Journalists, Generals and Politicians Tend not to Fight in Capitalism’s Wars.
Ian Dale is a journalist and radio show host on LBC. He defends the West’s response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. He defends the killing and destruction in Ukraine and he defends the military assistance the West have given Ukraine over the last three years. Furthermore, he pushes propaganda that it is all the fault of evil Mr Putin and nothing to do with NATO.
Several callers to his show are fed up with his belligerent attitude to the war and the million deaths that have occurred there. So once in a while a caller suggests that if he is so in favour of the war in Ukraine, he should leave the safety of his chair and go out to fight in it (LBC 16/2/2025).
Dale’s response is to dismiss this as a fatuous argument. Why is it a fatuous argument? Surely those who want war should be the first to the recruiting office. Why leave it for others to do the fighting and killing. Isn’t it just cowardice? After all, why doesn’t Dale want to fight? Why is he leaving it to workers in Ukraine and Russia to kill each other? He gives no reasons to the caller to his show and dismissing him out of hand is no reason at all.
And then there are the generals. They are keen to send workers to die for the capitalist class although they wrap it up in nationalist jingoism of fighting for “king and country”. A former Nato commander, General Sir Richard Shirreff, for example, has said Britain must prepare for war with Russia and should consider bringing back conscription (“I”, February 21, 2025). All from the safety of his retirement home in Tunbridge Wells!!
Socialists do not want any workers to fight in capitalism’s wars, not journalists like Dale nor other members of the working class. Socialists say that workers in Russia and Ukraine have identical class interests. And one of those interests is not to get involved in the disputes between capitalists and their politicians. The last thing socialists want is for workers to kill each other. We want them to become socialists and to democratically and politically abolish capitalism and establish socialism as a world-wide system of production and distribution.
War is divisive. It divides the working class when there should be class unity. We suggest to workers do not get involved in the interests of the capitalist class and their politicians like Keir Starmer, one of many Labour leaders who have gone to war in the past with detrimental consequences for the working class.
Of course, not all capitalists want to go to war. At the beginning of the Crimean War industrialists and their free market supporters like Cobden and Bright were against war, due to the heavy burden of taxation falling upon capitalists, while the landed aristocracy and many workers were calling for war against Russia. There were capitalists who opposed the First World War and powerful forces within the ruling class, like Lord Halifax, who opposed Churchill and the war with Germany in 1939.
Starmer recently led a charge of European leaders to fill what is left of Ukraine with military personal. He said that he is “willing and ready” to put British “boots on the ground” in Ukraine. He voiced this war mongering in the conservative ‘Daily Telegraph’. He wanted Britain to act as a “bridge” between the United States and Europe. It is doubtful if such a bridge is forthcoming. Trump’s bridge goes towards the Kremlin.
Of course, Starmer would be leading from the rear in the safety of the Downing Street bunker. Starmer, like Dale will not be doing the killing. Yet he received political resistance of parachuting a European army into the Ukraine. The German leader was not impressed at Starmer’s naivety and the Italian leader tilts towards Putin as does the German AFD who have done well in the recent German elections.
Starmer took his war proposals to Trump in the USA. Starmer has put British capitalism on a war footing by slashing the International Aid Grant to boost spending on a potential future war with Russia. At the meeting Trump did not give any assurance of the US acting as “a military backstop”. Trump wants access to the minerals in Ukraine. Unlike Starmer he is a capitalist with a capitalist instinct for the deal. Minerals, oil and gas for the US is where Trump’s interests lie.
Wars have nothing to do with the security of the working class. Workers have nothing to sell but their labour power or ability to work. They own no trade routes, no minerals, and have no strategic points of interest to defend. The security Starmer is talking about is the security of the private ownership of the means of production and distribution and the capitalist interest in trading on the world market without interference of other countries.
Wars are fought over raw resources of which there is plenty in Ukraine, lithium in particular. Trump now wants the money back as he sees Ukraine’s fight as a lost cause. As Mining.com noted:
“Various reports have suggested that Ukraine has mineral deposits worth upwards of $10 trillion…Rare earth elements — which play a key role in Defence and other high-tech industries — have become a particular focus for Trump as he seeks to secure supplies of critical minerals. The President said [on the 3rd February] he wanted the equivalent of $500 billion worth of rare earth”.
Trump demands the rare-earth minerals from Ukraine for what it has received in weapons. Whereas Ukraine thought the arms were free gifts not a loan with strings attached. This, like all capitalist wars, was not about ‘freedom’, and ‘democracy and sovereignty’ but a battle for raw materials, trade routes and spheres of strategic importance; these concerns are the only concerns of the capitalist class and its politicians. Russia now has a buffer zone in the Donbas between itself and Western Ukraine. It also has access to the vast mineral deposits in the Donbas region and to coal, oil, gas and uranium. The same applies to The Crimea with the added importance for the Russian naval fleet in the region.
Workers should remember this from Marx “Workers have no country”. And in particularly they have no country to die and kill for.
This is what we said about war and the working class in our Manifesto of 1914 and 1939. It remains just as pertinent today:
‘Having no quarrel with the working class of any country we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and Socialist fraternity and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of Capitalism and the triumph of Socialism’.
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The Golden Age of Capitalism? Hubris before the Fall
Trump and Making American Capitalism Great Again?
Marx: once wrote:
“history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” (“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”’ (1852).
Well, capitalism is a tragedy for the working class who have to live under its brutal system of class exploitation and general poverty and brutality. And capitalism is a farce in the shape of the political monsters who become Presidents, Prime Ministers, Duces and Fuhrers.
We also have the farce of the new President of the United States, Donald Trump, announcing a “golden age of the United States”. Trump tells us he is going to make “America Great Again”, he is going to forge a new Golden Age of Capitalism through Hi-Tech, tax cuts for the rich and the decimation of the Federal bureaucracy. Trump believes he has absolute power to do what he wants, even to turn the Gaza region into profitable “real estate” so his property developer friends can turn it into an oasis for the rich and it goes without saying, give the US exclusive access to the vast quantities of oil and gas in the Mediterranean Sea off the Gaza Strip. He signs Executive orders like confetti but cannot sign anything which interferes with the economic laws of the profit system.
We have been here before. After the First World War there was the roaring 20s. This too was described at the time as “the golden age” of capitalism where even workers gambled on the stock exchange and the boom appeared to be going on forever.
