taken by, the Socialist Party.

The political and economic organisations of the working-class should work together, in harmonious cooperation, and the Socialist Party desires, to this end, the affiliation of such unions as shall recognise the necessity for ending the wage-system and establishing the socialism.

Socialist Party, however, views the trade union movement as presently constituted as organised on an unsound basis. The Socialist Party declares that trade unionism is a necessary form of working-class organisation, but also declares that unless such unions are based upon the class-struggle they are insufficient and become ineffective.   The Socialist Party recommends that all members of the Party within trade unions be instructed to actively oppose all action of the unions that is not based on the principles of this Party. Therefore members of the Socialist Party, as trade unionists, must work for the conversion of their trade organisations to the sound economic position which alone fits the trade union to co-operate with the Socialist Party for the overthrow of capitalism.

Many are hungry for a change of direction. The strength and clarity of purpose needed in order to break free is going to require us to very thoughtful so as to knit our numerous diverse movements together. This doesn't mean a centralized hierarchy. Our society's allegiance and addiction to capitalism must be renounced and abandoned, if we want to see our way to a liveable future. The existing capitalist model of endless economic expansion and ceaseless capital accumulation is unsustainable. Clearly if we stubbornly persist down that path, collapse of the earth's life-sustaining ecosystems is inevitable. The signs are everywhere visible. Corporate interests are now in the driver's seat and they blithely ignore the facts, have utter contempt for truth, and couldn't care less for democracy, the environment or human rights.  We need to construct a new society. Capitalism is a failing economic philosophy which honours acquisition above sharing and cooperation. Capitalism is the antithesis of democracy. Capitalists do not cooperate they compete and seek to destroy competitors. Constant warfare is the history of capitalism.

We require the creation of a class-based political organization to raise the class consciousness of our fellow-workers. Unlike other sectors of the left, unions possess an infrastructure of buildings, meeting spaces, massive mailing lists and extensive administrative apparatuses. Participatory democracy is absolutely the best way to organize workers, because it is the only way that actually builds revolutionary consciousness, if, in fact, we do believe in the democratization of our labour unions.

The anarchist, Rudolf Rocker,  wrote  of unions serving as schools for the working class:

“… the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the socialist society of the future, the elementary school of socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to plant these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the strongest possible development, so as to make the task of the coming social revolution easier and to ensure its permanence.”

To be schools for socialism, unions must do more than simply mobilise. They must create structures that prepare workers for what are the ingredients of a socialist society.  It can serve as a big step towards preparing workers for control of their workplaces. The workers themselves must be collectively empowered.

How Things Sink Under Capitalism.

According to an issue of Canadian Jewish News, February 2, 2017, a few hours before Trump's inauguration, Obama ordered $221million to be given to the Palestinians. 

One needn't be brilliant to figure how they'll spend it. Then 'genius-head' Trump, bans immigration from countries whose populations he dislikes. The fact that these deals may not go through, isn't the point, which is, they would like them to.

So, we have two guys working at the most important job in the world, one after the other, taking action that will harm people. This is clearly indicative to how low things have sunk under capitalism.

So, let's help it sink a little lower - right into the garbage can of history. 

Steve and John.

Strange Bedfellows

In a recent episode of "Foyle's War" on TV Ontario, the main protagonist, Foyle, has to investigate the production, in the U.K., of German war materials - Yes, you read it right!

Based on a true story, and English-based subsidiary of, American-owned, Standard Oil, was producing fuel for German planes, both before and after Pearl Harbor. They shipped it in barrels, labeled 'whisky' to Tenerife, from where they were loaded onto German ships. The Luftwaffe needed the fuel to continue bombing Britain. 

As one of the company's owners said, "We don't care how we make a profit, business is business." 

Steve and John.

What is money

There is no truly independent country in the world, because international capitalism has made sure of this, and our own experience here in Britain, especially since 1964, should have brought it home to us. The past few years should have shown us just how independent Britain is, when foreign "bankers" tell the British government how to spend money, and how it must not spend money, in order to keep the international capitalist class happy. Workers have no country and a post-capitalist, wage-slavery free world to win.

