Science, Marxism and the big bang By Pete Mason
Reviewed by Roy Farrar
Science, Marxism and the Big Bang is written in a style that may not be familiar to the modern reader - that is, of a polemical presentation. In certain critical reviews this is necessary in order to follow the arguments as laid out by the authors being criticised and to more fully refute and correct them.
The book is a reply to Reason in Revolt by Alan Woods and Ted Grant, published in 1995. Their book has been useful in providing a foil against which Pete Mason has produced a very useful introduction to Marxism in relation to science and to its real method.
Pete outlines the development of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks through to dialectical materialism, and further, provides an exposition of the relationship of Marxism to scientific discovery.
The arrogant stance of Reason in Revolt is far from helpful. The cover blurb poses the question: will "this encounter" between Marxist philosophy and science "provide the basis for a new and exciting breakthrough in the methodology of science?"
Science
Scientists, if not indifferent to Marxism, would not welcome such high-handed philosophical meddling, and therefore could see this as an unnecessary intervention into the existing scientific method.
Pete Mason makes clear that Marxism is not a substitute for science. This does not mean that Marxism is not a science, or an adjunct of science, nor a question of Marxism versus science!
Marxism reveals science not just as a theoretical, but importantly as a human and social activity: that science is not something for itself, but a very crucial part of economic and social development.
Through the method of dialectical materialism we have a way of judging the probable development of future trends in advance of other 'thinkers'. But Marxism is certainly not a dogma where the lines of social and economic development of humankind will have been pre-ordained. This is a complete distortion.
The method of Marxism emphasises the impossibility of doing this. Marxism's value lies in its method as a guide to action, not as a creed or a cosmogony - a theory of the origin and development of the universe.
Examining any particular historical stage we can discern the necessity of the development of certain forms as an outcome from the contradictions of some previous state.
These contradictions are of inestimable importance to science, because out of the struggle to solve them emerges some unpredictable and novel discoveries, raising further and formerly unsuspected problems.
Marxists can foresee processes that are ongoing and unfolding and have no need to declare for either the eternal (and infinite!) existence of a universe essentially like ours, nor a single primordial origin.
Jewish and Palestinian workers unity in Israel today bodes well for future struggles
Monday, December 14, 2009
Thatcherism: what it was and how they fought it
Thatcher's legacy: Brutal class warfare against the rights and the conditions of the working class
Peter Taaffe
from Socialism Today (May 2009)
Monthly journal of the Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales)
As the 30th anniversary of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher - the most hated figure in Britain post-1945 - in May 1979 approaches, her record has been put under the media microscope. Predictably, it is the personality of Thatcher which has been the main subject of investigation by assorted capitalist newspapers - notably in the Observer and by Germaine Greer in the Guardian.
Most investigations of this character concentrate on her personal and psychological 'disorders', which reveal a deep and abiding hatred of Thatcher and everything that she stood for, even from middle-class media commentators but particularly by her victims, millions of British working-class people. The Observer Review, for instance, recalled the 'appreciation' of rock star Elvis Costello "singing live on BBC2's The Late Show in 1988 about hoping he stayed alive long enough 'to tramp the dirt down' on her grave; 'She has no soul,' Costello claimed, 'she will burn in hell.'" This evoked a postbag to that newspaper typified by one letter, appropriately from the former mining area of County Durham: "I would suggest as a memorial to Mrs Thatcher that instead of the usual headstone or statue, a dance floor should be erected over her grave."
This theme of dancing on Thatcher's grave is also evoked in current plays in London such as Ed Waugh's 'Maggie's End'. Ed Waugh, formerly a member and full-time worker for Militant, now the Socialist Party, was it seems provoked into writing this play because of the scandalous suggestion that Gordon Brown was considering a £3m state funeral for Thatcher after her death. This is something that only a select few prime ministers, usually 'war leaders' like Churchill, received in the past.
But Thatcher was not cut from the same cloth as those representatives of British capitalism who preceded her at the head of the Tory party. Post-1945 Tory prime ministers in the main, such as Harold Macmillan, presided over a 'post-war consensus', which prescribed that the government and the ruling class would seek to avoid a head-on confrontation with the organised labour movement. Following in the so-called 'Whig tradition', Tory 'grandees' developed the special art of British 'statecraft', by bending with the class and social winds. This served them well during the post-1945 boom, in accommodating to the tops of the labour movement - in particular, in 'sharing out' a growing 'cake'. But the 'slow inglorious decay' of Britain was masked during the boom. When the boom ran out of steam it inevitably culminated in a collision between the classes. This collision took shape in the 1960s but intensified in the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s.
Heath loses to miners
The Heath government came to power in 1970, following the dismal failure of the Labour government of Harold Wilson between 1964 and 1970. Heath set out to correct the decline of British capitalism, naturally at the expense of the working class. Edward Heath, although not himself a grandee - he was a 'grammar school boy' - was in the same political tradition as his Tory forebearers. He nevertheless threatened the labour movement, with the intention of provoking a 'general strike' which the government would 'defeat'. However, when his government confronted the miners in 1972 and 1974, it lost both times. The latter strike led to the three-day week and the defeat of the Heath government in the February 1974 election.
These events - particularly the unprecedented event, for Britain, of an industrial dispute provoking a general election and the defeat of the Tories - exercised a profound effect on the strategists of British capitalism. Heath gambled on an election whose theme was 'Who rules - us or the miners?' - and he lost. The whole of the labour movement stood behind the miners and it was the first election in which Militant (now the Socialist Party) played a key role, particularly our supporters in the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) in key marginal electoral seats. In Bristol South-East, for instance, the seat held by Tony Benn, "over 400 Labour Party Young Socialists poured in to Bristol" [Militant]. This helped to ensure his victory and subsequently earned the praise of Benn. Harold Wilson, leader of a minority government after the February election, was forced to go for a second general election that year in October, which gave Labour a slight majority.
Ruling class prepares revenge on Labour movement
The ruling class began to prepare for the future when it could take revenge on the labour movement. Heath was unceremoniously thrown overboard and replaced by Thatcher in early 1975. Formerly a minor figure in the Heath government, as Minister of Education, she had already earned an anti-working class mantle as 'Thatcher, milk snatcher' for removing free school milk for primary school children. But her ascent to the Tory leadership was no accident. Friedrich Engels, alongside Karl Marx, the originators of the ideas of scientific socialism, commented that each era calls for personalities required by objective circumstances. But if they do not exist in a rounded-out form, it 'invents' them. Thatcher, without any of the scruples or hesitation of the aristocratic Tory grandees, was the brutal face of British capitalism required by the situation. She not only polarised society but the Tory party itself.
The divisions between the Thatcherite 'dries' or 'hards' and the Heathite 'wets' were found not in any 'personality' clashes but in the methods chosen to confront the labour movement following the latter's triumph over the Heath government. The 'wets' correctly feared that Thatcher and her government would lead to a class confrontation which would bring into question the very basis of capitalism. They remained unreconciled to Thatcher for almost all of her reign but did largely accommodate themselves to her government when it appeared to score 'successes', much as the Republican establishment in the US acquiesced to Bush over the Iraq war despite their original misgivings, particularly when it had appeared initially to achieve its objectives.
Now, as the consequences of Thatcher's rule are laid bare by the present world and British economic and financial disaster, a by-product of her rule, they cannot but 'regret' her period in power. This has left so much devastation, not least in the enfeebled industrial base of British capitalism through the policies of this modern Genghis Khan. Buttressed by ill-digested ideas from the ultra-right Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and the messianic monetarism of her 'mad monk' Sir Keith Joseph, Thatcher capitalised on the retreats and ineptitude of the Callaghan Labour government. This government was more set on confronting the legitimate demands of trade unionists than the dire economic situation which was developing, culminating in the so-called 'winter of discontent'. The strikes of the most lowly-paid workers were vilified by the capitalist press, the Tories and even by the Labour government, as the 'dirty jobs' strike. Callaghan subsequently blamed his defeat on 'disloyal' and greedy unions. Even Germaine Greer criticises the "power of the elite trade unions" as a factor in the downfall of Callaghan and the triumph of Thatcher.
'Winter of discontent'
But the unions involved in this so-called 'winter of discontent' were anything but 'elite', representing as they did the most exploited, downtrodden layer. Militant warned in October 1978: "Sooner or later... the strategists of capital will conclude that the Labour government has served its purpose as far as they are concerned. In any case, if the government continues its present policies into next year, especially if it takes on more and more sections of workers fighting for decent living standards, it will virtually ensure a defeat for Labour." These prophetic words were, unfortunately, borne out in the May 1979 general election.
Militant also warned that Thatcher "would eventually be forced to launch an offensive against the working class and its organisations. [Tory shadow cabinet minister Nicholas] Ridley indicates this." Ridley had prepared a blueprint for confronting the unions. "He had written: 'In the first or second year after the Tories' election, there might be a major challenge from a trade union, either over a wage claim or redundancies.'" Ridley thought that this would come in the mines and therefore proposed: "A: build-up of maximum coal stocks, particularly at power stations; B: make contingency plans to import coal; C: encourage the recruitment of non-union lorry drivers by haulage companies to help move coal where necessary; D: introduce dual coal/oil firing in all power stations as quickly as possible." Right-wing Tory MP Ronald Bell, again indicating the future role of the Tories, stated: "Strike-breaking must become the most honourable profession of all."
The winter of discontent generated all the class spite which was to become the hallmark of the Thatcher years. At Reading Hospital, for instance, patients who turned up for treatment were asked whether they were trade unionists. Those who answered yes were refused treatment by a consultant surgeon. We pointed out in Militant at the time: "The demand for a living wage is seen as treachery by the capitalists." However, the Callaghan government had run out of steam and was incapable of imposing the will of the capitalists on an almost insurgent labour movement. Noises began to be made about splitting the Labour Party - which at that stage was still a workers' party at the bottom, although with an increasingly pro-capitalist leadership - and the formation of a national government. A left-wing Labour MP of the time, the late Stan Thorne, revealed that some right-wing Labour MPs had been involved in secret talks with the Liberals and Tories on the issue of splitting Labour and forming a new National Government, as a previous Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, had done in 1931.
This proposal has resurfaced in the capitalist press in relation to the Brown government. So dire is the present situation that there is despair that any government - let alone a David Cameron-led Tory cabinet - could ignite a social explosion if it tried to solve the crisis with draconian pro-capitalist measures. Therefore, why not a 'government of all the talents'? This is probably a non-runner before an election but if there is a 'hung parliament' with no party in overall control, then it could resurface. A coalition government is, however, as the 1930s showed, just a Tory government in disguise.
The plans in the 1970s came to nothing because the government that the capitalists expected would follow the next general election would be firmly under their control. Moreover, it would be determined, as we pointed out in Militant, to confront the working class: "A Thatcher government will be even worse than the hated Heath government which was kicked out by the trade unions in the economic chaos of the three-day week...The Tories want the state to interfere with the unions - outlawing 'flying pickets', breaking the unity of closed shops and imposing rules on union elections as a condition of unions being 'certified' by the government, similar to the 'registration' under the notorious Industrial Relations Act."
Militant outlined Thatcher programme in advance
Militant, in other words, outlined in advance exactly the programme on which Thatcher was elected in 1979 and explained how she and her cabinet were likely to act once in power. However, prior to the election, while ruthlessly preparing behind the scenes, Thatcher took pains to disguise her real intentions. Unbelievable as it sounds today, and in view of the havoc over which her government presided, Thatcher quoted St Francis of Assisi on the need to end 'discord' as she entered 10 Downing Street! In her very first budget, however, paltry tax concessions were given to average wage earners, which would be wiped out by inflation in a few months while Value Added Tax was increased to 15% and the Tories gave notice of further savage attacks on the living standards of working people.
