Climate Optimism.
Are we all doomed?
In the 1970’s comedy ‘Dad’s Army’ the character, Private Fraser used to periodically cry out “we’re doomed. Doomed I tell ya,”. Many climate activists and scientists also portray the future in apocalyptic terms. The future is bleak and humankind will become extinct.
Socialists do not share this pessimism. While climate change is scientifically true and is and will cause problems to various parts of the world like enforced migration due to drought and flooding, there is a solution; the common ownership of the means of production and distribution by all of society: socialism. That is the abolition of the profit system through democratic and political action by the world’s working class.
However, there are some climate optimists who believe that the environmental problems will be resolved within capitalism. One scientist is Hannah Ritchie who was recently given a platform in the ‘Observer’ (31.12.223) to advertise her new book ‘Not the End of the World: How we can be the first generation to build a Sustainable Planet’ (Chatto and Windus, 2024).
Ritchie stated that she changed from a climate pessimist to a climate optimist by following the Climate Action Tracker. The CAT follows every country’s climate policies, and its pledges and targets. She said:
“If we stick with the climate policies that countries currently have in place, we’re heading towards a world of 2.5C to 2.9C. Let me be clear: this is terrible and we have to avoid it. But countries have pledged to go much further. They’ve committed to making their policies much more ambitious. If each country was to follow through on their climate pledges, we’d come out at 2.1C by 2100”.
Later Ritchie was interviewed by the ‘Observer’ journalist, Killian Fox. Fox asked Ritchie:
“Capitalism has been a great accelerator of climate change and other environmental crises, but you don’t challenge it much in your book. Do you believe capitalism can right its wrongs? Or that it’s the best system to get us out of this mess?”
Ritchie replied:
“I accept that there are definitely flaws with capitalism. What I would push back against is the notion that we can just dismantle capitalism and build something else. The core reason is time. We need to be acting on this problem urgently, on a large scale, in the next five to ten years, and to me it does not seem to be feasible that we’re going to dismantle the system and build a new one in that time. I think capitalism does drive innovation, which is what we need to create affordable low-carbon technologies”.
Ritchie does not tell us what flaws are associated with capitalism. However, socialists are well aware of contradictions of capitalism. The principal contradiction of the profit system is between social production and class ownership. Productive work under capitalism is undertaken by the co-operation of millions of workers. It is the working class who produce wealth. However, the means of production, including oil and gas and their use in commodity production and exchange for profit, is owned as private property by a minority capitalist class. They have one interest and that it is making profit. This profit motive is forced upon capitalists and their politicians as an economic coercive power.
Capitalism is the cause of the climate emergency.
Capitalism is the cause of the climate emergency. This fact has been known for a long time but the coal, gas and oil industries has paid millions of pounds to “think tanks” to deny climate change, and to finance the media and politicians to rubbish the science of climate change. For decades little or nothing could be done due to the power and influence of powerful vested interest groups.
Ritchie naively believes in the pledges of nation states. And this is where the basic flaw of Climate Action Tracker is shown. Nation states make pledges but never keep them. They have their own interests to pursue. The gas and oil industry want their interests pursued by governments and politicians. Nation states like capitalist businesses are in competition with each other. They do not want to lose their competitive edge by surrendering their own interests for “the collective good”. Pledges are watered down, ignored, or dropped altogether.
Take as an example the United States. According to OilPrice.com the United States is now producing more than 13 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil—more than any country ever—and is headed to a continued increase in the short and medium term. U.S. crude oil production hit a new monthly record of 13.236 million bpd in September, according to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). And what does Ritchie think will happen if Trump wins the Presidency this Autumn? What of United States pledges on the climate emergency then?
Here is the United Nations Environmental Programme commenting on the 2023 Production Gap Report: “Phasing down or phasing up? Top fossil fuel producers plan even more extraction despite climate promises” produced by Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Climate Analytics, E3G, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Report (8 November 2023).
“A major new report published today finds that governments plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 69% more than would be consistent with 2°C.This comes despite 151 national governments having pledged to achieve net-zero emissions and the latest forecasts which suggest global coal, oil, and gas demand will peak this decade, even without new policies. When combined, government plans would lead to an increase in global coal production until 2030, and in global oil and gas production until at least 2050, creating an ever-widening fossil fuel production gap over time”.
What of the problem of “dismantling capitalism” thereby creating adverse conditions for dealing with climate change. Capitalism has developed technology and social production to the point where plenty for all can be produced but also a level of technology and science to solve environmental and social problems. Socialism will inherit scientific and technological expertise to solve problems bequeathed by capitalism.
Socialism will not start from nothing.