Irving Berlin wrote a song about the rich in 1927 a few years before the crash. It was called “Puttin’ on the Ritz.
Have you seen the well to do
Up on Lenox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air?
High hats and coloured collars,
White spats and fifteen dollars
Spending every dime
For a wonderful time
The “wonderful time” was not to last. Nor will the booming US economy in the second decade of the twenty first century. Trump’s supporters from the Bible belt to the trailer poor in their mobile homes may dance to YMCA at his rallies but the MAGA faithfully will remain dirt poor and exploited. Only the billionaires who sat in the front row of Trump’s inauguration as President are set to gain. Trump serves his own interests and those of his class while the working-class majority are imprisoned within the wages system.
The 1920s was a period of boom-time in the US economy.
What of the “Golden Age” of the 1920s? The US emerged from the First World War in a strong position. While other nations took time to recover from the war the US had a huge domestic market and its factories and infrastructure had been untouched by bombs and artillery. The government shielded this market from overseas competition by imposing tariffs just as Trump has threatened tariffs on its main competitors, the European Union, Canada, Mexico and China. The profits of industrial firms increased rapidly just as the hi-tech companies in the United States make record profits from the development of artificial intelligence. Sales of consumer goods in the 1920s such as cars, cookers, vacuum-cleaners and radios were readily available often bought on credit terms via hire-purchase agreements or loans.
Prices during the late 1920s on the Wall Street stock exchange rose to such a high value that they bore no relation to the actual value of the shares. Panic set in when it was realised that the high prices were artificial. Confidence drained away and the crash occurred. Banks called in their loans and people found they had no money to pay these loans back,
Much of the speculation was based on “on the margin” buying whereby it was possible to put a deposit on the purchase of shares with a promise to pay off the remainder in the future – the whole system was vulnerable should confidence begin to decline.
Hoover was so confident in capitalism delivering, he promised the US electorate “a chicken for every pot”. All the US workers got was unemployment and long queues for the soup kitchens (but without the chicken).
Here is the Socialist Party of Great Britain reflecting on the Great Depression some forty years later:
“The American government, following the customary policy of treating symptoms rather than deal with causes, tried to force prices up by cutting back production and restricting competition. In many cases this policy was superfluous; producers who were faced with a glutted market needed no official prompting to destroy food, and industrialists who found that they could not sell their goods had no alternative to closing their works. From the point of view of capitalism, it was all very logical but it meant that the world was presented, in what was supposed to be a great age of freedom and prosperity, with the spectacle of millions of underfed people while wheat was being burned; of men searching desperately for employment while factories were shut, while the winding wheels stayed still at the pit shafts and the great cranes hung silent and motionless in the almost tangible gloom of the shipyard”(Socialist Standard September 1969).
Like Hoover, Trump inherits a booming economy and Trump wants to surf on its waves believing, like Hoover, it will go on forever. Politicians have all rushed to praise Trump. They are all prepared to humiliate and denigrate themselves to curry favour and to do business. Take, for example, Lord (‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ Financial Times 21/1/18) Mandelson the new Ambassador to the US. In the past he said that Donald Trump was a danger to the world, little short of a white nationalist and racist. Now he thinks the President is a “nice person”, he is “a fair-minded person” (The Independent 29/1/25). To survive in capitalist politics, you have got to eat a lot of humble pie.
Capitalism calls the shots
The economic and social problems facing the working class do not derive from politicians like Trump, Starmer and all the others. Trump can only make America great again for the capitalist class, and only then if they do not lose out to its global competitors. China has already stolen a march on the US in artificial intelligence technology with its DeepSeek technology built at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals. US dominance in AI does not look so secure to investors as when Trump became President a few months back.
In an article “DeepSeek has ripped away AI’s veil of mystique: That’s the real reason the tech bros fear it”. (The Observer 2nd Feb. 2025), the journalist Kenan Malik wrote:
“The true impact of DeepSeek is not on the technology but on the economics of AI…built at a fraction of the cost and from inferior technology. The US ban on the sale to China of the most advanced chips and chip-making equipment…may have spurred Chinese researchers into becoming more innovative”.
As for the working class, millions of whom voted for Trump during the election, Trump can offer them nothing accept poverty and exploitation. He even admitted that on the day he invoked tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico; that there will be “pain”. However, it will not be pain for the billionaire club who underwrote Trump’s bid for the Presidency. The working class are always told by politicians that it is pain today and pleasure tomorrow but tomorrow never comes. And as for economic booms they do not last. Boom periods give way to economic crises, depression and high unemployment. A future crisis and depression might not be as deep as the 1930s or as long as the last the depression from the 1880s when Randolph Churchill said in a speech at Blackpool in 1884:
“We are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as 1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a revival. Your iron industry is dead, dead as mutton; your coal industries, which depend greatly on the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, grasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, has come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease” (Lord Randolph Churchill by Winston Churchill, M. P., pub. Macmillan & Co Ltd, London, 1906, Vol 1, page 291 quoted in “Why Capitalism will not Collapse: Our View of the Crisis”, The Socialist Party of Great Britain, February 1932).).
There might not be a 1929 Wall Street crash under Trump but maybe one similar to the 2007 and 2008 economic crisis and depression. Alternatively, it might be a prick of the bit coin or AI bubble which is the trigger for the next crisis. When a crisis hits US capitalism under Trump’s presidency, he will go the same way as previous presidents, like Herbert Hoover who was President in 1929, However too looked for scape goats during the depression of the 1930s by blaming Mexicans. He too could do nothing about the depression and rising unemployment despite numerous reforms.
Politicians always fail
Politicians always fail. President Trump will be no different. He is a brutal, cruel vindictive and a bombastic bully, a congenital liar. misogynist, and racist. These are skills needed to survive in capitalist politics but not to run the economy. It is not in Trump’s political power to run capitalism even for the capitalist class and the “tech bros billionaires”. He can impose tariffs on goods coming into the US but cannot do anything about the retaliatory moves of governments who go on to impose tariffs on US commodities coming into their country. He has political power and with that power he can demand world leaders kiss his ring in order to get an audience with him in the White House. He can invade the Panama Canal, take Greenland by force and rename the Gulf of Mexico. He can do most things except one, that is, mould capitalism to his will. He cannot do it. It is not in his power. Capitalism forces politicians to bend to its anarchic trajectory from one economic cycle to the next. Trump’s relation to capitalism is hubris before the fall. He will go the same way as previous presidents like Hoover before him.