The right wing of the Labour Party had prepared the basis for Thatcher by both failing to tackle the problems of the working class but, at the same time, seeking to aim blows against the left and particularly against Militant. Two Labour prime ministers - Harold Wilson, who had resigned in 1976, and James Callaghan, who took over from Wilson - had scathingly attacked Militant in a dress rehearsal for what was unleashed by the later Labour leader Neil Kinnock and his allies in the 1980s. Callaghan stated on TV: "We [that is the Labour Party leaders] neglected education. We have allowed it all to fall into the hands of the Militant group. They do more education than anybody else."
The Labour right wing, however, wished to 'educate' young people and the working class by teaching them to accept cuts in living standards as a 'fact of life', much as Gordon Brown and the Chancellor Alistair Darling do today. The right-wing Labour 'Manifesto Group', on the eve of the 1979 general election, had declared the "Labour Party must be the party of a permanent incomes policy". This was code for holding down wages while the rich got richer. In fact, the right began an almost permanent war against the left, with their main figures, such as David Owen and Roy Jenkins, threatening a split, which subsequently took place with the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). This eventually collapsed into a merger with the Liberals, becoming the Liberal Democrats, but they were the praetorian guard of the capitalists' attempt to purge the left from the Labour Party. In January 1980, The Times, then the house-journal of British capitalism, under the headline 'Time for a Purge', called for action to be taken against Militant.
14 May 1980 - massive demonstration of working-class opposition to Tories
At the same time, the predicted offensive against the working class, both by the government and the employers, together with the rise in unemployment, provoked a mighty working-class resistance to the Thatcher government. This was demonstrated by the 140,000-strong TUC demonstration through London in March 1980. Significant in this demonstration was the participation of Militant supporters and particularly the LPYS, who were "applauded as they entered Trafalgar Square singing the Internationale". The Times, at this stage, was speaking about the "irreversible decline" of British capitalism.
The mood began to grow for the TUC to call a one-day general strike, which was eventually watered down into a 'day of action'. Nevertheless, 14 May 1980 was still a massive demonstration of working-class opposition to the Tory government. This was followed in November 1980 with an historic Labour Party demonstration of 150,000 against unemployment in Liverpool. Massive demonstrations followed in Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham and London. For the first time in generations, the Labour Party had actually taken the initiative in mobilising working-class people in action. These regional demonstrations were due to the proposals of the LPYS, under a Militant leadership.
Such was the relationship of forces that the Thatcher government was compelled to step back temporarily from its plans for a head-on confrontation with the labour movement. This was shown in the mining industry in early 1981. The threat to begin a programme of mass pit closures was met with the threat of immediate strike action in South Wales. This resulted in panic within the government. Thatcher, for the first time since she had come to power, was forced into a humiliating retreat. But Militant warned: "The miners showed what could be done by bold and determined action, but if the Tories were allowed to do it they will come back later with further attacks on workers' rights and living standards." This was what had happened in 1925, when the capitalists, facing resistance from the miners, bided their time to prepare for the 1926 general strike. Unfortunately, the tops of the trade unions complacently accepted the situation in 1981 without any serious preparation for future battles. The miners were to pay a very heavy price later, as Thatcher and her boot boy, Nicholas Ridley, built up coal stocks, beefed up the police and prepared new laws in order to try and smash the miners.
Britain politically convulsed
Britain was politically convulsed at this time with the very existence of the government in peril. Riots erupted in Bristol, Liverpool, London and other inner city areas, class polarisation developed on an unprecedented scale and, as a by-product of this, the ideas of Marxism, signified by the dramatic growth of Militant, became more popular. The Thatcher government, however, relentlessly pursued its mad policies of 'monetarism' - squeezing inflation out of the system and cutting down the money supply - which resulted in the wholesale closure of factories. This enormously aggravated the economic crisis developing at this time both in Britain and internationally.
It was this period that ushered in the catastrophic economic devastation of British industry, which was in decline but was furthered by Thatcher. So terrified was she and British capitalism of the industrial working class, signified by the defeat of Heath and Thatcher's step back in 1981, that she was prepared to contemplate and even half-welcome the de-industrialisation of Britain. Manufacturing industry collapsed on an unprecedented scale: manufacturing output dropped 30% from its 1978 level by 1983 and unemployment reached a figure of 3.6 million. This reduced British capitalism to a minor player in manufacturing production and competition on the world markets. The current economic crisis has furthered this process and engenders a sense of despair from capitalist economists about the weakened industrial base of Britain and what this will mean for the future. We consistently warned at the time and since that the substitution of a 'casino economy' of the 'candy floss' industries of finance, banking, etc, in place of production of industries producing real value would ultimately result in a catastrophe for British capitalism and the British people.
A combination of factors saved Thatcher's skin during her first government. The most overwhelming reason was the cowardice of the right-wing leadership of the trade unions, who refused to take decisive action, for instance when the most brutal anti-working class, anti-trade union legislation in the advanced industrial world was introduced. Weakness invites aggression; prevarication, hesitation and outright cowardice were the hallmarks of the right wing of the trade unions both then and today, which emboldened the Tories. Thatcher was also saved by the Falklands War. Napoleon wished for 'lucky generals'. Thatcher herself came very close to military disaster in this war but her 'luck' held out and she managed to defeat the even more unpopular and decrepit Argentine dictatorship of General Galtieri in 1982. This allowed her the full backing of the patriotic press of Britain, with the Sun in the vanguard, conjuring up Britain's past imperial 'glory'.
Miners and Liverpool City struggles
This "Falklands Factor" in turn, laid the basis for Thatcher to go into another general election in 1983. Her hand was strengthened by the pusillanimity of Labour, this time led by the hapless 'left' Michael Foot, who presided over the expulsion of the five members of the Militant newspaper Editorial Board. Also, the recuperation economically from the crisis of 1979-81 furthered the Tories' cause with the promise of 'economic glory' to follow what had been achieved in the South Atlantic. This, in turn, laid the basis for Thatcher to once more recommence her war against the miners. We have carried extensive accounts on the Socialist Party website of the miners' strike, so it is not necessary to go over them here. But Arthur Scargill was undoubtedly correct when he recently wrote in the Guardian that the outcome of the strike was not at all predetermined, as some have argued. In fact, the Thatcher government was about to capitulate just a short time before the end of the strike.
A decisive and pernicious role in the defeat of the miners was undoubtedly played by the right within the trade unions and the equal, if not greater treachery of Neil Kinnock, the then Labour leader. With the rest of his family, Kinnock has become a multimillionaire due to his sojourn in British politics and the European gravy train; while the miners and their families, villages and communities were ruined. The miners' strike is one of the most glorious pages in the history of the British working-class movement, demonstrating, at the same time, however, the perfidious character of the right-wing trade union and labour leaders.
A similar treacherous and cowardly role was played by Kinnock and other Labour leaders in the Liverpool struggle between 1983 and 1987. A socialist Labour council in Liverpool had begun to transform the lives of the people of the city and, moreover, had achieved something that neither Galtieri nor Kinnock had managed, that is to defeat Thatcher in 1984. This excited the most vicious hostility from Kinnock and his entourage.
In the recent shameful distribution of character assassinating emails from Gordon Brown's own private office is once more revealed the degeneration of Labour from a pro-workers' party at the bottom, albeit with a pro-capitalist leadership, into one no different in its politics and 'morals', or lack of them, than the other capitalist parties in Britain.
One of those denouncing the unspeakable Derek Draper and Damian McBride - the two held responsible for the emails - is none other than former Blair cabinet minister Charles Clarke! It was this latter individual who advised Kinnock on how to destroy Militant in Liverpool. On one famous occasion on Wigan station, he was present when Kinnock declared: "I have got them now" in reference to Militant, the Liverpool City Council and the labour movement on Merseyside. Kinnock's statement was provoked by the announcement of 'redundancy notices', a tactic suggested by self-sacrificing Liverpool Labour councillors in order to gain time to manage the resources of the beleaguered city in 1985. There was absolutely no intention to make a single council worker redundant and yet Kinnock vehemently argued that this was the intention in his notorious 1985 Labour Party conference speech.
In other words, Kinnock and Clarke connived in an outright lie to destroy Militant, as they saw it, and sabotage a city council that had begun to really alter the lives and conditions of thousands of workers in Liverpool. Notwithstanding this, Kinnock's sidekick Roy Hattersley, without a shred of evidence, subsequently denounced "literal corruption" without suggesting any names or back up information. The same Hattersley and Kinnock remain silent on the gross spectacle of "Labour MPs, yes Labour MPs" with their snouts in the pig trough of 'parliamentary expenses' and 'second homes'.
Neo-liberal economy
At the same time, Thatcher undoubtedly found some political succour in the economic changes being wrought, both in Britain and worldwide, at this time. The neo-liberal economy, characterised by the development of new technology, was beginning to take shape. Thatcher, using the limitations of the past so-called 'mixed economy' under Tory and Labour governments, almost stumbled on the idea of 'privatisation', of which she was a "late convert", as Germaine Greer points out, to begin her 'revolution', in effect a counter-revolution. In passing, we should note that despite the widespread discrediting of the Thatcherite idea of privatisation, Brown and Darling are seeking to carry through the same policies today. Royal Mail, which cabinet minister Peter Mandelson still wants to sell off, has been joined by the Atomic Energy Authority (the government's nuclear clean-up business), the Royal Mint and an additional "29 state businesses", which are proposed for further privatisations!
Ideologically, the labour movement, under right-wing domination, was unprepared for Thatcher's offensive. The halfway house of the 'mixed economy', with a bureaucratically-run 'state capitalist' sector in the hands of the government and its appointees, and the majority of the economy in the hands of private capitalists, had reached a dead end. Thatcher and the right-wing ideologues that bolstered her, such as Milton Friedman, seemed to offer a 'new', exciting departure from the discredited quasi-'managed' Keynesian model. The sale of council housing, combined with the selling off, of profitable sections of state industry (what former Tory leader Macmillan termed the 'family silver') followed. This received hosannas alongside the soaring of the stock exchange, not just from British but world capitalism, which hailed Thatcher's 'experiment' as the prototype for a new capitalist eldorado. And it certainly was for a few, as profits and the capitalists' incomes soared and the City of London, in a new orgy of 'financialisation', benefited.
We warned that this would end in tears, not just for the working class but for capitalism itself. Thatcher was answered ideologically by us but crushingly in life by the development of the economic current crisis. According to Thatcher, the combination of Britain's North Sea Oil receipts and the 'expertise' of the service sector, led by the banks and finance houses of the City, was the answer to the 'discredited' theory of a manufacturing base. But it is impossible to open any newspaper today without seeing a devastating rebuttal, either indirectly or directly, of Thatcher's ideology, and with it that of the overwhelming majority of the capitalists in Britain. The aristocrats of Wall Street paid themselves $39 billion in bonuses in 2007; little wonder only one third of the British people in an opinion poll supported "state aid for banks". Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, declared in February, this year, that banking losses now "lie anywhere between a very large number and an unthinkable one" (Financial Times, 14 February 2009). In other words, the stewards of this system are like a referee in a football match when the crowd shouts "You don't know what you're doing"!
It is even worse in the US. In the summer of 2007, when this crisis was not even fully under way, the first estimate of losses from the credit crisis was one twentieth of what the international Monetary Fund now believes to be a minimum of $2.2 trillion. And these are the people - 'Thatcher's children' - who are going to take us back to the economic Promised Land. Every single platform of Thatcherism has been reduced to dust. The famous 'property-owning democracy' lies in ruins as homelessness, shanty towns, repossessions and negative equity become the norm for millions. House building is at its lowest level since 1924 and five million people in Britain would now like to live in decent 'social housing'.
