socialiststandard-2006-1217-jan

Socialist Standard January 20062

website: www.worldsocialism.org

6 Intellectual Property: a further restriction on personal freedomTristan Miller provides a commentary on intellectual property rightsfroma socialist perspective.

9 Why socialists aren’t part of the Left The Socialist Party is not part of the left, as can be seen from the kindof society we aim at, as well as our policies on reformism & leadership.

10 Catholicism in disgraceA look at the historic role of Catholic priests and of Catholic institutions inIreland over the centuries.

12 Capitalism and the quality of lifeAdam Buick examines the continuing commodification of life withincapitalism.

14 When truth hurtsJohn Bissett looks at the Freedom of Information Act and the cover-upover American plans to bomb Al Jazeera.

16 Working till we dropIs the modern capitalists' view of their workers that they must work tillthey drop?

contents3 Editorial

Six Million

3 Contact Details

4 PathfindersRay Kurzweil’s future people

8 Cooking the Books 1Value added, but who by?

13 Cooking the Books 2The property rights act

17 LettersKaren Horney

17 ReviewsThe Economics of Freedom: Ananarcho-syndicalist alternative tocapitalism.

18 50 Years AgoMr Bevan and the bombs

18 Meetings

19 Greasy PoleNightmare for Tory leaders

20 Voice from the BackOld, cold and hungry; Mediapriorities; Progress, and more

20 Free Lunch

REGULARSFEATURES

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THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAINThe next meeting of the Executive Committeewill be on Saturday 7th January at theaddress below. Correspondence should besent to the General Secretary. All articles,letters and notices should be sent to theeditorial committee at: The Socialist Party, 52Clapham High street, London SW4 7UN.TEL: 020 7622 3811 E-MAIL: [email protected]

socialist standardJANUARY 2006

6 10 12

Editorial

Let 2005 rest then, as a monument.A gravestone for the 6 millionchildren the Food and AgricultureOrganisations estimates died in the

hideous torture of starvation andstarvation related disease that year. TheFAO report, released on 22 November,also informs us that malnourishment alsocontributes to holding back educationalattainment and brings about a cycle ofpoverty and death. This in a world wherewe are embarrassed by riches of food andfarmers are paid to let fields fall fallow.

The figure 6 million is highlyevocative - the same number as the usualestimate of Jews that were murdered inThe Holocaust - possibly the most heinousact of mass murder in history as thesemillions were gunned down in pits orgassed in specially built camps for the

extermination of a whole people. A crimeof such infamy that its like has never beenknown and to this day in many parts of theworld - as renowned liar David Irving isfinding to his cost in Austria - it isconsidered a crime to deny that ithappened.

What historians can and do dispute,though, is the extent to which TheHolocaust was planned out in advance -whether Hitler always intended for themass murder of Jews or whether slaughtergrew out of local pragmatic responses todealing with local populations inconquered territories. The so-calledIntentionalist versus Functionalistaccounts of The Holocaust.

The debate is complex - andprobably irresolvable now. What is,

perhaps, clear, is that the Functionalistcase is somehow more horrifying. Itwould be comforting to human minds toknow that a handful of monsters dreamedup and guided the mass-murder from theirbunker - but it is more dreadful toconceive of low-level local officials goingabout their business : Item 5 - Merits ofGas over Bullets for extermination.Literally getting rid of some inconvenientpeople.

Perhaps, though, in future years,people will look back on the functionalistholocaust of our times - sit agog as theyhear of committees sitting down to makepolicies knowing they will lead to millionsof preventable human deaths because theycan't, won't, daren't raise the lives of thesepeople above holy private property, thesovereignty of nation states or even God.

The autogenicide of the human raceis why 6 million must die each year andwhy 850 million must liveundernourished.

We will be as equally deserving ofopprobrium as those who stood by and letthe Holocaust happen if we do not act assoon as we may to end this preventablewaste. If we lend our voices or our votesto political parties that put trade, business,capital and property before the rationalgood of distribution according to needs,we are contributing as culpably as thelowliest corporal genocide.

We urgently need to build aworldwide movement to bring a speedyhalt to the carnage. The easy thing - thefunctionalist thing - is to go on supportingparties that offer small, possiblist solutionswithin the current system. But the rightthing to do, the necessary thing, is todemand the impossible and turn the wholesystem over. Let's make 2006 themonument to the beginning of the end of amurderous system.

Socialist Standard January 2006 3

Six Million

The Socialist Party is like no otherpolitical party in Britain. It is made up ofpeople who have joined togetherbecause we want to get rid of the profitsystem and establish real socialism.

Our aim is to persuade others tobecome socialist and act for themselves,organising democratically and withoutleaders, to bring about the kind of societythat we are advocating in this journal.

We are solely concerned with buildinga movement of socialists for socialism.We are not a reformist party with aprogramme of policies to patch upcapitalism.

We use every possible opportunity tomake new socialists. We publishpamphlets and books, as well as CDs,DVDs and various other informativematerial. We also give talks and take partin debates; attend rallies, meetings and

demos; run educational conferences;host internet discussion forums, makefilms presenting our ideas, and contestelections when practical. Socialistliterature is available in Arabic, Bengali,Dutch, Esperanto, French, German,Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish andTurkish as well as English.

The more of you who join the SocialistParty the more we will be able to get ourideas across, the more experiences wewill be able to draw on and greater will bethe new ideas for building the movementwhich you will be able to bring us.

The Socialist Party is an organisationof equals. There is no leader and thereare no followers. So, if you are going tojoin we want you to be sure that youagree fully with what we stand for an thatwe are satisfied that you understand thecase for socialism.

IntroducingtheSocialistParty

Who We Are

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The Next Step


Future societywill be populatedby very specialpeople. Withintheir agelessbodies will existrejuvenatedorgans clonedfrom versions oftheir cells thathave been madeyounger; youthfulhearts andyouthful lungsthat will beat andbreathe forever.Beneath theirskin will scampernanobots: blood-cell sized robotswhich, likehighwaymaintenancevehicles, willrove theirbloodstreamsdestroyingpathogens,removing waste,correcting errorsin DNA andreversing theageing process.The same tinymachines willalso enable brain-to-braincommunication -telepathy of sorts- via the internetand ensure a vastexpansion inhumanintelligence.

Arguably, those special people may become less human as their bodiesmerge with a technology so advanced that it gradually begins to exceedand replace mere flesh and blood. At least, that's the prediction of RayKurzweil, a Massachusetts-based inventor and writer, in his article'Human 2.0' (New Scientist, Sept 24, 2005). As is all too common withtechie gurus, he has only the vaguest concept of political realities, so itdoesn't occur to him to question whether the future in question will becapitalist or socialist. If Kurzweil even grasped the difference, heprobably still wouldn't understand why the question was relevant. Heobserves certain antiprogressive tendencies in modern society, andascribes them to some anomalous general human behaviour, rather thanclass, specifically capitalist class, behaviour. Consequently he proffersdire warnings about what we ought to do with our collective humanknowledge, without ever addressing why we, the vast majority, are notin a position to control or determine what is done with that knowledge.Those of us who take an interest in the scientific adventure feelfrequently piqued at the tendency of 'futurologists' like Kursweil,Toffler et al to overlook the fundamental political issues arising from

the fact that human society is class-based. Scientists can be very far-sighted but at the same time have only a very narrow field of view, likea blinkered racehorse. Still, given our interest in the implications ofscience for a future socialist society, his predictions are interestingnonetheless and could be seen as relevant to it.

Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields of optical characterrecognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognitiontechnology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is the author ofseveral books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, andtechnological singularity. He is also an enthusiastic advocate of usingtechnology to achieve immortality. He predicts that 'we won'texperience 100 years of progress in the 21st century-it will be more like20,000 years of progress' due to exponential rather than lineartechological change which will result in the Singularity, 'technologicalchange so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric ofhuman history' (http://en.wikipedia.org).

The concept of a singularity, a new technological 'big bang', is anexciting one, and Kurzweil is clearly very taken with it. It is fairlyobvious that science does not progress in linear fashion, like a trainalong a railway, but in geometric fashion, doubling and doubling again.Revolutions in science are almost a weekly event these days, and it istherefore not hard to imagine a 'super-revolution', a point where thewhole of human society has to change very suddenly. In a way, asocialist political revolution is almost implicit in such an event, as thefetters and restrictions of outmoded social practices are blown to piecesin a matter of days or weeks by the devastating power of the singularity.

Of course, he could be wrong. There may be no singularity,despite all the indications. Alternatively, the powers that be might beable to prevent or limit it. You don't get rich by giving things away forfree. There is every reason to suppose, for example, thatnanotechnology, one very likely factor in causing the singularity, will bestrictly controlled and limited, a bomb kept in a concrete box.

Tellingly, Kurzweil comments that 'to proscribe such technologieswill not only deprive human society of profound benefits, but will drivethese technologies underground, which would make the dangers worse'(New Scientist, Sept 24, 2005).

It's not difficult to see how the proscriptive tendency ofcapitalism, governed by the rule of production for profit not need, couldput a dampener on Kurzweil's technology-enriched version of humanity.If such technology does come onto the market, to whom will it beavailable? All of humanity without exception, as Kurzweil perhapshopes, or only those wealthy enough to afford it? After all, it is likely tobe expensive treatment, making its beneficiaries not only economicallysuperior, but genetically superior also. Yet another proscriptive tendencyis intellectual property right (see Patent Absurdity, and also 'IntellectualProperty: a further restriction on personal freedom' on page 6 for afuller discussion of this subject).

Kurzweil likes to define humans as 'the species that seeks - andsucceeds - in going beyond our limitations'. But we will really startmaking some progress when the scientific community succeeds in goingbeyond its own limitations, and recognising the political dimension ofthe human project. Many scientists individually seem to understand therestrictive and anti-progressive nature of current practices, but somehowassume that explicit political positions are outside their remit, or evenbeneath them. In fact, all humans take a political position, whether theyadmit it or not. Science does not sit in a rarefied world above politics, itis part and parcel of it, and scientists who care about the world's futureought to have the courage and honesty to declarethemselves, and stop worrying about peer-grouppressure. It's not the professional suicide it once was. Ifyou oppose the restrictive practices of capitalism, thenyou oppose capitalism. It doesn't take an Einstein oreven a Kursweil to work out what that means.

PATENT ABSURDITYPatent and copyright laws existto 'protect' their authors and toprovide a profit incentive todevelop new ideas andtechnologies, according to thelobby which advocatesstrengthening patent law. But thislobby generally consists of largecompanies who have zealouslybought up libraries of patents inorder to lock out competitors,while the opponents of patentrestrictions tend to be smallcompanies unable to get a foot inthe door, and who argue thatsuch restrictions hold backdevelopment.

Human Genome Sciences ofMaryland are well known forpatenting much of the humangenome, and once tried to patentone of the bacteria that causesmeningitis, while IncytePharmaceuticals of Palo Alto,California own the patent onStaphylococcus aureus, a specieswhose study is crucial because itis known to evolve resistance toantibiotics (New Scientist, May16, 1998).An independent commission onintellectual property rightsreported in 2002 that the WorldTrade Organisation were strong-arming developing countries intosigning intellectual propertyrights (IPR) agreements which

were of no benefit to them,because they had very little topatent, but instead force upprices and inhibit technologytransfer. The report concludedthat IPRs effectively rip off poorcountries (New Scientist, Sept21, 2002).The issue of patents is alwaysgoing to be thorny, because botharguments are correct - incapitalism. Ownership ofintellectual property has to beprotected in a property owningsociety, as anyone who has hadtheir house burgled, their carstolen or their idea robbed willtend to agree, but there is nodenying that intellectual propertyrights do indeed stifle innovation

in every field,because of thetendency of patents toconcentrate into the hands of theintellectual property rich. Thescientific community is dividedon the question, between thosewho believe in knowledge for itsown sake and therefore wish topool ideas, and those who wishto profit personally from theirresearch by denying othersaccess. Since this is precisely thesame debate as betweensocialists and those who supportcapitalism, one might describescientists who wish to abolishpatent and copyright restrictionsas closet socialists.