Instead of giving their votes to capitalist politicians, workers should think and act in their own class interests. Workers should be organising politically and democratically to establish socialism; the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
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Maurice Saatchi on Capitalism and Marx
In 1978 unemployment was high with 1.6 million workers unemployed. The Tories used the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi to produce a poster design depicting a snaking dole queue outside of an unemployment office. Above it was the slogan “Labour isn’t Working”.
This slogan, was of course, a misnomer. It should have read “Capitalism is working”. High levels of unemployment is precisely what capitalism creates due to the anarchy of commodity production and exchange for profit. Capitalism is cyclical with periods of boom, crises, depression, and upturn. In a depression there is a high rate of bankruptcy and unemployment. As Marx wrote:
“…capitalist production moves through certain periodical cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, overtrade, crisis and stagnation” (‘Wages, Price and Profit’ in Selected Works Volume 1, p. 440).
Neither Labour nor the Tories can do anything about periodic high levels of unemployment.
Falling out of love with capitalism
Saatchi and Saatchi went on to become one of the largest advertising companies in the world with 114 offices in 76 countries and over 6,500 workers.
Maurice Saatchi no longer has the same enthusiasm about capitalism as he did in his younger days. In an article in the i newspaper, “Thatcher changed my mind on capitalism” (23rd December 2024) he said that he had changed his mind and that “Big companies may be as bad as big government”. What had changed was the dominance of the top five banks whose involvement in all financial transactions was 80 per cent.
Until then Saatchi had a romantic attachment to free market capitalism believing it was “assort of perpetual referendum”. In which “every day, hundreds of people cast their votes for the thousands of products and services on offer, and from the competition to win their votes better products and services arise”.
Saatchi now believes that this free-market model led to giant global cartels “beyond the reach of national governments”. And he admits:
“I had no idea that the unintended consequence of globalisation was a world with a huge imbalance of power between the individual customer and the giant corporation”.
And he concludes:
“Perhaps Marx was right: “After years of internecine conflict among capitalism, there will be fewer and fewer capitalists controlling vaster and vaster empires”
The Myth of the Market
Baron Saatchi has a shallow understanding of the market. We need only to consider the labour market. As a buyer of other people’s labour power, Saatchi enters the market as a capitalist with economic power. He and his class own the means of production as private property although, of course, in a rational world advertising would not exist. As George Orwell described advertising, it is nothing more than “the rattling of a stick inside a bucket of swill” (“Keep the Aspidistra Flying”). In a world without commodities, there is nothing to sell and nothing to advertise.
Why cannot workers just produce what they need or take what they and their families need to live on. The answer is the existence of the capitalist state paid for from the taxation of the capitalist class. The private ownership of land, raw resources, factories, transport and communication and distribution points protected by the machinery of government, including the armed forces, gives the majority of society no other option but to join the labour market to sell their labour power or ability to work in exchange for a wage or a salary. This also includes the three million so-called self-employed.
The labour market represents a site of class exploitation. Capitalists buy the workers’ ability to work and obtain what Marx called “surplus value”. Workers create all the social wealth in society. Workers produce more in value than the wages and salaries they receive. Class exploitation it is called. The wage or salary buys a subsistence existence receiving second best, or in the case of housing, nothing at all. Saatchi and his class live off the unearned income of rent, interest and profit. They have economic power and the working class does not.
The World of Billionaires
And the capitalist class does very well out of capitalism as a search in Wikipedia of Maurice Saatchi’s wealth attests. He lives at Old Hall, a mock Tudor castle in Staplefield, West Sussex. The property includes 60 acres of parkland, 10 acres of flowers, trees, and lakes, and a conservatory for semi-tropical plants. The Saatchi brothers take position 822 on the Forbes Rich List, estimated to be worth £144 million ($194 million).
What of the world’s billionaires?
As of April 2024, there were 2,781 billionaires in the world, which is a record number. Their combined wealth is $14.2 trillion, which is also a record. The wealthiest among them is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk buys politician to represent his interest, foremost in his interest is buying labour power from abroad and reducing his tax burden
According to Oxfam, in their pamphlet “Survival of the Richest”, the richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population.
Of course, not all capitalists are billionaires. A capitalist is someone who lives off the unearned income of rent, interest and profit. They buy labour power. They have interests peculiar to the owning class; usually around regulations associated with their business and the burden of tax they have to pay to their capitalist state. This is the world of the capitalist class whose interests are diametrically opposed to the world’s working class. The interest of the working class is to replace capitalism with socialism; replace the profit system with the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all of society.
Marx on the Accumulation, Concentration and Centralization of Capital
In his falling out of love with the way in which capitalism has developed, Saatchi misquotes Marx about fewer and fewer capitalists owning vast corporations like Musk and his “Hi-Tech bros” in Silicon Valley.
Saatchi appears to be quoting Marx from the final section of the first volume of “Capital”. We do not believe Saatchi has read Marx’s “Capital” and the misquote comes from another secondary source. Beware quoting from second hand sources; particularly with quotations associated with Marx. Read the original.
Marx’s comments on accumulation, concentration and centralisation of capital is found in the penultimate chapter of “Capital; “; that is chapter 32 “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”
Capitalists are under pressure of competition from other capitalists. Capitalists have to ensure they make a profit from their workers otherwise they could see sales drop; profits decline and their business vulnerable to bankruptcy and takeover.
Capitalists have to try to increase the intensity and extent of exploitation of their workers. Capitalists have to invest capital in new machinery, to move plant elsewhere in the world where there are less regulations and cheaper workers to employ.
More importantly capitalists have to ensure that their capital investments receive a profitable return. Capitalists are governed by the imperative:
“…to accumulate, is to conquer the word of social wealth, to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist” (Capital volume 1, Ch. XXIV, p. 592)
And
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets…Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake…” (Capital Volume 1, Ch XXIV, p. 595).
Under capitalism, accumulation of capital leads to the concentration and centralisation of capital in which “one capitalist kills many”. This was Saatchi’s disillusion with capitalism. Larger and more successful capitalists grow in size and economic power through investing profits or
obtaining credit from financial institutions or from shareholders in the stock market. And capital accumulation also leads to the centralisation of capital where smaller companies either fail to compete and die or are absorbed into larger companies.