Socialism will not be a tabula rasa. Socialism will not start from nothing. Socialism will be a globally interconnected social system. The means of production and distribution will still exist. So will transport and communication, technological and scientific research and more importantly common ownership and democratic control at a global, regional, and local level. What will be abolished is the profit system, the wages system, classes, and nation states. The absence of these serious barriers will not create adverse conditions but quite the reverse. Socialism would retain what is useful production and distribution along with co-operative and social labour.
Socialism would not need five to ten years to resolves the problems caused by capitalism. It will be hard work to initially deal with the problems caused by capitalism but the profit motive and class exploitation will not be in the way. Capitalism is incapable of solving the problems it causes. It is capitalism who does not have the time, not socialism.
What innovation takes place under capitalism often means that the negative consequences are not understood until much later. The profit motive cheapens production to create profit but does not create a world fit for human beings; paradoxically much of capitalism’s innovation is associated with war and conflict. It will be socialism that innovates where production takes place solely for social use. Meeting human need, dealing with environmental problems will generate innovation.
The profit system can never be made to work in the interest of workers. Workers under capitalism do not have the power to solve the problems that face them. In not owning and controlling the means of production and distribution workers can little effect change to environmental problems. Capitalism can only work in the interests of the privileged owning class of capitalists. Capitalism cannot be reformed a fact that scientists like Ritchie fail to grasp. The advantage socialism will have is the absence of nation states. And we will not be doomed to watch endless repeats of Dad’s Army.
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DARWIN
The viewpoint that discerns and identifies an historic linkage between Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in regard to their respective, earthshaking theories seems not to be obvious to scientists, generally, in our times. Most scientific people, to the extent that they do attempt analysis of our social system, are no more cognisant of the traditional Marxist critique than is the bulk of the population. When it comes to political science, their thinking is dominated by the ruling class approach to the extent of permitting their political views to influence, or colour, their research efforts. In any case, a century, and a quarter after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species it would not be easy to find scientists, other than an occasional Marxist, who do see a connection between scientific evolution and scientific socialism.
This was not always the case and, in the decades, immediately following the publication of Darwin’s monumental work in 1859. there was frequent and heated debate among scientists over the question. For example, in 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the famed German embryologist, delivered an eloquent address in which he defended and propagated Darwinism which was, at that time, under violent attack. A few days afterwards Virchow, the noted pathologist, assailed the Darwinian theory of organic evolution raising a terrible cry of alarm: “Darwinism leads directly to socialism”.
The German Darwinians, headed by Haeckel and Oscar Schmidt, immediately protested, insisting that Darwinism is in direct, open and absolute opposition to socialism. In the words of Schmidt, writing in the Ausland of 27 November 1877.
If the Socialists were prudent, they would do their utmost to kill, by silent neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory most emphatically proclaims that the socialist ideas are impracticable.
And Haeckel wrote (in Les preuves du transformisme, Paris, 1879. p. 110 et seq):
. . . there is no scientific doctrine which proclaims more openly than the theory of descent that the equality of individuals, toward which socialism tends, is an impossibility; that this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction with the necessary and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals . . .
In the ever-popular misconception of Marxist goals. Haeckel portrayed socialism as a demand for “equal rights, equal duties, equal possessions and equal enjoyments”. And having erected this straw man (one need not elaborate on the vast difference between the concept of equality in work and rewards on the one hand and a society based on from each according to one’s ability to each according to one’s needs, the societal goal of socialism, on the other) the scientist demolished it with an outpouring of words calculated to demonstrate that Darwin’s theory of descent proved that there can be no scientific validity to the “socialist goal” of equality in work or reward. In fact it proved, he argued. that the tendency of society is not even toward democracy — let alone socialism — that it can only be evolving in the direction of aristocracy!
But that was all argued out a long time ago and little if anything seems now to be said about a relationship between Darwinism and human societies. The Darwin theory has long since graduated to the status of an accepted fact by all but a minority of die-hard fundamentalists whose effect on the machinery of capitalist society is minimal at most. The capitalist class has long since accepted Natural Selection. To them, perhaps, it also provides a logical explanation for their own status; they, the “fittest”, have survived the no-holds-barred struggle.
In point of fact, Darwinism has nothing to do with democracy, aristocracy, socialism, or any other sort of social system. The theory of Natural Selection, no doubt, was somewhat applicable to primitive humans but once they got organised into civilised societies (slavery, serfdom, capitalism) their survival depended more on human-made factors than natural. True, there is a ferocious competition among members of the same class — for profits or for jobs — as well as relentless contention between the classes (workers against capitalists) in capitalist society. But that is a by-product of this social order and will become non-existent in a society based on common ownership and free access to all wealth.