TheTomorrowPeople

Kursweil


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Contact Details

The 21 November referendumconducted by the ElectoralCommission of Kenya to vote for oragainst the proposed new constitution

was just a waste of money.The clamour for a new constitution

commenced in earnest with the advent ofmulti-party politics in the early 90s. Sincethen it has reached crescendo. Lives havebeen lost, limbs broken and some of thosewho have been at the top relegated to thelower levels of society.

During the regime of former presidentDaniel Arap Moi, short-term politicalreforms were introduced to keep at bay thoseclamouring for a new constitution. Mr. Moisucceeded in that he was able to rule for longbut, at his departure, left the issue of theconstitution unresolved.

With the coming to power of PresidentMwai Kibaki and his national RainbowCoalition (NARC), constitution reform wasone of the promises given to Kenyans in the2002 general election campaign. In 2003 aconstitutional assembly was instituted at theBomas of Kenya venue which deliberated onthe views collected from Kenyans about theconstitution by the Kenya ReviewCommission in early 2002. The assembly satfor one year.

Its final submissions in early 2004formed part of what has been argued about.The so-called Bomas draft was viewed asflawed as well as having good contents forthe country. Or so those who took part in thedeliberations said.

Since the draft which came out ofBomas wasn't agreeable to all, Kenyan MPsmet to discuss the contentious issues (onpower sharing, devolution and so-called

religious courts). It was from theirdeliberations that a new draft emerged (theso-called Wako draft). The government gavedeadlines for the passage of the draft, thefinal of which was the referendum of 21November.

Kenyans overwhelmingly rejected thedraft, by voting 60 percent against thepassage while those for the passage onlymanaged to garner 40 percent of the vote. It'sback to the drawing board.

A new constitution or not isn't thepanacea for what ails Kenya. The countryhas only two tribes: the rich and thepathetically poor (though there are 42 ethnictribes). The rich own factories and employthe labour of the poor, who they exploit tothe last sweat. The poor are in the majoritybut their thinking, lives and even their way ofgoing are controlled by the other tribe.

The new constitution even if it's coatedwith sweet words will never solve theimbalance in society. It will never make thepoor rich. The rich tribe want to use theconstitution to perpetuate their hold on thelives of the poor tribe. They have nointention of making any tangible changes inthe lives of the other tribe.

And that's why I never support orparticipate in any activity designed to make anew constitution. I'll only participate in ameaningful activity which is intended tobring a system which has no frontiers, asociety in which production is for use notprofit, where there are no leaders and wheremoney isn't worshipped.

Only when such a society is establishedcan we say that we've arrived. And arrive wewill.PATRICK NDEGE, Nairobi.

Kenya Referendum farce

Above: President MwaiKibakiformer. Below: presidentDaniel Arap Moi

Socialist Standard January 2006u056

Professor NoamChomsky of theMassachusetts Instituteof Technology'scontribution is based ona Q&A session held on22 April last year atWashington StateUniversity. Tristan Millerprovides a commentaryfrom a socialistperspective.

The relation of intellectual propertyto personal freedom and its place inpublic and academic settings is aninteresting topic with an interesting

history.The Uruguay Round that set up the

World Trade Organization imposed what iscalled a free trade agreement, but which is,in fact, a highly protectionist agreement(the US and business leaders beingstrongly opposed to free trade and marketeconomies, except in highly specific waysbeneficial to them). A crucial part of thisagreement was the establishment of verystrong "intellectual property rights". Whatthis actually means is rights that guaranteemonopoly pricing power to privatetyrannies.

For example, consider a drugcorporation. Most of their serious researchand development - the hard part of it - isfunded by the public. In fact, much of thedynamism of the world's economy comesout of public expenditures through the statesystem, which is the source of mostinnovation and development. There issome research and development in thecorporate system, but it's mostly at themarketing end. And this is true of the drugindustry. Once the corporations gain thebenefit of the public paying the costs andtaking the risks, they want to monopolizethe profit and the intellectual propertyrights. These rights are not for smallinventors. In fact, the people doing thework in the corporations don't get muchout of them; at best, they would receive asmall bonus if they invent something. It'sthe corporate tyrannies that are making theprofits and they want to guarantee them.

The World Trade Organizationproposed new, enhanced intellectualproperty rights - patent rights - far beyondanything that existed in the past. In fact,they are not only designed to maximizemonopoly pricing and profit, but also toprevent development. For instance, theWorld Trade Organization rules introducedthe concept of product patents. It used tobe you could patent a process, but not theproduct, so if some smart guy could figureout a better way of producing something,he could do it. The WTO wants to blockthis. It's important to block developmentand progress in order to ensure monopolyrights, so they now have product patents.

Consider US history: suppose thecolonies, after independence, had beenforced to accept this patent regime. Whatwould we Americans be doing now? Firstof all, there would be very few of us at all,but those of us who would be here wouldbe pursuing our comparative advantage inexporting fish and fur. That's whateconomists tell you is right - pursue your

comparative advantage. That was ourcomparative advantage. We certainlywouldn't have had a textile industry. TheBritish textiles were far cheaper and better.Actually, British textiles were cheaper andbetter because Britain had crushed Irishand Indian superior textile manufacturersand stolen their techniques. They thereforebecame the pre-eminent textilemanufacturer, by force of course. Inactuality, the US does have a textileindustry which grew up aroundMassachusetts. But the only way it coulddevelop was by extremely high tariffswhich protected unviable US industries.Our textile industry developed and laterhad spin-offs into other industries. And soit continues.

We would never have had a steelindustry either, for the same reason: Britishsteel was far superior. One of the reasons isbecause they were stealing Indiantechniques. British engineers were going toIndia to learn about steel-making well intothe 19th century. They ran the country byforce so they could take what the Indiansknew and develop a steel industry. In orderto develop its own steel industry, the USused massive government involvementthrough extremely high tariffs and themilitary system, as usual.

This system continues right up to thepresent, and furthermore it's true of everysingle developed society. It's one of thebest-known truths of economic history thatthe only countries that developed are theones that pursued these techniques. Therewere countries that were forced to adoptfree trade and "liberalization" - thecolonies - and they got destroyed. Thesharp divide between the first and the thirdworlds has really taken shape since the18th century. And maintaining this divideis what intellectual property rights are for.In fact, there's a name for it in economichistory: Friedrich List, the famous Germanpolitical economist in the 19th century,

IntellectualProperty: afurtherrestrictionon personalfreedom

Guaranteeingcorporate profits

7Socialist Standard January 2006

who borrowed his major protectionistdoctrines from Andrew Hamilton, called it"kicking away the ladder". First you usestate power and violence to develop, thenyou kick away those procedures so thatother people can't do it.

Intellectual property rights have verylittle to do with individual initiative.Einstein didn't have any intellectualproperty rights on relativity theory. Scienceand innovation is carried out by peoplewho are interested in it; that's the wayscience works. However, there's been aneffort in very recent years tocommercialize it, much the same wayeverything else has been commercialized.So you don't do science because it'sexciting and challenging, because you wantto find out something new, and becauseyou want the world to benefit from it; youdo it because maybe you can make somemoney out of it. You can make your ownjudgment about the moral value.Personally, I think it's extremelycheapening, but also destructive ofinitiative and development.

It's important to note that the profitsfrom patents commonly don't go back tothe individual inventors. This is a verywell-studied topic. Take, for example, thewell-studied case of computer-controlledmachine tools, which are now afundamental component of the economy.There's a very good study of this by DavidNoble, a leading political economist. Whathe discovered is that these techniques wereinvented by some small guy working in hisgarage somewhere in, I think, Michigan.After the MIT mechanical engineeringdepartment learned about it, they picked upthese techniques and developed them andextended them and so on, and thecorporations came and picked them upfrom MIT, and finally it became a core partof US industry. Well, what happened to theguy who invented it? He's still probablyworking in his garage in Michigan orwherever it is. And that's very typical.

I just don't think intellectual propertyhas much to do with innovation orindependence. It has to do with protectingmajor concentrations of power whichmostly got their power as a public gift, andmaking sure that they can maintain andexpand their power. And these highlyprotectionist devices really have to berammed down the public's throat. Theydon't make any economic sense or anyother sense.

Neither do I think that intellectualproperty should play any role in academicand public institutions. In 1980 the Bayh-Dole Act gave universities the right topatent inventions that came out of theirown research. But nothing comes strictlyout of a university's own research; it comesout of public funding. That's how theuniversity can function; that's how theirresearch projects work. The whole systemis set up to socialize cost and risk to thegeneral public, and then within thatcontext, things can be invented. But I don'tthink universities should patent them. Theyshould be working for the public good, andthat means the fruits of their researchshould be available to the public.Noam Chomsky

To most people today, the notion thatideas or information can be owned seemsas natural as owning a house or a bicycle.We are brought up to believe that whensomeone writes a book or piece of music,or develops plans for a new invention, theybecome that work's sole owner. This meansthat they alone have the right to determinewhether and how that work is used byother people, or the right to transferownership of the work to another person ora company. Only the owner is allowed tomake and sell copies of the work, toincorporate it into a collection of otherworks, or to produce a new work based onthe original, such as a new edition or asequel. These "rights", as they are called,are encoded not just in our laws, butincreasingly, as we shall see, in our socialnorms and our technology.

However, the world did not alwayswork this way. To people in the Ancientworld and in Mediaeval times, the thoughtthat anyone could claim ownership andcontrol of something intangible like apoem or an idea would have seemedludicrous. Philosophers andmathematicians regularly borrowed,critiqued, and expanded upon the works oftheir colleagues; historians compiled andsummarized descriptions of eventsrecorded by others; and musiciansperformed existing songs while addingtheir own embellishments. Written workswere copied freely (albeit laboriously) bytrained scribes, and technologicalimprovements diffused gradually amongartisans through word of mouth.

To someone from the past, then,today's intellectual property regime wouldseem terribly restrictive. Had Shakespearebeen told he could not copy and reworkmaterial from other playwrights, he wouldhave seen this as a tyrannical imposition onhis personal freedom as an artist. What'smore, we would have been robbed of manyof his greatest works, including Hamletand King Lear, both of which wereadaptations of other authors' plays. Whatwas it that changed, then, betweenShakespeare's time and ours, to allow us tothink of information and ideas in the sameterms as physical property? And moreimportantly, is our society more or less freeas a result?

The answer to the first question isrelatively simple when we look at things intheir historical context. In the centurypreceding Shakespeare, two greatdevelopments began sweeping acrossEurope, one technological, the other socio-economical. The first of these wasmechanized printing, introduced byJohannes Gutenberg in the 1450s. Booksand pamphlets suddenly became easy andcheap to reproduce, and with theirabundance literacy and authorshipincreased. The second development wasthe capitalist mode of production, whichwas by fits and starts beginning to replacethe old feudal system. Trained scribes who

used their own inexpensive tools forcopying manuscripts were replaced byrelatively unskilled workers who operateda costly printing press owned by theiremployer. Few authors could afford a pressto print their own books, and the wealthypublishers who owned the pressesdepended on a steady supply of newliterature to drive their sales. Therefore,authors and publishers entered into anagreement whereby the publisher supportedthe author financially in exchange forprinting their book and retaining the profitsfrom its sale.