Marx wrote of centralisation:
“Centralisation may result from a mere change in the distribution of capitals already existing” (“Capital” Volume 1, Ch. XXV, p.627).
And of the credit system:
“…a new force comes into play – the credit system which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capital” (Capital volume 1, Ch XXV. P. 626).
The so-called “one percent” have, in the 21st century accumulated vast wealth to create even more wealth from the exploitation of the working class. The capitalist’s objective in this historical tendency is to maximise profits, increase his power to exploit workers, and to accumulate capital to survive in an intensely competitive world.
Saatchi only concentrates on the capitalist class, which is understandable since this is the class to which he belongs. But Marx’s historical tendency continues with the development of the working class. This is what he wrote:
“…, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common
means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors,
takes a new form”.
He goes on to say:
“That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime”.
Concluding:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated”.
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/deville/1883/peoples-marx/ch28.htm)
The historical tendency is towards socialism not for capitalism to last forever.
A Socialist Conclusion
It is important to note that Marx uses the word “historical tendency” to describe this process of capital accumulation. Marx was quite clear that socialism had to be established democratically and politically by the working class. The establishment of socialism involved human agency.
A splintered and fractured working class cannot establish socialism. Nor a class who are drugged with nationalist and patriotic fervour. Socialism had to be a global social system. Revolutionary action by a socialist majority
was the political force necessary to end the profit system and establish production solely and directly for social and individual use.
Marx was no economic or technological determinist. Marx held no such view. He attacked earlier materialists for holding the belief that human events are predetermined along a rigid track of history. In the “Third Theses on Feuerbach” he stated:
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated” (1845 MEGA I/5, pp 533-5).
And concluded in the “Eleventh Thesis”:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it” (ibid).
Marx gave to the working class a science of society, social systems and social relationships in order for them to change their circumstances through conscious political action. Not that they could change history any way they liked. Circumstances constrained action. Revolution had to be through a Socialist political party and through the capture of the machinery of government. And revolution had to be the political action of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.
More specifically, of history Marx wrote:
History does nothing; it “does nor possess immense riches”, it “does not fight battles”. It is men, real living men, who do all this, who possess things and fight battles. It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving –as if it were an individual person-its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends (“The Holy Family”, 1845 MEGA I/3, p.265).
Not the writings of an economic determinist. So, what of the economic factor? In capitalism, production plays its decisive role primarily through the exploitation of the working class that arises from human labour power being a commodity. In capitalism the dominant factor is the class relationship to the means of production to which all other social relationships have to ultimately defer. What moves and changes history is the class struggle.
Yet the political is always embedded in the economic because class exploitation can only ever take place where the exploiting class enjoy the support of the machinery of government to protect the institution of private property ownership and class exploitation. The class struggle is always a political struggle. And its absence in Maurice Saatchi’s article is evidence of this. Capitalists are the last people to tell the working class that they are exploited!
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The State and Parliament
The State is the public power of coercion. The State is a set of institutions that make and break laws. As Marx noted. The State is “The executive of the bourgeoisie”.
The State controls the armed forces in order to protect private property ownership; the means of production and distribution owned and controlled by the capitalist class. However, parliamentary democracy allows for the capture of State power by a socialist majority for ensuring a peaceful democratic revolution when private property ownership gives way to the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Parliament is the controlling point for the institutions wielding State power in a democracy and a place where socialists must be in a majority before a revolution. Socialist delegates will be sent to Parliament as delegates not representative. Socialists have no leaders. Delegates will be answerable to those socialists who sent them there. A socialist if elected to Parliament will show uncompromising opposition to all non-socialist members of parliament and to capitalism
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Making Socialists
Introduction
In ‘Road to Wigan Pier’, which was published in 1937, George Orwell claimed that: ‘The real Socialist writers…have always been dull, empty windbags…’ listing as examples Bernard Shaw, Henri Barbusse, Upton Sinclair, Waldo Frank…and William Morris.
Who were these ‘socialist writers?’ Bernard Shaw, the playwright, was a member of the Fabians a group of intellectuals who repudiated Marx’s theory of value in favour of Jevons’s theory of utility. Henri Barbusse was a cheerleader for Stalin. Upton Sinclair supported the First World War, And Waldo Frank was a Communist Party fellow traveller. Socialists they were not. Was Orwell right to include Morris in this disreputable group of non-socialists. Was Morris a ‘dull and empty wind bag’. We think not. Morris was long dead when Orwell made these remarks and so could not have attended his lectures to know whether he was worth reading.
In October 1886 Morris gave a lecture on ‘Socialism: Its Aims and Methods’ which was reported in the ‘Norfolk News’. The lecture was given to a large and appreciative audience and praised by the ‘Norfolk News’ correspondent. Orwell gave no such lectures.
Unlike Morris, Orwell did not set out to ‘make socialists’. Instead, he supported British capitalism during the Second World War and after the war gave names of notable writers he considered unsuitable candidates for the anti-communist propaganda activities of the Information Research Department, a secret propaganda organisation of the British State under the Foreign Office. A copy of the list was published by the ‘Guardian’ in 2003.
Two questions arise: What did Morris mean by ‘making socialists’ and what, if any, was Orwell’s contribution to socialism?
Making Socialists
From the beginning Morris stressed the importance of educating the working class about the necessity of establishing socialism. And for socialism to be established required the democratic and political action of a socialists’ majority understanding what needed to be done and how. His propaganda was two-fold: to educate workers about socialism and to make socialists. Morris did this through lectures and pamphlets right up to his death.
Morris was aware that there were few socialists on the ground. One or two socialists would be an object or derision written off as utopians, dreamers perhaps even mad. However, as the numbers increased, so a socialist revolution comes into sight. With a world-wide socialist majority socialism would be seen as a practical goal. This is what Morris said.
One man with an idea in his head is in danger to be considered a mad man; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act; a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer the question.’ – William Morris (1834-1896), ‘Art Under Plutocracy’ 1883 in Political Writings of William Morris’ Edited and with an Introduction by A. L. Morton, London1979 p57).
‘Making socialists’ appears to have the missionary undertones of a Dr Livingstone. Livingstone set out to convert Africans to Christianity. This is not the case for socialists. We do not preach a religious belief. Socialists set out to reason with workers, members of our own class, using facts and sound and valid arguments and to show that capitalism, as a social system, cannot work in the interest of workers and their families. We do not like using jargon but political ideas such as class, class exploitation, class consciousness class interest and class struggle define a reality in which the working class live out our lives.