But aside from this factor, scientists for the most part have gone overboard on Natural Selection. As Darwin also pointed out, human beings have always been social animals with the propensity for mutual aid. At the end of Chapter 11 of The Descent of Man he wrote:
The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons, etc are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual powers, through which he has formed for himself weapons, tools, etc, though still remaining in a barbarous state, and. secondly by his social qualities which lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-men. No country in the world abounds in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa; no country presents more fearful physical hardships than the Arctic regions; yet one of the puniest races, that of the Bushmen, maintains itself in Southern Africa. as do the dwarfed Esquimaux in the Arctic regions . . . (p.333, Modern Library ed.)
So much for what Haeckel had to say — especially on that “pitiless” struggle for existence that supposedly has always taken place among the human race. Even among the most primitive it was not that pitiless — according to Darwin and Mutual Aid naturalists such as Peter Kropotkin. Populations among the more primitive have always been small — whereas in civilised societies, despite the most horrible hardships, death-dealing implements and pollutants unimagined by primitives, populations have continued to multiply. Mutual aid does play an important role, even under advanced capitalism.
But what of the socialists and their reaction to Darwinism? Beginning with Marx himself, there was tremendous enthusiasm. Darwin’s book was published in the same year as Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the words of John Spargo of the old Socialist Party of America:
. . . Marx regarded it as a fortunate coincidence that his own book appeared in the same year as that of Darwin. He recognised at once the importance and merit of Darwin’s work, and at once brought it to the attention of his fellow radicals at their meetings. Liebknecht has told us how for months the Marx circle spoke of nothing except the value of Darwin’s work. With great frankness Marx likened his own work in the sociological field to that of Darwin in the biological field, and he was always manifestly pleased when others made the comparison Once, in the late sixties, when it had become commonplace in Marxian circles. W. Harrison Riley, editor of the International Herald, made the now familiar comparison and Marx replied: “Nothing ever gives me greater pleasure than to have my name thus linked with Darwin’s. His wonderful work makes my own absolutely impregnable. Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution”. (Karl Marx: His Life and Work, B. W Huebsche, NY. 1910. p 200)
It did not take long for Darwin to indicate that he was not anxious to be thought of as belonging to “the Social Revolution”. Isaiah Berlin writes, in his Karl Marx, His Life and Environment:
(Marx) offered to dedicate his Capital to Darwin, for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries. regarding him as having, by his theory of evolution and natural selection, done for the morphology of the natural sciences what he himself was striving to do for human history.
But Darwin was apparently not interested in being identified with a revolutionary socialist. He must have realised that his own book would give him more than enough troubles as it was, so:
(he) hastily declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end — the advancement of human knowledge. (A Galaxy Book, NY, Oxford University Press. 1959. p.232)
We should also have a brief look at what Engels had to say on the subject. In his Anti-Duhring, he devotes some eleven pages to a defence of Darwin against the attack by Herr Eugen Duhring, a German “reformer” of socialism:
The main reproach levelled against Darwin is that he transferred the Malthusian population theory from political economy to natural science, that he was held captive by the ideas of an animal breeder, that in his theory of the struggle for existence he pursued unscientific semi-poetry, and that the whole of Darwinism, after deducting what had been borrowed from Lamarck, is a piece of brutality against humanity. (Foreign Languages Publishing House. Moscow. 1954. p.97)
A little later Engels writes:
Now Darwin would not dream of saying that the origin of the idea of the struggle for existence is to be found in Malthus. He only says that his theory of the struggle for existence is the theory of Malthus applied to the animal and plant world as a whole. However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles arc required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature — the contradiction between the countless host of germs which nature so lavishly produces and the small number of those which ever reach maturity, a contradiction which in fact for the most part finds its solution in a struggle for existence — often of extreme cruelty . . . the struggle for existence can take place in nature, even without any Malthusian interpretation. For that matter, the organisms of nature also have their laws of population, which have been left practically uninvestigated, although their establishment would be of decisive importance for the theory of the evolution of species. But who was it that lent decisive impetus to work in this direction too? No other than Darwin, (page 99)
In retrospect one can understand the excitement of revolutionaries like Marx and Engels, in the latter half of the 19th Century, over a book such as Origin of the Species. The basic message of Darwinian evolution, they were certain, would sweep the world and with the spread of scientific information superstition would be forced into swift retreat. The superstition of religion had been, historically, a major pillar of capitalism. Origin of the Species knocked the very props from under it. And the general acceptance of biological evolution must, they thought, lead inexorably to an acceptance of social evolution and the principles of socialism.
To put it mildly, the pioneers of scientific socialism were over-optimistic. On the one hand, in these last two decades of the 20th Century, we have a battle still being waged between so-called Scientific Creationists and
Evolutionists while religions such as Roman Catholicism and various Protestant denominations are able to teach Darwinian evolution in their Church-owned schools of higher learning with no apparent damage to the future stability of their adjoining temples of superstition. On the other hand, some nations of state capitalism such as Russia. China and North Korea have demonstrated that they are able to carry on the basics of a capitalist economy with little more than a limited toleration of religion — or no apparent organised religion whatever.
