The People's Voice

We live in a world controlled by corporate power and the individually wealthy. Today, there are think tanks who get paid to make the cranks sound rational; to justify the illegitimate; and to increase fear, hate, greed, and xenophobia. The world is beset with a series of unprecedented inter-connected crises. The need to establish peace and avert environmental catastrophe are two most pressing issues facing humanity. But then there is the poverty and hunger in a world of plenty, the global refugee crisis. All the consequence of an unjust economic system that lies at the heart all our social ills.

For anyone with the ambition of constructing a truly democratic world beyond borders, the best ideas aren’t likely to come out of global capitalism but rather from the case for world socialism. We’re talking about how to build an alternative world.  People are presently scared about what’s happening around the world today. The planet is currently in chaos. There is a serious impending crisis unfolding. We continue to burn fossil fuels and destroy the air. Due to climate change and conflict,  people are unable to grow their own food and far too poor to buy food when harvests fail. There has never been too little food to go round, for and world food supplies has not been anywhere near complete depletion.  The problem has been one of poverty.  Capitalism continues to squeeze working class people and thus xenophobia rises and keeps people voting for populist politicians who serve the masters of an unequal economy.

Many people are now behind the idea that we need to build something else, something very different but building a sustainable world requires that we understand clearly what we are up against.

The technical solutions to the climate crisis are already well at hand. Renewable energy and alternatives to dirty technologies have emerged in virtually every sector of production. The world produces enough food to feed everyone, and our technology has developed to the point where we can meet our needs with very little work. Imagine workers developing better ways of doing things and sharing the wealth that comes from those developments.

Marx believed that as it became easy to meet our needs through the high level of productivity of the machines we used, the time would be right to get rid of capitalism and move to an economy based on the principle of “from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their needs.” It seems clear that we have reached that point to let us live in peace and reap the rewards of our prosperity made possible by the collective knowledge and hard work of mankind. We are now on the brink of a new world where people are able to meet their needs without the exploitation of labour that leads to the enrichment of a few. We can achieve a “sharing economy” where people share what they have with each other and need to use less, and therefore work less, using fewer natural resources. That idea holds much promise, but it cannot fit within the tired old paradigm of profit maximisation. Our aim is the development of a solidarity economy, based on meeting human needs within ecological limits through detaching from consumer culture. We hold a vision of a world where people share what they have without anyone profiting and with no one’s labour being exploited, where we would not rely on money, on wage labour or on capitalists. The exploitative profit system needs to be abandoned. Choose to see others as ourselves, their needs as ours.

In an age where the internet provides us with unlimited access to the direct sources, there appear to be no limits to the misunderstanding and distortion of Marx. In books and articles, there is a continuous reference to Marx, attacking him from all sides for claims that he never made. How can it be that the ideas of Marx can be so completely misunderstood and distorted? One reason is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks appropriated Marx's theory and tried to convince the world that their practice and theory follow his ideas that instead of the role of the worker being abolished, it is extended to all men. Selectively quoted and out of context parts of Marx serve as the official ideology of the regime. Also, the reformist social democrats believed they were the enemies of capitalism but for them, socialism is not a society fundamentally different from capitalism, but rather, just a form of capitalism in which the working class has achieved a higher status. iI is, as Engels described it, "the present-day society without its defects."  They genuinely do believe in a better world – but they believe it can be achieved by a kinder, gentler capitalism and that profits can be used to promote environmental, anti-poverty, and certain other noble causes. But they don’t dare to ask – or to admit – where these very profits come from: the unpaid labor of the entire working class. The compassionate capitalists believe that applying market principles to philanthropy, charity, and the government will help lift the world out of poverty, cure all famine and disease. However, they fail to recognise that the exploitation at the core of capitalism is what engenders the very poverty, famine, and disease that their philanthropic and charitable efforts are attempting to relieve. They think that those who are “privileged” to enjoy great wealth should take up the responsibility of sharing a tiny slice of it with poor people – and don’t recognise that the wealth/poverty divide was created by capitalism itself. Marx and Engels explain in the Communist Manifesto:

 "The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best… [It requires] in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie… It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class."
There is no greater misrepresentation of Marx than that which is to be found in the thought of the state-capitalists, the reformists, and the avowedly capitalist opponents of socialism alike, all of whom assume that Marx wanted only the economic improvement of the working class and that he wanted to abolish private property so that the worker would own what the capitalist now has. The truth is that for Marx the situation of a worker in a Russian "socialist" factory, a British state-owned factory, or an American factory such as General Motors, would appear essentially the same. Marx's concept of socialism is not a society of regimented, automatized individuals, regardless of whether there is equality of income or not, and regardless of whether they are well fed and well clad. It is not a society in which the individual is subordinated to the state, to the machine, to the bureaucracy. Even if the state as an "abstract capitalist" were the employer, even if "the entire social capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation," this would not be socialism. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which serves the needs of man. Socialism for Marx meant neither the mere abolition of poverty nor the abstract idea of fairness which he rejected so scathingly in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. Least of all did Marx see socialism in which “representative” power and authority replaced individual power and authority over men. 
It should be clear the popular idea of the nature of historical materialism is erroneous. Marx's "materialistic" or "economic" interpretation of history has nothing whatsoever to do with an alleged "materialistic" or "economic" striving as the most fundamental drive in mankind. Marx has been criticised for presenting politics, culture, religion, etc. as simple effects of a one-way economic cause.  The popular view assumes that in Marx's opinion the strongest psychological motive in man is to gain money and to have more material comfort; if this is the main force within man, so continues this "interpretation" of historical materialism, the key to the understanding of history is the material desires of men; hence, the key to the explanation of history is man's belly and his greed for material satisfaction. It is the understanding of history based on the fact that men are "the authors and actors of their history." Marx saw that political force cannot produce anything for which there has been no preparation in the social and political process. Hence that force, if at all necessary, can give, so to speak, only the last push to a development which has virtually already taken place, but it can never produce anything truly new. "Force," he said, "is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one." 
Marx did not believe that there is no such thing as the nature of man; that man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the culture writes its text. Nor was Marx ever tempted to assume that "human nature" was identical with that particular expression of human nature prevalent in his own society. For Marx the aim of socialism was the emancipation of man, and the emancipation of man was the same as his self-realisation and development of the individual personality. 
Capitalism has obviously changed in the hundred years since Marx and Engels wrote yet in the basic relations and structures which distinguish capitalism from feudalism and socialism, however, it has changed very little, and these are the main features of capitalism addressed in Marx's theories. The workers' relationship to their labour, products and capitalists are basically unchanged from Marx's day. Workers, for example, may earn more money now than they did in the last century, but so do the capitalists. Consequently, the wealth and income gaps between the two classes is as great or greater than ever. 
Marx wrote no “Utopia” of the kind that earlier writers had produced – writings based only on the general idea of a society from which the more obvious evils of the society in which they lived had been removed. But from the general laws of social development Marx was able to outline the features of the new society and the way in which it would develop.
The capitalist class would love for class struggle to just be considered an old-fashioned notion from the past but the class struggle -- the conflict between the capitalists and the workers -- is at the very heart of the capitalist system. The majority of people would love to live in a world free of poverty, unemployment, racism and war. This kind of world is only possible under socialism. Most workers today would readily agree that this is the kind of world they would want for themselves and future generations. But they think it’s a pipedream yet it is the task of the working class to turn this vision into a reality. By learning the lessons of the class struggles that went before us and by applying our power workers develop revolutionary class consciousness. Our socialist perspective in no way means that we do not defend against the immediate attacks today. On the contrary, it is absolutely necessary, and socialists make good fighters for today’s struggle. But in order to fight most effectively, workers also have to understand that there can be no lasting concessions from the capitalist system. To achieve abundance for all, the working class will have to organise and build a genuine socialist revolution.

Marx the anarchist?

The SPGB does have a clear definition of what they would describe socialism to be and it is not to be unexpected that we will not describe those with certain ideas as socialist if it conflicts.

The SPGB point is that we do have something in common with the Kropotkinists and other communist anarchists Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin ( although he is now considered by many not to be an anarchist) ie those anarchists that stand for a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society based on common ownership, but not with the Proudhon, (or Tucker, Warren) , those who stand for the self-management of a market economy. The problem that aggrieves many members of the SPGB as one article stated is that the anarcho-communists such as pro-Kropotkists seem to feel they have more in common with the Proudhonists than with us when after all we both agree on the ends (albeit differ occasionally on the means to attain the end and as such is of secondary importance at this point of time in history and what matters far more is what we have in common ) !

The SPGB argument is that capitalism (or property/class based societies in general) necessitates a state. Hence to bring about a stateless society which is what is meant by anarchism you need to get rid of capitalism ( and that logically entails getting rid of the need for money and the market as well , very much echoing Engels to Cuno in 1872 “And since the state is the chief evil [for Bakunin], the state above all must be abolished; then capital will go to hell of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Abolish capital, the appropriation of all the means of production by the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one: the abolition of the state is nonsense without a social revolution beforehand; the abolition of capital is the social revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.”)

Proudhon was an opponent of government and wanted a society without one. But being in favour of features of capitalism and wanting to retain the money-prices-wages-profit system (what Marx called "commodity production") well , you know in the eyes of the SPGB (and many anarchists ) that would not make him a socialist . He was against ground rent and interest but not against profit. In fact he was a bit of a currency crank with his ideas of credit bank and stood for a society of small-scale producers trading with each other without the interference of the state. His famous catchword "property is theft" was aimed not at small-scale property but essentially at landed property. He defended individual property against common ownership.
Proudhon was also against workers organising it trade unions, was against workers going on strike for higher wages.

Some would call him the first anarcho-capitalist rather than the mutualist that he was and the reformist he could also be accused of being . Proudhon possessed a popular programme which in essence involved a society of artisans. Proudhon was very concerned at the tendency of employers to exploit employees, and thought that if society was made up of artisans then no such exploitation would take place, each worker would own their own means of production, and would sell their products at the market rate, since the market is an unbiased process of checks and counters, this would tend to balance incomes and prices and provide an equitable system of commodity production and sale, but without the massive problems of class division and exploitation. There are people today who still believe this, Marx's efforts to debunk it notwithstanding.

As for definitions, the SPGB has theirs but the definition of "socialist", basically what it generally meant in the 1840s was anyone who wanted to reform society, in whatever way, so as to benefit Labour. That was indeed how it was used them and was, of course, one of the reasons why Marx and Engels called the manifesto they wrote for the Communist League of Germany in 1848 the "Communist Manifesto" and not the "Socialist Manifesto". Basically, it was much too broad a definition that included too many contradictory views I suppose the more appropriate world (then as much as today) would be "social reformers". It is only on that basis that supporters of private property and the market such as Proudhon could be called "socialist".