Socialists show, by historical example, the futility of reforms. We point out the inherent failure of Labour and similar governments who fallaciously believe you can have ‘socialist’ distribution while retaining the private ownership of the means of production; that is capitalists and the profit motive. It cannot be done you cannot pursue ‘social justice’ while letting capitalists exploit the working class and despoil the planet. With a capitalist social system, it is the interest of the capitalist class that is foremost; their interests and their profit motive will come first.
For all his many faults’ Morris understood this fact about capitalism while Orwell did not. Instead, Orwell described himself as a “democratic socialist’ supported the ILP then the Labour Party. His political trajectory was towards conservatism when, at the end of his novel ‘Animal Farm’, he repudiated the success of any form of revolution including a socialist revolution on the unsupported basis that revolutions would always be corrupted by leaders. Socialists disagree. A socialist revolution by a socialist majority using the vote to capture the machinery of government can establish socialism without violence. They would not need leaders to tell them what to do.
Socialists are not pessimists. We do not know where we are within capitalism’s anarchic history. Of class exploitation Morris, in a lecture ‘Where are We Now’ reflected on the seven years socialism had come to life as a political movement. Capitalism had been around two centuries prior to Morris and the Socialist League and we have come on another 125 years since his lecture. Socialists are still small in number but the world is more interconnected, the internet has made us known in a way that it was not the case in 1904. At the end of his lecture Morris concluded:
“Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, i.e. convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible” (‘Political Writings of William Morris’ Edited and with an Introduction by A. L. Morton, London1979 p225).
Socialists still try to convince workers to become socialists and that socialism is a practical alternative to the profit system.
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Orwell: Socialism and the Working Class
In the ‘Road to Wigan Pier’, Orwell wrote:
“To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.”
However, it is a starting point. A socialist in a pub on a Saturday night, and we agree that there is no better place to start although pubs are a diminishing venue to discuss socialism, can explain what a wage is and why employers resist higher wages and shorter working hours. And more importantly why, through the ownership of the means of production and distribution, workers are bossed about, told what to do, how and when.
Now Morris was prepared to explain to workers why they were imprisoned within the wages system, why they were exploited and what, politically, they could do about it. Orwell did not. Principally because he never knew the case for socialism to be in a position to make socialists. Politically, he was next to useless. His entire politics was negative.
The Road to Wigan Pier is a conservative tract. It offers no way out from capitalism for the working class. Orwell never defines what he meant by socialism and misuses the word ‘socialism’ by associating it with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Communist Party and the Labour party. On his travels, Orwell may have lived in filthy boarding houses, observed coal miners at work, and scrutinized government statistics on unemployment. He made no effort to hide his sympathy for his subjects; coal mining is described as a “dreadful job”. Yet nowhere does he politically engage with the workers he meets. They are merely catalogued and transposed into his fiction writing as the passive proles in ‘1984’. Orwell does not want to make socialists he wants to keep workers in their submissive and exploited position under capitalism. In writing about socialists, he does not see us.
Does the working-class man or woman sitting in the pub believe that all socialism amounts to is improved living and working conditions under capitalism? If Orwell dug deeper, he would have found out that many workers in 1937 as they do now, erroneously associate socialism with nationalisation. It shows how little Orwell frequented pubs. He also believed that one reason why socialism is so unpopular is that it attracts a fair number of ‘cranks’ He wrote
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” (‘Road to wigan Pier’ penguin, 2020 ed. p. 168)
Orwell claimed socialism at its most basic meant “justice and common decency”. This is a rather abstract almost meaningless definition of socialism. Socialism is about free and direct access to what we all need to live on. And what prevents direct and free access and condemns workers to a life of poverty is the private ownership of property, raw minerals, factories, farms, transport, communication systems and distribution points. Under capitalism the private ownership of the means of production is to make more and more profit out of the exploitation of the working class. It is not about meeting need.
Why, then, is Orwell a sacred cow? He is put on a political pedestal and can do no wrong. He misrepresents class, seeing class in terms of stratification rather than as a social relation to the means of production and distribution. He has no socialist objective beyond ‘justice and decency’, characteristics he misleadingly sees inherent in the working class.
Orwell states without any evidence that William Morris was a ‘windbag’ but four tedious chapters in the second half of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ the reader is confronted with shallow rhetoric, unsubstantiated claims, and crude and infantile name calling. Orwell never set out to make socialists but rather to muddy the waters of what class meant and undermining the definition of socialism by attributing it to all the shades of left-wing politics found in the late 1930s before a war Orwell was to support as a propagandist in radio broadcasts from the BBC and in his book ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’.
The Problems of the 1930s and still the problems of 2025
We have not left the world of Orwell. The poverty and human desperation he described in the first half of his book is still the poverty and desperation faced by the working class in 2025. In a recent article ‘Modern Slavery’ – why insecure jobs harm health’) December 16, 2024), the journalist Patrick Cockburn related the story of a waitress in a restaurant on a zero-hour contract who said that the worst aspect of her job was that “you cannot control your life, and you feel completely helpless”. Cockburn said that it was management – the employer – who decides whether or not she gets too little work or too much – or none at all. Cockburn said that she was one of 4.1 million workers in the UK in precarious employment – sometimes known as “the precariat”
We still have to endure austerity with its food banks, at least 1,172 independent food banks in the UK used by 3,12 million people (‘Statista’ July 8, 2024), heat deprivation and downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Child poverty is also high in the UK with 3.6 million children living in poverty after housing costs (Child poverty Action group 13 December 2024). In the 1930s it was the rise of fascism which was a serious concern of Orwell while today it is the rising trend of nationalism, and popularism and ‘progressive authoritarianism’ personified in Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. Political parasites feed off the misery of the working-class blaming others for unemployment, low wages, poor housing and declining standards of health care.
The cost-of-living crisis has seen many workers give their political allegiance to Reform. Reform and Farage are the toast of the media, never off the air or absent from the newspaper, blogs and other media outlets. If you go into pubs, workers poisoned by the likes of Farage will be blaming refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and others for their plight. They will not be giving an ear to socialist ideas and the necessity to abolish capitalism and establish socialism.
