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SNAKE-OIL REMEDIES FOR CAPITALISM.

Posted on October 18, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Quack doctors selling snake-oil and other supposedly effective remedies were popularised in US Cowboy adventures on the silver screen when I was a youngster. They rolled into town and offered bottles of the stuff to naïve citizens claiming it had qualities which would cure any ill that the human condition might suffer. Now we have a similar situation with regard to so-called contemporary ‘experts’ in curing the economic woes of capitalism. Each expert has his or her own brand of economic snake-oil and show up on our TV screens offering remedies that they insist are sure to be part of the cure for the sick system of capitalism. Some of these prescriptions have been covered in previous articles, particularly ‘Q3: Bailouts and Banks; and ‘Bonds and Bubbles’. This article will outline some more of them touted in the media as means of solving the ‘five-fold crisis. It will hopefully become clear from analysing them that the system cannot be saved by reforming various aspects of it.

1. Saving Capitalism by boosting spending.

As a way of trying to create economic growth, there have been a few suggestions recently by so-called economic experts that the government should not just print more money and give it to the banks, but give every adult a few hundred pounds to spend. The suggestion includes conditions which should be placed upon it; to be spent on sensible commodity items and within a set period of time – for example one or two months. The idea is that people will spend the money, shops will take on more staff, sell their stocks and re-order from manufacturers who will take on more staff and increase production. Whilst it ‘appears’ on the surface to make sense and have its attractions, economically it is a nonsense proposal for the following reasons.

Let us assume, for example, that the UK government gives out £200 to 40 million adults (a total handout of £8 billion) with the above conditions stipulated. In the first months shops are busy, take on temporary staff, have a bonanza and order more goods. The manufacturers, increase production, through overtime and/or temporary staff. Are new factories going to be built? No! Are high levels of permanent jobs going to appear? No! After the months are over, trade drops back at least to previous levels, shops order less, manufacturers cut-back production again. Temporary staff are laid off and the situation is back to its previous condition.

Or is it? Of course not – for at least 3 reasons! 1. Forty million people do not have to buy the things they have just purchased. 2. Retails capitalists have gained a share of the £8 billion. 3.Manufacturing capitalists have got a share. 4. The government is now £8 billion (minus the VAT they get back) further in debt. And so in the months after, the economic level may go further down than before and the government must raise taxes or cut expenditure. And all the above is assuming the very best scenario, for it is by no means certain that all the retail shops will increase the orders from UK based manufacturers. It is more likely the case that they will find ways to purchase cheaper supplies from the global market.

It only sounds a good idea if you don’t stop to think about it, but now more than ever we need to stop to think about things the elite are suggesting. This is not to suggest that giving people some of the money back which the capitalists and government have previously extracted from their labour, is not a good thing in itself, but it is not a cure (or even a partial cure) for the massive contradictions within the capitalist mode of production. And of course as a policy objective it would act as a distraction. A similar process would occur with any country which adopted such a suggestion and that is exactly why it is unlikely to be adopted anywhere.

Another allied scheme for saving the system by boosting spending, is the idea of payment of a ‘living-wage’. The idea that a certain level of wage is necessary to live and that the government-set minimum-wage is insufficient, pre-supposes wage-slavery and the continuation of capitalism. Of course a higher-wage, whilst the system persists is something to campaign for, but the idea of certain local authorities and private companies paying a ‘living-wage’, on a voluntary basis, leaves out of consideration those who are not so employed and those who are unemployed. Since under austerity, the former are getting less numerous and the latter more so, this will do nothing to seriously stimulate the economic activities of a country or region. Nor will it solve the problem of a satisfactory existence for the bulk of society – those who will not get a ‘living-wage‘.

For the sake of brevity, this is an extract from a longer analysis of six ‘remedies’ suggested by various schools of political and economic thought. The other snake-oil remedies are as follows.

2. Saving Capitalism by increased taxation.

3. Saving Capitalism by more/better regulation.

4. Saving Capitalism by increasing competitiveness.

5. Saving Capitalism by economic growth.

6. Saving Capitalism by further privatisations.

The full article discussing the five above suggestions appears with the title ‘Snake-oil for Capitalism’ in the black strip below the picture banner at the head of this page, or by clicking on the following link.

https://criticalmassdotnet.wordpress.com/snake-oil-remedies-for-capitalism

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2012.0

Posted in Critique, Economics, Finance | Tagged better regulation, Capitalist reforms, economic growth, further privatisations, increased taxation | Leave a comment

BONDS AND BUBBLES.

Posted on October 5, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Bonds.

Bonds are pieces of paper which are offered to the financial sector for investment purposes by two types of institution. First is the private company who, if they cannot or do not want to raise money in any other way, offer a paper promise (the bond). The promise is to return a certain amount (the bond value) at a future date in return for some cash. In order for bonds to be bought, there must be large quantities of liquidity within the overall financial sector otherwise there would be no point in offering one to the bond-market. This cash the bond issuers can use in two ways. They can use it (as with any spare internal revenue they have on their books), to develop production or they can use it to speculate. In the case of government bonds (sovereign bonds) it is generally used for revenue.

One element of the existing crisis arose because bonds were issued by firms in the past and the funds used to speculate. Many, if not most of those speculations, went sour during different phases of the crash. In other words many of those companies and financial institutions now still have high levels of debt. As argued in a previous post (Bailouts and Banks) those companies are hardly likely in the present circumstances to issue more bonds for either purpose. On the other hand most of those companies which did not speculate and are still financially sound, are also unlikely to issue bonds for the reasons mentioned above. They are hanging on to their large positive balance sheet entries. A lack of present demand, and given a promised future of austerity, a probable lack of future demand, is highly unlikely to tempt these and other firms to increase production. But these are not the only source of bonds.

A second source of bonds are those issued by governments. These have been much in the media’s attention of late. The tax income of 20th and 21st century governments, from all sources, is insufficient to sustain their expenditures. The debt of governments has increased to such a level, that there is now a genuine possibility of a future series of sovereign debt defaults (ie a governmental failures to pay). For this reason, those who purchase them are insisting on the interest they effectively receive on these bonds, from governments deemed most likely to default, is high. In this way those governments most in debt, are getting even more in debt. Some governments are having to issue bonds just to pay the interest on previous and current bonds. Even the so-called strong Governments such as the USA, the UK and Germany, are heavily reliant on bond income for their survival.

An interesting fact about bonds is that those who purchase them in effect are giving very little money away. This is because in exchange for their money-capital, they are given a certificate (the bond) which can be – and is – traded and exchanged like any other asset or money. So in normal times buying a government bond for a capitalist or capitalist consortium is almost like doubling the quantity of money invested. It’s ’substance’ enables the bond to be sold and a second investment to be made with a asset value not much less than the first. All this without risking any further money. In this way at least two investment vehicles can be operating with the one advancement of finance-capital. Also because the government bonds are issued by the state and the ultimate payees of the bond are all the tax-payers, then every tax-payer, who cannot ‘dodge’ their tax is in debt to the bond-holders without ever having entered into that debt themselves. This is the bond-holders trump card, with pro-capitalist politicians in charge, sovereign bonds are financial instruments of mass destruction for communities.

This new twist has been designated as ‘collateral transformation’. One of the definitions of ‘transformation’ is ‘alter out of recognition’ which is apt in this case for this is exactly what is intended. Note here that this ‘transformation’ just continues previous business as usual and as before merely hides the flimsy nature of the paper-backed assets along with the considerable risk of default. At the same time it should be noted that these so-called ‘high-grade’ collateral assets which are to be ‘rented out’ in this way are nothing more than government bonds. Bonds, which we have seen are nothing more than paper promises to pay – issued by governments who have no possible way to repay them! How sensible is that? Guess who are already gearing up for this new ‘transformative’ trading? JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank! Does this list ring any bells? Clearly nothing has been learned from the previous crash and the feeble efforts to hinder this practice have already been crudely subverted.

So much for the USA. Meanwhile across the pond! In Europe a so-called solution has been contrived by the political and economic elite, whereby the European central bank (ECB) will buy up the bonds, or guarantee them, providing the sign up to certain conditions (conditionality). It is hoped by this measure that the bond-market will continue to lend to government at more reasonable interest rates. ECB conditionality effectively dictates central-bank policies to governments. It is an attempt to overthrow European democracy by financial dictatorship. The conditions which will be demanded of course will comprise of cut-backs in government expenditure and the selling off of state (peoples collective) assets. These cut-backs, as those elsewhere, will of course not solve the underlying problem. They will as they are implemented, cause the destruction of working peoples standards of living and in some cases their lives, and of course, fight-backs. But austerity programmes also have further economic effects.