So, the general acceptance of Darwinism in modern biology, even in the “communist” and “socialist” worlds has added little to the basic political understanding of the workers.
Harmo (Harry Young) Socialist Standard no 963 November 1984
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WHO OWNS THE MOON?
The philosopher A. C. Grayling has published a book Who Owns the Moon? In defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space. He writes:
“A space Wild West is coming into existence. The consequences for peace and stability on Earth, already tenuous on conventional grounds…could be, and too likely will be, as petrol onto a fire”.
Grayling goes on to say: “The moon contains many common minerals, including basalt, iron, quartz, and silicon, and the strong possibility that there are ores (mineable deposits) of what geologists’ call ‘incompatible lithophilic’ elements: chlorine, lithium, beryllium, zirconium, uranium, thorium and the rare earths”.
Already the cowboys are on the Moon. Elon Musk supplied the Falcon 9 rocket and Intuitive Machines, a Texas based company supplied the lander. They are there for profit not humanity.
Grayling says that no one owns the moon, certainly not for competition and profit. He believes it is “the common inheritance of mankind”. This is pure idealism. If the moon is deemed to be profitable to be mined competing nation states will carve it up and parcel it out to their respective capitalist class.
If the moon is to be retained as “the common inheritance of mankind” then first Earth has to become the common ownership under democratic control of the entire world. That is the establishment of socialism.
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ARE SOCIALISTS EXTREMISTS?
The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always stated that both the political means and the socialist objective have to be democratic. In other words, the political means and the political object are inseparable.
The SPGB is a democratically constituted political organisation; we believe that there should be the widest discussion and debate of competing political ideas even those which are mad, bad and dangerous to know. Not though that universities are bastions of free speech. Universities and student unions have aggressive policies of banning newspapers, books and lecturers from the campus. If socialists wanted to debate the BNP at a university, or even UKIP, it just would not happen.
We reject censorship as self-defeating. We argue that workers should not be treated like infants and have unpalatable ideas and beliefs hidden from them. Workers should make up their own minds when confronted with political ideas and act according to their own interest. Censorship occurs when those doing the censorship are unsure of their own political case. We are not unsure of our socialist position which we have defended for over one hundred years. We stand in line for no one.
So, what harm could a government do when pursuing socialists as “extremists”? Here are a number of options open to the capitalist State:
- Imprison members.
- Attempt to pull the web site.
- Stop publication of socialist literature
- Prevent socialists standing at elections.
- Prevent socialists holding meetings at schools, universities and in public buildings.
- Stop socialists from going on the TV, radio and being interviewed in newspapers.
Quite frankly a government would have a hard time to prevent socialist activity taking place. You cannot kill a revolutionary idea generated by the class struggle and material interests. In any case, for the capitalist State to use its legislation against socialists in this way would be counterproductive and harm their own false legitimacy.
And the technological advances in communication through social media and the internet has moved individuals away from total government control particularly from the various coercive departments of the State, notably the police and the secret service. Yes, of course, they desperately want this control back and are using acts of terrorism as a means to increase their power and influence, however, the genie is out of the bottle.
And perhaps it always has been the case that the agents of the State are not as powerful as they think they are despite the worry of the conspiracy theorists of an Orwellian dystopian future of all-pervasive electronic government control. After all, none of the security agencies in the West, despite the billions of pounds at their disposal, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Empire in 1989!
Take three examples which support the socialist argument that the State has absolute power to somehow prevent the dissemination of socialist ideas and the political action of socialists. First, there is Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation, second, the passing of the 1918 Representation of the People’s Act and third the decline and fall of the East German secret police: the Stasi.
Bismarck’s anti-socialist law outlawed all Social-Democratic organisations (the name German socialists used at the time), all working-class organisations; all working class or socialist presses and ordered the confiscation of all socialist literature by the State. Social-Democrats and various other pro-working-class groups were arrested and deported. 900 workers were expelled from their homes; 1500 sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; 1300 publications were suspended and 332 worker organizations were forcibly dissolved. Nevertheless, the social democrats were still able to continue their political activity by adapting to circumstances and bypassing the State coercion used against them.
Under the 1918 Representation of the People Act, thousands of conscientious objectors, including SPGB members, were disenfranchised for five years. However, the Socialist Party of Great Britain still remained active and still produced the Socialist Standard. Socialists who had been conscientious objectors during the war still played an active political role in the political class struggle. The reason why the Party suspended all outdoor meetings in World War 1 was not only the near impossibility of escaping prosecution under the legal offence of “spreading alarm and despondency” but also the actions of the Courts in backing up illegal prosecutions. When mobs broke up legal meetings (often incited by newspapers) the police would ignore the action of the mob and charge the speakers with “breach of the peace” and the Courts upheld the account given by the police.