Though a few popular authorsbecame quite wealthy through thisarrangement, the vast majority were notsignificantly better off than the rest of thelabouring class. As with any employmentrelationship, it was not in the publisher'sinterest to pay authors any more thanrequired for their upkeep, thus forcingthem to either continue writing or seekother employment. To prevent authors fromsecuring payment from more than onepublisher simultaneously and to preventrival publishers from cutting into theirprofits, publishers in the 17th and 18thcenturies pressured governments to enactlaws recognizing a publisher's exclusiveownership and control ("copyright") of aliterary work. (Initially this ownershiprested with the author, though as it wasuseless to anyone without a press, heinvariably assigned it to a publisher.)Similar laws were enacted grantingmonopolies on "any manner of newmanufactures" - that is, patents - whichagain were beneficial primarily to thosewho already had the capital to exploit anddefend them.

For professional writers, artists, andinventors, then, copyrights and patents -collectively referred to as "intellectualproperty" - are simply a specialized legalformalization of the wage-labour exchangeother workers are forced to make with theiremployers. Just as manual labourers,lacking the means to produce and distributetheir own products, must sell their labourpower to a factory owner for an hourlywage, writers, lacking a printing press andbookstore, sell the copyright on theirwriting to a publishing house for a lumpsum or nominal royalty. And just asmanual labourers selling their labour powermust waive ownership of the goods theyhave produced and the freedom to usethem as they see fit, so too do writersselling their copyright lose the freedom touse their writing as they wishes. If a writerwishes to adapt or incorporate elements ofanother book - even one that they themselforiginally wrote - into a new work, theymust first secure (and often pay for)permission from the publisher who ownsthe copyright. Given that the free andfruitful exchange of ideas and informationwas commonplace before intellectualproperty, it is difficult to argue that theselaws have done anything other than robartists and scientists of their personalfreedom to learn from and interact witheach other.

And what of the rest of us, those ofus who do not make our livings writing,performing, or inventing? Has theintellectual property regime affected us inany way? Until relatively recently, theanswer was not much, or at least, not

No amount oflegislation can

change the basics

8 Socialist Standard January 2006

personally.Intellectualproperty wassimply a legalfiction allowingcorporations tostake their variousclaims to"properties" in theinformationmarket. How thecapitalists decidedamongstthemselves whohad the right toproduce what had

little bearing on theindividual freedom

of the average worker, who owned neitherpresses to print books nor factories tomass-produce new machines . Technicallyit was illegal for a worker to make a copyof a book, but since it would take themweeks or months to do so by hand, thepublishers' profits were not threatened andno injunction was sought.

With the advent of home computersand the Internet, however, the entireworking class suddenly found itself inpossession of the same sorts of instrumentsof production and distribution that hadpreviously been exclusive to wealthypublishing houses. Once a book or piece ofmusic had been put into digital form,anyone could instantly produce unlimitedcopies with the click of a button andinstantly send them anywhere in the world.Alarmed at the threat to their monopolies

and their profits, publishers began to takenotice. Criminal and civil lawsuits werebrought against individuals whodownloaded music from the Internet orcopied software for their friends.Publishers launched wide-scale public"education" campaigns to convince peoplethat unauthorized copying was akin to theftor even to piracy on the high seas. The fullforce of the law and corporate propagandaapparatus was applied to preventingworkers from exercising their new-foundability to produce and distributeintellectual property on a massive scale.

At this point, one could well arguethat people technically had not lost any oftheir personal freedoms, since by law theywere never free to copy information in thefirst place. This changed, as NoamChomsky notes, with the passing ofincreasingly restrictive laws in the late20th century. Now it is a crime not just tocopy a digital work, but also to use it inany way not authorized by the publisher.Many of the freedoms people enjoyed withprinted books and analogue audio andvideo recordings no longer apply to theirdigital counterparts. A publisher canarbitrarily decide that a particular e-bookcan be read only a certain number of times,or only up to a certain date, or only on acertain device, making transfer to a friendor donation to a library impossible. Theserestrictions are hard-coded into the deviceor software which reads the e-book, andmodifying the software or inventing a newdevice to circumvent these restrictions is acriminal offence.

In conclusion, Prof. Chomsky iscorrect in his identification of today'sintellectual property system as a way ofgranting legal monopolies to corporations.And I applaud him for speaking out againstthe worst excesses of companies exploitingthe patent system in the name ofmaximizing profits. But by focussing onand attacking only recent intellectualproperty law reforms, it is easy to fall intothe trap of suggesting that the system couldbe "fixed" simply by repealing thesereforms or otherwise tweaking the laws.As I hope I have shown here, from theirvery beginnings copyrights and patentshave existed to benefit only that smallminority of people who owned the presses,warehouses, and stores through whichbooks and other media are reproduced anddistributed. Any benefit to the inventorsand authors who actually produceinventions and artistic works is incidental,and furthermore comes at the cost ofstifling cross-pollination of ideas and theprogress it entails. No amount oflegislation can ever change thefundamental relationship in productionbetween the workers, who produce almostall of the world's artistic and scientificwealth, and the rich minority who controlthe means of disseminating this wealth.Therefore workers have no stake in theintellectual property regime and shouldwork only for the abolition of the entiresystem that supports it.

Tristan Miller

Value added,but who by?Sir Digby Jones,director-general ofthe employers'organisation, theCBI, has his owneconomic theory.

Interviewed in the Times law section (22November) he expounded his view thatBritish capitalism could no longer rely onjust producing "commodity" goods which"sell only on price" (by which he seems tohave meant basic material goods), butshould switch to "value-added" services.Britain, he argued, cannot compete withcountries such as India and China inproducing cheap "commodity goods", butshould let these countries make moneyfrom doing this which they could thenspend on buying "value-added" servicesfrom Britain.

But what does he mean by "value-added"? In Marxian economics it wouldmean the new value added by labour inthe process of production to thepreviously existing value of the raw andother materials. And which is divided intowages (the replacement value of theworkers' mental and physical energiesused up in production) and surplus value(which goes to the capitalist employerand is the source of profit).

In a talk to businesspeople inBirmingham last April, he did make a littleclearer what he meant. There were "fewerand fewer widget makers in the region",he said, "but we are creating more andmore work in the higher value, quality,branded sector". And he gave an

example. We should not be worried, hesaid,

"if we went into Tesco to buy a HarryPotter toy for ú10 to discover it had beenMade in China. Because of that £10 just£1 ends up in China. The rest stays inBritain via the likes of licensing andintellectual property rights, advertising,copywriting and marketing" (BirminghamPost, 27 April).

But neither advertising, norcopywriting, nor marketing add any valuesince there are concerned with selling notproducing goods, while licensing andintellectual property rights are claims onprofits, i.e. on value produced elsewhere.

So where does the £9, which DigbyJones calls value-added and which is thesource of the income of the advertisingagencies, etc. come from?

The workers in China who made thetoy (and the transport workers whotransported it to Britain) added a value ofbetween £9 and £10 to the value of thematerials from which the toys weremade, out of which theyreceived well under £1 (sincethe cost of the materialsand the profits of theiremployers also had tocome out of the £1 thatended up in China). TheChinese capitalists whoexploited them had topay licensing andintellectual property rightfees to firms in Britain,which swallowed up apart of the surplus valuethey had extracted fromtheir workers.

If they had hadthe facilities to

advertise and market the toys they couldhave done this themselves and kept moreof the surplus value. But, not being in thisposition, they had to sell the toys belowtheir value - well below their value, itseems - to a whole series of go-betweens(advertisers, marketing consultants andthe like) who each took a share of theadded value, the last one (Tesco) sellingit at its full value of £10 to the finalconsumer.

So, what Sir Digby calls "value-added" is rather "value-realised". It is notthe capitalists with money invested inadvertising, marketing and other activitiesto do with selling who add new value tothe goods made in China or India. It wasadded by the workers there, but soldbelow its value by their immediateemployer to selling capitalists in Britain.

In capitalist terms, Sir Digby'sstrategy for British capitalism could makesense: within a global division of labour,China, India and others produce the

material goods and Britain and otherssell them. But, if his figures for the

Chinese toys are right, what acondemnation of capitalism:nine-tenths of the selling priceof a good made up of non-productive on-costs to do withselling and only one-tenthwith actual production! Ifthat's the figure for all goods,socialism - where goodswould not need to be sold butwould be free for people to

take - would have no problemproducing enough for everybody,in China and India as well as in

Europe and North America.

Cooking the Books (1)

Sir Digby Jones

Out-pirated bycapitalism?


When someone comes across theSocialist Party for the first time,a common reaction is toconsider us as just another left-

wing political organisation. From one pointof view this is not surprising, as the leftuse similar terminology to us, talking ofSocialism, class struggle, exploitation, etc,and invoking Karl Marx. But digging alittle deeper will show that our politicalposition is very different from that of theleft. By 'the left' we mean the SocialistWorkers Party, the Workers RevolutionaryParty, the Socialist Labour Party, all thegroups with a name that's a variation onCommunist Party, Militant (dishonestlyusing the name 'Socialist Party'), and theScottish Socialist Party, among others.All quotations in this article are takenfrom the websites of the organisationsreferred to.

The first difference is that of ouraims, the kind of society we wish to seeestablished. Socialists are quite clear anduncompromising on this - our aim is asociety without wages, money, countriesor governments, based on commonownership of the means of production(land, factories, offices, etc.). Productionwould be for use, not profit, and therewould be free access to what had beenproduced. The result is quite simple: nopoverty, no homelessness, no starvation,no war. Such a society would be fullydemocratic, with no ruling class or vestedinterests.

Do the left stand for this kind ofsociety? The simple answer is No.Militant, for instance, say they wish to'take into public ownership the top 150companies, banks and building societiesthat dominate the economy, underdemocratic working-class control andmanagement.' Forget the rhetoric aboutdemocratic control - this is a recipe forstate-run capitalism. Socialism, as amoneyless society, will have no need forbanks or building societies. In general, infact, the left stand for a version ofcapitalism where the state is the mainemployer. This makes no difference tomembers of the working class, who stillhave to work for wages, but will now beexploited by the state and those who run itrather than by private capitalists. The leftare admirers of the Bolshevik revolution inRussia, which ushered in over 70 years ofstate capitalism and a police state. Theydiffer on when and why they think things'went wrong' in Russia, but they all supportthe regime established in 1917.

It's true that there are minorvariations on the theme of state-runcapitalism. The SSP, for instance,advocates 'the break-up of the British stateand the creation of a free Scottish socialistrepublic.' But a single Socialist country ina hostile capitalist world is just impossible,and this quote just reveals that the SSP aim

is state capitalism - Scottish statecapitalism. Many of the left are in factnationalistic in one way or another.

It is also true that some left-wingorganisations pay lip service to the idea ofa moneyless society. The CPGB, forexample, refers to 'communism - a systemwhich knows neither wars, exploitation,money, classes, states nor nations.' But,like the rest of the left, this is for them apaper aim that bears no relation to theireveryday activity or the ideas set out intheir publications. They make no effort toexplain how Socialist/Communist societywould work, and no effort to convince

workers of the advantages ofsuch a way of organisingthings. Instead they combine

a set of immediate demandswith the aim of a so-calledproletarian dictatorship, which inreality means state-run capitalism.