Thatcher defeated over poll tax
Thatcher was defeated, not on the issue of Europe, as countless commentators have claimed, but on the poll tax. And it remains an incontestable historical fact that it was the Marxists around Militant who played the decisive role in this battle. On this issue, Thatcher herself had no doubt: "The eventual abandonment of the charge represented one of the greatest victories for these people [the organisers of the anti-poll tax demonstrations on 31 March 1990] ever conceded by a Conservative government." [Margaret Thatcher, 'The Downing Street Years', p661.] We predicted from the outset that Thatcher would be defeated on this issue. We wrote in Militant soon after the 1987 general election about the recently-announced poll tax proposal: "We just don't want concessions or amendments, we want this legislation chucked out." Absolutely decisive in this battle was the campaign for non-payment, initiated by Militant comrades in Scotland and taken up on a mass scale one year later in the rest of Britain. Eighteen million non-payers of the poll tax finished it off and in the process reduced the 'iron lady' to iron filings.
Compared to the determined, 'steadfast' image portrayed by Thatcher, Cameron - despite his seemingly unassailable lead in the opinion polls - appears like a quivering blancmange. This is determined by the much worse situation today from the point of view of capitalism. He has upset the right in his party by seeking to 'detox' the Tory brand - code for Thatcherism. In a backhanded 'compliment' to Cameron, the Financial Times, in effect, indicated the threadbare proposals for a government led by him: "It is a cliché to say that Britain's Conservative party has no policies. It is also untrue; the Tories have views on issues as diverse as why a bottlenose whale starved to death in the Thames and the rate at which British museums buy new pieces for their collections... The problem is that the Tory party still lacks overarching strategies - especially when it comes to tackling the global economic crisis."
A new Tory government?
But, Cameron protests, he and his entourage are 'compassionate Conservatives' not 'hatchet-faced accountants'. When he gets down to the detail, in reality, Cameron resorts to the same old Thatcherite slash-and-burn policies. Osborne, his shadow chancellor, openly threatened to 'unpick' the 2005 agreements on pensions in the civil service, for teachers and other public-sector employees. The five million public-sector workers have faced a massive attack: "Public-sector pay is high enough." [Financial Times] Say that to the poverty-stricken members of the civil service union, the PCS, on £12,000 or £15,000 a year. MPs complain they cannot live on £64,000 a year, three times the average national wage in Britain! What hope then for poverty-stricken public-sector workers in Britain? The hue and cry that has met the demand for a 10% wage rise for teachers - merely to compensate for what they lost in previous deals - is completely hypocritical. In fact, by pressing for higher wages, surely this will increase 'demand' - teachers will have, for instance, 10% more to spend - which Brown, Darling and the high priests of the Confederation of British Industry are demanding.
The fact that higher wages produce problems for the capitalists is their concern. If they cannot give a decent wage and other basic living conditions, their system does not deserve to continue. Cameron and Osborne have brutally demanded 'austerity', which means a colossal worsening of conditions, not just of the working class but for the middle class too. Unbelievably, their mouthpiece, the Financial Times, claims that there is "an appetite for austerity... shared by the middle classes. The Tories could axe family tax credits to the relatively well off, as Mr Cameron suggested". A Cameron government would be a re-run for the working class of the experience of Thatcher herself, only probably much worse because the economic situation is dramatically worse than during her reign. It would provoke a massive social confrontation, probably even forcing the conservative officialdom of the TUC to move into action. A one-day general strike could come quickly onto the agenda. Experience of the Sarkozy government in France, with the uprisings in January and March, is an indication of what could happen in Britain if, as seems increasingly likely, Cameron replaces Brown in Number Ten.
'Laissez-faire' capitalism defeated
Thatcher represented primitive, brutal, class warfare against the rights and the conditions of the working class. The lesson of Thatcherism is that capitalism under whatever guise is incapable of ultimately delivering the goods for the working class, either in Britain or on a world scale. She helped to enshrine for an era the ideas of neo-liberalism. Ideologically, they were countered by the very small force of genuine Marxism, while the majority of intellectuals and leaders of the labour and trade union movement adhered to the 'Washington Consensus', that is Thatcherism on a world scale. Militant first of all, and now the Socialist Party and the Committee for a Workers' international (CWI), stood out. But the reality is that the pro-capitalist parties in Britain have not completely abandoned the economic heritage of Thatcher. Yes, the most 'dangerous' aspects for them have been relegated to history - unregulated, unrestrained financialisation of capitalism - but the same intentions are still there. Their mantra is that the working class must pay for this crisis. Our answer is at one with those workers and youth demonstrating in Italy, in Germany and elsewhere earlier this year, who marched under the slogan: "This is not our crisis!"
Larry Summers, the main economic adviser to President Obama, desperately tries to separate this crisis from capitalism itself: "There are those who just as in the 1930s tried to learn the lesson that capitalism did not work and needed to be replaced with an entirely different model. I don't think that's right." The problem for Summers is that a growing number do not agree with him. For instance, in March an online poll for a German TV talk show answered the question: "Which economic system is better for you?" Capitalism: 46%, socialism: 54%.
No poll can fully portray what the mass consciousness is. But one thing is clear: 'laissez-faire' capitalism has been defeated; the state has been forced to step in to rescue the system. The capitalists do not like this because state intervention raises the idea of not just rescuing the banks but also the majority of other industries which are on their backs. Not only the Tories oppose this. So do the Liberal Democrats, with the allegedly 'radical' Vince Cable coming out against long-term state intervention - 'dirigisme' - and also demonstrated hostility to further state rescues for firms like Visteon by the government. The consequence of this 'hands off' policy will be an inexorable rise in unemployment and a growing discontent, which is laying the basis for a massive radical movement in Britain and worldwide.
Thatcher has been pictured as a 'towering presence' during her lifetime. Yet even before she has departed this world a ferocious controversy rages over her heritage, with mass indignation at the idea of state recognition for her and her role. She was an important but now a diminishing factor in British politics. There is nothing for the most politically developed workers to learn from Thatcher, from the era that she represented, other than that no matter who represents this system they will attempt to pin the blame and the burdens of capitalism on the backs of the working class. Whether it is the face of Thatcher or the seemingly more 'acceptable' visage of Cameron, implacable opposition to them and their system, combined with intransigent criticism of those at the summits of the labour movement who are not prepared to oppose them, root and branch, as the miners, Liverpool and the poll tax protesters did, must be the cardinal principle of a revitalised labour movement.
Peter Taaffe
from Socialism Today (May 2009)
Monthly journal of the Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales)
As the 30th anniversary of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher - the most hated figure in Britain post-1945 - in May 1979 approaches, her record has been put under the media microscope. Predictably, it is the personality of Thatcher which has been the main subject of investigation by assorted capitalist newspapers - notably in the Observer and by Germaine Greer in the Guardian.
Most investigations of this character concentrate on her personal and psychological 'disorders', which reveal a deep and abiding hatred of Thatcher and everything that she stood for, even from middle-class media commentators but particularly by her victims, millions of British working-class people. The Observer Review, for instance, recalled the 'appreciation' of rock star Elvis Costello "singing live on BBC2's The Late Show in 1988 about hoping he stayed alive long enough 'to tramp the dirt down' on her grave; 'She has no soul,' Costello claimed, 'she will burn in hell.'" This evoked a postbag to that newspaper typified by one letter, appropriately from the former mining area of County Durham: "I would suggest as a memorial to Mrs Thatcher that instead of the usual headstone or statue, a dance floor should be erected over her grave."
This theme of dancing on Thatcher's grave is also evoked in current plays in London such as Ed Waugh's 'Maggie's End'. Ed Waugh, formerly a member and full-time worker for Militant, now the Socialist Party, was it seems provoked into writing this play because of the scandalous suggestion that Gordon Brown was considering a £3m state funeral for Thatcher after her death. This is something that only a select few prime ministers, usually 'war leaders' like Churchill, received in the past.
But Thatcher was not cut from the same cloth as those representatives of British capitalism who preceded her at the head of the Tory party. Post-1945 Tory prime ministers in the main, such as Harold Macmillan, presided over a 'post-war consensus', which prescribed that the government and the ruling class would seek to avoid a head-on confrontation with the organised labour movement. Following in the so-called 'Whig tradition', Tory 'grandees' developed the special art of British 'statecraft', by bending with the class and social winds. This served them well during the post-1945 boom, in accommodating to the tops of the labour movement - in particular, in 'sharing out' a growing 'cake'. But the 'slow inglorious decay' of Britain was masked during the boom. When the boom ran out of steam it inevitably culminated in a collision between the classes. This collision took shape in the 1960s but intensified in the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s.
Heath loses to miners
The Heath government came to power in 1970, following the dismal failure of the Labour government of Harold Wilson between 1964 and 1970. Heath set out to correct the decline of British capitalism, naturally at the expense of the working class. Edward Heath, although not himself a grandee - he was a 'grammar school boy' - was in the same political tradition as his Tory forebearers. He nevertheless threatened the labour movement, with the intention of provoking a 'general strike' which the government would 'defeat'. However, when his government confronted the miners in 1972 and 1974, it lost both times. The latter strike led to the three-day week and the defeat of the Heath government in the February 1974 election.
These events - particularly the unprecedented event, for Britain, of an industrial dispute provoking a general election and the defeat of the Tories - exercised a profound effect on the strategists of British capitalism. Heath gambled on an election whose theme was 'Who rules - us or the miners?' - and he lost. The whole of the labour movement stood behind the miners and it was the first election in which Militant (now the Socialist Party) played a key role, particularly our supporters in the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) in key marginal electoral seats. In Bristol South-East, for instance, the seat held by Tony Benn, "over 400 Labour Party Young Socialists poured in to Bristol" [Militant]. This helped to ensure his victory and subsequently earned the praise of Benn. Harold Wilson, leader of a minority government after the February election, was forced to go for a second general election that year in October, which gave Labour a slight majority.
Ruling class prepares revenge on Labour movement
The ruling class began to prepare for the future when it could take revenge on the labour movement. Heath was unceremoniously thrown overboard and replaced by Thatcher in early 1975. Formerly a minor figure in the Heath government, as Minister of Education, she had already earned an anti-working class mantle as 'Thatcher, milk snatcher' for removing free school milk for primary school children. But her ascent to the Tory leadership was no accident. Friedrich Engels, alongside Karl Marx, the originators of the ideas of scientific socialism, commented that each era calls for personalities required by objective circumstances. But if they do not exist in a rounded-out form, it 'invents' them. Thatcher, without any of the scruples or hesitation of the aristocratic Tory grandees, was the brutal face of British capitalism required by the situation. She not only polarised society but the Tory party itself.
The divisions between the Thatcherite 'dries' or 'hards' and the Heathite 'wets' were found not in any 'personality' clashes but in the methods chosen to confront the labour movement following the latter's triumph over the Heath government. The 'wets' correctly feared that Thatcher and her government would lead to a class confrontation which would bring into question the very basis of capitalism. They remained unreconciled to Thatcher for almost all of her reign but did largely accommodate themselves to her government when it appeared to score 'successes', much as the Republican establishment in the US acquiesced to Bush over the Iraq war despite their original misgivings, particularly when it had appeared initially to achieve its objectives.
Now, as the consequences of Thatcher's rule are laid bare by the present world and British economic and financial disaster, a by-product of her rule, they cannot but 'regret' her period in power. This has left so much devastation, not least in the enfeebled industrial base of British capitalism through the policies of this modern Genghis Khan. Buttressed by ill-digested ideas from the ultra-right Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and the messianic monetarism of her 'mad monk' Sir Keith Joseph, Thatcher capitalised on the retreats and ineptitude of the Callaghan Labour government. This government was more set on confronting the legitimate demands of trade unionists than the dire economic situation which was developing, culminating in the so-called 'winter of discontent'. The strikes of the most lowly-paid workers were vilified by the capitalist press, the Tories and even by the Labour government, as the 'dirty jobs' strike. Callaghan subsequently blamed his defeat on 'disloyal' and greedy unions. Even Germaine Greer criticises the "power of the elite trade unions" as a factor in the downfall of Callaghan and the triumph of Thatcher.