Independence for Scotland therefore is a myth put about by the Scottish National Party, which further confuses the Scottish section of the working class and blinds them from the real struggle – the class struggle. The outcome of the class struggle is the abolition of capitalism and an end to poverty, insecurity and the ever-present threat of war. The SNP is just another capitalist supporting political party, as politically dishonest as Labour and Conservatives and Lib-Dems and Greens or UKIP. Don't follow leaders. Leadership is capitalist principle. How about getting rid of leaders and opting for working towards socialism as capitalism can not be reformed without war (by deed or proxy) and poverty (relative or absolute)?

Don't settle for crumbs take over the bakehouse as we, the 95 percent, produce all of the wealth. Abolish capitalism and its iniquitous wages system.   Marshall Sahlins, perceptively observed:
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such, it is the invention of civilization" (Stone Age Economics).

In truth, the majority is impoverished. It is impoverished insofar as it has no other option than to sell its working abilities to those who monopolise the means of living and whose conspicuous wealth must irresistibly provide the very yardstick by which that poverty will be starkly exposed. This may not be the poverty of material destitution. But if the measure of a human being consists in the accumulation of material possessions to which he or she may claim the, by that token, we are demeaned. And, ultimately, it is in this devaluation of our human worth—not simply in the fact of material inequality but in the meaning this society attaches to it—that we may glimpse the very essence of this poverty. The basic income is not a solution, but another form of subsistence ration, effectively relative poverty, while wealth surpluses torrent upwards to an economically dominant capitalist parasite class.

Supporters of capitalism, especially the Von Mises school, may not be able to conceive of production without money and prices, but we socialists can. The definitive answer to your the "economic calculation problem" is a (largely) self-regulating system of stock control in which calculations are made in kind rather than in terms of a common unit like money.

And let us address those currency cranks who believe we can create money by a stroke of the keyboard. Surely, the recent banking crisis has exploded the myth about banks being able to create credit, i.e. money to lend out at interest, by a mere stroke of the pen but apparently not.

Financial crises always spark interest in critics of the system. They see the problems of capitalism—like its vulnerability to crises—as primarily financial in origin. The whole point of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of needs, but the accumulation of money. In other words, it’s impossible to separate the economic world into a good productive side and a bad financial side; the two are inseparable.

The monetary surpluses generated in production—the profits of capitalist businesses—accumulate over time and demand some sort of outlet: bank deposits, bonds, stocks, whatever. It’s going to be that way until we replace capitalism with something radically different. What we need to ask is why people today tend to blame banks rather than capitalism as a whole.

No bank can lend more than it has, either as deposits or what it has itself borrowed. The idea that money is created through fractional reserve banking is more of a metaphor.

No point in the socialist case arouses such controversy as that of the abolition of money and wages. Marx identified money as one of the two main manifestations of human alienation (the other was the state) and looked forward to its abolition in a communist society where human values would apply: where the standard by which something would be considered ‘valuable’ would be human welfare.

Marx also fully endorsed the slogan “Abolition of the Wages System!” a system which he regarded as a form of slavery. Money is just a means of saying ‘This is mine, not yours’.

Money in various limited forms existed for hundreds of years before the advent of capitalism but because it is an indispensable element in the workings of capitalism its general usage expanded universally with the development of that system. For a start, it is the device whereby capitalism separates the worker from the fruits of his or their labour; an indispensable part of the process whereby a minority class of capitalists ration the consumption of the great majority who as workers of one sort or another produce all the real wealth of society.

Marx saw money as having two basic functions: (1) a medium of exchange or circulation, i.e. the means through which articles produced for sale get bought and sold; and (2) a measure of value, i.e. a common unit in which the value of articles produced for sale can be expressed as a price, and is thus a standard by which they can be compared.