We should be more demanding on labels we ascribe to people. The very words "socialism" and "communism" are connected with the idea that the means of production should be owned by society as a whole (or socially, hence "socialism") or by the whole community (or communally, hence "communism", ). And it is far better that people who are opposed to it are not called "socialists" or “communists".

The difference between socialists and anarchists is not over the aim of abolishing the State as I have stated earlier but over how to do this. Anarchists say that the first objective of the workers' revolution against capitalism should be to abolish the State. Socialists say that, to abolish the State, the Socialist working class majority must first win control of it and, if necessary, retain it (in a suitably very modified form) but for a very short while just in case any pro-capitalist recalcitrant minority should try to resist the establishment of socialism. Once socialism, as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole people, has been established (which the SPGB has always claimed can be done almost immediately ), the State is dismantled, dissolved completely We are not talking years or decades or generations here , but as a continuation of the immediate revolutionary phase of the over throw of capitalism .

But to end with the Anarcho-Marxist case, some quotes from Marx about the abolition of the State.

In 1844 Marx wrote that :
"the existence of the state and the existence of slavery are inseparable" - "The King of Prussia and Social Reform"

Again, as Engels wrote in a letter to Bebel in March 1875:
 "Marx's book against Proudhon and later the Communist Manifesto directly declare that with the introduction of the socialist order of society the state will dissolve itself and disappear".

Then, in a circular against the Bakunin prepared for the First International in 1875, Marx wrote: 
"To all socialists anarchy means this: the aim of the proletarian movement--that is to say the abolition of social classes--once achieved, the power of the state, which now serves only to keep the vast majority of producers under the yoke of a small minority of exploiters, will vanish, and the functions of government become purely administrative"

Capitalism - the final frontier

The communist elements of the Star Trek universe is often obscured because the films and TV shows are centered on the military hierarchy of Star Fleet. To the extent that we see glimpses of civilian life, it seems mostly untroubled by hierarchy or compulsion.

In Star Trek the United Federation of Planets is often described as a type of post-capitalist society where there is no money and nobody wants for material things. In the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Captain Kirk says that they don't use money in the future. "Don't tell me: they don't have money in the 23rd Century?""Well, we don't." - Conversation between Dr. Gillian Taylor and Captain James T. Kirk, Star Trek IV

A first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Neutral Zone," has Picard getting up on his high horse with a three hundred year old businessman who is revived from suspended animation: The businessman, naturally, wants to get in touch with his agents to find out what has happened to his investments. Picard loftily informs him that such things don't exist anymore. Indeed, poverty and want have been abolished "A lot has changed in the last 300 years. People are no longer obsessed with the acquisition of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy."

In the movie Star Trek: First Contact, Captain Picard says that in the future no one is motivated by the desire for material wealth. "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

Jake Sisko in the Deep Space 9 episode "In the Cards", in an exchange with the Ferengi, Nog: Jake: "I'm Human, I don't have any money." Nog: "It's not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement." Jake: "Hey, watch it. There's nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." Nog: "What does that mean?" Jake: "It means we don't need money!"

According to Tom Paris in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Dark Frontier", a "New World Economy" began to take hold on Earth and throughout the Federation in the late 22nd century, and eventually made money obsolete. He even mentions that in the 24th century, Fort Knox is a museum, apparently to money and capitalism.

Humans have forged a classless, moneyless society free of serious social ills.

The Ferengi were practitioners of a form of capitalism, basing their entire style of trade on the concept of "caveat emptor", or "buyer beware". Ferengi make their money by following rules such as Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 1: "Once you have their money...never give it back." Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 10: Greed is Eternal. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 27: There is nothing more dangerous than an honest businessman. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 35: War is good for business. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 45: Expand or die. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 202: The justification for profit is profit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

There are two major technological advancements featured in the show that explain how such a society could exist: 1) A replicator that creates any object upon demand, which is capable of materialising any object out of thin air, with only the press of a button.without requiring any human labor, and 2) An infinite energy supply that requires scant human attention to maintain. The primary energy sources in Star Trek are warp cores, and the deuterium, antideuterium and dilithium crystals which power them, offering an abundance of energy. Teleporters, powered by warp cores, offer reliable transportation anywhere around the world (and from the world to the moon and other planets). Not only does it allow for the movement of people, it allows from the bulk transportation of goods to their destination.

Given the technical premises of complete automation and free energy, the Star Trek utopia of pure communism becomes a possibility. The replicator technology appears to have made capitalism obsolete. When Jean-Luc Picard wants his tea, he doesn't have to hand over any cash—he just tells the replicator, and the machine makes it so. Riker, Data, Dr. Crusher—they don't have salaries (although they do get vacation time). Nobody ever needs to worry about a bank account, or paying back loans for Star Fleet tuition. Within the Federation, life follows Marx's, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
If all you want is a drink, you can get free synthahol any time you want it.

Federation citizens don't have "stuff." They have simple, immediate, free access to all the necessities of life. They don't need bank accounts . The only things they actually own are objects of special personal value - Picard's volume of Shakespeare, Worf's battleh, and Riker's trombone. Picard's brother may still run a traditional French vineyard, while Cisco's dad operates a classic New Orleans restaurant. But these operations seem more like lifestyles than professions; there's no sense that either needs the income to get by. And in fact, both businesses are small, family run, almost self-consciously handcrafted products for discerning consumers.