And workers are still bossed around. Now, post-covid, workers are being forced to return to their places of work with no more working from home. At the beginning of December 2024 Nationwide ordered their workers back into the office. Employers have the upper hand in keeping workers together in one building. The place of work is where discipline is exercised by management, where control takes place and where orders are given and expected to be obeyed.
Unemployment is still a fact of life. According to the BBC (November 12, 2024) unemployment is on the rise again while pay growth slows. The trade cycle is one of the consequences of capitalism which no government or economist can resolve.
Making socialists in a sea of capitalism is difficult. We can just about afford the stamp to propagate the socialist case while our political enemies have millions of pounds to spend on subservient and compliant, albeit well paid work force of client journalists, economists, academics, think tanks, civil servants and of course the coercive state of the police and armed forces. The capitalist class has all this to propagate and defend their profit system.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain and making socialists
Unlike Orwell, socialists have two contemporary problems to confront with, both historical. First the failure of the Labour Party to resolve poor housing, inadequate health care and other problems facing the working class. And, tragically, this failure being associated with socialism. The second problem is the Bolshevik dictatorship, established by a coup d’etat in 1917. misleadingly calling themselves socialist/communist which also dragged socialism in the dirt. We have to spend more time now explaining to workers what socialism is not rather than what it actually means. Some socialists have thrown up their hands in despair and wanted another word for socialism like ‘post capitalism’ or simply ‘X’. But why give in to our political enemies? The passing of time will show the baseness of the claims that the Labour Party and the Bolsheviks were ‘socialist’
Fortunately, socialists do not have to rely on our own resources to make socialists. Capitalism does it for us. Capitalism and its politicians can never solve the problem of the working class. In 1937 Orwell was writing of misery of unemployment. Unemployment is still with us. The Labour government are about to get rid of 10,000 civil servants while the Vauxhall owner is to close the Luton factory. There were 28,000 business closures in 2024 (‘Accountancy Daily’ 13 December 20924). As time passes the socialist solution of abolishing capitalism and replacing the profit system with socialism will become clearer. It is the failure of capitalism to meet the needs of all society from one generation to the next that will force workers to realise that capitalism has nothing to offer them.
A criticism by the capitalist left is that the SPGB is ‘passive’ and ‘educative’ rather than an active revolutionary force. We are not passive but active in meeting with workers and persuading them to become socialists. Our socialist propaganda is active in showing workers time and time again that capitalism cannot work in their interests, that capitalist politicians cannot solve their economic and social problems. This criticism highlights the fundamental difference between the capitalist left whose political object is state capitalism or nationalisation, and socialists whose aim is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Socialists do not want to lead the working class anywhere. We want workers to think and act for themselves. We cannot impose world socialism. We take Marx’s principle that the establishment of socialism has to be the work of a socialist majority not a revolutionary minority of intellectual or professional politicians. The political action of the capitalist Left merely leads to a cul de sac of political failure.
Socialists have few and little outlets for making socialists. Socialists are very thin on the ground. We are the political equivalent of ‘The only gay person in the village’ a comedy sketch in ‘Little Britain’. At most social events a socialist find themselves in as the only socialist in attendance, often standing next to someone whose solution to the refugee boats crossing the Channel is for the Royal Navy to sink them. It is somewhat lonely being a socialist. Of course we have lectures, a magazine, a web site, the internet but against the Elon Musk’s, of the world owner of X (once Twitter) and distributor of a portion of his wealth to Trump’s Presidency and possibly via the billionaire property developer Nick candy, to Farage’s Reform Party. And against, for example, the Murdoch empire it seems that our socialist platform is limited in its range and scope. We do the best we can under very difficult circumstance.
So, it is back to capitalism as a global social system of class exploitation, d its anarchic and damaging trajectory in human history. It was Marx and Engels in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ who stated:
‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own grave-diggers’
We remain optimistic that sooner or later the working class will come to realise the practicality of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution over the anarchy of capitalism and the profit motive. World socialism is the only rational framework in which the needs of all of society can be met. In the meantime, socialists will carry on educating workers and making socialists while capitalism continues to create its gravediggers.
“The [Communist] ‘Manifesto’ being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles. Frederick Engels
“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.” .
― Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
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The Crisis: Capitalism’s Stranglehold on the Labour Government
There is of course nothing new in governments breaking pledges and turning policy somersaults, but latterly the occasions have become more frequent and more farcical. At every election since the second world war the Labour and Tory parties have undertaken to deal with inflation: to so little effect that prices have risen continuously for thirty years, with the rate of increase getting faster and faster.
It is not at all surprising that this should have happened because the governments have been running a policy of inflation in the belief that this was a way to prevent unemployment from increasing. A vain hope, because at each of the half-dozen recessions since 1950 unemployment has risen to a new higher peak—over a million in 1972 and now forecasts of a possible 1 1/2 million by early 1976. Instead of stopping inflation, it has been government policy first to promote it and then to try to suppress its symptoms by means of a “Prices and Incomes Policy”.
It started in 1947 under Attlee’s government and has been re-enacted half a dozen times. A long succession of failures as far as stopping inflation is concerned, but it would be churlish not to acknowledge its one happy achievement—the enrichment in the use of our vocabulary. We have had wage restraints, wage freezes, wage thaws, plateaus, pauses, ceilings, guiding lights, norms, standstills, early warnings, guide-lines, slow-downs, explosions, wage-stops, thresholds, curbs, social contracts, and a lot more.
The latest from Mr Wilson “the £6 limit on wage increases”, which he admits means a lower standard of living, has a novel refinement. For years the centrepiece of the Labour programme was the “national minimum”. The law was to be used to force “bad employers” to become “good employers” by making them put wages up. Now Mr Wilson threatens to use the law to prosecute employers who put wages up too much. They are, he says, “rogue employers”. The recipients, of course, could be workers whose wages are only a small fraction of Wilson’s own income.
Is it really possible for government ministers not to understand how capitalism operates? And to be unaware of the inevitable consequences of their own policies? Indeed, it is possible. During the nineteenth century,
although capitalism regularly went through the recurring cycle of expansion, boom, crisis and depression outlined by Marx as the economic law of the system, governments, capitalists and many economists were forever expecting booms to be permanent and being amazed as each crisis blew up. There are plenty of similar examples in our own times.