'Winter of discontent'
But the unions involved in this so-called 'winter of discontent' were anything but 'elite', representing as they did the most exploited, downtrodden layer. Militant warned in October 1978: "Sooner or later... the strategists of capital will conclude that the Labour government has served its purpose as far as they are concerned. In any case, if the government continues its present policies into next year, especially if it takes on more and more sections of workers fighting for decent living standards, it will virtually ensure a defeat for Labour." These prophetic words were, unfortunately, borne out in the May 1979 general election.
Militant also warned that Thatcher "would eventually be forced to launch an offensive against the working class and its organisations. [Tory shadow cabinet minister Nicholas] Ridley indicates this." Ridley had prepared a blueprint for confronting the unions. "He had written: 'In the first or second year after the Tories' election, there might be a major challenge from a trade union, either over a wage claim or redundancies.'" Ridley thought that this would come in the mines and therefore proposed: "A: build-up of maximum coal stocks, particularly at power stations; B: make contingency plans to import coal; C: encourage the recruitment of non-union lorry drivers by haulage companies to help move coal where necessary; D: introduce dual coal/oil firing in all power stations as quickly as possible." Right-wing Tory MP Ronald Bell, again indicating the future role of the Tories, stated: "Strike-breaking must become the most honourable profession of all."
The winter of discontent generated all the class spite which was to become the hallmark of the Thatcher years. At Reading Hospital, for instance, patients who turned up for treatment were asked whether they were trade unionists. Those who answered yes were refused treatment by a consultant surgeon. We pointed out in Militant at the time: "The demand for a living wage is seen as treachery by the capitalists." However, the Callaghan government had run out of steam and was incapable of imposing the will of the capitalists on an almost insurgent labour movement. Noises began to be made about splitting the Labour Party - which at that stage was still a workers' party at the bottom, although with an increasingly pro-capitalist leadership - and the formation of a national government. A left-wing Labour MP of the time, the late Stan Thorne, revealed that some right-wing Labour MPs had been involved in secret talks with the Liberals and Tories on the issue of splitting Labour and forming a new National Government, as a previous Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, had done in 1931.
This proposal has resurfaced in the capitalist press in relation to the Brown government. So dire is the present situation that there is despair that any government - let alone a David Cameron-led Tory cabinet - could ignite a social explosion if it tried to solve the crisis with draconian pro-capitalist measures. Therefore, why not a 'government of all the talents'? This is probably a non-runner before an election but if there is a 'hung parliament' with no party in overall control, then it could resurface. A coalition government is, however, as the 1930s showed, just a Tory government in disguise.
The plans in the 1970s came to nothing because the government that the capitalists expected would follow the next general election would be firmly under their control. Moreover, it would be determined, as we pointed out in Militant, to confront the working class: "A Thatcher government will be even worse than the hated Heath government which was kicked out by the trade unions in the economic chaos of the three-day week...The Tories want the state to interfere with the unions - outlawing 'flying pickets', breaking the unity of closed shops and imposing rules on union elections as a condition of unions being 'certified' by the government, similar to the 'registration' under the notorious Industrial Relations Act."
Militant outlined Thatcher programme in advance
Militant, in other words, outlined in advance exactly the programme on which Thatcher was elected in 1979 and explained how she and her cabinet were likely to act once in power. However, prior to the election, while ruthlessly preparing behind the scenes, Thatcher took pains to disguise her real intentions. Unbelievable as it sounds today, and in view of the havoc over which her government presided, Thatcher quoted St Francis of Assisi on the need to end 'discord' as she entered 10 Downing Street! In her very first budget, however, paltry tax concessions were given to average wage earners, which would be wiped out by inflation in a few months while Value Added Tax was increased to 15% and the Tories gave notice of further savage attacks on the living standards of working people.
The right wing of the Labour Party had prepared the basis for Thatcher by both failing to tackle the problems of the working class but, at the same time, seeking to aim blows against the left and particularly against Militant. Two Labour prime ministers - Harold Wilson, who had resigned in 1976, and James Callaghan, who took over from Wilson - had scathingly attacked Militant in a dress rehearsal for what was unleashed by the later Labour leader Neil Kinnock and his allies in the 1980s. Callaghan stated on TV: "We [that is the Labour Party leaders] neglected education. We have allowed it all to fall into the hands of the Militant group. They do more education than anybody else."
The Labour right wing, however, wished to 'educate' young people and the working class by teaching them to accept cuts in living standards as a 'fact of life', much as Gordon Brown and the Chancellor Alistair Darling do today. The right-wing Labour 'Manifesto Group', on the eve of the 1979 general election, had declared the "Labour Party must be the party of a permanent incomes policy". This was code for holding down wages while the rich got richer. In fact, the right began an almost permanent war against the left, with their main figures, such as David Owen and Roy Jenkins, threatening a split, which subsequently took place with the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). This eventually collapsed into a merger with the Liberals, becoming the Liberal Democrats, but they were the praetorian guard of the capitalists' attempt to purge the left from the Labour Party. In January 1980, The Times, then the house-journal of British capitalism, under the headline 'Time for a Purge', called for action to be taken against Militant.
14 May 1980 - massive demonstration of working-class opposition to Tories
At the same time, the predicted offensive against the working class, both by the government and the employers, together with the rise in unemployment, provoked a mighty working-class resistance to the Thatcher government. This was demonstrated by the 140,000-strong TUC demonstration through London in March 1980. Significant in this demonstration was the participation of Militant supporters and particularly the LPYS, who were "applauded as they entered Trafalgar Square singing the Internationale". The Times, at this stage, was speaking about the "irreversible decline" of British capitalism.
The mood began to grow for the TUC to call a one-day general strike, which was eventually watered down into a 'day of action'. Nevertheless, 14 May 1980 was still a massive demonstration of working-class opposition to the Tory government. This was followed in November 1980 with an historic Labour Party demonstration of 150,000 against unemployment in Liverpool. Massive demonstrations followed in Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham and London. For the first time in generations, the Labour Party had actually taken the initiative in mobilising working-class people in action. These regional demonstrations were due to the proposals of the LPYS, under a Militant leadership.
Such was the relationship of forces that the Thatcher government was compelled to step back temporarily from its plans for a head-on confrontation with the labour movement. This was shown in the mining industry in early 1981. The threat to begin a programme of mass pit closures was met with the threat of immediate strike action in South Wales. This resulted in panic within the government. Thatcher, for the first time since she had come to power, was forced into a humiliating retreat. But Militant warned: "The miners showed what could be done by bold and determined action, but if the Tories were allowed to do it they will come back later with further attacks on workers' rights and living standards." This was what had happened in 1925, when the capitalists, facing resistance from the miners, bided their time to prepare for the 1926 general strike. Unfortunately, the tops of the trade unions complacently accepted the situation in 1981 without any serious preparation for future battles. The miners were to pay a very heavy price later, as Thatcher and her boot boy, Nicholas Ridley, built up coal stocks, beefed up the police and prepared new laws in order to try and smash the miners.
Britain politically convulsed
Britain was politically convulsed at this time with the very existence of the government in peril. Riots erupted in Bristol, Liverpool, London and other inner city areas, class polarisation developed on an unprecedented scale and, as a by-product of this, the ideas of Marxism, signified by the dramatic growth of Militant, became more popular. The Thatcher government, however, relentlessly pursued its mad policies of 'monetarism' - squeezing inflation out of the system and cutting down the money supply - which resulted in the wholesale closure of factories. This enormously aggravated the economic crisis developing at this time both in Britain and internationally.
It was this period that ushered in the catastrophic economic devastation of British industry, which was in decline but was furthered by Thatcher. So terrified was she and British capitalism of the industrial working class, signified by the defeat of Heath and Thatcher's step back in 1981, that she was prepared to contemplate and even half-welcome the de-industrialisation of Britain. Manufacturing industry collapsed on an unprecedented scale: manufacturing output dropped 30% from its 1978 level by 1983 and unemployment reached a figure of 3.6 million. This reduced British capitalism to a minor player in manufacturing production and competition on the world markets. The current economic crisis has furthered this process and engenders a sense of despair from capitalist economists about the weakened industrial base of Britain and what this will mean for the future. We consistently warned at the time and since that the substitution of a 'casino economy' of the 'candy floss' industries of finance, banking, etc, in place of production of industries producing real value would ultimately result in a catastrophe for British capitalism and the British people.
A combination of factors saved Thatcher's skin during her first government. The most overwhelming reason was the cowardice of the right-wing leadership of the trade unions, who refused to take decisive action, for instance when the most brutal anti-working class, anti-trade union legislation in the advanced industrial world was introduced. Weakness invites aggression; prevarication, hesitation and outright cowardice were the hallmarks of the right wing of the trade unions both then and today, which emboldened the Tories. Thatcher was also saved by the Falklands War. Napoleon wished for 'lucky generals'. Thatcher herself came very close to military disaster in this war but her 'luck' held out and she managed to defeat the even more unpopular and decrepit Argentine dictatorship of General Galtieri in 1982. This allowed her the full backing of the patriotic press of Britain, with the Sun in the vanguard, conjuring up Britain's past imperial 'glory'.
Miners and Liverpool City struggles
This "Falklands Factor" in turn, laid the basis for Thatcher to go into another general election in 1983. Her hand was strengthened by the pusillanimity of Labour, this time led by the hapless 'left' Michael Foot, who presided over the expulsion of the five members of the Militant newspaper Editorial Board. Also, the recuperation economically from the crisis of 1979-81 furthered the Tories' cause with the promise of 'economic glory' to follow what had been achieved in the South Atlantic. This, in turn, laid the basis for Thatcher to once more recommence her war against the miners. We have carried extensive accounts on the Socialist Party website of the miners' strike, so it is not necessary to go over them here. But Arthur Scargill was undoubtedly correct when he recently wrote in the Guardian that the outcome of the strike was not at all predetermined, as some have argued. In fact, the Thatcher government was about to capitulate just a short time before the end of the strike.
A decisive and pernicious role in the defeat of the miners was undoubtedly played by the right within the trade unions and the equal, if not greater treachery of Neil Kinnock, the then Labour leader. With the rest of his family, Kinnock has become a multimillionaire due to his sojourn in British politics and the European gravy train; while the miners and their families, villages and communities were ruined. The miners' strike is one of the most glorious pages in the history of the British working-class movement, demonstrating, at the same time, however, the perfidious character of the right-wing trade union and labour leaders.
A similar treacherous and cowardly role was played by Kinnock and other Labour leaders in the Liverpool struggle between 1983 and 1987. A socialist Labour council in Liverpool had begun to transform the lives of the people of the city and, moreover, had achieved something that neither Galtieri nor Kinnock had managed, that is to defeat Thatcher in 1984. This excited the most vicious hostility from Kinnock and his entourage.
In the recent shameful distribution of character assassinating emails from Gordon Brown's own private office is once more revealed the degeneration of Labour from a pro-workers' party at the bottom, albeit with a pro-capitalist leadership, into one no different in its politics and 'morals', or lack of them, than the other capitalist parties in Britain.
One of those denouncing the unspeakable Derek Draper and Damian McBride - the two held responsible for the emails - is none other than former Blair cabinet minister Charles Clarke! It was this latter individual who advised Kinnock on how to destroy Militant in Liverpool. On one famous occasion on Wigan station, he was present when Kinnock declared: "I have got them now" in reference to Militant, the Liverpool City Council and the labour movement on Merseyside. Kinnock's statement was provoked by the announcement of 'redundancy notices', a tactic suggested by self-sacrificing Liverpool Labour councillors in order to gain time to manage the resources of the beleaguered city in 1985. There was absolutely no intention to make a single council worker redundant and yet Kinnock vehemently argued that this was the intention in his notorious 1985 Labour Party conference speech.