Yet at other times, capitalism seems alive and well in the Star Trek universe. The Enterprise crew-members sometimes spend "credits". The Federation credit does not appear to serve the role of capital as money does in a capitalist economy: production is not based on the accumulation of capital for reinvestment of production; instead production is undertaken to satisfy human needs, and the Federation credit is likely more akin to a Labour voucher - a means for distributing / rationing goods for individual consumption. Alternatively, the credit may serve as a means of quantifying energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_credit

Every citizen of the Federation has plenty of food of virtually any type they want, clothes, shelter, recreational and luxury items, and has all their basic material needs easily met. A society based around self-improvement and collectively improving the human race instead of cut-throat competition, and combined with heavy automation, it means labour is essentially free, menial tasks are automated, and goods are made freely available to all citizens due to superabundance.

There is a passage in Capital Vol III, in which Marx distinguishes between a “realm of necessity” and a “realm of freedom.” In the realm of necessity we must “wrestle with Nature to satisfy [our] wants, to maintain and reproduce life”, by means of physical labor in production. This realm of necessity, Marx says, exists “in all social formations and under all possible modes of production”, presumably including socialism. What distinguishes socialism, then, is that production is rationally planned and democratically organized, rather than operating at the whim of the capitalist or the market. For Marx, however, this level of society was not the true objective of the revolution, but merely a precondition for “that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.”

In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” he writes that: "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

Socialists are portrayed as hopelessly utopian impossiblists. What kind of society could be so productive that humans are entirely liberated from having to perform some kind of involuntary labour? It’s not that all work would cease, in the sense that we would all just sit around in dissipation and torpor. For as Marx puts it, “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” Whatever activities and projects we undertook, we would participate in them because we found them inherently fulfilling, not because we needed a wage or owed our monthly hours to the cooperative.

Yet we have the promise of widespread automation is that it could enact just such a liberation. Recent technological developments have taken place not just in the production of commodities, but in the generation of the energy needed to operate the automatic factories and 3-D printers of the future. Hence one possible post-scarcity future combines labor-saving technology with an alternative to the current energy regime, which is ultimately limited by both the physical scarcity and ecological destructiveness of fossil fuels. If cheap energy and automation are combined with methods of efficiently fabricating or recycling raw materials, then we have truly left behind ‘the economy’ as a social mechanism for managing scarcity. What lies over that horizon?

The demise of wage labour may seem like a faraway dream today. But once upon a time – before the labour movement retreated from the demand from shorter hours, and before the stagnation and reversal of the long trend toward reduced work weeks – people actually worried about what we would do after being liberated from work. In an essay on “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a few generations, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” And in a recently published discussion from 1956, Max Horkheimer begins by casually remarking to Theodor Adorno that “nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings.”
Socialism, to boldly go where no-one has gone before.

adapted from http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/

Too much oil? (1986)

Too much oil? (1986)

From the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many ports on the east coast of Scotland have recently had the strange sight of rows of oil rigs moored along the shore. This does not reflect any great new oil discovery, but the current slump in the world market. The "over-production" of oil, resulting in a fall in price to under ten dollars a barrel, meant that many of the fields in the high-cost North Sea have become "uneconomic" and has virtually ruled out any new explorations.

The bright future that North Sea oil was supposed to bring to Scotland's economy has not arrived and few Scottish Nationalist politicians now bother to bring out that empty phrase. "It's Scotland's Oil".

The effects of the slump in the oil industry are continuing to be felt. Many workers who believed that the industry offered security and high wages are having to get used to replacing their wages with thirty pounds a week on the burroo. The benefits that their high wages enabled them to enjoy are becoming the burdens of mortgage and HP repayments.

Those still employed in the industry are feeling the effects as well. In an effort to retain profit margins, wages are often the first targets of any employer, and these have been reduced, often sharply. Previously, wages have been paid for the whole of the "two weeks on. two weeks off " period commonly worked on the rigs but now many are being paid only for the time actually spent off-shore. Expenses that the workers received are being cut back; many are having to buy their own meals.

The unions are unable to do much about these cuts. They are not strong in the higher paid, higher skilled parts of the industry and the workers where they are organised have not much muscle anyway. In any recession, however, the union s position is always weak.

The service and supply industries are also feeling the pinch. Two of the four refabrication yards in the Moray Firth are facing closure. as the reduced amount of work makes them surplus to requirements. This area already has high unemployment. In Aberdeen, there are other industries and employers but the small towns of the Moray Firth have no such hope.

Oil-rig construction in Scotland has been dead for some time and the current slump has only emphasised this. Even if things do pick up it is estimated that the North Sea is about at its peak production and will soon start to decline. Anyway the "surplus" rigs can be brought back into production. The boat yards on the east coast which hopefully viewed the oil industry as an alternative to the decline in shipbuilding, have a grim future.

The OPEC conference at the start of August may offer the industry some respite. It surprisingly agreed to restrict production to beneath the current world demand, in an attempt to force up the price and clear the current glut. It succeeded in the first aim anyway, as the price shot up by four dollars a barrel when the news broke.

Whether the agreement will last remains to be seen. The market for oil remains very depressed and the underlying cause, the world recession, shows no sign of ending. The temptations to bust the cartel are very strong. Many of the oil-producing countries are desperate for revenue and have been hit hard by the slump. Britain, which is not an OPEC member, is continuing to produce at full capacity; OPEC has been annoyed by this and by British oil interests benefiting from its cartel. Some of its members may not restrain production for long.