Cut-backs in government spending will also take further demand out of the market and so undermine any government activity trying to stimulate growth. But also note here the overall surreal nature of this crazy circuit. The central government prints money, via its central bank (ECB in Europe) and gives it to the banks. The banks lend it to financial investors and institutions, who give it back to governments in exchange for government bonds. The governments then spend it on their salaries and favoured war projects etc., but of course they are supposed to pay the value of the bonds to the investors. Just in case they cannot, the central banks guarantee to buy the bonds back if the individual governments can’t honour them. Think about it! Central Banks representing governments are printing money, practically giving it away in order to get it back again via the financial sector and paying interest for the privilege. In the process making the bond-holders, their ilk and their brokers even richer.

If it weren’t for keeping their buddies among the financial elite happy, it would make more capitalist sense to just print money and give it directly to the investors and cut out the middle-men? The full stupidity of this solution to the sovereign debt crisis is revealed by the fact that at no stage does this any phase of this money-printing circuit involve stimulating fundamental economic activity. But of course printing shed-loads of money tokens and handing them out to the rich individuals and institutions will enable some things and stimulate others. It will enable members of the political class to get jobs in the City of London and Wall Street (the revolving door between governments posts and jobs in the finance sector.) and importantly the extra financial assets will stimulate more bubbles.

Bubbles.

The publicity around the toxic mortgage crisis of 2007 also revealed the tip of an iceberg of what are generally called ‘financial bubbles’. These bubbles are more frequent than is often assumed and they occur when large amounts of finance capital chase what is seen as sure thing, ’value-enhancing’ investments. In such cases, there is an expectation that the investment opportunity targeted will continue to rise in value and so more and more money chases assets tied to the target. This initially has all the symptoms of a self-fulfilling prophesy, for the sequence of purchases boost the price of the asset and therefore it seems indeed to be increasing in value by the ‘obvious’ fact of its increasing price.

However, price and value are not always the same thing. Indeed, they rarely are. Prices always fluctuate, for a variety of reasons, above or below the value of anything. In the case of bubbles the price is pushed up by chasing demand and is based upon hopes far more than reality. It continues until a point is reached when some investors, start to sell because they recognise this and fear a downward trend. This too becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. As more people sell, the price continues to drop and eventually a virtual downward stampede occurs and the price drops catastrophically. As it did in the dot-com bubble of the 1990’s and again in the more recent housing bubble. When bubbles burst, as they always do, some of the rich investors lose all or substantial amounts of their investments.

So if the previously noted further printing of money will not stimulate economic growth in general, it will almost certainly stimulate further bubbles. How can it not do otherwise? With huge dollops of money available at low interest are the speculators, now accustomed to big returns and the brokers used to huge fees, simply going to stop at home and watch TV? No! Sooner or later, they are going to search frantically for something or somewhere to ‘put’ their money for safety or enrichment. Just watch Bloomberg TV for an afternoon, to see the amount of effort being put into the search. But even looking for safety is a form of competition which has the potential to produce its own bubbles as it has partially done in the case of gold and other metals.

According to some economic statisticians, the dollar value of Gold has increased by 460% from $250 per ounce in 2000, to almost £2,000 dollars per oz, in 2012. Over the same 12 year period, silver has increased by 650%, Copper by 450%, Iron by 760%, zinc by 169%, nickel by 170% and Uranium by 370%. These calculated percentage rises, accurate or not, are not all to do with the costs of production increases, for in some cases costs have come down or stayed the same. One part of this rise is due to the depreciation of money as a measure of value, but another is due to this abundant money supply as finance-capital chasing the relative safe harbours of essential raw materials. These increases are not all certain bubbles, but they are the thick froth of speculation fermented by the invasive spores of finance-capital greed.

As noted, when the bubbles pop, the bubble chasers lose, but these are not the only casualties, because those at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, are dependent, – whilst it exists – upon the capitalist mode of production. The bubble losses, cause further contractions and dislocations in the value and surplus-value creating circuit of capitalist production, which only employs labour for the purpose of creating surplus-value and thus profits. If credit shrinks, debt increases and profits fall drastically, as they do in a financial crisis, then practically everyone is effected. If this triggers a general crisis, then production is also additionally curtailed, with further knock-on losses of jobs and income. But not everyone suffers. Even in a downturn or crisis, some of the super-rich can and will get richer.

With the callous commitment to austerity throughout Europe and North America, the last remnants of shame and conscience among the rich and their colleagues in politics has finally disappeared. The imposition of measures to reduce welfare expenditure for the average citizen comes at the very moment when the rich are at their richest for generations and who have made a profession of avoiding their tax obligations. Having previously tightened their belts through the gradual austerity period leading up to the capitalist crisis, the workers existence is now being further depleted by a general collapse across most segments of economic activity. Crucially, the indebtedness and contraction of capitalist private industry is in now in sync with governmental indebtedness. The two interrelated debt inspired contractions are already making the crisis a general one and it will continue to deepen.

All the policies so far suggested or recommended are aimed at dealing with symptoms, for that reason they will be to no avail. The underlying cause of the symptoms lies in the fundamental circuit of the production and augmentation of industrial capital and the accumulation and capitalisation of surplus-value. Poor tax collection, a popular symptom targeted by some, is only a part of the problem. It merely exacerbates the fundamental problem caused by the nature of large-scale surplus-value extraction and its augmentation into industrial capital. Taxation is a deduction from the surplus value created annually by the efforts of workers as they engage with the means of production. All the policies promoted and activated by all the pro-capitalist political parties, whether Conservative, Republican, Liberal, Democratic, or bourgeois pretend-socialist are dealing with symptoms. With these policies, there is no escape from the eventuality of a general and long-lasting crisis as occurred between the 1840-50’s, the 1920-30’s and 2008-14?

Sooner or later the mass of the people will have to engage with transforming the capitalist system or the capitalist system will continue to engage in transforming their standards of living. It will do so to a level much below the ones obtained during the 1960’s to 1980’s and even the depressed ones currently in existence. Sooner or later people will have to engage with the ideas and practices of anti-capitalism with a human face or they will be presented with the inhuman face of capitalist promoted nationalism, racism and neo-fascism. To paraphrase Marx; ’It is not enough that theory seeks people, people need to seek theory‘. It is not enough for educated people to use that education to intelligently moan or intellectually criticise the struggle of others. If they do not become part of the solution, they may become part of the problem. Or alternatively find themselves on the sidelines whilst the economic crisis is transformed into a political and social one. And it will be a crisis capable of ripping what is left of the heart out of even more defenceless communities

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2012.)

Posted in Economics, Finance | Tagged Bonds, ECB, economic crisis, Financial Bubbles, sovereign debt | Leave a comment

Q3: BAILOUTS AND BANKS.

Posted on September 27, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Bailouts.

The recent announcement of Q3 (further Quantitive Easing), by Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve, indicated that at least his part of the US establishment saw the solution in the same way. They think sorting out the current crisis can be achieved by printing more paper money and distributing it via various financial institutions. This announcement in the US came only weeks after a similar statement had been made in Europe by Mario Draghi. Both, in slightly different words, are prepared to ‘do as much as it takes’ in this direction.

Measures such as these are being collectively proposed and implemented because the top political and financial players do not fully understand their system and therefore have no other solution but to deal with appearances. Such is their ignorance of the basic structure of the capitalist mode of production, that they mistake appearances for the underlying reality. It ‘appears’ to them that the problem on the one hand is lack of ’animal spirits’ among investors (according to Mervyn King Governor of the Bank of England) and on the other hand (various pundits) insufficient demand. For this reason it also ‘appears’ to them that the solution is to print more money so as to increase demand. But extra money can only increase demand if it gets into consumers hands and if access to this is via interest-bearing loans then given the current economic crisis, very few consumers want extra loans.

In reality, beneath the appearances, the present situation of low economic activity, is the result of a previous situation in which a general level of insolvency emerged as the main problem, following the collapse of a housing bubble. Financial institutions and businesses, were caught out holding too much debt and when the sub-prime housing debacle finally burst in 2007, a long chain of due payments could not be made. A further knock-on effect of this collapse was the chain of banking failures and near failures in 2008 which in turn saw these institutions being bailed-out by various governments. In the USA much of this was done under Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In the UK the Long term Refinancing Operation (LTRO). For example; in just one case only, the US government bailed out American International Group to the tune of $182.3 billion.

Now it should be obvious that too much debt is only the other side of the balance sheet to too much lending. No one can borrow (ie acquire debt) without some body else lending (or extending credit) the amounts borrowed. A crisis of high levels of debt is therefore the result (the other side of the coin so to speak) of previous high levels of lending. And, of course, no one could have lent for the eventual risky purposes if there was not plenty of spare money looking for an investment opportunity. In this regard, there are still trillions of £’s, $’s and euros of outstanding loans – so why would these debtors want to borrow more and take on more debt?