Marx also identified two kinds of paper token money: tokens that were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of the money-commodity and tokens which were not. The former created no problem. The latter, however, could create a problem if they were issued in a greater amount than the amount of the money-commodity that would otherwise circulate. In this case, if they circulated alongside gold or silver, the value of the tokens would depreciate, i.e. they would buy less than their face-value. If they were the only currency (as is the case today) this would result in a rise in the general price level, i.e. in a change in the standard of price.

An inconvertible paper currency has to be managed by the government or some state institution such as a central bank which, to avoid depreciation or inflation, has to calculate the correct amount to issue. In Marx’s day the case where the only currency was paper token money was a hypothetical one which he only discussed in passing.

"Paper coin, that forgery
Of the title-deeds which we
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of earth."
Shelley

Wee Matt

The Migrant Rules

The number of asylum seekers in Europe has soared over the past 10 years. In that time claims have increased fivefold to more than 1.2m last year, unleashing a populist backlash that could yet affect the outcome of elections in France and Germany this year.

The Guardian newspaper has analysed the experience of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy – and found the conditions in Britain do not compare well. Only Italy, on the front-line of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Mediterranean, fares worse. Its analysis found that Britain takes fewer refugees, offers less generous financial support, provides housing that is often substandard, does not give asylum seekers the right to work, has been known to punish those that volunteer and routinely forces people into destitution and even homelessness when they are granted refugee status due to bureaucratic delays.

 Alex Fraser, director of refugee support at the British Red Cross explained, “Roughly 3% of asylum applications in Europe were lodged in the UK. I don’t think we will see a reduction ... by making the experience tougher. All it will do is make the experience of people in the system more difficult.”

Britain consistently has the lowest approval rates for asylum seeker claims of the five countries. “The average grant rate in Europe is 63 to 65%,” said Fraser, which compares with a grant rate of roughly a third in the UK, dropping to 28% in the third quarter of 2016, which Fraser called “really low”.

Britain has been rebuked for not taking its “fair share” of refugees. In 2016, Britain received 38,517 applications for asylum (1 per 1,664 people in the population). This compares with 722,370 claims in Germany (1 per 112), 123,432 in Italy (1 per 485), and 85,244 in France (1 in 775). The only western European country home to fewer asylum seekers is Spain, which had 15,500 applications in 2016 (1 per 2,971).

On top of this, most of these countries are involved in refugee resettlement programmes with more ambitious aims than the UK’s commitment to taking 20,000 Syrian refugees from refugee camps by 2020.

France, which has a similar population to Britain, will take 30,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2017. Germany will begin a new humanitarian programme in 2017 to resettle 13,700 of the Syrians living in Turkey, despite the fact that an estimated 600,000 Syrians have arrived in Germany since the outbreak of war in 2011.

The British government also provides less in the way of financial support for asylum seekers than Spain, France and Germany (though not Italy). While people wait to hear if they have been granted asylum in Britain they are provided accommodation and £36.95 a week to cover food, clothing, toiletries, transport and all other costs. In France, asylum seekers are given almost double this amount – €11 (£9.40) a day, or £65.59 a week – as well as accommodation. In December 2016, the French Council of State found that this rate was “manifestly insufficient” and ordered the French government to increase it in early 2017.

In Spain, asylum seekers are either housed in refugee reception centres where they are provided with food, clothing and other essentials and a small cash allowance, or in apartments, where they receive up to €300 (£256) a month to cover expenses and food. Germany gives asylum seekers €31.15 (£26.50) a week on top of accommodation, but this does not have to cover their food, as it does in Britain.

The condition of the accommodation provided for asylum seekers in Britain has also been condemned. A recent home affairs select committee report into asylum housing said the quality of accommodation provided to asylum seekers was “disgraceful” and cited cases of mice, rats and bed bugs.

Britain is also the only country out of the five examined that does not set a maximum time limit for holding asylum seekers in detention facilities and the only country that does not allow unaccompanied children who arrive and claim asylum the right to apply to be reunited with their parents.

Judith Dennis, policy manager for the Refugee Council, said a major concern was the high rate of destitution and homelessness experienced by refugees in Britain.