The unusual factor in the OPEC deal was how the agreement was reached. The main stumbling block had been Iraq, who claimed that it should get special dispensation as it needed the revenue to wage war on Iran. Ominously, at the conference, Iran itself agreed to this saying that it would pursue "other means" to cut back Iraq's production levels. How many more lives this will cost remains to be seen. This war has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. The price of oil is sometimes very high.

In a sane society, oil with all its benefits would be used as it could be, solely to satisfy human needs. Such terms as "price", "profit levels" and "uneconomic production" would become meaningless. It is not the price of oil that really determines whether it can be extracted but the cooperative effort of human labour, using all its skill and techniques, which allows such inhospitable places as the North Sea to produce an item of such great benefit.

Ian Ratcliffe

Marx Goes on Green

"In London," Karl Marx wrote "they can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense"
Marx was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a "free gift of nature" to business."

Today, with climate change threatening life itself, the ecological contradictions of capitalism have reached truly dire proportions. The environmental crisis will undoubtedly play a far larger role in the demise of the system than Marx and Engels realised 150 years ago.

Karl Marx’s analysis of the environment under capitalism shows how saving the planet is inextricably linked to transforming our society. Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by corporations devoted to profit above all else. According to Marx, capitalism is an economic system profoundly at odds with a sustainable planet. The exploitation of nature is as fundamental to the profit system as the exploitation of working people. Capitalist farming is unsustainable because it inevitably starves the soil of nutrients. It is nothing less than "an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil" Marx also pointed out that "The development of civilisation and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Capitalism has created a metabolic rift between human beings and the Earth. Karl Marx came up with the term “metabolic rift” to explain the crack or rift that capitalism has created between social and natural systems, humans and nature. This rift, he claimed, led to the exploitation of the environment and ecological crisis. Marx argued that we humans are all part of nature and he was also the first one who saw social societies as an organism with a metabolism similar to that of humans.The general idea is that disruptions, or interruptions, in natural cycles and processes creates an metabolic rift between nature and social systems which leads to a buildup of waste and in the end to the degradation of our environment. The growth under capitalism of large-scale agriculture and long distance trade only intensifies and extends the rift. large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised agriculture work together in this destructive process, with industry and commerce supplying agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil. All of this is an expression of the antagonistic relation between town and country under capitalism. As Engels later put it: “The present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country” under “one single vast plan.”Despite its potential cost to society in terms of increased labor time, he viewed this fusion as “no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalist and wage-workers.”
The market system is incapable of preserving the environment for future generations because it cannot take into account the long-term requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning. Because capitalism promotes the accumulation of capital on a never-ending and always expanding scale it cannot be sustainable. Engels explained this destructive dynamic: "As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions"

We disrupt the natural ecosystem at our peril, Engels warned. "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first." Engels added: "At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature." On the other hand, "we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." That is, we can organise society in step with nature's limits.

This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from determining production in human society and a system of participatory democracy and rational planning is built in its stead. A rational agriculture, which needs either small independent farmers producing on their own, or the action of the associated producers, is impossible under modern capitalist conditions; and existing conditions demand a rational regulation of the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth, pointing beyond capitalist society to socialism and communism. Engels argued that only the working people organised as "associated producers" can "govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way". This "requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order." 

For Marx and Engels, people and nature are not two separate things . Marx wrote that: “Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” Marx goes so far as to define communism as “the unity of being of man with nature.”

The most basic feature of communism in Marx’s projection is its overcoming of capitalism’s social separation of the producers from necessary conditions of production. This new social union entails a complete decommodification of labor power plus a new set of communal property rights. Communist or “associated” production is planned and carried out by the producers and communities themselves, without the class-based intermediaries of wage-labor, market, and state. Marx often motivates and illustrates these basic features in terms of the primary means and end of associated production: free human development.

Marx does not see this communal property as conferring a right to overexploit land and other natural conditions in order to serve the production and consumption needs of the associated producers. Instead, he foresees an eclipse of capitalist notions of land ownership by a communal system of user rights and responsibilities:

"From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition."

HOW TO SKIRT AROUND SHORTSIGHTED SCHOOL RULES! (weekly poem)

HOW TO SKIRT AROUND SHORTSIGHTED SCHOOL RULES!

The Principal of the Isca Academy, Exeter, sarcastically told boys

to wear skirts as she'd banned them from wearing shorts in the

heatwave although girls were excused from wearing stockings.

Preventing schoolboys wearing shorts,

Is all about conformity;

And therefore demonstrates the faults,

Of school dress uniformity.

It's all about 'bow to our rules',

And the perceived 'dead liberty',

Of pupils challenging the school's,

Immoderate authority.

Some school boards act like Daleks, who,

When taking prisoners, often say;

“We are the masters now, so you,

Don't question orders—just obey”.

A uniform has this effect,

On every Army new recruit;

It says to them 'don't dare reject,

The order when it comes to shoot'.

It's not for the convenience,

Of those that have to wear the clothes;

It's all about the dominance,

That we allow them to impose.

So boys, congratulations on,

Your 'V-sign' to the Principal; (1)

Who's 'principle' was woebegone,

And made you nigh invincible!

(1) Aimee Mitchell. (Miss!)