This takes us on to a further point. Inspite of all their revolutionary posturingand calls for a fundamental change insociety, the left actually devote their timeto chasing reforms of capitalism. If youlook at the programmes or manifestos ofleft-wing parties, you will find them full ofreforms of a wide variety of types. Arandom list of examples: 'Right toretirement from age 60 for all workers'(CPGB); 'a Scottish Service Tax - a fairalternative to the council tax that will makethe rich pay their share' (SSP); 'Animmediate 50% increase in the pension asa step towards a living pension for allpensioners' (Militant); 'Renationalise therailways' (WRP).

The left generally draw a distinctionbetween 'immediate demands' such asthose just listed and longer-term goals.We've already seen that the longer-termgoals in any case involve a continuation ofcapitalism, but they are usually givensecond place to the short-term demands.The justification normally provided is thatfighting on the immediate demands willwin workers over to the longer-term ideasof the organisation. 'The struggle for

reforms can tip over into revolution.Battles for reforms are vital preparation forsocial revolution' (SWP). But no evidenceis offered for such a position, and the taskof revolutionaries is not to jump on thebandwagon of reforms but to expose theirinadequacies, to show that reforms cannotsolve working-class problems. Indeed,some left-wing groups deliberately anddishonestly go for short-term aims thatthey know cannot be met under capitalism,as a way of fuelling working-classdiscontent. In other words, theydeliberately lie to workers as a way ofgetting them into their party!

Lastly, Socialists differ from the leftin our attitude to leadership anddemocracy. Socialism will be democratic,

with all having an equal say in howthings are run; it follows that themovement for Socialism must bedemocratic too. The Socialist Partyhas no leaders and is run by itsmembership. We have an executivecommittee, elected each year byballot of the members; their role isnot to make policy but to administer

the Party in accordance withdecisions made by members.

The left, however, adopt aLeninist view and supportleadership: they seethemselves as leaders ofthe working class, and areorganised internally with adivision between an inner

circle of leaders and'ordinary' members. For

instance, they see the need for'authoritative and influential

leaders who have been steeled over a longperiod of time' (CPGB). Most left-winggroups do not operate as cults (see theNovember Socialist Standard), but theystill have a distinction between rank-and-file members and the leadership. They areoften rather coy about their role as would-be leaders, but as Leninists they all supportthe idea of a vanguard. A leadership-basedorganisation is not going to be any use inestablishing an egalitarian society withoutleaders. But, as we've said, that's not whatthe left aim for anyway.

The left, then, stand for state-runcapitalism rather than Socialism; theyadvocate reforms rather than revolution;they are in favour of leadership rather thandemocracy. The Socialist Party, in contrast,does not aim at reforming capitalism but atreplacing it by a new democratic way oforganising the world, Socialism, broughtabout by a revolution, and we do not seeourselves as leaders. It should be clear thatthe Socialist Party is quite unlike the leftwing, and that we are definitely and forgood reason not part of the left.

Paul Bennett

Why Socialistsaren't part of the Left


The Roman Catholic Church (and, toa lesser extent, its Christianderivatives) arrogated onto itself therole of arbiter in things appertaining

not only to matters of what it called'morality' but to all forms of humanbehaviour and even juridical practice.Canon Law was the ultimate determinantsuperior to all other legal forms.

As feudalism yielded to capitalism inEurope and modern nation states were freedfrom the political hegemony of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, the Popes andtheir cardinals were forced to concede towidening democratic forms which werehistorically anathema to Rome. Still, evenin countries where Roman Catholicism hadbeen politically and morally overshadowedby various forms of Protestantism, differentPopes cautioned against democraticconcessions to the people.

According to Pope Leo XIII(Encyclical, Immortale Dei 'On theChristian Constitution of States', November1885) canon law is effectively superior tothe civil law, having derived from JesusChrist through Peter and the apostles to theChurch:

"In very truth, Jesus Christ gave hisapostles unrestrained authority in sacredmatters together with the genuine and mosttrue power of making laws, as also with theduplex right of judging and punishingwhich flow from that power."

By then, of course, such nonsense wasa fatuous Popish aspiration which was inconflict with the material conditions of lifein most of Europe. The power to make andenforce laws and the right and the power topunish in pursuit of such laws was now in

the possession of the bourgeoisie and itsgod was profit.

IrelandIreland nestled on the western flank ofEurope, its natural development frustratedby its proximity to its powerful neighbour,England. According to legend, Ireland hadbeen Christianised by St Patrick in the fifthcentury AD but, as in many other places,the Christian proselytizer appeared to havefashioned the new faith to suit the territory,or the native Celtic tribes adjusted it to suittheir customs. Druidic Ireland might haveaccepted the Christian God but it did notgive up its Druidic ways nor did it submitto the authority of Rome.

Effectively, the Celtic ChristianChurch was set within the organisationalnorms of the clan system. Each clan electedits own bishops and priests, which meantthat there were a great number of clan-nominated bishops whose episcopalauthority was the writ and the power of theclan.

Eventually in the 12th century PopeAdrian IV in a bull Laudabiliter gaveauthority to King Henry II of England toinvade Ireland and "enlarge the bounds ofthe Christian faith to the ignorant and rudeand to extirpate the roots of vice from thefield of the Lord". In the "Lord's Field", asperceived by Rome, the easy moral attitudesand forms of social organisation enjoyed bythe Irish were proscribed and as thehistorian P. Beresford Ellis points out, "TheIrish clergy had embraced feudalism (thesocial system underpinning RomanCatholicism) a system repugnant to theordinary Irishman long before it was

Catholicism in Disgrace

In Canada, the United States,Australia and elsewhere, butespecially in Ireland, the RomanCatholic Church stands indisgrace, following the plethora ofrevelations about the activities ofpaedophiles and other types ofabusers among its clergy.Obviously the structure of theChurch and the often uncannypower its priests and bishopshave over a subservient laity mustmake it a target for paedophilesand sadists. But the real andutterly appalling shame of theChurch was its subsequenttreatment of the abused and itsfrenetic efforts to cover up by liesand other deceits thecontemptible behaviour of itsservants.

Was it purely coincidence thatthe greatest abuse outside Irelandtook place in Canada, the US andAustralia, in mainly Irish Catholicareas and under the tutelage ofthe Irish Christian Brothers andIrish priests? Here we look at thehistoric role of Catholic priests andof Catholic institutions in Irelandover the centuries and for thesource of the awesome power andthe cavalier attitude of a now-disgraced Church.


enforced in Ireland". Whatever the wishesof the Church, the de facto imposition offeudalism in Ireland would take another fivetorturous centuries.

Outside that area of Leinster, knownas "The Pale", on the eastern side of Ireland,the native Irish clans resisted the incursionof English authority. Initially, within thePale bishops and abbots, in accordance withthe feudal system, became barons under thecrown but later Anglo-Norman clerics wererewarded with appointments to Irish livings- inevitably to the chagrin of the nativeclergy.

In the centuries that followedownership of land and other forms ofproperty were increasingly denied to thenative Irish. But England was still aCatholic country and thus priests andbishops in Ireland, while being denied themore influential positions within the

Church, did not suffer any other forms ofproscription from the government. Outsidethe Pale the power of the priest and theChurch within the atrophying world of theclans prospered, especially within theprovince of education.

The war of the two kingsIt is argued that it was this 'prospering', thestrength of the Church and its priests inIreland, that withstood the force of theReformation when England becameProtestant. Certainly, after the Reformation,and especially after the defeat of the EnglishCatholic Stuart, King James II, in 1691, theCatholic Church and its priests were tosuffer legal proscription and viciouspersecution. Ironically, James's defeat inIreland was at the hands of the CentralEuropean powers organised under the termsof the Treaty of Augsburg, and thecommander of the victorious forces wasWilliam, Prince of Orange, James'sProtestant son-in-law - the famous KingBilly, who, despite the subsequentpersecution of Presbyterians as well asCatholics by his government isimmortalised in the folk memory of Ulsterloyalists.

This persecution of IrishProtestantism's largest denomination as wellas Catholics 'and other dissenters' was theresult of the Establishment of theEpiscopalian Church, which made thepractice of other religions illegal and subjectto severe penalties, including confiscationof property. Later, in 1719 Parliament

passed an Act of Toleration granting relieffrom the Penal Laws to Presbyterians butthe Act made no concessions to Catholics.In the years following the formalisation oflaws against the Catholic Church and itsmembers some 5,000 Catholics becameAnglicans, but the overwhelming majorityof the native Irish were mere 'tenants-at-will' on smallholdings without eithersecurity of tenure or fixity of rents; in factthey were outlaws in the land of their birth.

It was in such conditions that theCatholic Church and its priests, not alwaysspeaking with the one voice, gainedoverwhelming influence over the minds ofthe people. All forms of agrarian unrest,inevitable under persecution, were roundlycondemned by the Church. But the priestswere close to the people, their onlyarticulate ally and, almost in spite of thecontempt of the hierarchy for the peasantry,their influence over the minds of the peoplebecame more telling. The Englishgovernment was a brutal foreign powervisibly persecuting priest and people.Inevitably the Church, in the form of itspriests, became the powerful institutionalstabilising factor in the bitter lives of aninarticulate, harassed and brutalised people.

Excommunicated IRA membersThe Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829gave formal legal recognition to the RomanCatholic Church in Ireland; by then thepower of the Church and its religiousfraternities was awesome. It wasn't only inmatters of birth, marriage and death that thepower of the church was evident; almostevery sort of activity, business, political orsporting had the ubiquitous priest and in the

structure and content of education the powerof the Church was paramount.

As the Church-supported IrishNational Party fell into decay before theburgeoning power of Sinn Fein after 1905,clerical influence was transferred to thelatter party though the official organ of IrishCatholicism condemned the RepublicanRising of 1916 as 'an act of brigandage' andsupported the British execution of the rebelleadership. Similarly, during the subsequentguerrilla war (1919-22) the Churchcondemned the IRA and excommunicatedits members, but in the main the old priestlystalwarts were there to lend support andcomfort - and, perhaps, save the Churchfrom its own error of judgement.

The guerrilla war ended with a Britishgovernment-enforced partitioning of Ireland

into Northern Ireland and the Irish FreeState. For the zealots and bigots ofCatholicism and Protestantism it seemed ared-letter day, for it lent to each in theirrespective areas virtually untrammelledpolitical and social influence.

In the north the political agents of thelinen lords and the industrial capitalistsdeclared that they had a Protestantparliament for a Protestant people, while theProtestant churches cosied up to a system ofsectarian discrimination designed to hurtworkers who were Catholics and foolworkers who were Protestants into believingthat their slums and their miserable lifestyles made them superior to their evenmore miserable class brethren.

SurrenderIn the south, all the political partiessurrendered to the arrogance and deceits ofthe Catholic Church and its institutions. Theminds of the young were given over topriests, nuns and Christian Brothers for an'education' unquestionably based on amorbid, insular Catholicism. As if that wasnot bad enough, as we now know, in manyof the institutions run by Catholic religiousorders children were being physically andsexually abused and the Church wastolerating this abuse.

The scandal of the Magdalenelaundries, which was highlighted by BBC,ITV and to its credit RTE, demonstrated thequite remarkable power the priests had overan acutely educationally deprived people.The laundries were operated by the Sistersof Mercy (sic!) who brutally exploited slavelabour to carry out their function. Theslaves were young women who had beenabandoned in pregnancy, or who showedpromise of behaviour alien to the views oftheir families. In many cases a priestrequested or persuaded a child's parents toabandon their child to these institutes ofbrutality and slavery for 'the good of thechild's soul'. One old woman who had onlybeen released in the late sixties from thisdreadful servitude told a television audiencehow the priest had approached her parentswhen she was young and advised them thattheir daughter's good looks could "presentan occasion for sin".