After being granted refugee status, people stop receiving the support they have been getting as an asylum seeker and must apply to receive mainstream benefits and have 28 days to leave the accommodation provided to them by the Home Office. Because of the difficulties involved in applying for benefits, very few refugees are able to register for benefits in this 28-day period, forcing them to go to food banks and charities for food and meaning many find themselves homeless. “What we do is force refugees into homelessness and destitution almost routinely,” said Dennis. “It’s hard to see how someone without an advocate or a special need that makes them a priority for council housing will be able to move on within 28 days. We’d expect the majority of those who have to source private sector housing will become homeless.”

Britain also has the strictest restrictions on asylum seekers working. They are not allowed into paid employment unless they have been waiting to hear about their asylum claim for 12 months. Then they are only allowed to work in occupations featured on the government’s “shortage occupations” list, a limited set of professions including classical ballet dancers, orchestral musicians, , medical practitioners and engineers.

Fraser said that while on paper asylum seekers are allowed to work, he has never met an asylum seeker who has been able to. “It doesn’t seem to be a reality,” he said.

This contrasts with Spain where asylum seekers can work from the day they apply for asylum and are given their “red card” identification document. Vocational and language training classes are organised at Spanish reception centres in which asylum seekers first live to help them find work. In Italy, asylum seekers can work after six months. In Germany, asylum seekers can apply for work three months after submitting their asylum claim, with certain vetting conditions.. In France asylum seekers can work nine months after applying for asylum in limited occupations.

A Capital Idea

In Capital Marx examines the working of capitalism in detail. He takes as the basic unit of the capitalist economy the commodity, an item of wealth produced for sale. Where goods are produced for sale then, and only then, do they have a value. The law of value operates only where there is commodity-production. For thousands of years goods, produced for sale under pre-capitalist conditions, exchanged more or less at their values. Capitalism, which is a system of production for profit as well as for sale, is more complex and commodities only accidentally exchange at their values. Nevertheless the law of value still operates. In fact, under capitalism all the paraphernalia of exchange—money, prices, trade, banks, bills, bonds, credit—are developed to a high degree.

For Marx the classless society that would replace capitalism—which he called either Socialism or Communism— would not be an exchange economy. Wealth would be produced for social use and not for profit or for sale. Hence the law of value would not operate in Socialist society. There would be no commodities, no money, no prices, no trade, no banks and the like.

This was also how all the Social Democratic writers on Marxian economics, people like Kautsky and Luxemburg, saw it.

The standard textbook on Marxian economics used by all sections of Russian Social Democracy, including the Bolsheviks, was A Short Course of Economic Science by A. Bogdanov first published in 1897

“The new society will be based not on exchange but on natural self-sufficing economy. Between production and consumption of products there will not be the market, buying and selling, but consciously and systematically organised distribution.”

Bukharin and Proebrazhensky's  The A.B.C. of Communism, wrote of Socialism (which he, for political reasons, calls Communism):

“The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. Under communism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic co-operative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products. These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them. In such conditions, money will no longer be required”

The question no reformer ever face is, if society’s ideas are “bad”, what makes them so? Why are they not “good” ideas? Why is society so “unreasonable” that it accepts an arrangement which allows a few people to enjoy almost boundless wealth while the condition of the vast majority is never better than insistent poverty and can sink as low as outright starvation? Why is society so “foolish” as to waste so much of its resources on destruction? Such questions are endless but had we known, or cared, the one logical and consistent answer to them had already been found, by that man whose beard caused us so much amusement. The Materialist Conception of History which, among other things, sees ideas in their place as the products of material conditions and not as the makers of those conditions:

“. . . economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch . . . “ (Engels — Preface to the German edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1883).