© Richard Layton

Would you credit it

A number of reformists want to solve the problems of capitalism without changing its relations of production and instead find the flaws in some part of the monetary mechanism. For some with their roots in the Social Credit movement of Major Douglas it is in the banker’s credit monopoly that is at fault. The currency reformers of the Social Credit type wish to save capitalism by making changes in the monetary system alone. While the Social Creditors exonerate the industrialist capitalists they concentrate their attacks upon the bankers and financiers. The Social Credit propose to socialise credit only and leave the capitalists in control of industry, and the proposed lever for this social transformation is an alteration in the monetary mechanism.

 Social Creditors had the merit of recognising that the productive forces of capitalist society are being strangled in an economic strait jacket: that poverty in the midst of potential plenty is shameful and unnecessary. They sincerely desire to abolish war, poverty, and the miseries of exploitation, but without upsetting the existing social relations of production and without compelling anyone but a handful of bankers to yield up their power and privileges.

They find the scapegoat in “the money power”, the credit monopoly of finance capital. They insinuate that bankers deliberately create panics and crises by contracting credits or withholding them. They do not know that the calling in and curtailment of credit is simply evidence that the crisis is already under way, instead of being the fundamental cause of its occurrence, and they pass over the fact that bankers, like other capitalists, can only invest money where there is the prospect of profit.

The problem before society to-day is not a financial problem. It is a property problem. The banks belong to the superstructure of capitalism. Private property is the foundation. The financial crises, consumption crises, credit crises and the like are nothing more than the reflections of the fundamental economic crisis arising from the anarchy of production. No amount of credit supply to manufacturers, no amount of currency manipulation which leaves the question of property ownership untouched, can do other than aggravate the crisis of capitalism.

They are mistaken in the belief that money is not (or should not be) a commodity, but a system of worthless tokens, fiat money. They mistake the superficial forms of modern money (its paper dress as currency or its phantom bookkeeping existence as checks) for its inner nature. They completely fail to comprehend the function of money in a commodity producing society, and particularly under capitalism, the most developed form of a commodity producing society. As the general equivalent of value, money is not only a commodity but the king among commodities, destined to reign so long as capitalism endures.

Nor do the Social Creditors understand that money is also subject to all the laws of capitalism. Chief among these laws is the necessity of transforming money into capital, and using capital to appropriate surplus value. The financier accomplishes this by loaning money to the industrialist or the merchant, who, in their turn, appropriate their share of surplus value directly from the working class. The self-same capital is used for exploiting purposes by both groups of capitalists, and yet the Social Creditors condemn the bankers alone. Their position amounts to this: the capitalist may exploit the working class, but the finance capitalist must not exploit his fellow capitalists.
 Social Credit preys on the fear of the small businessman presenting the monster of finance capital which threatens to destroy them. Hence, the Social Creditor’s assault upon the credit monopoly,  which is merely a specialised extensions of the monopoly of the means of production by the capitalist class. The credit monopoly is the means by which large aggregates of capital exploit the lesser capitalist groups, and through them, the working class. The credit monopoly at the apex of exploitation could be overthrown only by an overthrow of the general monopoly of the means of production in the hands of the capitalist class.

The Social Creditors, however, have no quarrel with any other form of the power of private property but “the money power”. They charge the banker with converting “the communal wealth into financial debt”, although that process is only a special case of the continuous transformation of social wealth into private property under capitalism. They speak of “the communal credit” as though such a thing existed in a social system based upon the institution of private property. Marx disposed of such nonsense once and for all with the remark that “the only thing which enters into the collective possession of the people under capitalism is the national debt”.

Douglas’ chief contribution to the science of economics is his discovery of a flaw in “the price system”. This flaw is formulated in an algebraic theorem, A over A plus B. According to Douglas, all purchasing power is distributed in the course of the productive process, as follows: Let A represent payments made to individuals..(whether workers or capitalists) in wages, salaries, and dividends. Let B represent payments made to other organizations for raw materials, bank charges, and other external costs. Then A, the rate of flow of purchasing power to individuals, must obviously be less than the rate of flow of prices, A plus B, by a proportion equivalent to B. This permanent deficiency in purchasing power is supposed to be bridged by the banker’s extension of credit against production. When the banks withdraw credits, the gap between prices and purchasing power grows wider and wider, until the crisis occurs.

This theory fails to explain why, if there exists a permanent deficiency in purchasing power, capitalist crises break out periodically. The Social Creditors attempt to get around this difficulty either by asserting that the present crisis is altogether unprecedented, a phenomenon peculiar to current times , or by accusing the bankers of anti-social conduct. Neither of these explanations will hold water. Fourier over a century ago described the first capitalist crisis in the same phrase used by the Social Creditors, “poverty in the midst of plenty”. The financial magnates are as helpless as any other capitalist group to start or stop a general capitalist crisis, although they have induced temporary credit stringencies for their private purposes.

But even as it stands, the fallacy in Douglas’ discovery is not difficult to detect. This lies in the fact that B payments (raw materials, bank charges, and other external costs) are A payments (wages, salaries, dividends) at a previous stage of production. So long as some other, more fundamental flaw does not interrupt the production and circulation of commodities, B payments will continue to be transformed indefinitely into A payments; banks will keep extending or renewing credits, and the industrialist will continue producing profitably. The fundamental cause of capitalist crises is to be found in the antagonisms of capitalist production, which generate all the relatively superficial flaws discovered by Douglas in “the price system”.