In other words, Kinnock and Clarke connived in an outright lie to destroy Militant, as they saw it, and sabotage a city council that had begun to really alter the lives and conditions of thousands of workers in Liverpool. Notwithstanding this, Kinnock's sidekick Roy Hattersley, without a shred of evidence, subsequently denounced "literal corruption" without suggesting any names or back up information. The same Hattersley and Kinnock remain silent on the gross spectacle of "Labour MPs, yes Labour MPs" with their snouts in the pig trough of 'parliamentary expenses' and 'second homes'.
Neo-liberal economy
At the same time, Thatcher undoubtedly found some political succour in the economic changes being wrought, both in Britain and worldwide, at this time. The neo-liberal economy, characterised by the development of new technology, was beginning to take shape. Thatcher, using the limitations of the past so-called 'mixed economy' under Tory and Labour governments, almost stumbled on the idea of 'privatisation', of which she was a "late convert", as Germaine Greer points out, to begin her 'revolution', in effect a counter-revolution. In passing, we should note that despite the widespread discrediting of the Thatcherite idea of privatisation, Brown and Darling are seeking to carry through the same policies today. Royal Mail, which cabinet minister Peter Mandelson still wants to sell off, has been joined by the Atomic Energy Authority (the government's nuclear clean-up business), the Royal Mint and an additional "29 state businesses", which are proposed for further privatisations!
Ideologically, the labour movement, under right-wing domination, was unprepared for Thatcher's offensive. The halfway house of the 'mixed economy', with a bureaucratically-run 'state capitalist' sector in the hands of the government and its appointees, and the majority of the economy in the hands of private capitalists, had reached a dead end. Thatcher and the right-wing ideologues that bolstered her, such as Milton Friedman, seemed to offer a 'new', exciting departure from the discredited quasi-'managed' Keynesian model. The sale of council housing, combined with the selling off, of profitable sections of state industry (what former Tory leader Macmillan termed the 'family silver') followed. This received hosannas alongside the soaring of the stock exchange, not just from British but world capitalism, which hailed Thatcher's 'experiment' as the prototype for a new capitalist eldorado. And it certainly was for a few, as profits and the capitalists' incomes soared and the City of London, in a new orgy of 'financialisation', benefited.
We warned that this would end in tears, not just for the working class but for capitalism itself. Thatcher was answered ideologically by us but crushingly in life by the development of the economic current crisis. According to Thatcher, the combination of Britain's North Sea Oil receipts and the 'expertise' of the service sector, led by the banks and finance houses of the City, was the answer to the 'discredited' theory of a manufacturing base. But it is impossible to open any newspaper today without seeing a devastating rebuttal, either indirectly or directly, of Thatcher's ideology, and with it that of the overwhelming majority of the capitalists in Britain. The aristocrats of Wall Street paid themselves $39 billion in bonuses in 2007; little wonder only one third of the British people in an opinion poll supported "state aid for banks". Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, declared in February, this year, that banking losses now "lie anywhere between a very large number and an unthinkable one" (Financial Times, 14 February 2009). In other words, the stewards of this system are like a referee in a football match when the crowd shouts "You don't know what you're doing"!
It is even worse in the US. In the summer of 2007, when this crisis was not even fully under way, the first estimate of losses from the credit crisis was one twentieth of what the international Monetary Fund now believes to be a minimum of $2.2 trillion. And these are the people - 'Thatcher's children' - who are going to take us back to the economic Promised Land. Every single platform of Thatcherism has been reduced to dust. The famous 'property-owning democracy' lies in ruins as homelessness, shanty towns, repossessions and negative equity become the norm for millions. House building is at its lowest level since 1924 and five million people in Britain would now like to live in decent 'social housing'.
Thatcher defeated over poll tax
Thatcher was defeated, not on the issue of Europe, as countless commentators have claimed, but on the poll tax. And it remains an incontestable historical fact that it was the Marxists around Militant who played the decisive role in this battle. On this issue, Thatcher herself had no doubt: "The eventual abandonment of the charge represented one of the greatest victories for these people [the organisers of the anti-poll tax demonstrations on 31 March 1990] ever conceded by a Conservative government." [Margaret Thatcher, 'The Downing Street Years', p661.] We predicted from the outset that Thatcher would be defeated on this issue. We wrote in Militant soon after the 1987 general election about the recently-announced poll tax proposal: "We just don't want concessions or amendments, we want this legislation chucked out." Absolutely decisive in this battle was the campaign for non-payment, initiated by Militant comrades in Scotland and taken up on a mass scale one year later in the rest of Britain. Eighteen million non-payers of the poll tax finished it off and in the process reduced the 'iron lady' to iron filings.
Compared to the determined, 'steadfast' image portrayed by Thatcher, Cameron - despite his seemingly unassailable lead in the opinion polls - appears like a quivering blancmange. This is determined by the much worse situation today from the point of view of capitalism. He has upset the right in his party by seeking to 'detox' the Tory brand - code for Thatcherism. In a backhanded 'compliment' to Cameron, the Financial Times, in effect, indicated the threadbare proposals for a government led by him: "It is a cliché to say that Britain's Conservative party has no policies. It is also untrue; the Tories have views on issues as diverse as why a bottlenose whale starved to death in the Thames and the rate at which British museums buy new pieces for their collections... The problem is that the Tory party still lacks overarching strategies - especially when it comes to tackling the global economic crisis."
A new Tory government?
But, Cameron protests, he and his entourage are 'compassionate Conservatives' not 'hatchet-faced accountants'. When he gets down to the detail, in reality, Cameron resorts to the same old Thatcherite slash-and-burn policies. Osborne, his shadow chancellor, openly threatened to 'unpick' the 2005 agreements on pensions in the civil service, for teachers and other public-sector employees. The five million public-sector workers have faced a massive attack: "Public-sector pay is high enough." [Financial Times] Say that to the poverty-stricken members of the civil service union, the PCS, on £12,000 or £15,000 a year. MPs complain they cannot live on £64,000 a year, three times the average national wage in Britain! What hope then for poverty-stricken public-sector workers in Britain? The hue and cry that has met the demand for a 10% wage rise for teachers - merely to compensate for what they lost in previous deals - is completely hypocritical. In fact, by pressing for higher wages, surely this will increase 'demand' - teachers will have, for instance, 10% more to spend - which Brown, Darling and the high priests of the Confederation of British Industry are demanding.
The fact that higher wages produce problems for the capitalists is their concern. If they cannot give a decent wage and other basic living conditions, their system does not deserve to continue. Cameron and Osborne have brutally demanded 'austerity', which means a colossal worsening of conditions, not just of the working class but for the middle class too. Unbelievably, their mouthpiece, the Financial Times, claims that there is "an appetite for austerity... shared by the middle classes. The Tories could axe family tax credits to the relatively well off, as Mr Cameron suggested". A Cameron government would be a re-run for the working class of the experience of Thatcher herself, only probably much worse because the economic situation is dramatically worse than during her reign. It would provoke a massive social confrontation, probably even forcing the conservative officialdom of the TUC to move into action. A one-day general strike could come quickly onto the agenda. Experience of the Sarkozy government in France, with the uprisings in January and March, is an indication of what could happen in Britain if, as seems increasingly likely, Cameron replaces Brown in Number Ten.
'Laissez-faire' capitalism defeated
Thatcher represented primitive, brutal, class warfare against the rights and the conditions of the working class. The lesson of Thatcherism is that capitalism under whatever guise is incapable of ultimately delivering the goods for the working class, either in Britain or on a world scale. She helped to enshrine for an era the ideas of neo-liberalism. Ideologically, they were countered by the very small force of genuine Marxism, while the majority of intellectuals and leaders of the labour and trade union movement adhered to the 'Washington Consensus', that is Thatcherism on a world scale. Militant first of all, and now the Socialist Party and the Committee for a Workers' international (CWI), stood out. But the reality is that the pro-capitalist parties in Britain have not completely abandoned the economic heritage of Thatcher. Yes, the most 'dangerous' aspects for them have been relegated to history - unregulated, unrestrained financialisation of capitalism - but the same intentions are still there. Their mantra is that the working class must pay for this crisis. Our answer is at one with those workers and youth demonstrating in Italy, in Germany and elsewhere earlier this year, who marched under the slogan: "This is not our crisis!"
Larry Summers, the main economic adviser to President Obama, desperately tries to separate this crisis from capitalism itself: "There are those who just as in the 1930s tried to learn the lesson that capitalism did not work and needed to be replaced with an entirely different model. I don't think that's right." The problem for Summers is that a growing number do not agree with him. For instance, in March an online poll for a German TV talk show answered the question: "Which economic system is better for you?" Capitalism: 46%, socialism: 54%.
No poll can fully portray what the mass consciousness is. But one thing is clear: 'laissez-faire' capitalism has been defeated; the state has been forced to step in to rescue the system. The capitalists do not like this because state intervention raises the idea of not just rescuing the banks but also the majority of other industries which are on their backs. Not only the Tories oppose this. So do the Liberal Democrats, with the allegedly 'radical' Vince Cable coming out against long-term state intervention - 'dirigisme' - and also demonstrated hostility to further state rescues for firms like Visteon by the government. The consequence of this 'hands off' policy will be an inexorable rise in unemployment and a growing discontent, which is laying the basis for a massive radical movement in Britain and worldwide.
Thatcher has been pictured as a 'towering presence' during her lifetime. Yet even before she has departed this world a ferocious controversy rages over her heritage, with mass indignation at the idea of state recognition for her and her role. She was an important but now a diminishing factor in British politics. There is nothing for the most politically developed workers to learn from Thatcher, from the era that she represented, other than that no matter who represents this system they will attempt to pin the blame and the burdens of capitalism on the backs of the working class. Whether it is the face of Thatcher or the seemingly more 'acceptable' visage of Cameron, implacable opposition to them and their system, combined with intransigent criticism of those at the summits of the labour movement who are not prepared to oppose them, root and branch, as the miners, Liverpool and the poll tax protesters did, must be the cardinal principle of a revitalised labour movement.
"Too Big to Fail" a gossipy soap opera
Too Big to Fail
Andrew Ross Sorkin, Penguin, £14.99
We discover that Erin Callan, the chief financial officer for Lehman Brothers, is concerned that she won't be able buy her dream apartment once the financial crisis hits. We learn that Hank Paulson leaves the door open when he goes to the loo and that he is passionate about the environment. We are even told where Tim Geithner of the New York Federal Reserve gets his hair cut. This can give us a glimpse into the lives of these incredibly wealthy and arrogant bankers but it at no point helps us understand what happened to cause the crisis.
If the lives of these financial wizards were compared with the lives of working class Americans it could have been a powerful indictment of the huge gap between the rich and the poor in the US.
When I was told that Callan fought back the tears as she resigned I wanted to fling the book across the room. Callan will be OK! Sorkin simply does not mention the effect that the financial crisis will have on ordinary people. The hundreds of thousands of people who faced homelessness are absent, those whose pensions were wiped out have vanished and those who lost their jobs are nowhere to be found.
The lack of analysis of how the financial crisis occurred is a problem. It is sometimes mentioned that there wasn't enough regulation on the banks but why this led to the crash is not explained. Sorkin doesn't mention that the same people running around trying to solve the crisis are the people who argued for less regulation.
For the banking industry the lack of analysis in this book must be the book's appeal. Business Week actually argued that this book could become required reading for colleges in the future.
Any real analysis has at least to rock the boat. In 2007 the World Economic Forum named Sorkin a Young Global Leader and Vanity Fair named him as one of 40 new members of the "Next Establishment". If the role of the New Establishment is to protect the old order he has done his job well.