Any serious student of capitalism knows that the capitalist is in business to make a profit and therefore will not invest more to expand production at those times when there is no prospect of selling the product profitably. Yet in the last recession, in 1971-2, Heath and Barber complained bitterly that though for months on end they pleaded and threatened and offered inducements for increased investment, “nobody would listen”. Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the present government, confesses to having been equally ignorant of the facts of economic life. “One thing I have learnt from my experience in the past seven months [as Chancellor]: there is no chance of investment if business expects a general and prolonged recession, however generous the tax incentives” (Report of speech, The Times, 5th October 1974).
Later in the same month he was again airing his ignorance, this time as guest speaker at the Lord Mayor’s banquet for bankers and merchants of the City of London:
I simply cannot understand how it can make economic sense . . . to keep a million active men and women idle when the nation needs the goods they could produce (Times, 18th October 1974).
Since when has capitalism been interested in meeting people’s needs? And, in a depression, who needs additional production of unsaleable cars, motor-cycles, super tankers, steel and so on?
In one respect nineteenth-century British governments were better informed than governments since 1945. They knew how to prevent inflation and decided that it was in the interest of capitalism to prevent it. There was no inflation for the hundred years before 1914. Prices rose and
fell by moderate amounts in booms and depressions, but the level was lower in 1914 than in 1814. Now the price level is more than seven times the 1938 level and rising fast, by far the biggest cause being the depreciation of the currency consequent on government policy.
There were always some uninfluential groups advocating inflation to cure the ills of capitalism. One was dealt with in the Socialist Standard in August 1906. Using the Marxist analysis the writer of the article showed that it would cure nothing and would simply raise prices: “the workers, as is usual, being the first to suffer”. Another example is mentioned in The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, by Alan Bullock (p. 17). Bevin, trade union leader and later a minister in the Attlee government, was present in 1908 at a conference to discuss remedies for unemployment. One proposal was “the issue of paper pounds”. A Liberal politician who was there thought that it was “very sensible” but politically impracticable.
After 1945 it was quite different. Influenced by Keynes (or by crude distortions of Keynes) the Labour and Tory Parties and the TUC adopted the doctrine that the government could “manage” the economy in a way that would prevent crises and depressions occurring again. By “maintaining demand” they believed they could always prevent unemployment. Maintaining demand meant in practice printing more money and putting up prices. Keynes, whether he intended it or not, had made inflation respectable.
A number of economists in the past have understood that if an inconvertible paper currency is issued in excess amounts, it will correspondingly put up prices. Marx’s special contribution was to anchor it to his theory of value. In given circumstances a certain amount of currency will be required. If the currency consisted solely of gold coin it would represent a certain total weight of gold and therefore a certain total mass of value. If the gold is replaced by inconvertible paper money (not convertible into a fixed weight of gold) and is then issued in amounts exceeding the gold it represents; it will simply put up prices. This is the present situation. Currency in Britain in 1938 was under £500 million. It is now over £6,000 million. It went up £835 million in the year to July 1975.
Those who reject this explanation of inflation can apply a test. Let them show when such excess issue took place without raising prices; or when such excess issue was halted and prices did not fall.
In December 1919, after a very fast rise in prices, a ceiling was placed on the note issue and within a year prices were falling fast and wages with them. Lord Rothschild (Times, 30th June 1975) recalls that German inflation was halted in 1923 by applying the recommendations of a committee (two members of which were the banker Brand and the economist Keynes) which included the Reichsbank being “forbidden to print more notes”.
Some modern “monetarists” have confused the issue by trying to relate price movements to the total of currency plus some or all of bank deposits. Why should the act of lending by depositors to banks affect the price level? Historically there is no justification for the theory. The enormous growth of bank deposits in the last decades of the 19th century was accompanied by a fall of the price level, not a rise.
Harold Wilson used to be quite confident about how he would prevent inflation. In 1957 some of his articles in The Guardian were published as a pamphlet, Remedies for Inflation. In Section III “What Labour Would Do” he wrote:
Ever since the Coalition Government’s White Paper (Employment Policy, 1944) all major parties have been committed, on Keynesian lines, to using the Budget as a means of avoiding undue inflation or deflation. In inflationary times, therefore, all are agreed in theory on the need for public saving through a large Budget surplus, though we have felt that a number of Conservative Budgets have sacrificed financial stability to a desire for fiscal popularity.
In practice Wilson’s government in 1974-5, instead of running a Budget surplus, has shown the biggest deficit in British peace-time history.
Wilson says that the Government’s latest measures have been forced on it by the threatened drastic fall of the pound under pressure from foreign holders of sterling, just like Labour Premier Ramsay MacDonald in 1931.
There is no sign that the bulk of the Labour ministers and the TUC have given up their delusion that unemployment can be prevented or reduced by a further round of “reflation” (their name for inflation). But at the moment Wilson, after years of promoting inflation because he thought it would prevent unemployment, is now declaring that inflation causes unemployment.
Some of his critics in the Labour Party and trade unions (including apparently Mr Scanlon, leaders of the engineers), think they have Marx’s backing for their view that the way to deal with crises is to raise wages further. They are quite wrong. Of course, Marx favoured the attitude of workers getting as high wages as they can at any time, but he did not hold that crises could be averted by raising wages. He dealt with the higher wages argument in Capital (Vol II, p. 475) and s, owed how absurd it is. Depressions end when the capitalists see prospects of profit improving. Putting wages up further would reduce profit margins not increase them.
Because Socialists view the thirty-year Labour-Tory experiment with Keynesian fallacies as a complete fiasco for the working class it must not be concluded that we are enamoured with the prospect of returning to capitalism without inflation. With or without inflation capitalism will go on producing unemployment, crises and depressions. With Labour government, or any other government, “managed” or left to market forces, with or without more nationalisation, capitalism has nothing to offer to the working class. The only course for the workers is to replace capitalism with Socialism.
“H” from the Socialist Standard August 1975
We republish the above article from the Socialist Standard, some fifty years ago, because it highlights the problems Labour governments and Tories too of having to twist and turn their economic policies to the tune of the economic laws of capitalism. Starmer, claim he wants “growth”, “Growth” “Growth” but growth does not come. Sustained Growth depends on capitalists investing in the means of production and the exploitation of the working class. Even then investment can be cut by an economic crisis over which governments and capitalists have no control.
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What is the Materialist Conception of History?
The development of social relation through history goes hand-in-hand with the technical means for producing the ability to live and reproduce the human species.