High levels of lending, borrowing and debt indicate that the underlying problem was not at all caused by a lack of liquidity. There had been so much money (liquidity in all its forms) swilling around the financial institutions in the lead-up to the crisis, that after all the ‘safe’ investment opportunities had been taken up, much of the surplus spilled over into dodgy forms of speculation. To soak up this vast pool of finance capital, special financial instruments were concocted out of every possible association with value, (Derivatives) no matter how limited or how far removed it was from its originating asset source. Then these instruments were leveraged scores of times over, creating vast amounts of fictitious capital. All of which was swilling around and among the savings, loans, insurance and pension schemes who became caught up in them. Immediately after the solvency crisis, these various institutions, the ones too big to fail, were bailed out by writing off debt, re-scheduling it and printing even more money. The others went to the wall.

But banks and manufacturers were not the only institutions who were continuing business by spending more than the income they received. Capitalist state institutions were also following a similar financial model to some of the participants active in the financial markets. They too were borrowing large amounts of money on the promise to pay it back in the future. This is exactly what financial speculators do only there is an essential difference in how these borrowings are used. Speculators bet on the future value of financial instruments in the hope that they will be either worth more or less than their current value. If they get it right, they repay the loan and pocket any surplus. If wrong, they lose all or a part of their bet.

Government agencies rarely speculate in this fashion, but they do continually borrow large amounts which they are not able to fully repay and must raise taxes in order to meet the repayments as they become due. A majority of western governments are now so much in debt that if they were a business they would be declared bankrupt and those in charge not allowed to run anything in the future. However, capitalist governments and their elites, are able to avoid such outcomes and by their control of government, raise taxes, print more money and hope in this way to reduce their borrowing. In the European Common Market, they can also agree to bail-out each others government by again printing money and guaranteeing government bonds.

But as should be obvious in all sectors, liquidity is not the answer to insolvency. If the extra money does not get to all those in debt then many will continue to be in debt and thus be insolvent or potentially insolvent. Nor is printing money the answer to economic recovery. If the extra cash does not get taken up by the manufacturing sector, – under capitalism, the drivers of economic production, – then there can be no more value created to enter into the supply or demand parts of the capitalist economy. Equally obvious is the fact that extra printed money will not be taken up by capitalist manufacturing capacity, if they do not see the market will sooner rather than later, be able to absorb their extra production. But will the new money stay in the banks?

Banks.

The extra printed money, noted above, will be delivered by the government managed central banks to the banking sector at a very low interest rate. The banks, at least for the short term, will be even more reluctant to lend it for economic production, or financial speculation. This reluctance will be motivated by the toxic nature of the financial instruments available and the rise in unemployment and the fall off in demand. Similarly those businesses, dependent upon buoyant demand will be reluctant to increase production using borrowed funds. Even those businesses who have good current balances and don’t need to borrow will be reluctant, under austerity to increase production and may reduce productive capacity, rather than increase it.

The finance capital sector are perhaps the main ones most likely to take advantage of the cheap cash made available by quantitative easing, but their use of it will not necessarily create economic growth, since the markets they frequent feed off surplus value created in the productive realms of the capitalist system. Their investments are more likely to continue to be bets on the paper increases and decreases (shorting) in financial instruments, bets on share prices, currency exchange differences and on future prices of commodities. It is what they have done in the past and are doing in the present. The likelihood is they will continue to do so in the future.

The printing of money and pumping it into the banks is based upon a mistaken view that the crisis is one of insufficient demand rather than the results of a crisis of relative over-production of commodities, fixed capital and surplus value. The banks have already been bailed out several times and huge tranches of money have been lent to them by central banks at close to zero interest. They have had plenty of liquidity in the past but this monetary priming did not result in any sustained economic activity. How could it? Nor will it in the immediate future. Money is only borrowed by the economic elite for two purposes. The first is to invest in financial instruments and the second is to invest directly or indirectly in businesses for development or expansion purposes. Investment for business expansion, however, will in general only be undertaken during buoyant market conditions.

Since there is no such buoyancy or sufficient general market demand this quantitive easing will not result in further investment in productive capacity, but the opposite. There is currently a scaling down of productive capacity in many places and in many countries. Where new production is instigated in certain niches it will add to the relative over-production in two ways. First it will create more competition in a shrinking market situation and second; new production facilities are generally more productive than previously levels. New production, in general, therefore uses relatively less labour than older forms of production. Less labour employed means less purchasing power via wages entering the markets, than has been displaced elsewhere, by closures as austerity measures are implemented.

As noted earlier, some of the new cheap money made available to banks may find its way into the financial sectors, but even here the financial market is depressed where it is not already in crisis. Finance capital is increasingly looking for safe places to preserve its existing value, and has largely given up searching for places to expand the existing value of their holdings. Some of the safe places will continue to be in staple raw materials, such as food-stuffs, metals, essential infrastructure projects, energy sources and delivery systems. The consequent frantic search for safe places in these categories is already forcing up the costs of basic requirements and thus taking more demand out of all other categories of commodity production. Since food, transport, light, heat and housing, however, cheaply they are reduced, are the first requirements of survival so the purchase of other items will be progressively given up.

The announcement of a new UK business bank by the Con/Lib coalition is a belated recognition that the existing banking system is not fulfilling the purpose of economic development. We can see from the above economic conditions why this is so. However, on a UK coalition wing and a prayer, £1 billion of UK tax-payer money plus an undisclosed amount of private capital is to be collected together in a new institution. The money however, in this case will not be given directly to the banks. Although it will take some time to become operational it is worth considering its proposed pattern for it reveals the sterile and counter-productive nature of the proposal. And of course, it will not increase productive economic activity.

The existing banks will be encouraged to lend money to businesses and these loans will be underwritten or purchased by the Business Bank, which will then package these into parcels (ie more derivative instruments) and sell them off to private investors. In other words the whole basis of leveraged derivatives will be pump-primed again, this time by direct Government initiative, rather than the private sector, malpractice. In other words it will be sucked up into the already over-bloated finance sector with all that that entails. Which will be another twist in a downward spiral. Of course, some of it will find its way into the bond-market and some will fuel further financial bubbles – both of which are the subject of the next posting in a weeks time.

Roy Ratcliffe (September 2012)

Posted in Economics, Finance | Tagged Bank bailouts, Ben Bernanke, Liquidity, Mario Draghi, Q3., Quantitative easing, Solvency, speculation | Leave a comment

RELIGION AND VIOLENCE.

Posted on September 19, 2012 by stutteringsteps

In a previous article I argued that not all of the motives, behind the recent and past attacks upon western embassies and other economic, social or cultural artefacts, have sprung from religious sensibility to criticism. I have suggested [in the blog ‘Spring turns to Autumn’] that the hatred of the west in former colonised and imperially oppressed countries, has much to do with centuries of exploitation and oppression and the contemporary manifestations of this residual problem. However, there is undoubtedly a religious element which is used as focus and justification among some of the 20th and 21st century combatants. This religious justification reveals much about the intimate and fundamental connection between religion and violence.

It is well documented that religion and violence are not strangers, but are profound members of the same family of intolerance. The history of all religions catalogues frequent outbursts of violence. If we only consider the events documented from the European middle ages, we have vicious internal and external crusades by Christians and internal violence and counter violence by Muslim forces. We have the pre and post colonial periods in which European Catholics and Protestants having fought among themselves for at least thirty years, gun-boated themselves around the known world pillaging and confiscating in the name of ’saving’ lost souls for Jesus.

The USA, itself now the target for much Islamic anger, was itself formed by assertive and aggressive Christians, displacing and engaged in genocide against native peoples. African native people and religions were often forcibly captured, sold and suppressed by military forces accompanied by missionaries of considerable religious zeal. And even in modern times we had born again Christians in the guise of Tony Blair and George Bush Junior, leading another crusade against those they considered modern day ‘infidels’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Christian President Obama, regularly issues instructions (or sanctions them) to assassinate suspects, without any pretence of due process. A Mormon Christian, Mitt Romney, is running against him in the coming US presidential elections – would he be any different?.

So religion and killing in the name of God, (or blessed after the event by God’s representatives) still plays a considerable part in justifying, rationalising, promoting and perpetuating violence against the other. Let us not be hypocritical in the West – it does so not only in the East, but also here in Europe and North America. Considering the fact that most religions (including all those listed above) have some articles of faith which speak of love, peace, justice, equality etc., it is hard not to conclude that there are severe and irreconcilable contradictions in the concepts and beliefs of those who adhere to religion. These problems are further revealed in the contradictions in the concept of God – or however the higher power is conceived.

Contradictions in the concept of a higher power.

The concept of a higher power, however, conceptualised or personified, is a common historical recurrence amongst all peoples throughout the ages. Whether it is conceptualised as ‘spirits’ in Zoroastrianism, ‘Nirvana’ in Buddhism, ‘Dao’ in Taoism, ‘Brahman’ in Hinduism or personified in the form of ‘Yahweh‘, ‘God’ or ‘Allah‘ in the case of the Abrahamic religions, a higher, super-human power is a recurring idea. It is perhaps remarkable that all these ‘higher power’ forms are conceptualised as having not only the ultimate power of creation in general, but in particular are viewed as embodying all those characteristics that are beneficial and good – according to the finest human sensibilities.