Then there is the example of the East German secret police: the Stasi. Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people. In 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 people full time along with 173,081 unofficial informants and it still was unable to prevent the collapse of the Government, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the integration of East German capitalism with West German capitalism. It should be noted that the trade unions, because of their backing, were in a somewhat different position.
While the socialist movement has little support among the workers there is little to do but accept or seek to evade restrictions imposed by the authorities. As the numbers increase the situation will be correspondingly altered, either because (like the trade unions) socialists shall be better able to resist, or at some stage socialist delegates will be elected by socialists to Parliament. Socialist propaganda should always stress that socialism and democracy are inseparable; that there is no way of establishing a world economic system based on socialist principles, except through the democratic action of a socialist majority; and the capture of the machinery of government.
So, are socialists extremists? If it means rejecting the bogus claim that capitalism is “democratic”, then, yes. And if it means to argue the State has little or no interest in “individual liberty” and instead pursues the interest of the capitalist class against the working-class majority, then yes. And, if by extremist it means to take political action to help create a socialist majority necessary to replace capitalism with socialism; then it is guilty as charged.
First, though, look at those making the accusation of “extremism” against us! Look at the self-satisfied faces of the world leaders and their representatives who attended a “solidarity” march in January 2015 following the terrorist attacks in Paris. And just consider the violent and destructive policy in the Middle East and elsewhere on behalf of the interest of their respective capitalist class. Who is then the extremist?
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SOCIALISM NEEDS MORE THAN DISSENT
The task of establishing socialism has come to be associated with social reforms to make capitalism run more smoothly and iron out its myriad of social and economic problems.
Because capitalism cannot solve the problems of the working class, there is questioning and dissent. However, dissent is not enough. Nor is questioning social problems and leaving it for politicians. For every social problem facing the working class there is a social reformer standing in the way of social revolution. Nevertheless, reforms are not an option.
Dissent, political dissent must have with it a socialist objective, or it is nothing. Capitalism as a social system with a beginning and an end and class struggle must be seen as something to be abolished and replaced by a new social system based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
However, it is not the task of socialists to impose socialism onto a working-class majority. Socialism must be global. It must replace a world system based upon class exploitation with a social system based on “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. Socialism must be established by a socialist majority taking hold of the machinery of government. The world working class must establish socialism no one else can.
Some claim workers are too stupid to establish socialism and they can only be led. Others say workers are not cut out for socialist politics.
Yes, it is easy to sneer at incredibly slow development of the working class. But socialists and socialist ideas come out of the class struggle not from philosophical textbooks.
Marx and Engels rejected this political elitism and the dismissal of workers as political idiots. Marx and Engels believed that workers could become active socialists and that all workers can reason and learn by experience. Thinking and acting as a socialist is within the realm of any open-minded worker free from prejudice and ruling class propaganda. This has been proven by workers becoming socialists.
They produced one of the most important political propositions in human thought: that workers were not only capable of establishing socialism, but they could do it by themselves without leaders.
This is what they wrote in the ‘Communist Manifesto’:
“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class……The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority…What the bourgeoisie, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”.
And this proposition influenced socialists in establishing the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. In clause 4 we said:
“That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain was established by members of the working class in 1904. Workers were able to establish a socialist party by their own work alone and to sustain the Party under difficult political circumstances united around a socialist object and a set of socialist principles.
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WAR IN UKRAINE: TWO YEARS ON
After almost two full years of war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused untold losses to the working class and Ukrainian economy. Ukraine’s GDP fell by 40% in 2022. Villages are just ruins and an additional 7.1 million Ukrainians now live in poverty.
The United Nations estimates about 10,400 civilian deaths with another 19,000 wounded. The military casualties are even more difficult to estimate – but estimates put the figure about 70,000 soldiers killed and another 100,000 wounded. Russian military casualties are about the same. Millions have fled abroad and many more millions have been displaced from their homes within Ukraine. The battlefield resembles the First World War with its trenches and artillery barrages.
This is a war in which the working class in Ukraine and Russia have no interest. It is a war fought over land, minerals, and spheres of strategic influence. If the war is not going to go into its third year, then the working class of both countries along with workers elsewhere in the world need to recognise the urgent need to end capitalism, the cause of war, and replace the profit system with socialism.
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THE NIGHT SHIFT
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF SURPLUS VALUE?
The Night Shift was a film made in 1979 starring Frank Windsor in which two men construct a diesel engine in an industrial hanger. As the film progresses, we learn that the men are unemployed with their jobs taken over by computers and robotic machines. At the end of their shift another group of men arrive who then dismantle the engine only for it to be rebuilt again the following day.