Andrew Ross Sorkin, Penguin, £14.99
Book Review by Rachel Eborall, December 2009
Too Big to Fail soon developed another title in my head: "Why Socialists Yell Jump to Bankers". This book claims to be a moment by moment account of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. However, it turned out to be full of tittle-tattle and gossip.We discover that Erin Callan, the chief financial officer for Lehman Brothers, is concerned that she won't be able buy her dream apartment once the financial crisis hits. We learn that Hank Paulson leaves the door open when he goes to the loo and that he is passionate about the environment. We are even told where Tim Geithner of the New York Federal Reserve gets his hair cut. This can give us a glimpse into the lives of these incredibly wealthy and arrogant bankers but it at no point helps us understand what happened to cause the crisis.
If the lives of these financial wizards were compared with the lives of working class Americans it could have been a powerful indictment of the huge gap between the rich and the poor in the US.
When I was told that Callan fought back the tears as she resigned I wanted to fling the book across the room. Callan will be OK! Sorkin simply does not mention the effect that the financial crisis will have on ordinary people. The hundreds of thousands of people who faced homelessness are absent, those whose pensions were wiped out have vanished and those who lost their jobs are nowhere to be found.
The lack of analysis of how the financial crisis occurred is a problem. It is sometimes mentioned that there wasn't enough regulation on the banks but why this led to the crash is not explained. Sorkin doesn't mention that the same people running around trying to solve the crisis are the people who argued for less regulation.
For the banking industry the lack of analysis in this book must be the book's appeal. Business Week actually argued that this book could become required reading for colleges in the future.
Any real analysis has at least to rock the boat. In 2007 the World Economic Forum named Sorkin a Young Global Leader and Vanity Fair named him as one of 40 new members of the "Next Establishment". If the role of the New Establishment is to protect the old order he has done his job well.
The Code of the Mosleys
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"
— P. G. Wodehouse (Bertie Wooster speaking to Spode) , in The Code of the Woosters (1938)
Chris Harman
Diana Mosley: A dedicated follower
of fascism
(23 August 2003)
Diana Mosley, who died last week, was a particularly unpleasant fossil. Fossils are relics of living things that tell us something about the past. Sometimes what they tell us is so deeply upsetting to the conventional wisdom that people make great efforts to hide it.
Acres of type were devoted to her life last week. She was, Andrew Roberts told readers of the Daily Telegraph, “funny, charming, intelligent, glamorous”. Of course, there was mention of her admiration for Adolf Hitler and her marriage to Britain’s would-be fuhrer Oswald Mosley in top Nazi Goebbels’ house with Hitler as a witness.
This keenness on fascism was treated as an eccentric oddity from 70 years ago. No one said it did not seem such an oddity at the time. That would be to admit that briefly in 1933 and 1934 wide sections of Britain’s ruling class thrilled to the idea of imitating Hitler’s methods. Diana Mosley was a typical product of that class, brought up in the country house of her father, Lord Redesdale.
Her first marriage was into one of the wealthiest families in Britain, the Guinnesses, and she could look forward to a life of luxury cruises, shooting parties and endless self indulgence.
But the great world economic crisis of the early 1930s threatened the wealth that sustained such parasitism. Unemployed riots reawakened the old panic about workers, and even servants, no longer knowing their place. It was then her noxious sister, Unity, got gooey-eyed over Adolf Hitler for showing how to create a murderous movement capable of imposing discipline on the lower orders.
Diana was soon as infatuated with Oswald Mosley, a baronet and son-in-law of a former viceroy of India.
He had swept through the Tory and Labour parties before setting out to build a fascist party of his own. It was the height of fashion in the early months of 1934 for the upper crust to attend his rallies where thousands of uniformed followers gave the Nazi salute.
Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail proclaimed “Hurrah For The Blackshirts”. Among the secret sympathisers was the man who was soon to become King Edward VIII. This was the atmosphere as Diana divorced her husband to marry Mosley. They believed they were destined for immediate glory. It was not to be. British capitalism, still bolstered up by a huge empire, began to recover from the economic crisis.
The upper class fad with British fascism faded as profits rose. The huge anti-fascist demonstration in Cable Street in 1936 blocked the Mosleyite attempt to stir up anti-Jewish feeling in London’s East End.
Diana’s cousin Winston Churchill had once admired Hitler’s way of dealing with the left in Germany. But by 1940 he led the section of the ruling class who saw German power as a threat to the British Empire.
Fearing the Mosleys might aid a German invasion, he shoved them both in prison. He never forgot they came from his own class. They were allowed to live together in a house in the prison grounds, with other prisoners acting as domestic servants.
Oswald Mosley made repeated attempts to build a new political career in the post-war years by unleashing racist agitation. But so long as the ruling class could control the workers’ movement by other means, they did not need him. They preferred to cultivate the lie that fascist methods were foreign to their political culture.
He died in self imposed exile in France in 1980. His wife lived on, an embarrassing reminder to the upper classes that many of them had once looked to the fascist options. It is a pity that hell does not exist for her to rot in.
— P. G. Wodehouse (Bertie Wooster speaking to Spode) , in The Code of the Woosters (1938)
Chris Harman
Diana Mosley: A dedicated follower
of fascism
(23 August 2003)
Diana Mosley, who died last week, was a particularly unpleasant fossil. Fossils are relics of living things that tell us something about the past. Sometimes what they tell us is so deeply upsetting to the conventional wisdom that people make great efforts to hide it.
Acres of type were devoted to her life last week. She was, Andrew Roberts told readers of the Daily Telegraph, “funny, charming, intelligent, glamorous”. Of course, there was mention of her admiration for Adolf Hitler and her marriage to Britain’s would-be fuhrer Oswald Mosley in top Nazi Goebbels’ house with Hitler as a witness.
This keenness on fascism was treated as an eccentric oddity from 70 years ago. No one said it did not seem such an oddity at the time. That would be to admit that briefly in 1933 and 1934 wide sections of Britain’s ruling class thrilled to the idea of imitating Hitler’s methods. Diana Mosley was a typical product of that class, brought up in the country house of her father, Lord Redesdale.
Her first marriage was into one of the wealthiest families in Britain, the Guinnesses, and she could look forward to a life of luxury cruises, shooting parties and endless self indulgence.
But the great world economic crisis of the early 1930s threatened the wealth that sustained such parasitism. Unemployed riots reawakened the old panic about workers, and even servants, no longer knowing their place. It was then her noxious sister, Unity, got gooey-eyed over Adolf Hitler for showing how to create a murderous movement capable of imposing discipline on the lower orders.
Diana was soon as infatuated with Oswald Mosley, a baronet and son-in-law of a former viceroy of India.
He had swept through the Tory and Labour parties before setting out to build a fascist party of his own. It was the height of fashion in the early months of 1934 for the upper crust to attend his rallies where thousands of uniformed followers gave the Nazi salute.
Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail proclaimed “Hurrah For The Blackshirts”. Among the secret sympathisers was the man who was soon to become King Edward VIII. This was the atmosphere as Diana divorced her husband to marry Mosley. They believed they were destined for immediate glory. It was not to be. British capitalism, still bolstered up by a huge empire, began to recover from the economic crisis.
The upper class fad with British fascism faded as profits rose. The huge anti-fascist demonstration in Cable Street in 1936 blocked the Mosleyite attempt to stir up anti-Jewish feeling in London’s East End.
Diana’s cousin Winston Churchill had once admired Hitler’s way of dealing with the left in Germany. But by 1940 he led the section of the ruling class who saw German power as a threat to the British Empire.
Fearing the Mosleys might aid a German invasion, he shoved them both in prison. He never forgot they came from his own class. They were allowed to live together in a house in the prison grounds, with other prisoners acting as domestic servants.
Oswald Mosley made repeated attempts to build a new political career in the post-war years by unleashing racist agitation. But so long as the ruling class could control the workers’ movement by other means, they did not need him. They preferred to cultivate the lie that fascist methods were foreign to their political culture.
He died in self imposed exile in France in 1980. His wife lived on, an embarrassing reminder to the upper classes that many of them had once looked to the fascist options. It is a pity that hell does not exist for her to rot in.
Money: A Marxist view
Pieter Lawrence
The Fetishism of Money
Socialist Standard, April 2002.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “fetish” came to be used by anthropologists to mean “an inanimate object worshipped by savages on account of its supposed magical powers.” Often such objects took the form of amulets and in some cultures this practice still continues. In our more developed society this is dismissed as superstition. But whilst the wearing of amulets may not be that common, despite our technical culture “fetishism” is a deeply entrenched part of political thought.
In Marxian theory the “fetishism of commodities” is the illusion that in buying and selling the values being exchanged are part of the physical make-up of the commodities themselves. If this were true it would mean that buying and selling, and the tyrannies of the profit system, could never be removed. But in fact, the values of commodities result from wage labour as part of the economic relationships of the capitalist system. In socialism, with people co-operating to produce directly for needs, the commodity form of goods will disappear leaving the community with free access to simple articles of use.
In religion, gods are products of the human imagination given powers to dominate the lives of those who create them. The destructive effects of religion are evident in the many conflicts that divide people throughout the world but this does not end with subservience to imagined gods. There is also the fetishism of money. This also attributes powers to an alien force that dominates our social affairs. Part of the fetishism of money is the illusion that money has its own productive powers. Particularly in politics, money is fetishised as having the power to solve problems because without it nothing can be done.
How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources”? What is meant by resources is always money. Every day politicians give lack of money as a reason why we cannot provide better health care or safe reliable trains or the many other public services that are in urgent need of improvement. Not just in Whitehall and Westminster but in Borough, District and Parish Councils throughout the country the same mantra is chanted week in and week out, year after year, “if only we had more money, something could be done”. This ignores the fact that productive resources are materials, means of production, transport, energy, communications and networks of infrastructure through which goods and services are produced. And all these depend on one single resource which is labour. These are the real resources on which the lives of communities depend and there is an abundance of labour to provide for needs.
At times there may be millions of unemployed people, factories standing idle and unused materials being stockpiled but capitalist politicians still repeat, “We do not have the resources.” They are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds are pre-occupied by the illusion that only money resources count. They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money, whereas the opposite is the truth. The powers of the community to solve problems can on be fully released with socialism and the abolition of money.
Reliance on the imagined powers of money runs through every social problem. For example, in the last two elections Labour made a commitment to reduce child poverty. For this, they hope to use money. “The chosen means is also clear: a new form of child support which starts in 2003. But it will be costly, as the budget will reveal for the first time.” (Economist, 23 February)
“Poor children are defined as those living in households whose income, after housing costs, is below 60 percent of the median — the income in the exact middle of the income distribution.” Poverty is of course relative and this degree of poverty in Britain is not as severe as the poverty of children in undeveloped countries where 40,000 children under five die in poverty every day. In Britain, child poverty generally means substandard housing, poor conditions in the home, exclusion from benefits enjoyed by better off contemporaries, and poor diets (fats, sugar and carbohydrates).
Any kind of child poverty is a total disgrace and would be easily removed in socialism within a very short time. Under the Labour governments there has been a marginal improvement. According to the Economist,
“Progress has so far been slow. In 1996/7, the year before Labour took office, the number of children living in poverty was 4.4 million. By 1999/2000, this had declined only to 4.1 million. A more substantial decline to 3.5 million is expected for 2001/02 as reforms such as the working families’ tax credit (WFTC), introduced in October 1999, take full effect. But this will still mean that the government has failed to meet its earlier pledge to remove more than a million children out of poverty in Labour’s first term. To cut the number of poor children by around a million would cost as much as ?6.1billion. The pledge to reduce child poverty is proving to be an expensive one.”
Socialists would say not just expensive. Because it relies on the uncertainties of the market system and the use of money, the hope of any Labour government ending child poverty is impossible. Labour and Tory governments having been making the same promise for many years and they have all failed.
Appeals for money
But the magical powers of money to solve problems dominates not just the world of reformist politics, it also dominates the many charities that constantly ask for money. A recent example is an appeal run by Oxfam on TV:
“What do we dream for our children? Health, happiness, success? A safe place to sleep at night? A drink of water that won’t kill them? Never to be hungry again? We all want the best for our children. For some people that starts with such simple things. All they want is a better world for them to grow up in. It’s not much to ask and all we are asking of you is £2 a month.