This is incrementally true, for those religions who consider there is an emissary from, or someone ‘chosen’ who intercedes with this higher power. Thus Jesus, in Christian theology is the embodiment of all that is best in the human personality. Wisdom, justice, love, peace, the alleged qualities of Jesus, are all the best attributes of human beings but made consistent in Jesus, in contrast to their inconsistency in humanity. Essentially the same is true of Mohammad, for Muslims. He too embodies all that is just, humane, loving, respectful, supportive etc. This commonly held view among most religious people has led to the hypothesis, that it is human beings who have projected what is best in humanity onto the notion of a mystical entity who is imagined to be consistent in this regard, rather than this mystical entity creating inconsistent human beings.

On the surface, alternative explanations such as these appear as simple matters of opinion as to the origins of good, community spirit, love, justice, peace etc. The problem arises, however, from the following. In the name of this essentially benign, loving higher spirit or God, (by various names), many of the followers of religions (the Abrahamic ones in particular) feel they are justified in killing in the name of their God. Or alternatively in the name of his son or his prophet. This represents a massive contradiction in the notion of a benign and beneficial higher power. People imagine that ‘goodness’ is what their version of a ‘higher power’ wishes them to do and it is what they want themselves, but then many of them are prepared to do the most ‘bad’ things imaginable in promoting this religious view or in preventing criticism of it.

This phenomena is not only an individual psychosis, restricted to a few, but it is embedded in the collective scriptures of each Abrahamic religion. The pages of the Torah (Old Testament), the New Testament and the Qur’an contain numerous passages (scores of them in fact) advocating violence against non-believers, alternative believers and those who choose to think differently about what is required for humanity to get along peacefully. By not rejecting these violent scriptural verses in each religion and accepting the assertions they are promoted by the higher power, followers of these religions – even those of a peaceful disposition – provide those with violent temperaments a convenient scriptural justification for their violence.

This textual justification, along with self-interest, is perhaps why some – or even many – religious believers stay quiet about, or look the other way, when atrocities are carried out by the members of their own denominations. Is it not the case that many professed Christians do not protest against, or look the other way, in face of the West’s initiated wars of invasion and killing in the middle east and elsewhere? Is it also not the case that many peaceful Muslims stay quiet or look the other way at the killing and atrocities carried out by their own religious brethren?

Further. Is it not the case that many Zionist Jews are justifying their brutal treatment of Palestinians since 1948 by reference to the biblical promised land? Predictably, is it not also true that the Christian Zionists of the USA are the most vigorous advocates and supporters of this Israeli oppression? It would seem from these facts and those above that religion continues to be part of the problem for humanity, not part of the solution. For this reason among others, religions of all denominations need to be seriously criticised openly and frequently.

Roy Ratcliffe (September 2012.)

Posted in Arab Spring | Tagged Christianity, humanity, Religion and violence, Zionism | 2 Comments

SPRING TURNS TO AUTUMN.

Posted on September 15, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Can it really be surprising that the Arab Spring has turned into an Anti-west Autumn? Are the recent violent attacks on US and European Embassies and their staff, along with assorted western commercial targets, really something that was provoked by a largely unseen film? Alternatively were these attacks merely events which only needed an opportunity to occur and an appropriate trigger? I suggest the latter. The recent overthrow of despotic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa has provided the opportunity, the internet publication of the recent anti-Islam film has provided the most recent trigger.

Anyone who has critically observed the West’s interventions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, over a number of years, will hardly be surprised, that the West‘s consistent violence will be reflected back upon them at any opportunity. The support for numerous puppet regimes, the funding of Israel‘s war against the Palestinian‘s, the illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the indiscriminate bombing of Libya along with countless targeted (and mis-targeted) drone assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, has built up a massive reservoir of resentment in many lands.

During the Arab Spring this long-suppressed, smouldering anger and resentment was focussed upon the military-supplied regimes in the middle east. They were regimes who kept their citizens in check and supported the West’s negative economic, financial, political and military interventions throughout the region. The chosen ideological framework of the aggressive penetration by the west’s capitalist inspired economic interests has been by ideas of secular liberal democracy, but importantly, it’s economic and political interests are led by practicing Christians.

It can hardly be surprising that those who are strongly opposed to the West’s oppression and exploitation are also obliged to use the most appropriate ideological constructs that are available to them. What set of ideas are available to them? Since the historical betrayal of anti-capitalist ideas perpetrated by the Stalinists, it is not surprising that the ideological construct directed against the 20th and 21st century imperialist-style onslaught of the Christian-led capitalist West, now frequently orbits around the ideology of Islam.

For this reason the activist vanguard of those opposed to western intrusion and hegemony in the Middle East, North Africa, are often those most closely associated with Islam. But not always and not for ever. This Islamic leadership role, where it emerges, has been further gifted to the Islamists, by the aggressive, exploitative antics of the West along with its Imperial, racist heritage and its contemporary institutionalised development. A further twist endorsing this outcome has been an inconsistent and self-serving response by the pro-capitalist political elite to the phenomena of religion.

At one level in the West, there has been an accommodation to patriarchal religious ideology (particularly with regard to questions of female subordination) where this has furthered the elite’s economic and political interests. At another level there has been a surreptitious and proxy attack upon foreign labour disguised as a form of intolerance to their religious or cultural norms. This accommodation to patriarchal religious governance, has served to strengthen the status of religious activist leaders and by the same measure weakened the alternative status of secular activists among these communities.

It is also predictable, that the American political and economic elite will be in complete denial concerning the fundamental opposition to the West’s foreign polices. Accordingly, they have fixed the blame upon the publication of the film and will continue to do so. Their focus in negotiating any future outcomes will therefore be on the religious issue and in this way will play into the hands of religious extremists. However, it should be understood that the anger and violent opposition to the west within many Arab countries, is not entirely about religion, even if for some Islamists this is completely the case.

A great deal of the opposition, is to the economic and social conditions resulting from the hegemony of western militarised Capitalism. The original catalyst for Arab Spring Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, was the poverty, unemployment and lack of political freedoms delivered by the West‘s puppet regimes. Despite any collusion with the West’s elite’s, these economic and social issues are of such magnitude that the Islamist leaders and other religious elites cannot solve them. At root, they are essentially the same issues which the pro-capitalists of the West also cannot solve. The class tensions, partly masked in the east by religious ideology, will sooner or later re-emerge as they are doing here in the west with the increasing breakdown and unmasking of consensus politics.

The various Middle East uprisings and now anti-West retaliation, distressing and confusing as they are, are also indicators that epoch of the West’s neo-liberal domination of the world is coming to an agonising end. The post-Second-World-War, Anglo-Saxon empire is gradually crumbling at the edges. Like the earlier decline and fall of the Roman Empire and that of the later British Empire, this unfolding fragmentation and dislocation is taking place at its periphery and will continue to do so for a further period.

Meanwhile, at the core of the West’s inter-connected heartlands lies a massive economic and financial crisis, which is also causing similar problems of unemployment, poverty and social unrest to those in the East. This same crisis is simultaneously undermining the economic strength of the political and financial elite in the US and Europe. Already the elite in many European capitalist countries are faced with handing over effective economic and political sovereignty of their countries to the IMF and World Bank in exchange for financial bailouts. Irrespective of any potential radical political changes in the US and Europe, this developing economic crisis will progressively limit the ability of the elite to impose their will upon those in former colonised and subjected countries.

Nevertheless, a further burst of militarised response interventions by the US and the West elites, is to be expected. Relatively low-cost drones will be part of this response, but all such responses will exacerbate their problems and increase the opposition to them in former subjugated countries. The capitalist West has just done far too much harm and continues to do so, for this to be forgotten or forgiven by the peoples of subjected nations. Only an alternative socio-economic system in the West, could invite peace and reconciliation with the rest of the world‘s ordinary people – including those in the now volatile East.

Until then, the anti-capitalist left position should of course be solidarity with struggles against the West’s interventions and impositions, but solidarity combined with a resolute critical dimension. It should be a critical dimension which refuses to accept (and campaigns against) cultural or religious traditions which oppress, women, disabled, gay and promote other forms of discrimination. If for many individuals, religion is still ‘the opium of the people‘, then we should argue and campaign for them to cease using this drug of choice, whilst campaigning for real changes in their circumstances which presently engender, or require, such an opiate.

Roy Ratcliffe (September 2012.)

Posted in Arab Spring, Economics, Politics | Tagged Drone assassinations, Religious tensions, US. elite in denial, Western hegemony | Leave a comment

WHAT TRIGGERED THE CRISIS?

Posted on September 10, 2012 by stutteringsteps

It is generally recognised that there is an ongoing economic crisis taking place within the 21st century capitalist system. However, its causes and what has triggered it – which are not necessarily the same – are the subject of considerable dispute. This dispute takes place not only within the pro-capitalist camp but also within the anti-capitalist ranks. The pro-capitalists, viewing as they do, the capitalist system as the most advanced and desirable system, rarely if ever delve below the ’appearances’ of the economic categories of their system. They try to make sense of it and suggest remedies based upon these surfaces appearances. From the standpoint of anti-capitalism, however, it is important to understand the underlying phenomena which gives rise to these appearances and recognise the complexity involved. The following is a contribution to such an understanding.