When a young doctor who in hispractice had experienced the ravages oftuberculosis became Minister of Health inthe Coalition government of 1948 hepromulgated a Bill to give free medical careto expectant mothers and children under theage of five. The Catholic Archbishop ofDublin wrote to the then Taoiseachcomplaining that such state interferencecould not be tolerated in a Catholic country.In France, Italy or any other Catholiccountry such absurd temerity would havebeen laughed at; in Catholic Ireland both theBill and its political sponsor were dropped.

But the bishops could not control theairwaves nor could they control Irishcapitalism's demand for widening of theeducation curriculum. Irish Television stillplacates the bishops with a silence for theAngelus; it is an acknowledgedembarrassment but as in all other countriesthe value-system and vulgarities of globalcapitalism's unitary culture overshadows themorbid doctrines of the Church andsometimes even exposes its institutions forthe moral cesspits they are.

RICHARD MONTAGUE

Above: Pope Leo XIII. Right: The Pale


Capitalism is a society where nearlyall the things that humans need orwant are articles of commerce,things made to be bought and sold.

This is not a complete definition since undercapitalism one thing in particular becomes acommodity - the human ability to work andto create things, what Marx called "labourpower" - and this is in fact the definingfeature of capitalism. It's a commoditysociety in which labour-power is acommodity.

This has two consequences. The firstis that there is not simply production forsale but production for profit. And secondly,most things that humans need or want tendto become commodities, i.e. have to bebought. It is not difficult to see why. Thewages system means that most people aredependent, for satisfying their needs, on themoney they are paid for the sale of the onesaleable commodity they do possess (theirlabour power), money which they then useto buy what they must have to live. So the"commodification" of labour power means

the commodification of food, of clothes, ofaccommodation, and of other, less materialwants too.

One of the things that the spread ofcapitalism meant, in concrete terms, was thespread of money-commodity relations. It's aprocess that's still going on in parts of theworld and which even conventionaleconomists speak of as integrating formerlylargely self-sufficient subsistence farmers inAsia, Africa and Latin America into the"money economy".

What we are talking about here is thecommodification of people's material needs.Some people might not find thisobjectionable. Some even find it aprogressive, even a liberating development.In fact this is one of the standard defencesof capitalism - that the money economygives people the freedom to choose what toconsume by how they spend their moneyand that this is the most efficient way oforganising the satisfaction of people'smaterial needs and wants. Of course this

isn't true in that it assumes that the economyresponds to consumer demand, whereas infact it responds to changes in the rate ofprofit, while most people's "demand" islimited by the size of their wage packet orsalary cheque.

That capitalism is not the mostefficient way of providing for people'smaterial needs - and that socialism as asystem of common ownership, democraticcontrol and production just for use would dothis much better - is the traditional socialistcase against capitalism. And it retains all itsvalidity. But, after the last World War, in the50s and 60s capitalism in North Americaand Western Europe appeared to live up toits promise of material prosperity for mostpeople through the emergence of the so-called "consumer society". But then another,different criticism of capitalism appeared:that while it might have solved more or lessadequately the problem of "bread", of dirematerial want, for most people in these partsof the world, it had still not created asatisfactory society.

Books began to appear in Americawith such titles as The Lonely Crowd, TheOrganization Man, The Hidden Persuaders,The Waste Makers, One-Dimensional Man,all critical of various aspects of the"consumer society" as a society in whichpeople were encouraged to regard theacquisition of more and more consumergoods as the main aim in life. In Europe,such criticism took on a more explicitlyanti-capitalist form. In France the criticalbooks bore such titles as A Critique ofEveryday Life and the Society of theSpectacle. The argument was that in the"consumer society" (called instead, moreaccurately in fact, "commodity society") thelogic of buying something to passivelyconsume had spread from the purchase ofmaterial goods to other aspects of everydaylife - to how people spent their leisure timeand to how they related to each other.

This type of criticism added anotherdimension to the socialist case againstcapitalism: that it not only failed to organisethe satisfaction of material needs properlybut that it also degraded - dehumanised - the"quality of life".

It's not clear to whom the credit fordeveloping this "cultural criticism" ofcapitalism should go. The Frankfurt Schoolof Marxism (Fromm, Marcuse and others),the Situationists, even radical journalists inAmerica like Vance Packard, would beamong the candidates. In any event theywere all working on the basis of theobservable fact of the degrading effectcapitalism was having on the quality ofeveryday life by spreading commercialvalues more and more widely.

It's a powerful criticism of capitalism.Perhaps even these days, in this part of theworld, a more powerful criticism than thetraditional socialist one that capitalismbrings material poverty to most people.Certainly, on a world scale, there arehundreds of millions in dire materialpoverty. And there are few millions in thiscountry - around 15 percent of thepopulation - who are materially deprived.But we can't say this of the majority of thepopulation here. Most people in Britaindon't have a problem about getting threemeals a day, decent clothes, heating, don't

Capitalism and the quality of life

Richard Hamilton’s pop art critique ofcontemporary consumer society "JustWhat Is It That Makes Today's Homes SoDifferent, So Appealing?"

ThePropertyRightsActW h e nLabour gotback intooffice in1997, one of

the first things they did, to showwithout spending any money thatthey were reformers, was to signup to the European Conventionon Human Rights. This wassupposed to give people morelegal "rights". Actually, asinfringements could give rise tomonetary compensation, it wasmore a bonanza for lawyers andhas resulted in the further spreadof "compensation culture",capitalism's tendency to put amonetary value on everything.

But it has also had anothereffect: to entrench further therights of property, as two recentlegal cases have shown (Times,18 April and 23 November).Before the entry into force of the1998 Human Rights Act,"squatters" acquired a legal right

to a property after occupying itunchallenged for at least 12years.

The cases involvedproperty companies which hadacquired titles to land which hadbeen squatted by farmers formore than the 12 years. Thecompanies relied on an article ofthe Convention that states:"Every natural person is entitledto the peaceful enjoyment of hispossessions. No one shall bedeprived of his possessionsexcept in the public interest andsubject to the conditionsprovided by law."

The judges in both cases(the second those of theEuropean Court of HumanRights in Strasburg from whichthere is no appeal) ruled that theprevious English law thatallowed the farmers to assumeownership of the land was aninfringement of the propertycompanies' rights as enshrinedin the Convention. As a resultthey will receive ascompensation a nice fat cheque,likely to run in one case tomillions of pounds.

So-called "human rights"have always been linked to

property rights. As C.B.Macpherson showed in hisclassic study of 16th and 17thEnglish political philosophy, ThePolitical Theory of PossessiveIndividualism, the whole conceptof human rights was based onthe idea of every human beinghaving a property right to theirown body. The state is notsupposed to stop them usingtheir mental and physicalenergies as they think fit; thisinvolves not just freedom fromarbitrary arrest andimprisonment, but also thefreedom to exercise their mentalfaculties in speech, publicationand religion.

Property as such came tobe regarded as a human rightwhen it was argued that humansalso had a right to what theythemselves had got from natureby their own bodily efforts, i.e. bytheir own labour. However, giventhe existing unequal ownershipof property, especially land, thebourgeois "theorists ofpossessive individualism" shiedaway from the egalitarianimplications of this labour theoryof property. Instead they cameup with various more or less

specious reasons as to whyproperty, however acquired (andincluding land, which no onecreated by their labour, and evenslaves), was, in the words of theFrench Revolution's 1789Declaration of the Rights of Manand the Citizen, "an inviolableand sacred right".

The freedom of property-owners from arbitrarydispossession by the state waswhat the French Revolutionestablished in France, but whichthe so-called GloriousRevolution in England in 1688and the US Constitution hadalready established in thesecountries.

The European Conventionof Human Rights is a directdescendant of the 1789Declaration of the Rights of Man,itself a reflection of the theory of"possessive individualism". It isessentially a Convention on theRights of Property - as neatlyillustrated by the fact that thearticle under which the propertycompanies won was not someobscure subsection, but Article Iof Protocol I entitled "Protectionof Property".

Cooking the Books (2)


have to go to the pawnbrokers or live invermin-invested rooms. In fact, thecommodification of the "wants of the mind"is based on the fact that most people havemoney to spend on satisfying wants overand above those of "the stomach". If peopledidn't have this discretionary purchasingpower after having satisfied their materialneeds, then there would be no market forcultural and entertainment products forcapitalism to stimulate, manipulate andexploit. (As to why people have this "extra"money to spend on entertainment, it willhave something to do with increasedintensity and stress at work requiring morerelaxation - more escapism - for people torecreate their particular ability to work.)

The criticism of "consumer society"was not just that it represented the invasionand colonisation of every aspect of sociallife by money-commodity relations, but thatit also encouraged passive consumptionrather than active participation. There is agreat deal of validity in this point - that the"consumer society" is one where,sometimes literally, people sit in armchairs

watching the passing show provided forthem. This is a criticism of people's lack ofparticipation is shaping their lives, a lackthat was also reflected politically where"democracy" is conceived of as merelychoosing every four or five years betweenrival would-be elites (using in factmarketing techniques to attract support).Instead of people making their own sport ortheir own entertainment - or politics - theyconsume them as a pre-packagedcommodity.

There must be something wrong witha society in which, instead of people livingtheir own lives and interacting with theirneighbours in a human way, they sit in frontof a screen watching actorsperform artificial scenes basedon exaggerations of everydaylife and identifying with thefictitious characters in theseprogrammes. And in which themost widely-read newspapersdon't discuss real events somuch as the artificial onesportrayed in these programmesand the lives and loves of theleading actors who play inthem - as well as those of otherso-called "celebrities" from theworld of sport andentertainment.

As long as capitalismlasts, the quality of life willcontinue to decline. There'snothing that can be done tostop this within the context ofcapitalism as it is due tocapitalism, representing, as itdoes, the dissolving effects onsociety of the spread of money-commodity relations into allaspects of life. So, despite theslow, but undeniable increasein material living standards incertain parts of the world thecase for socialism as a non-commercial society in whichhuman welfare and humanvalues will be the guiding

principle retains all its relevance. With thecommon ownership of the means of life,there could and would be productiondirectly to satisfy human needs and wantsand not for sale with a view to profit - thedeath of the commodity, the end of whatWilliam Morris called "commercial society"- and a classless community with agenuinely common interest in whichhumans can relate to each other as humanbeings and not as social atoms collidingwith each other on the market-place ascommodity buyers and sellers.

ADAM BUICK

Above: Marcuse. Right: Fromm

Under a section headed 'OpenGovernment', The Labour Partyelection manifesto of 1997 declaredhow "Unnecessary secrecy in

government leads to arrogance in governmentand defective policy decisions". It madereference to the Scott Report on weapons salesto Iraq under the Conservative Party andpledged that Labour would fight for aFreedom of Information Act and more opengovernment. Many voters were highlyimpressed with New Labour's alleged crusadefor accountability and gave them their fullsupport at the election.

In December of that year Tony Blairproudly revealed the White Paper Your Rightto Know: The Government's Proposals for aFreedom of Information Act. The documentadvocated "establishing a general right ofaccess to official records and information",and stated this would lead to more open andaccountable government.

The much awaited Freedom ofInformation Act received Royal Assent on 30November 2000 and was brought fully intoforce in January 2005. In June a report by theDepartment for Constitutional Affairs, whichassessed the first three months of the new Act,found that Ministers and Whitehall bureaucratswere failing to open up the government anddisclose information punctually to the publicas previously pledged. The report showed thatWhitehall departments had not revealed all theinformation asked for by the public in half ofall cases and that there had been hold-ups in athird of all requests.