Except for scientific purposes, it does not much matter whether the reader grasp this part of the Douglas theory. His panacea does not necessarily follow from it, nor is it understood by most Social Creditors. They put their trust in the scientific attainments of this quack doctor of economics because his remedy is so cheap and palatable.

There are three proposals in the Social Credit program: the socialization of credit, the National Dividend, and the Adjusted Price. First, the power of creating credit is to be taken away from the private bankers and vested in the state. Then the state is to be incorporated and a National Credit Account set up. Out of the Social Credit, calculated from the excess of productive capacity over purchasing power, National Dividends will be periodically distributed to all eligible stockholders of the corporative state. The inflationary rise in prices which would follow the issuance of National Dividends (a fancy name for unsecured currency) will be prevented by the Adjusted Price. The Adjusted Price requires all retailers to sell their goods at a decreed discount and to be reimbursed at the average rate of profit by the government. Thus, Social Credit combines the best features of the dole, perpetual price-cutting, and a bull market.

The scheme is utterly Utopian. If credit was nationalised, as it is for all practical purposes in many capitalist countries today, it would simply put a more powerful weapon in the hands of the monopoly capitalists who control the state and be used, as it is in those countries, to protect the profits of national capitalists against foreign competition. The closest the workers will ever get to a National Dividend under capitalism is the national dole, a subsistence pittance to keep them alive until capitalist production or imperialist war needs them. To put the Adjusted Price into effect would entail the regulation of the .entire national economy, and, short of proletarian revolution, this could only be attempted by a dictatorship of monopoly capital. Credit could only be successfully socialised, however, after all the instruments of production had been socialized.

In the Draft Scheme for Scotland, Douglas proposed to reduce all wages in organized industries twenty-five percent, to deprive the membership of any trade union violating a wage agreement of the National Dividend, and to compel every worker to remain at his present trade for five years after the initiation of the scheme on penalty of losing his dividend. The National Dividend is supposed to compensate the worker for this loss of wages, freedom, and the right to strike.  Social Credit is radical in form and reactionary in substance. Its propaganda panders to all the confused pseudo-socialists covering for their outspoken hatred of finance capital. The Douglasites walk with their heads in the clouds, filled with rosy dreams of the future in which, by their financial feat, there is enough of everything for everybody, God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with their world. Social Credit propaganda has influenced certain sections of the labor movement, who substitute speeches about “holding the the banker’s to account” and the nationalization of the banks of England for a revolution. The bankers won’t flinch from this “onslaught”, but people may be diverted from that which matters more than all else to-day, namely, the struggle to secure the social ownership of the means of production.

Social Credit have ruled two provinces in Canada for a number of years. In New Zealand they had a number of MPs. In both countries they proved themselves to be loyal servants of the ruling class and ardent defenders of the capitalist system.

The Struggle

Much of the left today has abandoned Marx’s Capital.  Many people against certain aspects of capitalism snatch pieces of Marxism to give themselves a progressive legitimacy. Being anti-capitalist does not say much.  It only begs the question: how do we describe capitalism and from what angle are we criticizing it?  Much of the Left chooses to divide capitalism between good and bad ones. They replaced Marx's criticism of capitalism with a host of reformist and even reactionary demands peddled under this name. Marxism stands for the abolition of wage labour. Academics have tried to convert it into a scientific sociology or an alternative economic science for the left wing of the bourgeoisie. Pseudo-socialist presented workers with repulsive examples of despotic societies in the name of socialism, like the Soviet Union, China and Albania. The result was to alienate workers from communism, cut the connection between worker and communism. 

Capitalism is defined in many ways. Each of these definitions of capital leads to a specific political conclusion. The term capitalism has been increasingly replaced by the more clever-sounding “free enterprise,” or " free markets". One definition of capitalism is based on private property. This definition equates capitalism with private ownership and is also defined in terms of market economy and competition. That is a mistake. Those who define capitalism as private property ownership think that to abolition capitalism, state ownership must replace private property. Some others think that we can do away with capitalism if we abolish market and institute a central planning system. Capitalism can just as be run by the government through state-owned companies as privately-owned enterprises. Defining capitalism by the market and private property ownership is a misleading characterization of Marx's criticism of capitalism that led to the failure of the revolution in Russia. Nowhere does Marx says private property ownership is an essential characteristic of capitalist exploitation. What he says is that capitalist exploitation requires that productive labourer to be separated from the means of production and it is irrelevant whether the state owns the means of  production or a person or a group of people. Many take disparity in income level as a way of defining a capitalist society and unequal political power can be also taken as a criterion to defining capitalism. Those who define capitalism as unequal income level seek redistribution of wealth via taxation reform. 

All these definitions of capitalism are all alien to Marx. What is socialism? Marx defined socialism as the abolition of wage slavery and the creation of a society based on common ownership.  Socialism is humankind's liberation from all forms of deprivation and bondage.

Marx’s theory of surplus value is the cornerstone of his analysis of capital.  For him, class means the production of surplus value by the worker and its appropriation by the industrial capitalist. When Marx talks about exploitation, this is what he has in mind. When Marx talks about class exploitation, he has in mind the extraction of surplus-labour from direct laborer by the capitalist enterprise. This surplus is the unpaid labour of the laborer that the capitalist lines up in his/her pocket. Marx's entry point to analyze capitalism was neither private ownership nor market but rather exploitation of  labor power and appropriation of surplus value by industrial capitalists. 