Belief in economic appearances are the economic equivalent of the everyday fact that from our various places upon the planet it ‘appears’ that the sun goes round the earth, when in fact it is the opposite. This fact did not prevent the vast majority of people ‘believing’ that this was so for thousands of years, despite it being challenged, particularly by Copernicus and later observers of celestial reality. In delving beneath appearances, Marx, did for economics, what these early mathematicians and observers had done for astronomical and other sciences. Marx formulated the general possibility of capitalist crisis as emanating from the separation in time and space between purchase and sale of commodities. This together with the pursuit of profit leading to relative over-production (producing more than could be sold at a profit) could compound the general possibility and turn a limited crisis into a general one.

During the 20th century such a period of relative over-production, was off-set to some degree by the extension of multiple forms of credit. Indeed, such an off-setting, extended credit factor itself, can create an over-production of credit along with the increased possibility of defaults. This occurred roughly during the period of 1970 – 2000. In many ways the relative over-production of commodities and thus the overproduction of productive capital was revealed in Europe when wine lakes, butter mountains and set aside agrarian policies were brought to popular notice. Such EEC measures where not taken because all these commodities and future land-produced commodities, could be sold on the open market at their value and the capital invested realised, but the opposite. They were purchased and stockpiled (or dumped) because the capital (and thus surplus labour) locked up in them, could not be realised without government intervention, utilising borrowing and tax revenue to purchase them.

At this point it should be obvious, as in other walks of life, that due to complexity, the immediate trigger releasing an acute crisis may not always occur at the point were the crisis is maturing, but at a weaker connected juncture. And the system of capitalist production has many such junctures. The circulation process of capital, requires many intermediate stages between initial purchase of raw materials, means of production, the production, distribution and sale of the finished commodities. Between each of these numerous phases, money or credit or a combination of the two, must link all the elements of production and circulation.

What is true of each particular industrial or commercial factory, is also true at a national and international level. The whole system of modern capitalism requires a complex international interconnection and continuous reliable production, transportation and consumption process. A significant or substantial breakdown in any one of the linked but separate stages or between stages can trigger or be triggered by a particular crisis and in certain circumstances – subsequently develop into a general crisis. The following are just a number of the more probable locations for such possibilities of crisis emerging and re-emerging.

1. Significant quantities of commodities remaining unsold.

Relative over-production. This could occur for any number of reasons – saturation of the market, downturns in consumer spending, collapses in currency – but any such significant relative over-production of commodities, would result in the failure of money capital to return to the producer. Depending upon the financial reserves held by the producer (or availability of sufficient credit) this could in turn lead to failure to pay for further materials or labour, leading to cancellation of orders and sacking of workers. Any such failure in one place could pass down the line of suppliers and producers causing multiple failures there also.

2. Non-fulfilment of payments.

Defaults. This could occur for the above noted reasons, but also because of swindles, thefts, speculative purchases, miscalculations, a down-grading or lack of credit, increased costs of credit, a rise in the costs of materials or labour etc. Again any such significant occurrence in one company or industry could have a knock-on effect on others along the full length of the chain of supply, distribution and consumption. Each one relying, sooner or later, on receiving payments in order to pay their creditors.

3. Unavailability of credit.

Credit squeeze. The complexity and diversity of the modern system of capitalism requires an extensive credit system. Credit avoids, any interruptions in the process of production and consumption, caused by delays in the realisation of surplus value or an insufficient supply of interest bearing capital. Credit itself could dry up or be refused, not because of any problems with production or distribution of commodities, but because of problems or changes occurring in the credit granting institutions. Crises in this realm of capitalism can react upon the essential production processes and cause a crisis. Because any such refusal in one place could have a domino effect on the payments and transactions of industrial or commercial businesses.

4. Speculative bubbles and collapses.

Leveraged and fictitious capital. An extensive credit system and the supply of surplus value in the form of interest bearing capital, leads to the creation of ‘leverage’ and fictitious capital. Speculative surges of money capital seeking interest on its investments in favourable avenues, can create bubbles of activity in one sphere of activity, leading to shortages of money capital available for general productive activity. Such bubbles can accelerate the creation of fictitious capital (paper ‘financial instruments’ and after distorting the cost of credit and the replenishment of productive capital, the bubble can suddenly burst. A bursting bubble, as was seen by the housing sub-prime bubble which collapsed in the USA in 2008, leads to a contraction and dislocation of credit and banking solvency. This in turn can lead to a crisis elsewhere in the system.

5. Interrupted material supplies.

Exhausted resources. It is obvious that supplies of materials can be interrupted for any number of reasons, including being triggered by any of the above four reasons and those to follow. However, materials supply can be interrupted by circumstances outside of the production or circulation processes, such as wars, disasters, and increasingly exhausted primary sources (mines, forests, wells, seas etc.). Also an interruption could occur due to reduction in the quality of materials. Such interruptions can trigger a production crisis in which commodities can no longer be produced or produced in the same qualities, quantities or at the same price. For example a crisis in the supply in the pivotal energy producing material of crude oil or refined petrol would cause a general crisis of production in all spheres of life.

6. Labour withdrawal or insufficiencies.

Strikes or occupations. Since labour is an essential requirement for all kinds of production, an insufficiency of labour, for any reason, can cause an interruption to production even if all the other factors needed for production are available and in the places were they are required. Labour is the necessary ‘active’ value-increasing ingredient in production as all other values are consumed by the activity of labour during production and become embedded or embodied in the final product. Labour-withdrawals in the form of strikes, sit-ins and work-to-rules, interrupt the production processes and delay the circulation of capital as well as possibly cause the deterioration of other elements of production. Industry-wide strikes can cause a series of crises, which ripple outward. A general strike is more likely to occur as the result of a general crisis, but it to can accentuate such a crisis.

7. Transportation interruptions or failures.

Infrastructure collapse or denial. Since the circuit of productive capital requires completion between the initial investment for purchase of means of production, the production process itself, and the subsequent marketing and sale of the final products, transport becomes vital. With the development of global economic interactions there are numerous parts to the transport of; raw materials, means of production, and delivery to markets. Any serious or long-lasting interruptions to these phases of transport can cause a crisis within a factory, an industry or even in certain circumstances an entire country. Indeed, in the Second World War one of the major means employed by both sides to bring an industry or country to its knees, was to deny each other the means of transport of essential supplies of consumer goods, raw material goods and means of production.

8. Government economic contractions or failures.

Sovereign debt. The state, under the system of capital, is a multiple tool for the capitalist and pro-capitalist elites. It is the Swiss Army Knife of social control and support for the capitalist system in general. The state is used for producing things considered necessary or desirable, but are not immediately profitable for the individual or collective forms of capital. In some periods it is also used for producing things for which the combined investment of private capital is insufficient – a modern Army, Navy and Air force, for example. Governmental purchases are often the way certain capitalist concerns are guaranteed high returns on invested capital.

Many modern governments have also become insurers and assurors of welfare benefits, employing large numbers of workers, whose wages and salaries purchase commodities and services. Additionally, the state is also the instrument for holding down the population, should large numbers or a majority of the population want to challenge the existing mode of production or instigate changes detrimental to the rule of capital. Government failures in any of these aspects, particularly in the early 21st century, those attached to the honouring of interest payments and capital repayments obtained from the international bond-markets, can cause repercussions and crises within the system as a whole.

All these eight broad categories and their own numerous internal possibilities of disconnection, interruption or failure can trigger a crisis or series of crises. These in turn can create an actual domino effect on other elements which are separated in time and space, but are necessary parts of the ‘unity’ of the whole mode of production based upon the circulation and augmentation of capital. Due to the complexity this interdependence; “Effects in their turn become causes.” as Marx pointed out in Capital Volume 1.

For this reason, under certain circumstances, a particular crisis or a sequence of particular crises can trigger a general crisis. It may not always be clear which caused which. However, it is clear that the bursting of the speculative housing bubble in the US and elsewhere, triggered a crisis of credit in the banking system in 2008. This in turn reacted upon the production processes within capitalist industry and commerce. It is also clear that building up over a number of years, a sovereign debt crisis was brewing and this surfaced in 2011 and 2012.

It is clear that crises have occurred and are occurring in all but three of the above aspects of the capitalist mode of production. Only 5 (interrupted material supplies), 6, (insufficient labour) and transportation (infrastructure problems) have been devoid of serious problems so far. Crises in the areas of relative over-production (1), speculation (4) and sovereign debt (8) are still unresolved and Defaults (2) as well as Credit squeeze (3) are as yet only partly resolved. All this means that the probabilities of any further serious problems in any of these areas will possibly trigger a full-blown general crisis, such as last occurred in 1920 – 1930‘s. Of course there can be no absolute certainty of any such general collapse, but should one occur it is highly probable that it will be triggered by a further serious dislocation or dislocations in one (or more) of the above areas.