Maurice Frankel, director of theCampaign for Freedom of Information, said inthe Guardian (24 June) that some departmentshad been so bad that "in any other field, the

government would be sending in a hit squad totake the functions over from them becausethey couldn't do the job". Pointing particularlyat the Home Office, he continued: "Thelegislation seems to have passed them by.They are living in a time warp."

In July, with Blair gearing up for his G8meeting in Gleneagles, the governmentdecided to release more than 500 documentsrequested under the Freedom of InformationAct - previously blocked documents producedby the Strategy Unit under Lord Birt, a Blairadviser. However, the government chose torelease them on the Friday evening of the Live8 events around the country, in the fullknowledge that the weekend press wouldfocus so much on the Live 8 concerts they'dhave little concern for anything else.

On 22 November the Daily Mirrorprinted a report, headed "Bush plot to bombhis Arab ally", which referred to a leaked 5-page government memo contending that USPresident George Bush considered bombing AlJazeera's headquarters in Qatar and was talkedout of it by Blair. Readers eagerly awaitedfurther revelations and wondered how thegovernment would react to the disclosure. Butdid the Blair government greet the opennessthat such an enquiry could bring and complywith requests for further information on thematter? Not on your nelly! The governmentrather had the attorney general, LordGoldsmith, threaten the Mirror and othernewspapers with the Official Secrets Act,elevating the disclosure of any furtherinformation to a treasonable offence.

It is somewhat ironic that a government,which had blatantly and dramatically lied tothe British public over Iraq's WMDs in anattempt to get them to support a war in Iraq, awar which was presented as being very muchin our interests, should now be saying thatdisclosure of the memo was not in the nationalinterest. After all, such an attack on AlJazeera's Qatar base could have resulted inretaliation against the British public at homeand abroad.

And it was not as if the USA had notalready set a precedent in attacking Al Jazeeraoffices. During the 2001 invasion ofAfghanistan, a US 'smart bomb' hit their Kabuloffices. Two years later, in April 2003, thewar in Iraq in full swing, their Baghdad officewas hit by a missile. In the latter incident not

only had Al Jazeera provided thePentagon with its co-ordinates,fearing another 'mistaken' attack,but witnesses in the area saw theplane fly twice over the buildingbefore it was hit. That same daythe Baghdad office of Abu DhabiTV was also hit.

What possible motive couldthe US have had for wishing tobomb Al Jazeera? Well, AlJazeera is based in Qatar, acountry considered a US ally andits staff are gleaned from allaround the world, even Britain, sothere can be little question of theTV station being considered anenemy. Al Jazeera's only agendais to report the news to anaudience of 50 million and in adifficult climate. When the TVstation first began broadcasting it won muchacclaim in the US. The New York Timeseulogized it as a "beacon of freedom" andWhite House officials saw it as livingtestimony that the Arab world wanteddemocracy and freedom of speech. But thenthe US top brass realised that Al Jazeera has a'tell it like it is' method of reporting; that itwas not going to bury the truth like so manywestern TVstations. It began reporting ingruesome detail what it saw, so much so that ithas a nifty sideline in selling footage toforeign TVcompanies. Moreover, it aired thealleged Osama bin Laden video tapes to theArab world. Clearly the TV station wasbecoming something of a "turbulent priest"that the kings of oil wanted rid of.

When, in 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, the USDeputy Defence Secretary claimed Al Jazeerawas "endangering the lives of US troops", itwas Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary ofDefense who upped hostility to the TV stationby falsely claiming it was collaborating withIraqi insurgents. At the behest of their USpuppet-masters, the newly elected Iraqigovernment had Al Jazeera temporarilythrown out of the country.

Back in June of 2005, Donald Rumsfeldfurther complained about Al Jazeera tarnishingthe good old US image "day after day". WhenUS forces launched a massive and mercilessassault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, stoppingall men of military age from leaving the city

How open is 'open government'?John Bissett looks at theFreedom of Information Act andthe cover-up over Americanplans to bomb Al Jazeera.

When thetruth hurts

Wolfowitz: “Al Jazeera endangering thelives of US troops” and Rumsfeld: “AlJazeera collaborating with Iraqiinsurgents.”


before the attack and with many hundreds ofcivilians dying in the consequent napalmbombardment, Rumsfeld commented on AlJazeerah's coverage of the atrocity: "I candefinitely say that what Al Jazeera is doing isvicious, inaccurate and inexcusable."

George Orwell once said: "during timesof universal deceit, telling the truth becomes arevolutionary act." Well, events before andsince the invasion of Iraq have revealed wecertainly live in times of universal deceit, somaybe Bush wanted Al Jazeera knocked outfor its revolutionary act of telling the truthabout the occupation of Iraq.

In prosecuting the former CabinetOfficial David Keogh along with LeoO'Connor, a researcher to the former LabourMP, Tony Clarke, over the leaked memo, andin threatening the media with the OfficialSecrets Act, the government is guilty of the

same crime that the story focused on - namelythat of attempting to strangle the truth. Blair,on the one hand, allegedly advises Bush that itwould not be wise to bomb Al Jazeera, whowould have been bombed because they revealthe truth which the US finds harmful. YetBlair clamps down on all attempts to bring thecircumstances surrounding the memo to publicattention, because to do so would likewiseharm Bush.

George Orwell left us with anothermemorable quote: "He who controls thepresent, controls the past. He who controls thepast, controls the future." This is exactly whatNew Labour, indeed the Bush-Blairbandwagon, is all about - controlling thefuture via their control of the present and whatinformation is available to us and in theinterests of their own backers. The Labourgovernment ceases to be "open to scrutiny"and accountable to the people and insteadbecomes the puppet of US foreign policy itsdetractors always claimed it to be, losing whattrust supporters might have had in it.

Of course none of the above shouldcome as a surprise to the well informed, whoare highly attuned to the Machiavelliangoings-on of the executive of big business,namely governments. Few governments ruleby force nowadays; most rule by consent, aconsent granted by a misinformed andconstantly lied-to public. Were governmentsreally open with the truth, they would live as

long as it would take the masses to tie

their metaphorical nooses. Indeed, it wasGeorge Bush Snr who once said: "If thepeople knew what we had done, they wouldchase us down the street and lynch us."

One thing that the Socialist Party canpride itself on is its openness. We have nosecrets; nothing we say or do is said or donebehind closed doors, away from publicscrutiny. Our EC meetings, Conferences andDelegate Meetings are always open to thepublic and there is nothing stopping membersof the public speaking at the same. Moreover,all of the reports of these meetings areavailable for scrutiny, even posted on the Web.And there are reasons for this - not only do webelieve in accountability and feel it importantto win the trust and respect of our fellowworkers, we further envisage socialist societyto be free, open and democratic, with alldelegates wholly accountable to the peoplewho elect them, so it makes sense that anorganisation advocating such a society shouldhold its own democratic procedures up as amodel.

And as advocates of democracy, freespeech and accountability, we will be closelywatching the trial of David Keogh and LeoO'Connor at Bow Street Magistrates Court on10 January, though without much hope thatthis case will result in a triumph in the causeof government accountability. For Blair andBush there is just too much at stake - the truth.

John Bissett

"If the people knewwhat we had done,they would chase usdown the street andlynch us." GeorgeBush Snr.


The Al Jazeera Newsroom


Working till wedropThe motto of the ancient

Roman slave owners was thatslaves should work, or sleep.It seems the modern

capitalists' version of that term is thatwage slaves must work till they drop.In November last year the media wasfilled with furore over the publicationof the Turner Report onto the future of the pension system - callingfor the retirement age to be increased from 65 to 68 by 2050.

The proposals in the report appear to try and be balanced,playing off the increase in retirement age with an end to means-testing, restoring the link between pensions and earnings (so thatpensions will rise with wages and thus be a more secure hedgeagainst inflation) and compelling employers to contribute towardsindividual pensions of employees. It also proposed that individualsshould be encouraged and facilitated in providing a personalpension for themselves. Essentially, the report seeks to spread theburden of the ageing population among all concerned parties.Turner himself told the BBC: "Unless we want the state pension toget meaner and meaner we either have to have higher tax or ahigher state pension age, we have decided on both."

That's how it is presented in the media, that is. We are allgetting older, and so pensions are going to cost more. How are wegoing to pay for them? Put another way, though, with the reality ofthe class struggle in mind, the problem looks more like: workersliving longer means that the share of the national income going tothe working class and away from the capitalists will rise if thecurrent settlement is maintained. This is clear from Turner's choice.The reality of paying for the pensions through higher taxes wouldhave been to take the cost of pensions from the surplus valueproduced by the working class as a whole and channel it back intotheir total life-time wage packet. It would have meant a transferfrom capital to labour.

It obviously cannot be about real privation, real shortages -there is more than enough food, clothing and housing to go round.What will happen, though, is that relative to capital invested - andmore importantly capital put aside in pension funds - the cost ofoutlays will rise. From this comes the myth that we are not savingenough - as if in choosing not to eat a loaf of bread today, it wouldmean there will be two loaves of bread tomorrow. Further, many ofthese retirees go on to do much useful work in the community or infamily life - but it is work which does not generate profits directlyand so is invisible to the capitalist planners.

This is a clear example of capital holding back production anddistribution - causing complications and distortions to rational

economic activity by compelling us to play the game of turn-over.The system always ensures that production leads to the creation ofmore money and value and ultimately more money (and capital) for

capitalists real and imaginary. Put another way: the advancesfrom our labour - including an increased life span - are beingclawed back by capital to its advantage.

In seeking, therefore, to try and spread the pain around,what the report is proposing is in fact to push the burden fromthe capitalists and onto the workers. We need to be clear:raising the retirement age of workers is a very real pay cut.We will be asked to work more years and for a greaterproportion of our lives than we expected. For some this willbe a very real loss.

Already there is a marked difference in life expectancyacross income groups, with unskilled manual male workers

having an expectancy of 71 years as compared to an average of 79for professionals (and of course, these being averages means a greatmany do not reach them). That means that more than just cuttingthese workers' pay, these proposals will actually cost them a greatdeal of any extra life expectancy they might gain by 2050.

The distinctly Old Labour reforms to pensions of endingmeans-testing, linking pensions to earnings and compellingemployer contributions are just a way of buying off the unions anddisguising the reality of the attack. Of course, this report is just aset of proposals and it will be up to the Government to implementchanges which may include some parts and not others. AlreadyGordon Brown has been making ominous noises of concern -preferring his model of means-testing (he calls it targeting resourceson the poor) to a general simplified and slightly increased statepension.

The unions, though, are obligingly making noises about thepoorest and least well off being hit hard by these proposals, but areessentially content with them. Now that 'class warfare' is a term tobe derided in the labour movement, these organisations are blindedto the reality of the situation and the working class is leftintellectually disarmed before a media barrage of lies about peopleliving longer meaning paying more.

Rousing the unions to defend the workers' position withincapitalism, though, isn't the job of socialists. Even if these reformswere stopped, the next economic crisis, the next half-baked excusewould soon come along to try and roll back the workers' share. Ourmission is to show clearly both how we are robbed and exploited bythe system ruled by capital and how we can untap the wealth of ourcollective productive power by taking control of the means ofproduction directly.