Science fiction writers masquerading as economists and “futurologists” have, for many decades, suggested that computers and robotics will take over most of the work currently undertaken by human beings with even robotic repair serviced by self-replicating machines. Workers, like the two men in the film, will be left with nothing to do.
A recent paper by the academic, A. J. Kjosen asks the question “Do Androids dream of surplus value”?
http://www.academia.edu/2455476/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Surplus_Value?
Kjosen points out, correctly, that robots, even sophisticated robots are, what Marx called, dead labour. Only exploited living labour generates surplus value. In a science fiction setting of a world of self-replicating robots doing all necessary work, you would not have the production of surplus value and you would not have capitalism. Political Economy and its Marxian critique remain unknown to most science fiction writers.
This has not prevented economists periodically stating that the working class is redundant and will increasingly be replaced by machines and robots. In March of 2013, four economics researchers from the New York Federal Reserve published a report on job “polarization” – the phenomenon of routine task work disappearing with only the highest and lowest skilled work still available. The authors wrote: .
The indications are fairly stark. The work in routine occupations is trending toward zero. This fall lines up fairly well with the rise of automation of various kinds. For example, computer programs are doing the work of paralegals and x-ray technicians, and factory robots are displacing large numbers of automobile assembly line workers. There are applications that can write sports newspaper articles, based simply on the scoring history in the game (Huffington Post 18 November 2004)
Another group of futurologist, Pew Research Center and Elon University, published a paper: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs which canvassed the views of robotic experts on the future of work. The report gave a picture of a 2025 in which the majority of people would have no physical and mental capabilities to sell as a commodity to an employer (what Marx called labour power). Only a minority of workers would be needed to guide the “bot-based economy”. One of the authors, Stowe Boyd, believed:
An increasing proportion of the world’s population will be outside of the world of work — either living on the dole, or benefiting from the dramatically decreased costs of goods to eke out a subsistence lifestyle
(http://www.nbcnews.com/business/careers/robots-could-take-over-even-bosss-job-n174106)
He asked the question: “what will people be for in a world that does not need their labour”. He had no answer, because it was the wrong question.
The Labour Process: Werewolves and Vampires
In the first volume of Capital in a discussion of the labour process under capitalism, Marx wrote:
“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power…A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax…(Capital p283,284).
The labour process is common to all social systems, including a future socialist society, but it has a peculiarity under capitalism which the economists and futurologists ignore. Capitalism, employment and commodity production are all about the extraction of surplus value; the unpaid work of the working class. The objective of capitalism is not to meet human need, including creative work, but to accumulate capital for the sake of capital accumulation; to expand value as an anti-social objective and to make profit.
Marx uses the metaphors of Gothic horror to drive home the reality of capital, employment and the labour process under capitalism:
…capital has one sole driving force… to create surplus value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks … (Capital Vol. 1, p. 342)
So far, we have observed the drive toward the extension of the working day, and the werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour… (Capital Vol. 1, p. 353)
Marx goes on to show that capitalism has a tendency to introduce new technology to replace labour in order to increase productivity and the rate and extent of exploitation. Yet, although displaced workers feed into the “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed other industries open up requiring workers to exploit. One million industrial robot currently in operation, for example, have been directly responsible for close to three million jobs according to the international Federation of Robotics (ifr.org 2011).
The fantasy of world-wide mass entrenched unemployment expected by some economists and futurologists over the last seventy-five years has not materialised. And futurologists do not have a particularly good track record in their predictions of future unemployment. Here are a couple of examples of crystal ball gazing:
First, there was a statement made by Jack Peel, Director of Industrial Relations for the Common Market Commission, and formerly a trade union official who said:
Well before the end of the century less than 50% of the population of working age will be working (The Daily Mail 16.7.73)
Mr Peel’s prediction was utterly wrong. In the final decade of the 20th century there were in Britain some 27.8 million in work out of a working population of about 35 million.
And second, a, Professor Stonier gave evidence in 1978 to the Government Central Policy Review Staff in which he said;
Within 30 years Britain will need no more than 10% of its labour force to supply all its material needs. (The Times 13.11.78)
In 1980, under the heading of “By 2001 only 1 in 10 may be working”, The Evening Standard reviewed a book by Professor Stonier. No critical analysis was given by the newspaper to Professor Stonier’s preposterous claims. If his forecast had been correct and if unemployment had been rising from the 6% of 1978 to the 90% as predicted by 2001, unemployment would now be over 8 million and rising fast. In fact, unemployment is currently falling.
Such groundless predictions are often uncritically repeated in the media by lazy journalists and newspapers only interested in a publishing a good story. However, these groundless claims are just that; groundless.
Architect or Bee?
For socialists the important question raised by the introduction of machines and robots into production is not the one asked by economists and futurologists. The important question is a political one; do we want to act as bees or as architects?