In advance of this, however, is the question of the response of the 99% to the measures currently being implemented by the elite in an attempt to save the system from itself. Clearly a sustained general strike in any country, will cause serious disruptions to production and reproduction in the economic cycle and will undoubtedly introduce a political dimension into the economic, financial and social upheavals. Any such developments will face those engaged in a struggle to maintain decent living standards, with the choice of going beyond capitalism or resigning themselves to the fate dished out to them. Revolutionary anti-capitalists, it goes without saying will continue to argue to go beyond. To what, remains a separate question and is considered in other articles. [See for example; ’The Riddle of History Solved’; ‘Capital and Crisis’ and ’Marxists against Marx’]

Roy Ratcliffe (September 2012)

Posted in Economics, Finance, Marx | Tagged anti-Capitalism, causes of crisis, Credit squeeze, global crisis, Marx on economics, relative overproduction, sovereign debt, speculation | Leave a comment

“PROTECTING THE DREAM!”

Posted on August 31, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Mitt Romney uttered the above three words at the recent Republican Convention in the USA. The race for the Presidency is now officially on and every negative tactic that billions of dollars can buy will be used by both sides to promote their particular interests. However, in referencing the ‘magical’ American Dream, which he advocated should be ‘protected at all costs’, Romney unwittingly highlighted an essential feature of capitalist and pro-capitalist politicians on all sides of the political spectrum. The promotion of ‘Over the Rainbow‘ ‘dreams‘, or a particular American version of such ‘dream’s’ in the case of the US, is necessary under capitalism. This is because, for the vast majority of people, their reality has been and is increasingly becoming a nightmare.

Dreams encountered naturally whilst sleeping, whether good or bad, are soon over, but the type of dreams peddled by politicians such as Romney, need to be continuous. Such dreams are maintained by constantly promoted and skilfully manipulated illusions. Like their professional stage-illusionist counterparts, politicians learn the art of manufacturing deception by elaborate rituals and distracting attention away from what they are really doing, particularly while the spotlight is upon them. The congressional and parliamentary ‘stages‘, and other such electioneering platforms on which they collectively practice their well rehearsed rhetoric and histrionic posturing, are there for fooling people into believing they are trying to help those who vote for them.

Like anyone else faced with even a slightly convincing performance, we can if we choose, suspend our disbelief and enjoy the show as do the highly selected and willing audiences at the Republican and Democratic Conventions. It also helps of course, if enough people outside of such cabaret style entertainment ‘experiences’ can be rendered gullible or sufficiently self-deluded, that they too will promote the necessary political illusions. It is the illusions which become in turn a self-delusion that formal politics is the solution to life’s problems and not part of its many problems. Illusions, delusions, and dreams are as much essential products of the bourgeois mode of production as ‘smart-phones, smart-bombs, baton’s and killer drones.

a) Illusions in politics.

So one of the first illusions the political class and its supporters, sows amongst its electorate is that they are in politics for the general good. In fact they are all, without exception, in it for their own self-advancement. Even those who consistently try to do good things for others – a very, very small minority – are simultaneously in it for their own prestige and betterment. The vast majority, on the other hand, are cynical manipulators and greedy appropriators of any money, perks or privileges, they can vacuum into their bank accounts. This illusion of ‘general good’ should have been shattered as the lived reality of the past fifty years in every country of the world, has been revealed so starkly. In not one country, have politicians improved things for their citizens. Any improvements achieved, have invariably been initiated, struggled for and sustained by the citizens themselves – often forced upon reluctant politicians. And in many aspects of life, things have got a great deal worse.

The third illusion emanating from the political class and their paid sycophants is the illusion that they can have an independent effect upon the economic activity of the country they appear to administer. This is a most successful past illusion and has entered the consciousness of most non-sceptical people. This illusion is most strongly held by the older generation, the younger generations being increasingly sceptical – all to the good!. The fact is that under the capitalist mode of production, economic activity, is under the direct control of the owners and controllers of financial and productive capital and the respective means of production. The politicians themselves are at best under the indirect (at worst the direct) control of the economic and financial elite, rather than the opposite.

This much has also been made clear again in recent years and months by how governments (and their politicians) have to toe the lines drawn up by the bond-markets, rating agencies and by the numerous un-punished frauds and thefts by big business and big finance. It is a fact – again exposed in the 21st century – that an ordinary citizen stealing something petty such as a bottle of water (firewood in the 19th) will result in a fine and even a prison sentence, yet whilst stealing billions by the economic and financial elite, will be overlooked or nullified by a measly out of court settlement, before business is allowed to continue as before.

b) Illusions in Capitalism.

The current crisis of capitalism, with its multiple aspects, economic, financial, social, political and ecological, has not yet entirely removed the illusions promoted by those who gain from the present system. [see the ‘Five-fold crisis of capitalism’] In defence against the rising criticism of the obscene levels of wealth accumulated by the 1% along with their tax avoidance, a particularly virulent illusion is currently being sustained. It usually takes the form of we need the rich (so don’t tax them highly or scare them away) for they are the ‘wealth creators’. This is utter self-interested and self-deluded nonsense. The rich don’t create any wealth, they, like their politician friends, just use their elite and privileged positions to vacuum up the wealth created by others.

It may ‘appear’ that wealth is created by investments, but it is not. In many cases monetary wealth is obtained by dodgy speculation, in such forms as futures, derivatives and hedge funds. The Wall Street and City of London, promoters of this form of speculation do not create any wealth. All they produce is pieces of paper, which entitle them to cash-in for any accrued benefits, when they choose to. Their monetary gains are not creations of new wealth, but derive from someone else’s losses. Real wealth is created by people working on materials, using tools and other means of production to produce articles which are necessary and/or satisfying. The factories, workshops, machines and raw materials which produce essential and luxury items are created by working people and are staffed by working people who daily create new wealth. Without this continuous activity everything would just grind to a halt – including the usefulness of pieces of paper, bearing a government stamp – ie fiat currency.

If we delve further into the reality of the capitalist system, even the vast sums of money used to purchase those factories, machines and raw materials was accumulated out of the surplus products and value, produced by present and previous generations of working people. Pieces of paper and entries in legers do not produce anything except dust and (prior to computers), mental fatigue. The swollen bank accounts of the rich would be useless if there were not things to buy and things to eat – produced by whom? The answer is glaringly obvious if you stop to think about it. The factories, shops and offices, would not have even been built if there were not workers constructing them. When built these premises and mechanised contents would be life-less, useless, piles of glass and concrete containing equally life-less unproductive machinery, without working people operating and maintaining them to produce what we need and what we would like.

Another illusion spun out of the flimsiest intellectual sycophantic fantasies is that capitalist wealth trickles down so that everyone gets a share. This illusion should now be in the process of being cast aside, because it is obvious that wealth actually defies the analogy of gravity in this upside down capitalist world and gushes up to the rich, from the ranks of those who create it in the bottom sections of society. Wealth is clearly not created from the top down, but from the bottom up. Over the last fifty years, this fact should have become abundantly clear. The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. How could it be anything other than this in a system in which real wealth is created by those who produce actual tangible products, yet the vast amounts of vouchers of entitlement (paper money or digitised bank accounts) to these products are deviously amassed by the 1%?

A number of other illusions promoted by the supporters of the capitalist system are now being progressively exploded. The illusion that justice under capitalism is neutral and freely open to all. It would be an amazing contradiction if a system based upon economic exploitation could spawn anything but a legal system in which wealth and privilege did not distort any sense of fair play and recompense for wrong doing. The legal system and the justice based upon it mirrors in many ways the economic system; it is corrupt, self-serving and elitist. Whoever, pays most to its legal advocates, ensures the best possible outcome for themselves, and it is the rich who can pay the most. The poor are increasingly barred from seeking a remedy against injustice, by lack of funds.

The same goes for equal rights. A system in which there is no economic equality, could hardly evolve equality with regard to gender, race, class, sexual orientation or disability. The two centuries old struggle for equal human rights, under the capitalist system has consequently hardly dented the white-male privileges which dominated its metamorphosis, from the pre-capitalist feudal period. It continues to maintain its current strangle-hold. An occasional black or female politician or capitalist entering the ranks of the elite, does not create equality, but it does serve to create an illusion of its possibility. Yet the reality is, despite heroic efforts by generations of dedicated activists, the systems fundamental inequality still permeates all aspects of capitalist economic, social, religious and political life.