In the Poverty of Philosophy Marx gave a rough outline of his theory of history:
“…the social relations are intimately attached to the productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production, and in changing their mode of production, their manner of gaining a living, they change all their social relations. The windmill give you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (‘Prometheus Books’, 1995 p. 119).
Marx’s sketch is not an appeal to technological determinism since the steam-mill factories made feudal relations incompatible with large areas of production. Consequently, a class struggle developed between the aristocracy and the industrialists, resulting through revolution the industrialists and their politicians gaining control of the State in a political way while also marrying into the aristocracy.
In fact, Marx said:
“History does nothing, It possesses no immense wealth, it “wages no battles” is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims” (Marx and Engels, ‘The Holy Family’, 1845) .
Although later he wrote in his ‘18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ from 1852: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Marx’s rejection of idealism and his view of labour and production demonstrated that his conception of history was materialist. Ideas, politics and the state were not written out of history but judged to be a superstructure and rested on materialist foundations. This superstructure does not develop independently but is constrained in any given social system. Marx outlined his theory of history in the preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859):
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
The materialist conception of history clarified esoteric and idealistic statements; usually theological and philosophical, made within the superstructure, down to basic statements about class, class interest and class struggle. These statements reflected and favoured property relations, the types of production and social relations to the means of production.
However, base and superstructure in society do not always represent reality and appearance. For example, consciousness and social being are reciprocal and interactive with each other and have to be for socialism to be possible. Although freedom may be reduced to the freedom of capitalists to exploit yet liberal ideas of freedom have influenced social policies of western capitalism. Therefore, the superstructure can react back upon the base.
Marx’s Materialist conception of history informs socialist politics. The development of the forces of production have meant that socialism – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. Socialism will be a global system of production and distribution solely and directly meeting human need.
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The United Nations and Global Warming
What about the United Nations and global warming? The United Nations is anything but united. As an international organisation, representing hundreds of national governments with competing interests, trying to tackle this global problem, the United Nations has been a dismal failure. Resolving the climate crisis requires the world’s leading industrial nations to collectively agree to legally binding cuts in their emissions and to forego the short-term benefits to their economies of continuing to burn more fossil fuels. In a world of divided and competitive nation states this cannot be done.
The origins of the UN climate talks date back to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At that gathering, 154 nations including the United States, signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) treaty. Further treaties have taken place since then. The last treaty, the Paris Accord, dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance, was signed in 2016.
Over forty years after the first UN meeting, global warming is still a major global problem. Four countries, China, the US, India and Russia produce half of all carbon emissions. According to the scientists, three quarters of Paris Climate pledges agreed in 2016 are totally inadequate (Guardian Wednesday 6 November 2019).
At the UN climate talks (COP25) held in Madrid in December 2019, major emitting countries did all they could to block progress. The final text was a watered-down compromise. There was no collective action nor could there be between competitive capitalist countries with conflicting interests. Poorer countries at risk of flooding are just so much collateral damage.
Worse still at COP 29 held in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, where the opening speech given by President Ilhaam Aliyev said that oil and gas were” gift from God” and his government had no intention of stopping their use. The countries most effected by Global Warming wanted trillions of dollars from the rich nations but were only promised a pitiful donation.
All very disappointing to the environmental reform pressure groups like Greenpeace. Like all reform groups Greenpeace want capitalism without the effects of capitalism.
If the United Nations cannot do anything substantial about the climate crisis it at least produces statistics to show how serious the problem is. The UN report said that one million species face extinction (BBC News 7 May 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that climate change is responsible for at least 150,000 deaths per year, a number that is expected to double by 2030. The effects of global warming will cause dire health consequences such as death from malnutrition, insect-borne disease and heat stress.
Extreme weather events, like the recent fires in the Brazilian rain forest, in Australia and in California and the drought in Africa in 2015 and 2016, will increase in destructive frequency. About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters. According to the UN’s climate science panel, the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed.
Indonesia, for example, is moving its capital from the climate-threatened city of Jakarta to the sparsely populated island of Borneo, which is home to some of the world’s greatest tropical rainforests. These forests now face felling to make way for a new city – another contribution to global warming. As well as dire problems of pollution and traffic congestion, Jakarta suffers from severe subsidence, which makes the coastal city extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, also caused by global warming (Guardian 26 August 2019).
Not all capitalists will be losers. Those constructing the new city for the Indonesian government will make a profit. Elsewhere, some capitalists will benefit in winning contracts for the building of flood defences, from demanding higher insurance premiums from policy holders, and by producing renewable energy systems like solar panels and wind turbines. Nevertheless, climate warming remains a systemic threat to capitalism and commodity production for exchange and profit. There have always been capitalists who profit from the misery of other people.
And some countries face a contradiction. They recognise that burning coal contributes to global warming and adverse weather conditions but carry on regardless. The government of Bangladesh, for example, plans to burn more coal for power even though it will worsen global warming in a nation already battered by climate crises from floods to cyclones. About 3% of the country’s power comes from coal, but it plans to build 29 coal-based power plants in the next two decades to increase this to 35%.
The United Nations says that nearly one in three children in Bangladesh is at risk from disasters linked to climate change. Floods in 2019 have killed at least 60 people and displaced nearly 800,000 in Bangladesh, which in the low-lying delta region of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and is vulnerable to the impacts of rising global temperatures, including more extreme weather and rising sea levels. Its traditional sea-defence of the mangrove swamps has been impacted by capitalism’s profit-seeking shrimp farming.
http://news.trust.org/item/20191106152850-nleno/
The capitalists and politicians are split about how to protect their class interests. Some even blame capitalism itself. The former boss of Unilever, Paul Polman, has warned that capitalism is a “damaged ideology” that must “reinvent itself”. He said that “to survive” capitalism must do more “to combat the climate emergency” (Guardian 30th October 2019). But how can capitalism change into something it isn’t? He did not say. Capitalism is not a person but a social system. Capitalism is all about exploiting the working class and making profit. The profit system cannot reinvent itself. Capitalism can only be abolished. Ironically, his firm Unilever makes a lot of money from soya and coconut oil plantations, using land where once there used to be tropical rainforests. As such, it has made a major contribution to the problems that Mr Polman is so concerned about.
The capitalists and their political representatives are like the mice in Aesop’s fable, “The Mice in Council” who try to put an alarm bell on the cat that is killing them. They know that not to put the bell around the cat’s neck will lead to decimation but no one will be brave enough to come forward and to put the bell on.