From this viewpoint, history is not the jumble of accidents, personal misdeeds and romantic mysteries which was served to us as the staple diet of our schooldays. History is a continuous process of social development, passing from one system to another, marking its way with periods of social revolution and with each system giving rise to its own class antagonisms. Man’s history, in other words, has been a process of class struggles which have brought him now to capitalism, a system with only two classes and therefore with only one class to struggle for its emancipation. Capitalism has done many things. It has broken the customs and taboos of earlier society, it has massed its people into great productive units. It has entirely separated one of its classes from the means of production and by so doing has brought into existence the most explicit of class divisions in human society. Capitalism has developed—and continues to develop—the process of extracting a surplus product, from the unprivileged class for the privileged class, into an unprecedented science.This, then, is capitalism. But how do we examine the system, how explain its workings, its class relations, its method of exploitation? How do we come to an understanding of capitalism’s tendencies and the process by which it nourishes the seeds of its own destruction? This analysis was the work of Marx’s Capital.

The first question Marx had to ask was—what is the mode of production in capitalist society? The answer was commodity production, that the mass of wealth under capitalism was produced as commodities. “Our investigation” said Marx, “must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” 

Marx’s method is to isolate the commodity, as ". . . in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.” From this simple statement he goes on to examine the commodity in detail; the limits within which one will exchange with another, the implications of the social relationship of value, the way in which commodities perform their function of exchanging so as to realise a surplus value for the capitalist class.

Marx examined the nature of the commodity which all workers possess—human labour power—and he revealed the process by which the working class are exploited, he revealed the reasons for their alienation from the means of production and he charted the course of their ever-deepening misery and degradation:

. . . within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work, and turn it into a hated toil . . . (Capital).

This passage, which ends with the famous statement that “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital,” has come in for much criticism from those who argue that the opposite tendency has taken place, that capitalism has solved its problems and makes its people ever happier in a flood of washing machines, cars and television sets.

But is what Marx said true? Misery? Agony? Join the rush-hour, take your place on a fast assembly line with everyone trying to keep up the bonus, have a go at finding somewhere to live which is bearable and within the pay packet of an average worker. Look into the figures of families who are suffering extremes of poverty amid the so-called Welfare State, which was another of those things which were supposed to have proved Marx wrong.

Brutality? Look up the recent crime statistics, with their evidence that we live in times of almost unprecedented violence. Consider the fact that men now earn their living by making the things which have the power almost to wipe out settled life on the earth. Mental degradation? This is the age when capital accumulation usually means the use of computers and automated techniques of production, when human beings are reduced to simply numbers, when exploitation is constantly being refined and intensified.

Capital probes the entire mechanism of capitalist society. While the “orthodox” economists grapple with their feeble expedients—their selective employments taxes, their import restrictions, their manipulations of Bank Rate—the Marxist analysis explains it all. And not at all in the popularly supposed manner of the unsmiling “Red Prussian.” Although he deals with a difficult and intricate subject, Marx never leaves his readers in doubt that he is a human being. His writing not only has power, but wit and movement as well:

Our capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims: “Oh! but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more money." The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all. He threatens all sorts of things. He won't be caught napping again. In future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing them himself. But if all his brother capitalists were to do the same, where would he find his commodities in the market? And his money he cannot eat, (Capital, p.172).

Marx shows how capitalism develops and how and why it will end. He shows that there is now only one subject class, and that it is their historical function to abolish private property and build the new society of Socialism. All this is in his works, in Capital and others. But at the same time Marx was clear that none of this was inevitable; he knew that men make their own history and that, working within the society they find, they must carry out their historical task.

What this means is that capitalism is not a matter of mankind, in some blindingly tragic mistake, getting onto the wrong path. It is not a matter of incorrect or anti-social ideas. In the same way, socialism will not happen simply because we think it is a "right” idea. Both systems are part of man’s social evolution, both have their own super-structure of institutions and ideas springing from a basis which can be scientifically examined and classified.

Socialists are distinguishable for their grasp of all this. Non-Socialists, however sincere they may be, however pressing the problems they protest against, can be identified by their failure to appreciate the scientific case for socialism. The reformers:

:They all want the impossible, namely, the conditions of bourgeois life without the necessary consequences of those conditions.” (Letter to Paul V. Annenkov, December 28, 1846)