One further capitalist promoted illusion is about to be shattered as the crisis deepens. It is the illusion, based upon a short post-second-world-war reality of an entitlement to welfare provision. Capitalism, it was then suggested, had learnt its lessons from the savage treatment of 1920’s and 1930’s working people. Threatened by the example of attempted anti-capitalist revolutions, the political elite of the time decided it would institute universal forms of welfare provision. Full employment, free education, health, social services, pensions and unemployment benefit, would be pitched at such levels that would allow a dignified existence for all. The scourge of unemployment, poverty, and the stain of ill-health and ignorance would be removed from the fabric of capitalist social life.

Well guess what? Unemployment, poverty and ill-health is back with a vengeance. The capitalists and pro-capitalists, having amassed obscene levels of wealth have also discovered it is too expensive under their system to continue to deliver such promised entitlements to those who managed to attain them. Instead of improved welfare provision re-directed from the hugely increased accumulation of general wealth they have decided enough is enough, or rather what they previously thought was enough they now think is too much. Austerity is now the new nightmare facing the working class and the poor – the short-lived post-war reality is over. The bourgeois dream is dead! However, the dream – now projected into an imagined future – as Mitt Romney so clearly acknowledged, needs to be protected – and protected – at all costs! The system as it starts to implode – needs it!

So forget the past, forget the present and look into the future through the jaundiced eyes of the pro-capitalist elite is the newly emerging political mantra. We are invited to suspend our critical faculties and enter the virtual reality of an imaginary post-crisis capitalism which – predicated on economic growth – will once more deliver our dreams. Forget that it was the previous capitalist growth that created the present economic and financial crisis. Forget, that the past and present economic growth under the capitalist mode of production is already damaging the planet and that any future growth will make this damage permanent. Forget everything and just sleepwalk into the impending collapse, valiantly ’protecting the dream’ – at all costs.

‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ or ‘Follow the Yellow brick road’ may be a bit too obvious for Mitt Romney and Ryan, Obama, or Clegg, Cameron and Miliband, or even Hollande, Monti, Merkel and others in the political elite. However, rest assured, these aspiring political Wizards of Oz, have all prepared a selection of ‘pre-election lullabies for soothing us to sleep – perchance to dream. Not to mention having prepared an army of robo-cops for those of us who refuse to accept their practiced sincere insincerity or follow them to the ends of the capitalist rainbow – in search of our individual fantasy pot of gold.

Alternatively, we can wake up to reality, cast off the spell, refuse to simply ‘wish upon a star’, and reject the illusory castles in the air. We can exit the hall of mirrors, and continue to create our own grass roots reality. Another world is possible, but only if we disown the capitalist dream, see through the bourgeois illusions and work together in anti-capitalist solidarity movements of all kinds. Yet it is even here that sadly we may encounter others who wish to ‘protect a past dream’ and its associated illusions. Sectarian anti-capitalism is based upon a different set of wishful thinking and the promotion of various illusions necessary for its acceptance. These too need to be duly jettisoned. In some places, anti-capitalist sectarian dogma continues to be used to divide us and to attempt to implant other forms of mirrored, virtual-realities which allegedly – also for our own good – recreates reliance on yet another set of political elites. This is yet another fantasy game of shadows which should not be protected, but rejected and replaced by collective, self-organised, sombre reality.

Roy Ratcliffe. (September 2012.)

Posted in Economics, Politics | Tagged bourgeois illusions, Cameron, Capitalist Crisis, Clegg, Miliband, Mitt Romney, wealth creation, welfare provision | Leave a comment

ASSANGE AND ASYLUM. WHAT’S NEXT?

Posted on August 19, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Whatever the current upfront technical or legal wrangle pivots around, (sexual accusations, bail infringements, etc.), everyone knows that the real issue is that Julian Assange provided a showcase for exposing the secret machinations of the economic, political and financial capitalist elite. The real substantive wrong-doing of Assange – in the eyes of the US and UK establishment – is not in transgressing the rights of females within relationships, nor their rights to chose who and when to partner with. They overwhelmingly ignore these rights when it suits them. Assange’s real crime is in providing a secure publishing organization for whistle-blowers. Their capitalist system is economically, financially and morally approaching a series of end-game crisis points. They will do everything in their power, to prevent full transparency of what they are up to.

The capitalist and pro-capitalist elite are eminently capable of paying someone to lie or fabricate charges against someone they don’t like, in order to get their hands on them. This has been done in the past and will continue to be done in the future. The real reason that the US and the UK have not provided emphatic guarantees, that they will not pursue extradition, is because that is exactly what they wish to do. Perhaps that is also why the Swedish authorities have refused to interview him in the Ecuadorian embassy. The ruthlessness the US intend to pursue has been demonstrated by the case of Bradley Manning and his degrading incarceration. It is also demonstrated by the antics the US and UK have previously got up to with regard to Guantanamo Bay and numerous extraordinary renditions, leading to torture and death.

A death sentence, is a highly unlikely punishment for Assange, even though right-wing US politicians have openly called for such penalty, but incarceration and harsh treatment certainly is. One also only need recall, how the close allies of the US elite in Israel (who routinely work together in such matters), dealt with the atomic bomb whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu. They pursued him relentlessly using all kinds of misinformation and intrigue, including being trapped by using the intimate sexual attractions of a female secret service operative. Those in power and privilege will go to any lengths to prevent or silence those who in any way, small or large, threatens to expose the nature of their continued rule.

The granting of asylum by Ecuador to Julian Assange, ramps up the diplomatic tensions around this issue. Clearly those currently in power in Ecuador, who themselves (as with other Latin American countries) suffer from the devious and subversive machinations of the US capitalists and state forces, have some sympathy with Assange‘s project to expose the US. How far, this sympathy will extend is as yet unknown and remains to be seen. They could of course, grant him Ecuadorian citizenship, in some way and even appoint him later to some diplomatic status. He could perhaps be elected in absentia to a parliamentary position in a supportive Ecuadorian community.

They could perhaps even consider employing or appointing him as a junior minister of information, in the Ecuador government. Alternatively, the UK government’s actions and threats, in particular, could be challenged in the human rights courts. Any tactics such as these would increasingly create problems for the UK and the US. However, the repercussions which the vindictive elites in these latter two countries would go to, perhaps make such actions unlikely. It would be a very courageous – and game-changing outcome – if such strategies were adopted by Ecuador. Meanwhile it is to be hoped that whatever the outcome, other internet activists can replicate what WikiLeaks pioneered and continue to provide an avenue for those people who are horrified, sickened, or both at what the economic, political and financial elite perpetrate against their fellow citizens, yet strive to keep secret.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2012)

PS.

The issue of Julian Assange, and the publicity around the granting of asylum by Ecuador, has sparked off a high intensity debate among some sections of the left. There are those who are vehemently for his extradition to Sweden and those equally adamant that he should not. It has split the left in a most debilitating and destructive way. Most of the opinions, for that is all many of them are, concern the allegations made in Sweden by two former sexual partners. I do not know whether there is substance in the variously (and conflicting) reported allegations or not, but I do know prejudice when I read it.

For white prejudice, it is enough for a black person to be accused of crime, for guilt to be assumed. For homophobic prejudice, it is enough for a gay person to be accused of immorality, for guilt to be assumed. It is enough for religious prejudice, to assume, without evidence, that an atheist lacks morals. For male chauvinists, it is enough for a female to be declared irrational, for it to be considered true. For radical feminists, it is enough for a man to be accused of sexual harassment, for it to be assumed true.

Now it will undoubtedly true, that (as with white people) some black people will commit crime, some homosexuals (as with straight people) may be immoral, some atheists (as with some religious people) will lack morals, many women (as with men) will be irrational at times, many men may be guilty of sexual harassment – but in all such instances it will not be all. In such cases of prejudice the supposition is – guilty until proven innocent! It is a dangerous supposition from the standpoint of the oppressed who would suffer from it most – and which is the opposite of the modern concept of – innocent until proven guilty.

The rational position in such cases is to demand sufficient and substantive evidence and the rational response of those accusing is to present that sufficient and substantial evidence. Only in the eyes of those already prejudiced (including those on the left) is it a failing or crime to remain neutral until such time, and as in this Assange case, which has a further dimension, to consider that other dimension. This issue of dispute, as with others, reveals the lack of maturity of the left in general and the anti-capitalist left in particular, along with its own self-entrapment in dualistic modes of thinking. In this bourgeois mode of thinking there are but two basic principles.

1. In any dispute, you must choose one side or the other; one side must be right, the other side must be wrong. Or mostly right and mostly wrong.

2. You are entitled to make up your mind on any issue based upon ‘official’ or ‘authoritative’ assertions and the flimsiest piece of evidence, particularly, if it fits your pre-conceptions.

These two principles infect, not only bourgeois thinking in all aspects, from the scientific to the religious, but also inflicts the bourgeois forms of socialism outlined by Karl Marx.

In the real world, it is not necessary to take sides on an issue, particularly where it is muddied by lack of information, contradiction and distortion. In the real world both sides of an issue can be wrong. In the world as understood, by the revolutionary-humanism of Karl Marx, you only make your mind up after lengthy, careful and prejudiced free analysis and even then maintain it with doubt for new evidence may arise, which causes a reappraisal of your analysis.