In socialism everyone would have the opportunity tocontribute to the community for as long as they could. Theircontributions would not have to be strictly rationed nor controlledand all would be able to share in the common produce. Thecreation of second class cast-off workers known as pensionerswould cease to be and in its place we could have a fair share for all.The struggle for such a society is in our immediate practicalinterest. PIK SMEET

Be disobedient -think for yourself

Let's rebel! Let's freeourselves from the corrupt,rapacious society we live in!

We workers produce,organise, and manageproduction for a minority ofcapitalists who own what weproduce; then, from the sale ofthe products we make, thecapitalists accumulate morecapital from profits. Some of theprofits are reinvested to haveus work to develop theproduction facilities for theowners, the remainder of theprofits are used by the ownersto expand their wealth andextend their power bycontrolling their governmentsand "persuading" politicians,both nationally andinternationally.

Let us change this way ofrunning affairs! We workersproduce and distribute allgoods; let us own everythingand abolish private property, so

everyone can democraticallydecide how to care for eachother.

This division of worldsociety into those who own andcontrol capital (the capitalistclass), and those who have towork to increase the capitalists'wealth (the working class) mustbe abo1ished and replaced bya co-operative society ofcommon ownership by freelyassociating individuals - that iseveryone. A real inclusivesociety of carers with no selfish,private owning capitalists, asnow , accumulating wealth andrunning society through theirpoliticians and governments.

Under common ownershipreal democracy will work;everyone can participate fully inadministration and be heard -not like now, when the 30seconds it takes you to put across on the ballot paper isignored for years by politicianstoo busy pocketing brownenvelopes.

Within a society of

common ownership, if there areindividuals elected they will becontrolled by the electors andsubjected to immediate recall.This means the elected will beservants of the electors, andrecalled to be removedimmediately by those whoelected them, if they do notfollow the instructions of thosewho gave them the chance tobe public servants.

The evidence thateveryone has equal power andan equal vote in every decisiontaken will be obvious within thisfuture society by the removal ofthe threat of hunger, exercisedunder capitalist society againstall who are unwilling to acceptthe conditions of work andcompliance. Within this futuresociety of freely associating,equal individuals, every man,woman and child will take whatgoods they want from acommunal store. This freeaccess, this freedom is whatwill maintain real democracy,and it will be possible because

money will be unnecessary andnon-existent.

Money is a means ofexchange in capitalist society. aform of rationing by the ownersof the non- owners - no money,no goods. In a society ofcommon ownership and freeaccess - we use the wordsocialism to describe it -everybody will own everything,so why would we want to payourselves? Our common sensewill tell us not to waste whatcould be shared with others.

As socialists we want toparticipate in a global-community progression to freehumankind's real humanpotential. We are all equals, ifdifferent. We don't acceptleaders, which is why we inviteyou to ignore leaders too. Beginto free yourself, be disobedient,think for yourself, askquestions, and inquire after thecase we suggest. - leaflet issued by socialists inIreland.

Adair Turner


Book ReviewRationed freedomThe Economics of Freedom: Ananarcho-syndicalist alternative tocapitalism. Solidarity Federation. 2003.£2.50.

This 40-page pamphlet presents analternative, variously described as an"anarchist economy" and "libertariancommunism", to capitalism.

We wouldn't disagree with thegeneral description of the alternativeoffered:

". . . a society without money. Peoplework as a social duty; wages areunnecessary - 'from each according totheir ability'; and cash is no longer neededto acquire goods - 'to each according toneed.'"

" . . . a system without the market andwhere everyone has equal rights to havetheir needs met . . ."

" . . . a society where all have equalcontrol over decision-making and equalaccess to goods and services."

"All work is voluntary, and goods andservices equally accessible. Money, wagesand prices do not exist."

But what is surprising is thealternative to having to use money toacquire consumer goods described in thesection "planning basics", which speaks of"voluntary 'rations', decideddemocratically":

"Some sophistication is needed to runthis 'rationing' system. There is no point inallocating everyone four eggs a week.Some people do not eat eggs; others wouldprefer six but no cheese, and so on. In thecase of food, it might be a ration of caloriesand nutritional intake, taking into accountfactors like age, height, special dietary andother needs. People would be entitled toany common foodstuff that met theseneeds, rather than being allocatedquantities of specific foodstuffs."

We really are talking here about asystem of rationing (without the invertedcommas) in which people would beallocated (equal for people in equalcircumstances) certain amounts of things.The proposed alternative to money turnsout to be a computerised card to bepresented to draw your entitlement fromthe common store:

"Allocation of goods can becomputerised to record every product orservice a person takes or uses with theinformation also being stored on cards tobe presented when someone wants aproduct or service. The purpose is toprevent very excessive consumption. Forexample, it allows staff in common storesto query why someone might be requestinga new suite six months after getting theprevious one."

This is surprising as the pamphlet issupposed to be describing an "anarchisteconomy" whereas the scheme proposed,involving as it would keepingcomputerised records of everythingindividuals consumed, can only with greatdifficulty be described as "libertarian". Noteven capitalism does that! And, what aboutthe shoplifters?

Socialist society will certainly, for

planning how much to produce, need arough figure for what people are likely toconsume over a given period, but this onlyneeds to be measured globally for anydistrict - as, for instance, by acomputerised system of stock control or bysample polling - not at the level of eachand every individual.

But why could not people have freeaccess to consumer goods and servicesaccording to what they themselves decidetheir needs are? There are only twocircumstances that would make thisunworkable: (a) if it wasn't technicallypossible to produce enough to satisfy theneeds of everyone, and (b) if it was thoughtthat even a significant minority wouldconsistently take more than they could use.

All the evidence suggests that, oncethe artificial scarcity imposed by the needto make a profit has been removed, andonce all the resources currently wasted onselling activities (and on armaments andarmed forces) have been redirected touseful production, then enough could beproduced to supply everyone's needs. Andexperience of where even today peoplehave free access to something - e.g. buses,telephones, drinking water, in some places- they only use these things when theyneed to. In any event, what would be thepoint of taking more than you neededwhen you could be certain that the storeswould be stocked with what you wanted?That would just clutter up where you lived.

Certainly, particularly in the veryearly days of socialism and perhaps laterafter some unexpected natural disaster,there could be shortages of some thingsthat might necessitate recourse to somesystem of rationing for those things. Butthis would only be exceptional andtemporary, the normal situation being freeaccess to goods and services according toself-determined needs.

What this pamphlet proposes is anintrinsic system of long-term rationing,even if the rations are to be decideddemocratically. That would be a possiblealternative to money and, if it worked,fairer than money, but it's not necessarilywhat socialists advocate could - or should- happen in "a society without money".ALB

Karen Horney AgainDear Editors,A letter last month quotes Karen Horney.Her book on neurosis is really worth a readsince she was much in the same socialpsychology vain as Erich Fromm, i.e.finding more to neurosis in the way oursociety is than merely positing biologicaland individual causes. She argued that theneurotic individual doesn't have a large ego(real sense of self, not the negativeconnotation of ego) and substitutes anunreal sense of self in place.

As an illustration, every one of usgets told to get passes in this or that inorder to get a well paid job. That can leadto someone knocking their head against awall, doing things they aren't in to, andhaving an unrealisable goal to achieve andthus having a measure for their failure toget down over.

It has always been a socialistargument that we will do what we likedoing in socialism and thus this will lead toharmonious development of people.Horney the psychiatrist put a theoretical orpsychological insight/argument that backsthis up somewhat.

GRAHAM TAYLOR, BRABRAND,DENMARK

Dear Editors,Regarding Karen Horney, I found her firstand last books the best and her other stuffmediocre. Her first book, New Ways inPsychoanalysis, is excellent if you want acrash course on Freud and she seems to bea bit more radical probably under theinfluence of "her close friend" Fromm. Sheseemed to have sold out a bit in her lastbook.

I don't want to give the impressionthat Neurosis and Human Growth is notworth a read. I think it is a must and is oneof the most influential books I have read. Ithink you have to read it at least twice toget the full impact.

DAVE BALMER (by email)

Letters

This declaration is the basis of ourorganisation and, because it is alsoan important historical documentdating from the formation of theparty in 1904, its original languagehas been retained.

ObjectThe establishment of a systemof society based upon thecommon ownership anddemocratic control of the meansand instruments for producingand distributing wealth by and inthe interest of the wholecommunity.

Declaration of PrinciplesThe Socialist Party of GreatBritain holds

1.That society as at presentconstituted is based upon theownership of the means of living(i.e., land, factories, railways, etc.)by the capitalist or master class,

and the consequent enslavementof the working class, by whoselabour alone wealth is produced.

2.That in society, therefore, there isan antagonism of interests,manifesting itself as a classstruggle between those whopossess but do not produce andthose who produce but do notpossess.

3.That this antagonism can beabolished only by the emancipationof the working class from thedomination of the master class, bythe conversion into the commonproperty of society of the means ofproduction and distribution, andtheir democratic control by thewhole people.

4.That as in the order of socialevolution the working class is thelast class to achieve its freedom,the emancipation of the working

class will involve the emancipationof all mankind, without distinctionof race or sex.

5. That this emancipation must bethe work of the working class itself.

6.That as the machinery ofgovernment, including the armedforces of the nation, exists only toconserve the monopoly by thecapitalist class of the wealth takenfrom the workers, the workingclass must organize consciouslyand politically for the conquest ofthe powers of government, nationaland local, in order that thismachinery, including these forces,may be converted from aninstrument of oppression into theagent of emancipation and theoverthrow of privilege, aristocraticand plutocratic.

7.That as all political parties arebut the expression of class

interests, and as the interest of theworking class is diametricallyopposed to the interests of allsections of the master class, theparty seeking working classemancipation must be hostile toevery other party.

8.The Socialist Party of GreatBritain, therefore, enters the field ofpolitical action determined to wagewar against all other politicalparties, whether alleged labour oravowedly capitalist, and calls uponthe members of the working classof this country to muster under itsbanner to the end that a speedytermination may be wrought to thesystem which deprives them of thefruits of their labour, and thatpoverty may give place to comfort,privilege to equality, and slavery tofreedom.

18 Socialist Standard January 2006

The Daily Sketch (3/12/55) reported a BBC Televisioninterview with Mr. Aneurin Bevan the previous evening inwhich he was asked what he would do about the H andA bombs if he became PrimeMinister. According to the report hereplied that he would abolish the Hbomb but keep the A bomb. As hewas a member of the LabourGovernment that made the A bombany other reply about that weaponwould have needed someexplanation, but the reason he gavefor regarding the H and A bombs asdifferent propositions was singularlyunconvincing.

"Pressed to express thedifference, he said the differences ofquantity became differences ofquality. 'It's like comparing drowningin a bath with drowning in an ocean.'he said." - (Daily Sketch, 3/12/55.)

We would have supposed that both ways ofdrowning led to the victims being equally dead.

Mr. Bevan went on to say that he did not think thatthe H bomb "either postpones war or brings it nearer". In

this he differs from his associate, Mr. Richard Crossman,Labour MP for East Coventry (who, it is rumoured, hasnow moved away from the Bevanite group). Writing in

the Daily Mirror (25/11/55) Mr. Crossmanclaimed that with both sides having the bombthe Powers dare not go to war.

"We are at peace today because noGreat Power can make war withoutautomatically blowing itself to pieces."

Mr. Crossman is, therefore, in favour ofkeeping the H bomb as well as the A bomb.

In the meantime the ManchesterGuardian reports (7/11/55) that the AmericanGovernment has given urgent instructions tothe American military authorities "to widenresearch into germ and gas warfare, andwarfare by the use of radio-active particles." Itwould appear from this that the AmericanGovernment does not accept Mr. Crossman'sview that large-scale war between the big

Powers must either be with the use of the H bomb or notat all. They evidently envisage other possibilities.