At the end of his flawed but useful book: Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology (publ.1980), Mike Cooley wrote of the future:
The alternatives are stark. Either we shall have a future in which human beings are reduced to a sort of beelike behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them, or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills and abilities in both a political and technical sense, decide that they are going to be architects
of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of choice and expression rather than less. The truth is, we shall have to make the profound political decision as to whether we intend to act as architects or behave like bees (p.180)
So the choice centres on politics and who own and control the means of production and distribution not the application of science, technology and robotics per se. Futurologists assume that the working class will remain passive and private property ownership of the means of life including robotic systems will remain unchallenged. They view society as a beehive where social relationships are defined in terms of minority class power, privilege and wealth to the exclusion of the rest of society. Capitalism, employers and employed, markets, commodity production and exchange for profit are all taken for granted. Technology and science are not neutral but reflect the social system in which they are conditioned and develop.
However, socialists do not see social systems as static any more than we see social systems incapable of being changed. Power structures of society can be challenged and capitalism can be changed in a revolutionary way given a socialist majority understanding and desiring the establishment of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Within such an open and democratic framework human creativity will be a realised as a social need. A socialist society will not be Luddite with regards to technology and robotics. To free human beings to become creative and to fully take part in the democratic affairs of a socialist society; computing systems, robotics and other forms of technology would be used to enhance human life rather than to diminish it. .
The Night Shift was a pessimistic film. It showed the working class as passive, incapable of taking control of their own lives and forced to become slaves to the machine and the profit system. This need not be the case. There is a socialist alternative.
In a socialist society no one will be forced to become a cog in a machine and a slave to time. Instead, men and women, freed from the tyranny of capital, the misery of employment and the slavery of the wages system will become fully rounded human beings opening up a world of possibilities currently denied to them by capitalism. As Marx suggested in an often misunderstood passage from the ‘German Ideology’(1845):
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”.
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THE OBJECT OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
A system of society alludes to the sum total of human relationships – necessarily a worldwide system – and is meant to distinguish us from those who seek to organise co-operative colonies, islands within a sea of capitalism. Socialism will not be a colony, not a kibbutz, but a system of society in the sense that capitalism, feudalism, and chattel slavery must be characterised as systems of society.
The term common ownership should not be confused with such phenomena as state ownership, or public ownership, terms used under capitalism to designate a more direct ownership of certain industries by the capitalist class as a whole. Common ownership implies the absence of ownership and we specify that this common ownership is to apply to the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. We do not speak here of one’s personal belongings as some not too discerning opponents of our case delight in inferring. Democratic control should speak for itself but the point must be made nevertheless that in a society wherein the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution are commonly owned it is difficult to conceive of control other than democratic.
In order to rule out all possibility of misunderstanding it is necessary to indicate some of the consequences of establishing the socialist system of society summarised above. Production will be solely and directly for the use of the whole population, with no buying and selling, and no price system. Rent, interest and profit, and the wages system will be abolished. Production and distribution will be on the socialist principle: “From each according to ability: to each according to need”. All will have free access to society’s products. There will be no class division, no working class or owning class and no trade unions: there can be no trade unions because there will be no wages to bargain over and employers to bargain with. Socialist society can only be world-wide; humanity will not be segregated behind national frontiers or coerced by the armed forces of governments.
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NO SOCIAL SYSTEM LASTS FOREVER
Unlike the Classical school of economics (for example Adam Smith and David Ricardo) who believed in the harmony of classes, Marx emphasized the importance of class, class conflict and class struggle. In the ‘Communist Manifesto’ the class struggle was “the motor force of history”. Class was defined in an objective way with respect to the ownership or otherwise of the means of production -land, minerals, oil and gas, factories, transport and communication, distribution points and so on. In capitalism Marx considered the two major classes to be the capitalists who owned the means of life and the working class who were excluded from ownership and could only sell their ability to work as a commodity in exchange for a wage or salary.
Since Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no alternative to the market; to buying and selling, an absurd dogma agreed with by amongst others Tony Blair and Keir Starmer, capitalism is held up as the only social system in town. Capitalism, we are told, is going to last forever.
Socialists reject the conservative dogma that there is no alternative to capitalism and that the working class is not cut-out for socialism. Capitalism is a social system with a beginning in class struggle and a potential end in class struggle through a socialist revolution. A socialist politics is a revolutionary politics using a revolutionary vocabulary or it is nothing. If servility is a vice, then so is political cowardice; capitalism is a social system not a natural state of affairs. And social systems come and go.