In over 70 countries Oxfam is helping people work themselves out of poverty. They never give up and neither do we. Will you stand alongside us too? With your £2 a month we can help them with seeds, tools — help them build wells with clean, safe water give children an education so that they can have a chance of a real future free from hunger and pain. All people want is a better life for their children. Please do something remarkable today and help make a dream a reality. Telephone Oxfam today and give £2 a month.”
It is not the purpose here to criticise those who want to do something to help others in desperate need. In a way, their willingness to help provides a hope for the future. But the brutal facts have to be faced, that during the past 25 years during which time OXFAM and similar organisations have been appealing for money to solve problems, the number of seriously undernourished people has, according to the FAO, almost doubled from 435 million in 1974/5 to over 800 million in 2000. In view of this we are bound to point out that when OXFAM claim to be in over 70 countries “helping people to work themselves out of poverty,” so far as the general problem is concerned this statement is misleading. If OXFAM and its supporters were to also join the work of organising for socialism, that would be a significant step forward. What could be their objections to a world organised solely for the needs of people? Surely this is what they claim to want. By working for socialism they could see an end to the need to make appeals for money.
Following the volcanic eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in Congo the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast its Goma Crisis Appeal (25 January). This included what given amounts of money could do. For example, “?30 will treat 18 people for severe malaria — ?100 will provide clean water to 4,000 people for a week.”
We may not go as far as Oscar Wilde when he wrote, “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.” But it does remain true that appeals for money to alleviate suffering tend to perpetuate the system that causes the suffering. Moreover, the idea that such suffering results from natural causes is not always the case. Most natural dangers known and socialism would not need to leave communities exposed to them. This would avoid many disasters. Also, contingency plans would exist throughout the regions and at a world level for the relief of any catastrophe. Emergency supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies would be maintained at strategic points whilst machinery, equipment and helpers would be moved quickly to the area of crisis. The present appeals for money are a pathetic substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom that communities in socialism would have to immediately use them
The fetishism of money is part of the ideology of the profit system that claims uncountable victims across the world. In the Pre-Colombian societies of South America, in homage to their gods, human sacrifice was widely practised. For example, this was a gruesome ritual amongst the Aztec people in what is now Mexico. “In the heart of Tenochtitlan the pyramid rose as an architectural fetish, charged with the powers of all the offerings, and the blood from thousands of sacrificed human beings. The structure was the terrifying centre of the Aztec world” (The Aztecs, Richard F. Townsend).
Many of the sacrificial victims were children and we think of this as barbaric. Perhaps for this reason we now prefer to keep out of our minds the fact that every day we sacrifice many more children’s lives than the Aztecs could ever manage. We sacrifice them in homage to the god of money, on the altar of the capitalist system.
The Fetishism of Money
Socialist Standard, April 2002.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “fetish” came to be used by anthropologists to mean “an inanimate object worshipped by savages on account of its supposed magical powers.” Often such objects took the form of amulets and in some cultures this practice still continues. In our more developed society this is dismissed as superstition. But whilst the wearing of amulets may not be that common, despite our technical culture “fetishism” is a deeply entrenched part of political thought.
In Marxian theory the “fetishism of commodities” is the illusion that in buying and selling the values being exchanged are part of the physical make-up of the commodities themselves. If this were true it would mean that buying and selling, and the tyrannies of the profit system, could never be removed. But in fact, the values of commodities result from wage labour as part of the economic relationships of the capitalist system. In socialism, with people co-operating to produce directly for needs, the commodity form of goods will disappear leaving the community with free access to simple articles of use.
In religion, gods are products of the human imagination given powers to dominate the lives of those who create them. The destructive effects of religion are evident in the many conflicts that divide people throughout the world but this does not end with subservience to imagined gods. There is also the fetishism of money. This also attributes powers to an alien force that dominates our social affairs. Part of the fetishism of money is the illusion that money has its own productive powers. Particularly in politics, money is fetishised as having the power to solve problems because without it nothing can be done.
How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources”? What is meant by resources is always money. Every day politicians give lack of money as a reason why we cannot provide better health care or safe reliable trains or the many other public services that are in urgent need of improvement. Not just in Whitehall and Westminster but in Borough, District and Parish Councils throughout the country the same mantra is chanted week in and week out, year after year, “if only we had more money, something could be done”. This ignores the fact that productive resources are materials, means of production, transport, energy, communications and networks of infrastructure through which goods and services are produced. And all these depend on one single resource which is labour. These are the real resources on which the lives of communities depend and there is an abundance of labour to provide for needs.
At times there may be millions of unemployed people, factories standing idle and unused materials being stockpiled but capitalist politicians still repeat, “We do not have the resources.” They are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds are pre-occupied by the illusion that only money resources count. They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money, whereas the opposite is the truth. The powers of the community to solve problems can on be fully released with socialism and the abolition of money.
Reliance on the imagined powers of money runs through every social problem. For example, in the last two elections Labour made a commitment to reduce child poverty. For this, they hope to use money. “The chosen means is also clear: a new form of child support which starts in 2003. But it will be costly, as the budget will reveal for the first time.” (Economist, 23 February)
“Poor children are defined as those living in households whose income, after housing costs, is below 60 percent of the median — the income in the exact middle of the income distribution.” Poverty is of course relative and this degree of poverty in Britain is not as severe as the poverty of children in undeveloped countries where 40,000 children under five die in poverty every day. In Britain, child poverty generally means substandard housing, poor conditions in the home, exclusion from benefits enjoyed by better off contemporaries, and poor diets (fats, sugar and carbohydrates).
Any kind of child poverty is a total disgrace and would be easily removed in socialism within a very short time. Under the Labour governments there has been a marginal improvement. According to the Economist,
“Progress has so far been slow. In 1996/7, the year before Labour took office, the number of children living in poverty was 4.4 million. By 1999/2000, this had declined only to 4.1 million. A more substantial decline to 3.5 million is expected for 2001/02 as reforms such as the working families’ tax credit (WFTC), introduced in October 1999, take full effect. But this will still mean that the government has failed to meet its earlier pledge to remove more than a million children out of poverty in Labour’s first term. To cut the number of poor children by around a million would cost as much as ?6.1billion. The pledge to reduce child poverty is proving to be an expensive one.”
Socialists would say not just expensive. Because it relies on the uncertainties of the market system and the use of money, the hope of any Labour government ending child poverty is impossible. Labour and Tory governments having been making the same promise for many years and they have all failed.
Appeals for money
But the magical powers of money to solve problems dominates not just the world of reformist politics, it also dominates the many charities that constantly ask for money. A recent example is an appeal run by Oxfam on TV:
“What do we dream for our children? Health, happiness, success? A safe place to sleep at night? A drink of water that won’t kill them? Never to be hungry again? We all want the best for our children. For some people that starts with such simple things. All they want is a better world for them to grow up in. It’s not much to ask and all we are asking of you is £2 a month.
In over 70 countries Oxfam is helping people work themselves out of poverty. They never give up and neither do we. Will you stand alongside us too? With your £2 a month we can help them with seeds, tools — help them build wells with clean, safe water give children an education so that they can have a chance of a real future free from hunger and pain. All people want is a better life for their children. Please do something remarkable today and help make a dream a reality. Telephone Oxfam today and give £2 a month.”
It is not the purpose here to criticise those who want to do something to help others in desperate need. In a way, their willingness to help provides a hope for the future. But the brutal facts have to be faced, that during the past 25 years during which time OXFAM and similar organisations have been appealing for money to solve problems, the number of seriously undernourished people has, according to the FAO, almost doubled from 435 million in 1974/5 to over 800 million in 2000. In view of this we are bound to point out that when OXFAM claim to be in over 70 countries “helping people to work themselves out of poverty,” so far as the general problem is concerned this statement is misleading. If OXFAM and its supporters were to also join the work of organising for socialism, that would be a significant step forward. What could be their objections to a world organised solely for the needs of people? Surely this is what they claim to want. By working for socialism they could see an end to the need to make appeals for money.
Following the volcanic eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in Congo the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast its Goma Crisis Appeal (25 January). This included what given amounts of money could do. For example, “?30 will treat 18 people for severe malaria — ?100 will provide clean water to 4,000 people for a week.”
We may not go as far as Oscar Wilde when he wrote, “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.” But it does remain true that appeals for money to alleviate suffering tend to perpetuate the system that causes the suffering. Moreover, the idea that such suffering results from natural causes is not always the case. Most natural dangers known and socialism would not need to leave communities exposed to them. This would avoid many disasters. Also, contingency plans would exist throughout the regions and at a world level for the relief of any catastrophe. Emergency supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies would be maintained at strategic points whilst machinery, equipment and helpers would be moved quickly to the area of crisis. The present appeals for money are a pathetic substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom that communities in socialism would have to immediately use them
The fetishism of money is part of the ideology of the profit system that claims uncountable victims across the world. In the Pre-Colombian societies of South America, in homage to their gods, human sacrifice was widely practised. For example, this was a gruesome ritual amongst the Aztec people in what is now Mexico. “In the heart of Tenochtitlan the pyramid rose as an architectural fetish, charged with the powers of all the offerings, and the blood from thousands of sacrificed human beings. The structure was the terrifying centre of the Aztec world” (The Aztecs, Richard F. Townsend).
Many of the sacrificial victims were children and we think of this as barbaric. Perhaps for this reason we now prefer to keep out of our minds the fact that every day we sacrifice many more children’s lives than the Aztecs could ever manage. We sacrifice them in homage to the god of money, on the altar of the capitalist system.
Obama's lap dogs lap-up Nobel war rationalizations
The Nation and the Obama Doctrine
12 December 2009
President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech has been hailed virtually unanimously across the entire spectrum of the American political establishment.
Bristling with imperialist arrogance, Obama’s speech amounted to a full-throated defense of US aggression and a brief for the unlimited use of military violence to recolonize large parts of the world. Delivered by a president who only a week before had announced an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that will lead to the deaths of many thousands, the speech essentially asserted the right of the United States to invade any country in the world.
“The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” Obama insisted. The US, he said, has the right to "act unilaterally if necessary" and to launch wars whose purpose "extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor." This was a reassertion of the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war, which is a violation of international law.
Obama referred to the historical concept of “just war,” which maintains that wars must be waged only in self-defense, must employ proportional force and do so in a manner that avoids civilian casualties. He then said it was necessary to “think in new ways” about these notions, implying that such quaint ideas had to be rejected and the world had to accept the right of the US and other imperialist powers to inflict death and destruction on targeted populations as they saw fit.
Obama was not just defending the ongoing wars in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. As in his December 1 West Point speech, he made clear that these are only the first of many future wars. Speaking in Oslo, he singled out as potential targets a series of countries, including Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe and Myanmar.
In an implicit threat to rival powers, Obama made a point of referring to the US as "the world's sole military superpower.”
The White House clearly decided to use Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech as an opportunity to stage an international defense of American militarism and imperialist war. It was confident that the different factions of the US political and media establishment could be brought on board behind a policy—dubbed by media commentators the “Obama Doctrine”—that both reiterates and extends that elaborated by the Bush administration.
On the right, the speech won the support of the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, among others. One Republican strategist, Bradley Blakeman, remarked, "The irony is that George W. Bush could have delivered the very same speech. It was truly an American president's message to the world."
The Wall Street Journal wrote that the speech put paid any notion that Obama would give a "wooly-headed address about peace in our time." Instead, Obama "stated clearly that sometimes war is necessary…”
“Congratulations, Mr. President," wrote the organ of the Republican right.