(from "Notes by the Way" by H., Socialist Standard,January 1956)

CHISWICKTuesday 19 JanuaryRUSSIA: AN ANALAYSISOF RECENT CHANGESSpeaker: Vincent OtterCommittee Room, Chiswick TownHall, Heathfield Terrace, W4(nearest tube: Chiswick Park).

EAST ANGLIAA new East Anglian RegionalBranch has been formed. Thebranch's first meeting will takeplace on Saturday 11 February inNorwich from 12 noon to 4pm.

The agenda is as follows:12 noon. Informal chat.1pm. Meal2pm to 4pm. Branch organisationand future activity.

The exact venue is: TheConservatory, back room of theRosary Tavern, Rosary Road,Norwich.All welcome.

Meetings

Declaration of Principles

Mr. Bevan and the Bombs

CorrectionDue to a printing error the last line and thename of the writer were left off the "Reportfrom Paris" on page 8 of last month'sSocialist Standard. The last sentence ofthe article should have read: "Andcapitalism should be eradicated withoutfurther delay to enable us to enjoy thebeautiful things of this world without fear".The writer was Dele C. Iloanya, Paris.

19Socialist Standard January 2006

Nightmarefor Toryleaders

By their decisive vote the Torymembership have elected, inDavid Cameron, a leader whoseems to be unsure about his

own identity. Is the man they havechosen the same David Cameron who,perhaps trying to impress us with hisfearlessly rounded personality, recalledhis ballet lessons as a child? Or is he the David Cameron whoquickly denied having those lessons "after checking with hismother" (although not, apparently, with his spin doctors)? Is heDavid Cameron speaking, at the start of his campaign, to theCentre for Social Justice (and there's a grand name for anorganisation that hardly anyone has heard of): "The biggestchallenge our country faces is not economic decline, but socialdecline"? Or is he David Cameron three months later, when hetold the assembled hacks outside Parliament: "I want us toconfront the big challenge that this country faces: making surewe have a strong economy so we can generate the jobs weneed . . ."? Is he David Cameron looking forward so much tobeing party leader: "I am very excited by it. I want to be a voicefor change, for optimism and hope"? Or is he David Cameronshortly afterwards, who was asked on the Richard and Judy

show if the Tory leadershipwould not be some kind ofpoisoned chalice andresponded starkly "It's anightmare job"?

There are not a fewprecedents to encourageCameron in that pessimistic -or rather realistic - assessment.At the Tory conference in 1963it dawned on Alec Douglas-Home, then known to readersof Burke's Peerage as the 14thEarl of Home, that he - thegovernment's affablegentleman amateur - was inserious danger of beinguprooted from the mellowcourtesies of the House of

Lords and dumped, as party leader and prime minister, into thebear garden of the Commons. This was not an attractiveproposition. "Oh they must find someone else" he wailed to alobby correspondent "Even if they can't agree on Rab (Butler) orQuintin (Hailsham) there must be someone else. But please,please, not me". But "they" did not "find someone else" becauseof all the contenders for the leadership he was considered to bethe one least likely to be a disaster.

And on that unpromising assumption he was pitched intobattle against Harold Wilson, whose craftily cultivated Yorkshirevowels enunciated the claim that the Labour Party stood for athrusting, technological Britain while the Tories, by the very factof Douglas Home becoming their leader, had proclaimed theirresolve to cling to a discredited past. It did Home no good thathe saw himself to be a "moderniser", charged with uniting hisparty after the schisms of the Macmillan years. His PartyChairman, along with many of his supporters, came to dread hisefforts to compete with Wilson's grasp of the irrelevances ofcapitalist economics. On some of his prime ministerial journeysabroad his wife repeatedly had toremind him of their destination for fearthat he would step off the plane anduse the welcoming microphones to leteveryone know how delighted he wasto have arrived in some other city. Heath

Home never mastered thetechniques of putting across ontelevision the deceptions and evasionsso necessary to a politician. He cameacross as someone whose historicallyprivileged background prevented himhaving any idea of how the majority ofpeople lived - not that the politicianswho do show some such

understanding are any more effective. So it was some surprise,that it was by only a small margin that Home lost his one andonly election in 1964. He then largely left the job of opposing theWilson government to his lieutenants and in July 1965, as thetide of criticism rose around him, he resigned. In 1989 a TVinterviewer asked him "You never really wanted to be PrimeMinister did you?" and Home replied "Terrible intrusion into one'sprivate life". As he left Downing Street his party resolved thatnever again would their leader "emerge" as he had; in future itwould be through an election. Not that it has done them muchgood, or made the job less of a nightmare.

The first person to gain advantage of the Tories taking theirfirst nervous steps into any kind of internal democracy wasEdward Heath. He was by then already a controversial figure inthe party, partly because of his support for British membership ofthe European Community and partly because he had pushedthrough the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance, which hadaffected a great many small shopkeepers. In a sense unknownto Home he was a "moderniser" whose modest background wasin contrast to the earl in his castle among the grouse moors. ButHeath resisted any attempt by Tory propagandists to "sell" him inthat way, on the grounds that to do so would be to descend tothe same depths of cynicism as Wilson.

During his five years as Leader of the Opposition Heathsignalled that the Tories had broken with the polices of"Butskellism" - the consensus between Labour and ToryChancellors about economic policy. In its place the partydeveloped plans to reform - which really meant to curb - theeffectiveness of trade unions to resist any attacks on wages orworking conditions. At the same time there was to be an end togovernment helping out "lame ducks" - propping up firms or evenindustries which were in difficulties. In the short term theargument ran, this may cause problems, for example to workerswho lose their jobs; but in the long run the logic of profitabilitywould ensure greater and enduring prosperity for all.

CameronThis was also called modernising but this latest plan to

solve all the problems of British capitalism did not long survivethe Tory victory at the 1970 election, as it was undermined by aseries of what came to be called U turns. Finally, Heath'sgovernment was seen as a bunch of rigid blunderers whowillingly reduced the country to a three day week rather thanquestion the dogma contributing to the crisis.

By the time he lost the election in February 1974 Heath hadfew friends in his party and he was infamous for his unprovokedrudeness. He seemed genuinely to fail to understand whyanyone could possibly resist the force of his arguments; asDouglas Hurd, who was then his PoliticalSecretary, put it "He believed that peopledeserved the evidence and by god theywere going to get it". Worse was tocome for him as an exasperated partydeprived him of the leadership andelected Thatcher in his place, leavingHeath to moulder on the back benches,jeered by his own party when hecriticised the Thatcher government andimmersed in what looked very much likethe comfort of a long-term sulk.

And now it is Cameron's turn; thequestion is, in spite of his assurances,has anything really changed? On his wayto the leadership Cameron presentedhimself as an architect of compassionate conservatism - asdistinct, presumably, from cruel and pitiless conservatism. Wellhe would say that, wouldn't he - just as all the other recentleaders - Hague, Duncan Smith, Howard - have said it, beforetheir party went on to fight an election on policies which wereanything but compassionate. Of course cadging for votes doesstrange things to a politician; how else can we explainCameron's recent yearning to give up his £1.2 million house inNotting Hill and move to Neasden. Or his inability to remember,not just whether he took Class A drugs, but whether he joinedthe Tory Party, when he was at Oxford. (With a memory like that,how on earth did he get a degree?)

When he said the job of Tory leader is a nightmare perhapshe had in mind, not just the experiences of the three men mostrecently in that job but the fact that he is the fifth Tory leaderduring the last eight years and that of the ten leaders startingwith Churchill the majority have either been ousted or haveresigned. A persistent feature of nightmares is the sensation ofbeing out of control - something which all the politicians whoprofess to be able to shape capitalism to their will, perhaps tomake it a compassionate social system - must know about. Theymay try to conceal the chaos behind a mask of confidence, untilreality ensures that they wake up screaming. IVAN

Home -affable,gentlemanamateur

Heath - the frying pan...

Thatcher - the fire

Produced and published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UNISSN 0037 8259

Never Steal Anything ... The owning class through theirschoolrooms and churches are forevertelling young workers never to steal, butin reality the capitalists turn out to bethe biggest thieves of all. "Fraud iscosting British business £72 billion ayear, according to a report out thisweek. Despite the warning of recentcorporate scandals involving Enron,WorldCom, Parmalat and Refco, UKcompanies are still estimated to belosing 6 per cent of their annualrevenue to fraud and corruption, says astudy by the Association of CertifiedFraud Examiners and internationallawyers Mishcon de Reya" (Observer,20 November). £72 billion a year! Itseems to be a case of never stealanything .. small.

Room At The Top Good news for the homeless in France,according to a recent report on hotelsthat have some vacancies. "The leastexpensive room at the George V, isabout £390 per night includingbedroom, bathroom and breakfast. Themost expensive suite at the PlazaAthenee costs almost £10,000 per nightand includes four rooms and breakfast"(Times, 30 November)

Old, Cold And Hungry Malnutrition amongst elderly Scots hassoared in the past ten years andpressure groups blame the ScottishExecutive for allowing pensioners to livebelow the poverty line. In 1995, 40

Scots died from malnutrition, but lastyear that figure had soared to 99."(Times, 21 November) Even morealarming figures have been released forthe UK by the charity Age Concern."150,000 people over 65 have died as aresult of the cold in the past five years."(Times, 25 November)

The Slaughter Of The Innocents Capitalism's record of murder is evenmore horrific when looked at from aworld perspective. "Nearly six millionchildren die from hunger or malnutritionevery year, The Food and AgricultureOrganisation says. Many deaths resultfrom treatable diseases such asdiarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria andmeasles, the agency said. They wouldsurvive if they had proper nourishment,the agency says in a new report on

world hunger."(BBC News,22 November)

Our Masters'Voice TheConfederationof BritishIndustryexpresses theviews of theBritishcapitalist class.Here for

instance is Sir Digby Jones, thechairman of the CBI, on trade unionsand international competition: "Tradeunions in the private sector in the 21stcentury will become largely irrelevant....There are 1.3 billion Chinese out therewho want your lunch and a billionIndians who want your dinner." (Times,22 November). Sir Digby is of courseindulging in wishful thinking, he knowsthat the British working class's greatestprotection against the profit-madowners on the industrial front is theunion. A greater threat to all thecapitalists of the world would be theworld's working class uniting politically.(See Rigg's view below).

Ah,Progress The rapidgrowth ofcapitalism inChina andIndia hasbeen greetedwith acclaimby all itssupporters.There isanother sideto the storythough,illustrated bytwo recentdevelopmentsas reported in the Observer (27November) The Chinese city Harbin,population 3.5 million, has had no watersupply for four days because of thepollution caused by 100 tonnes ofbenzene - a colourless, odourlesscarcinogenic chemical - spilling into theriver upstream after an explosion at thelocal chemical factory. "The poisoning ofthe Songhua river has exposed themurkier side of China's spectaculareconomic growth; the emphasis onbusiness rather than environment, thetendency to cover up health risks andsplits within the government." FromIndia comes news of the exploitation ofchildren to feed the rapacious growth ofcapitalism. 400 children were found

working in factories in Delhi. "Housed ina night shelter for beggars, theembroidery workers, aged 5 to 14, werewaiting yesterday to hear their fate."

by RiggFree lunch

Average digs atthe PlazaAthenee

The Songhua riverat Harbin, now fullof benzene

Some of theDelhi childlabourers,

photographedbefore being

rescued

socialiststandard-2006-1217-jan

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