At the end of the crushing defeat of the rebellion in 71 BC, with Spartacus dead on the battlefield, 6000 slaves were crucified along a 2000 metre stretch of the Apia Way to Rome. Crucifixion was a cruel and painful death recently brought back into fashion by the short-lived terrorist group Isis in its feudal Islamic State. Rome’s symbolic exercise of crucifying the slaves was to demonstrate to this class the imperial power of Roman society, the power of its ruling class and the perennial glory of ancient Rome. But within a few centuries that Empire had been swept away. No Empire lasts forever and this is a fact equally applicable to countries today like the United States and Russia as it once was to Imperial Rome.
Shelley put it this way in his poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Here is another example from history. At the end of the failed Peasants Revolt in 1381, Richard II reportedly told the serfs: “serfs you are and serfs you shall remain forever”.
John Ball, on of the leading thinkers of the peasants Revolt was tried in front of the King at St Albans and then hung, drawn and quartered with the King’s retort to the failed uprising ringing in his ears. There is no blue plaque to John Ball in the old market square of St Albans where he was executed. However, his protest: “When Adam delved and Eve Span, who was then the Gentleman” lived on in the Peasants’ Song (anon) and later in William Morris’s romance ‘The Dream of John Ball’ (Lawrence and Wishart,1977). But the class to which he preached his sermons of liberation has long since disappeared – the peasants have left little or no written history of their struggles with the feudal order.
In 1539, during the Reformation, the Abbey of St Albans in which John Ball was imprisoned some two centuries earlier was dissolved. Henry VIII appropriated its income, disposed of its assets and expelled
the monks who had once thought their future secure. The chronicle against John Ball was Jean Froissart’s ‘Chronicle’, ‘The Anonimalle Chronicle’ – a detailed account mainly of Wat Tyler and his end, which is now considered mere propaganda for Richard II [see ‘Spokesman for Liberty’, ed. Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickward]. The treasury and cloisters of the Abbey are now ruined fragments – symbolic references to a feudal order no more permanent than capitalism.
Four centuries later no serfs were to be found in Britain at all. Instead, there was a propertyless working class whose children were sent to the mills and where women were forced down the mines. Their brutal existence was described by Frederick Engels in his book ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ (1845). A different exploited class existed in place of the old feudal one; a class of workers imprisoned within the exploitive wages system and forced to sell their ability to work for a wage and salary.
Richard II was wrong. Serfs were not going to last forever neither was the ruling class who exploited them. The ruling class Richard II represented were swept away, first, in the 17th century, through a Civil War which disposed of the doctrine of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ with the swing of an executioner’s axe, along with feudal tithes and privileges. Then in the late 17th century the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which took political power from the monarchy and gave it to a cabal of landed aristocracy, City bankers, merchants, and the early industrial capitalists. With the imposition of the Reform Act of 1832 and the consolidation of capitalist political power in the reforms of the Liberal government at the beginning of the 20th century, the capitalist class became the latest exploiting class in human history.
The capitalist class came into existence through class struggle establishing “new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones” (‘Communist Manifesto’) calling into existence the working-class with a revolutionary potential to make history by becoming a class “for itself”. From the perspective of history, the working-class movement is relatively young. Its movement is not smooth and linear. Mistakes have been made and there are periods when this movement is stronger than others. At what point the working class as revolutionary force is situated with capitalism’s exploitive history, we do not know.
The working-class movement in Britain has passed through three political stages in its development. First an incoherent stage around the actions of groups like the Diggers and Levellers (1649), the Swing Riots and rick burning in the 18th century and the Luddites in the early 19th century. Second, a more coherent phase with the establishment of trade unions and workers identifying themselves as a class with its own distinct political interests such as the Chartist movement and then another phase with the formation of The First International (1864-1876) informed by the scientific writings of Marx and Engels among which was stated: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves” General Rules, October 1864). And third, through bitter political experience in the Social Democratic Federation, the development of a political movement of workers who became transparently aware of their class position recognizing that it could only be furthered by their own effort, without the need for leaders, democratically within a principled Party and with only one object: socialism.
This mature development was reached at the turn of the last century in 1904 with the establishment of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The Object and Declaration of Principles, drawn up by working class men and women, presented a sound Marxian critical analysis of capitalism. It also set out a practical political programme through the revolutionary use of the vote and the capture by a socialist majority of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, to achieve the socialist object; the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
As the Socialist Party of Great Britain wrote in 1848:
“In 1904 a new era in working class politics commenced with the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The Object and Declaration of Principles that were laid down by the founders of this party…have remained to this day a clear and concise statement of the basis of the organisation, admitting of neither equivocation nor political compromise with the enemy for any purpose however alluring. Here is no flirting with reforms nor false and soothing catchwords to enlist the sympathies and support of those who lack political knowledge but, instead, a straightforward statement of the essentials of the working-class position under Capitalism and the only road to its solution – the capture of political power by a working class the majority whose members understand what Socialism means and want it (‘The Communist Manifesto and the Last 100 Years’, The Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1949).
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