Capitalist exploitation does not occurs in the market. Buying and selling of  labour power is a "fair and equal exchange."  Buying and selling of other commodities produces no surplus value. Whether means of production is owned privately or owned by the state is irrelevant to capitalist production. Capitalist production is production of surplus value and its appropriation by people other than the productive worker.

Marx’s theory of surplus value identifies non surplus-value producing capitalists, for example, merchants and money lending capitalists (the bankers) and where they stand in regards to the production and appropriation of surplus value. To expand his/her production, the capitalist may have to borrow money from money lender who in return gets a portion of the surplus-value in the form of interest.  Moreover, the industrial capitalist can sell his/her products to a merchant to speed up the capital turnover.  The merchant, in return, receives a part of the surplus value in the form of a discount, and the capitalist enterprise can concentrate on the production of surplus value rather than being involved in commodity exchange process. Another part of the surplus-value goes to the state in the form of tax to secure the necessary stability and protection for capital, and so on.

While the capitalists whose capital is directly engaged in the production of surplus-value,  the industrialist, is engaged in the production of surplus value, the merchant performs the transformation of commodity into money.  In other words, merchants do not produce surplus-value, for buying and selling a commodity simply represents the exchange of value between two equals. However, merchants make the realization of surplus value possible because they turn products of labor into capital. Similarly the money lender does not produce any surplus value, but he/she may lend his money to the industrial capitalist who may lay it out for the expansion of production and creation of more surplus-value.  In other words, the financiers transfer their money to capitalist enterprise only temporarily.  By putting their money at the disposal of industrial capitalist, money lender provide the condition of existence of production and appropriation of surplus-value.  Therefore, merchants and money lenders neither are the appropriators of surplus value nor its distributor.  They are recipients of portions of the surplus value in the forms of discount and interests, respectively.  Therefore, neither buying and selling, whether in domestic or international markets, nor lending or borrowing money, creates surplus value.  In other words, Marx uses his theory of surplus value as a principle tool in locating various segments and groups of people in the capitalist society and where they stand in relation to production and appropriation of surplus value.   

The last bricks of the Welfare State are being dismantled and even the existing basic level of society's responsibility towards the individual, in terms of social welfare and economic security, is being challenged by employers and politicians. In many parts of the world nationalism and religion are on the ascendance. Yet in other regions of the globe workers are gradually emerging out of their previous political apathy. The world is entering a turbulent period of intensified worker protest movements. Today the destructive results of the recession and government austerity policies for the workers - unemployment, loss of social services, etc. - are felt more than ever. In the whole of Europe questions such as unemployment and lack of job security and so on are becoming a focus for a renewed surge of workers' movement, and the ruling class is losing its capacity for the political intimidation of the workers' movement through its once tried and tested populist mobilisation of the "middle-class" strata. The decline of trade unionism, while having immediate detrimental effects on the life of millions of workers, has created an environment for new thinking and alternative practices in worker organisation in Europe. The workers' movement has already moved towards more radical actions organised outside the traditional union structure, creating alternative organisations, as witnerssed by the recent Walmart protest wildcat strikes. The worker is realising that it is the worker and worker alone who should take care of his economic interests and political rights, without hoping for anything to come from the politicians who fill parliamentary seats or the bureaucrats in their professional union posts. The era of workers' strength on the political stage is once again arriving.

Many political activists shrug their shoulders at socialism and socialist organization, preferring participation in the host of one-issue struggles and while socialists should actively be involved also in these fields, this doesn't preclude theoretical work for communism. Capitalist society will assimilate protests and re- formulate them after its own image, incorporating them into the establishment. To resist this requires the existence of independent socialist parties. The issue of the primacy of theory over movement, or vice versa, has little meaning. They are the different levels of a single social movement. Socialism is a movement for working-class and communist revolution. We regard this revolution possible and on the agenda right now. But as a class which is under pressure, we also fight for every improvement in the social situation which enhances workers'  political and economic power and promotes their human dignity. We also fight for every political opening which may facilitate the class struggle. We are activists of the worker's protest movement. We are fighting for the establishment of the worker's social and economic alternative as a class. The worker's position in production does not change. The economic foundation of society does not change. This class's alternative for the organization of human society does not change. The worker still has to sell his or her labour power daily in order to live, and thus views the world from the same standpoint and offers the same solution to it. Socialism is the worker's movement to destroy capitalism, abolish wage-labour and do away with exploitation and classes.

There is a need to express the socialist vision in more concrete terms where more practical models of economic and political organisation in socialist society are elaborated.  Many socialists say it is not for us to devise blueprints and utopias, that our task is to organize a revolution against the existing system, to make our goals clear but it is the process of workers' revolution itself which will provide the practical forms of their realization.  Nevertheless, to some degree, we must offer positive alternatives. Socialists should, firstly, communicate the precise meaning of socialist aims, and, secondly, to show the feasibility of their realization. It must explain that the abolition of bourgeois ownership does not mean the introduction of state ownership, and show how the organization of people's collective control over means of production is practical. It must stress that socialism is an economic system without money and wage labour, and then shown how organizing production without labour power as a commodity is possible. Our job is not to make models and utopias and prepare a detailed blueprint for production and administration in a socialist society but to show in what ways socialist society differs from the existing one. For example, we show the process of the withering away of the state following a socialist revolution by explaining the material basis of the state in class society and its superfluousness as a political institution in a classless society, and not by producing a step by step guide programme for the dismantling of state institutions and its departments.