The New York Times, the voice of American liberalism, said the speech was "appropriately humble" as well as "somber and soaring," It drew particular attention to Obama's defense of the war in Afghanistan as "morally just and strategically necessary."
Hastening to align itself with the imperialist establishment and declare its support for the speech was the Nation magazine, the main organ of what passes for “left” liberalism. John Nichols, one of the magazine’s principal commentators, in a blog entry published almost immediately after the speech and featured as the lead item on the magazine’s web site, wrote that it was "an exceptionally well-reasoned and appropriately humble address."
Nichols gushed, "The president's frankness about the controversies and concerns regarding the award of a Peace Prize to a man who just last week ordered 30,000 US new troops into the Afghanistan quagmire, and the humility he displayed…offered a glimpse of Obama at his best."
"As such," he continued, "the speech was important and, dare we say, hopeful."
In an interview on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” news program, the Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, praised the speech’s supposed "humility and grace." The host of the show, evidently expecting more criticism, noted that vanden Heuvel "seemed to be resolving the conflict between the wartime president…and the speech about peace rather easily…”
Vanden Heuvel responded with blather about the "complexity" of American life. It was a "complex speech," she said, and she was "interested in its complexity."
Contrary to vanden Heuvel, there was nothing “humble” or “graceful” about Obama’s speech. Nor was it complex. It was an open brief for unrestrained aggression and colonial oppression.
There should be no confusion as to the position of the Nation and the privileged upper-middle-class layers for which the magazine speaks, including former radicals and one-time critics of US imperialism. They have moved squarely into the camp of American imperialism. They support Obama’s wars in Central Asia and Iraq and, more generally, the efforts of the United States to assert global hegemony.
In the run-up to the 2008 elections, the Nation was among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Obama campaign, presenting his victory as the first stage in a radical reform and revitalization of American democracy. It vouched for Obama’s supposedly antiwar credentials.
One year later, the candidate of “change” and “hope” presides over a right-wing administration that is expanding US military aggression while it bails out Wall Street and attacks the jobs and living standards of the working class.
The unmasking of Obama before the entire world has not in any way lessened the support he receives from the Nation. On the contrary, the coming to power of an African-American president has served as the vehicle for American liberalism, including its supposedly “left” wing, which long ago abandoned any serious reform agenda and rejected class as the basic category of social life in favor of race, gender and other categories of identity politics, to lurch further to the right.
It has provided the means by which the Nation has completed its passage into the camp of American imperialism and political reaction.
Remarking on Obama’s speech, Walter Russell Mead, the Henry Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, remarked, “If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations. When Obama says them, people purr.”
The “purring” of the Nation comes at a time of growing popular opposition to the Obama administration and its policies. In his speech, Obama himself made reference to the fact that his expansion of war is deeply unpopular, noting the “disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the population.” He made clear, however, that this “disconnect” will have absolutely no effect on the policy of his government.
What will happen as the “disconnect” turns into anger and opposition? How will the Nation respond? Its greatest concern is the growth of a political movement that breaks free of the Democratic Party. While it responds now with lies and political hucksterism, under different conditions the Nation will support repression—the purring kitten will turn out to have sharp claws.
The evolution of the Nation underscores the fact that a genuine movement against imperialist war must develop in opposition to the defenders of the Obama administration, the Democratic Party and American capitalism.
As the economic crisis intensifies and aggressive war expands, the working class will emerge as the leading political force in the opposition to war and imperialism. The critical task is the construction of a political leadership based on the understanding that imperialist war is rooted in the capitalist system, and that the fight against war must be an international struggle linked to the socialist reorganization of society.
Joseph Kishore
12 December 2009
President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech has been hailed virtually unanimously across the entire spectrum of the American political establishment.
Bristling with imperialist arrogance, Obama’s speech amounted to a full-throated defense of US aggression and a brief for the unlimited use of military violence to recolonize large parts of the world. Delivered by a president who only a week before had announced an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that will lead to the deaths of many thousands, the speech essentially asserted the right of the United States to invade any country in the world.
“The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” Obama insisted. The US, he said, has the right to "act unilaterally if necessary" and to launch wars whose purpose "extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor." This was a reassertion of the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war, which is a violation of international law.
Obama referred to the historical concept of “just war,” which maintains that wars must be waged only in self-defense, must employ proportional force and do so in a manner that avoids civilian casualties. He then said it was necessary to “think in new ways” about these notions, implying that such quaint ideas had to be rejected and the world had to accept the right of the US and other imperialist powers to inflict death and destruction on targeted populations as they saw fit.
Obama was not just defending the ongoing wars in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. As in his December 1 West Point speech, he made clear that these are only the first of many future wars. Speaking in Oslo, he singled out as potential targets a series of countries, including Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe and Myanmar.
In an implicit threat to rival powers, Obama made a point of referring to the US as "the world's sole military superpower.”
The White House clearly decided to use Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech as an opportunity to stage an international defense of American militarism and imperialist war. It was confident that the different factions of the US political and media establishment could be brought on board behind a policy—dubbed by media commentators the “Obama Doctrine”—that both reiterates and extends that elaborated by the Bush administration.
On the right, the speech won the support of the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, among others. One Republican strategist, Bradley Blakeman, remarked, "The irony is that George W. Bush could have delivered the very same speech. It was truly an American president's message to the world."
The Wall Street Journal wrote that the speech put paid any notion that Obama would give a "wooly-headed address about peace in our time." Instead, Obama "stated clearly that sometimes war is necessary…”
“Congratulations, Mr. President," wrote the organ of the Republican right.
The New York Times, the voice of American liberalism, said the speech was "appropriately humble" as well as "somber and soaring," It drew particular attention to Obama's defense of the war in Afghanistan as "morally just and strategically necessary."
Hastening to align itself with the imperialist establishment and declare its support for the speech was the Nation magazine, the main organ of what passes for “left” liberalism. John Nichols, one of the magazine’s principal commentators, in a blog entry published almost immediately after the speech and featured as the lead item on the magazine’s web site, wrote that it was "an exceptionally well-reasoned and appropriately humble address."
Nichols gushed, "The president's frankness about the controversies and concerns regarding the award of a Peace Prize to a man who just last week ordered 30,000 US new troops into the Afghanistan quagmire, and the humility he displayed…offered a glimpse of Obama at his best."
"As such," he continued, "the speech was important and, dare we say, hopeful."
In an interview on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” news program, the Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, praised the speech’s supposed "humility and grace." The host of the show, evidently expecting more criticism, noted that vanden Heuvel "seemed to be resolving the conflict between the wartime president…and the speech about peace rather easily…”
Vanden Heuvel responded with blather about the "complexity" of American life. It was a "complex speech," she said, and she was "interested in its complexity."
Contrary to vanden Heuvel, there was nothing “humble” or “graceful” about Obama’s speech. Nor was it complex. It was an open brief for unrestrained aggression and colonial oppression.
There should be no confusion as to the position of the Nation and the privileged upper-middle-class layers for which the magazine speaks, including former radicals and one-time critics of US imperialism. They have moved squarely into the camp of American imperialism. They support Obama’s wars in Central Asia and Iraq and, more generally, the efforts of the United States to assert global hegemony.
In the run-up to the 2008 elections, the Nation was among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Obama campaign, presenting his victory as the first stage in a radical reform and revitalization of American democracy. It vouched for Obama’s supposedly antiwar credentials.
One year later, the candidate of “change” and “hope” presides over a right-wing administration that is expanding US military aggression while it bails out Wall Street and attacks the jobs and living standards of the working class.
The unmasking of Obama before the entire world has not in any way lessened the support he receives from the Nation. On the contrary, the coming to power of an African-American president has served as the vehicle for American liberalism, including its supposedly “left” wing, which long ago abandoned any serious reform agenda and rejected class as the basic category of social life in favor of race, gender and other categories of identity politics, to lurch further to the right.
It has provided the means by which the Nation has completed its passage into the camp of American imperialism and political reaction.
Remarking on Obama’s speech, Walter Russell Mead, the Henry Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, remarked, “If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations. When Obama says them, people purr.”
The “purring” of the Nation comes at a time of growing popular opposition to the Obama administration and its policies. In his speech, Obama himself made reference to the fact that his expansion of war is deeply unpopular, noting the “disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the population.” He made clear, however, that this “disconnect” will have absolutely no effect on the policy of his government.
What will happen as the “disconnect” turns into anger and opposition? How will the Nation respond? Its greatest concern is the growth of a political movement that breaks free of the Democratic Party. While it responds now with lies and political hucksterism, under different conditions the Nation will support repression—the purring kitten will turn out to have sharp claws.
The evolution of the Nation underscores the fact that a genuine movement against imperialist war must develop in opposition to the defenders of the Obama administration, the Democratic Party and American capitalism.
As the economic crisis intensifies and aggressive war expands, the working class will emerge as the leading political force in the opposition to war and imperialism. The critical task is the construction of a political leadership based on the understanding that imperialist war is rooted in the capitalist system, and that the fight against war must be an international struggle linked to the socialist reorganization of society.
Joseph Kishore
"Avatar" schmavatar
http://www.colesmithey.com/capsules/2009/12/avatar.html
The most expensive film ever made leaves much to be desired. Paralyzed from the waist down, former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) voices several movies worth of tell-don't-show narration for the benefit of audiences who like being read to when they watch a movie. With no oil resources left on Earth, a battalion of outsourced military bozos have set up camp on the moon "Pandora" with a group of optimistic scientists in order to incite a tribe of native aliens called the Na'vi. They want to drive the Na'vi out of their giant tree home to extract an energy-producing mineral called Unobtainium (yes, really). Jake's lack of scientific training nevertheless allows him to rest in a coffin-like bed from which he projects a walking-talking avatar in the form of a Na'vi creature. Jake's mission is to earn the trust of the blue-skinned Na'vi and report back to the colonizing military forces, who want to dispossess the aliens rather than kill them all outright. The Na'vi are primitive aliens who wear loin cloths, do battle with bows and arrows, and fly around on winged four-eyed creatures with which each Na'vi bonds for life. Naturally, Jake falls for a cute Na'vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who returns his affection. The inevitable David-and-Goliath war that transpires delivers a familiar tale: boy meets alien, boy goes native, boy betrays his past to do what's right. For an ostensibly anti-imperialist war movie written in all caps and splashed with every primary color in the Maxfield Parish color wheel, "Avatar" ends up being a toothless rollercoaster of eye candy that sexes up war, the very thing it professes to detest. "Avatar" is the perfect film to desensitize young audiences before they get the call-up.
The most expensive film ever made leaves much to be desired. Paralyzed from the waist down, former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) voices several movies worth of tell-don't-show narration for the benefit of audiences who like being read to when they watch a movie. With no oil resources left on Earth, a battalion of outsourced military bozos have set up camp on the moon "Pandora" with a group of optimistic scientists in order to incite a tribe of native aliens called the Na'vi. They want to drive the Na'vi out of their giant tree home to extract an energy-producing mineral called Unobtainium (yes, really). Jake's lack of scientific training nevertheless allows him to rest in a coffin-like bed from which he projects a walking-talking avatar in the form of a Na'vi creature. Jake's mission is to earn the trust of the blue-skinned Na'vi and report back to the colonizing military forces, who want to dispossess the aliens rather than kill them all outright. The Na'vi are primitive aliens who wear loin cloths, do battle with bows and arrows, and fly around on winged four-eyed creatures with which each Na'vi bonds for life. Naturally, Jake falls for a cute Na'vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who returns his affection. The inevitable David-and-Goliath war that transpires delivers a familiar tale: boy meets alien, boy goes native, boy betrays his past to do what's right. For an ostensibly anti-imperialist war movie written in all caps and splashed with every primary color in the Maxfield Parish color wheel, "Avatar" ends up being a toothless rollercoaster of eye candy that sexes up war, the very thing it professes to detest. "Avatar" is the perfect film to desensitize young audiences before they get the call-up.
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