WHOSE UNDER THE FISCAL CLIFF?

Posted on August 15, 2012 by stutteringsteps

Over the last few months the term ‘Fiscal Cliff’ has become increasingly popular in political as well as financial discourse. The term originated in the US, to refer to a series of impending tax increases and government spending cuts which are intended to cut the huge government deficits. As matters currently stand, the projected US yearly deficits over the last ten years has increased from $128 billion to $1.2 trillion. The debt ceiling (the legal limit of total US government debt allowed) is set at approx $16.4 trillion and already has reached $16 trillion. Both sets of figures are now considered by all US political parties as unsustainable and are therefore in their eyes in need of correction.

However, such huge sovereign debt problems are not restricted to the US economy, but apply, to a lesser extent, to the countries of Europe and elsewhere. The ‘cliff’ analogy refers to the expectation that governmental budget austerity and cuts will lead to a huge drop in economic activity possibly in the form of ‘double-dip’ recessions. The ‘correction’ of such deforming deficits raises the question of who in the US and Europe is going to be buried under the debris when the ‘fiscal cliff’ finally collapses. To continue with the ‘cliff’ analogy for the moment, those in the economic and political elite are currently proposing policies which will ensure that the 1% will be the first to be evacuated from under its impending collapse.

On the other hand, the weakest elements of the 99%, those with fewest resources, will be left at the base of the cliff, whilst those better off among the 99% will have to scramble to safety as best they can. We will definitely not be all in this collapse together. The solutions which all current mainstream political parties propose are variations on the same basic theme. First: Cut spending on welfare and public sector employment in order to reduce government expenditure, whilst increasing costs and indirect taxation to improve government income. Second: Hope for sufficient economic recovery, to soak up the exceptional levels of unemployment caused by these measures. The variations are only about how quick these policies should be implemented and how much charity should be extended to the shattered victims of austerity and the disintegration.

It is popular on the liberal and soft ‘left’ to argue that there is an alternative set of policies to the currently evolving crisis. These amount to policies which will save capitalism from its own worst symptoms and soften the blows for the able-bodied poor and those less fortunate. Some of these alternative suggestions have been promoted along the lines of; ‘government debt is not all bad; that government debt has been higher in the past; that government spending boosts private capitalist economic activity; that the current problem is caused by a shortage on money supply; higher taxes on the rich should be implemented; a financial transactions tax should be initiated; etc. These sorts of proposed solutions emanate from the ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’ political spectrum in the USA and from the ’socialist’ democratic political and trade union spectrum in Europe and the UK.

The pro-capitalist, anti-worker and anti-poor logic of these political trends is clear! For these advocates, its OK that working people have to pay high taxes to fund insane levels of government (war-enhanced) debt and continued borrowing; its OK for the rich to exploit the poor, providing they don’t dodge taxes and pay an increased amount of it; that it is OK for financial speculators to rip off everybody, providing they are taxed a bit more when they do so; that it is a good idea for general tax payments to be used for enabling private enterprise and personal capital accumulation. In other words, these policies are what every enlightened bourgeois individual should want and advocate. In fact the system should be criticised and exposed for what it is doing and not doing, not humbly reminded of what it should – in all honesty – be already doing.

Significantly, these types of reformist stage management policies are only focussed on the symptoms emanating from the capitalist system. The advocates of reform measures, do not seem to understand the underlying systemic nature of the developing capitalist crisis. This current crisis is not something which can be reformed away by tax increases and regulation, because it is made up of at least five, fundamental and irreconcilable contradictions. [see the ’Five-fold crisis of Capitalism’]

These fundamental contradictions can only be resolved by violently suppressing one side of the contradiction or the other. The two sides are, on the one hand, the capitalist system and its supporters, and on the other, the combined sections of the working and oppressed classes. What is currently being seriously prepared by the elite is not financial regulation of themselves and greater fiscal responsibility, but class war – initiated by the capitalists and their political supporters.

Of the five contradictory elements, one in particular has been insufficiently analysed with regard to an important development of 20th century capitalism and the consequent rise of a new employment sector for the working classes. That development, the public sector, (teachers, social workers, health workers, local government workers, fire-fighters, police, military, civil servants) is obvious to all, but the economic consequences of this sector, in the cycle of capital circulation and accumulation, has largely been ignored and little understood.

With the neglect of Marx among activists, few people on the left have bothered to consider his 19th century analysis of productive and unproductive labour. This neglect is perhaps not surprising, but in the current circumstances, it leaves an important dimension out of consideration by our anti-capitalist understanding. [For a fuller description of this distinction see Productive and Unproductive labour.]

Explained briefly, productive labour, from the standpoint of the capitalist mode of production, is the employment of workers to reproduce and augment their capital. Unproductive labour, however useful and/or necessary, which does not reproduce invested capital, together with a return of a surplus amount (profit) is not productive. Indeed, under the capitalist system, unproductive workers are a drain upon, (a deduction from), the annual surplus extracted from workers employed productively in their various production processes.

Since a part of these annual surpluses, must be surrendered (as taxes) to the governments of capitalist countries, to exercise their functions, there is a struggle by the capitalist classes, over how much, or rather how little they are compelled to surrender. It is these taxes (corporate and individual), together with government borrowing, which currently provide the wages of the public sector.

Individual capitalists and their companies, avoid tax in numerous ways, and their political representatives and lobbyists campaign to reduce the official levels of taxation. The huge deficits run by the US government and noted above, are in a large part the result of the successful lobbying to lower taxes for the rich which commenced under the George W Bush administration in 2001 and again in 2003.

Tax cuts in the US were extended in 2005 and 2007 and again in 2008 and it is estimated that these tax cuts removed $1.1 trillion dollars from government revenue, which had to be replaced by borrowing. This pattern, to a lesser degree has been replicated everywhere in the capitalist world. It is a part of the neo-liberal capitalist agenda to cut taxes for business and the rich and slough off parts of the public sector which can be re-structured into a capitalistic form.

It is, however, only on the surface, that the problem seems to be one of taxation. It may seem that what is needed is to increase taxes, and stop tax avoidance, to correct a fiscal imbalance within capitalism. But fiscal deficit is only a surface symptom which, like an eruption of ash and pumice from a volcano, has a much deeper underlying pressure and substance beneath it. That pressure and substance is the changed ratio under modern capitalist production methods between productive labour and unproductive labour.

This ratio together with the desire of capitalists and pro-capitalists to reduce taxation is causing an attack upon the numbers (along with the salaries and benefits) of those employed in the public sector. This sector along with the poor, the old and the infirm, are those, under this system, who are further threatened by the impending collapse of the fiscal cliff. So far this is only producing rumblings of discontent, but sooner or later this sector is likely to explode. [see’workers and others in the 21st century‘at www. gmanticapitalists.com]

Irrespective of any increased taxes and rigour with regard to collecting them, the underlying problem still remains. The technical levels of production has increased exponentially and its location has spread geographically. The consequent changed ratio between workers who are essential for the reproduction and growth of capital and those who are essential to working people, but a drain on capital, is a fundamental change in the social composition of work. These are problems, not of taxation, but of fundamental economic contradiction and crisis.

The capitalist drive for profits is not only mass-producing commodities, but mass-producing unemployment in the private sector and now the public sector. It is also mass-producing pollution and ecological damage alongside mass-producing obscene amounts of wealth for a relatively small elite, only a little of which trickles down. The current crisis should be a catalyst for widespread debate upon the degenerate and militarised nature of 20th and 21st century global capitalism and the need for an alternative system. It should not be diverted or restricted to discussions on taxation alternatives.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2012)

Posted in Economics, Marx, Politics | Tagged Fiscal Cliff, Marx, productive and unproductive labour, sovereign debt, taxation | Leave a comment

THE SPECTRE OF STALINISM.

Posted on August 6, 2012 by stutteringsteps

As the present economic and financial crisis deepens, more working people and other sections of society will undoubtedly come to question the continuation of the capitalist system. However, exactly at that point they will be confronted with the spectre of Stalinism and Russia. This phenomena and its practice in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, will be used by pro-capitalists of all spectrums, to discourage any projected ideas or attempts of going beyond capitalism. For this reason it is essential that anti-capitalists understand, not only the specific practice of Stalinism, but its connective tissue with the vanguardist tradition of Bolshevism/Leninism and its further roots in sectarianism. This article offers a short introduction to this problem.

It is a fact that over the last seventy years a dark shadow has hung over the vision of an egalitarian post-capitalist society. This shadow was first cast by Bolshevik sectarian intolerance, but it became darkest under the regime of Joseph Stalin. Stalin and his followers were certainly not anti-capitalists even though many of them thought they were and declared so. Their self-deception came about by the fact that they often oppressed the owners of private capital. However, in practice and particularly during Stalin’s rule, they became nationalistic activists who purged themselves of all humanity in pursuit of state-capitalist economic, political and military power.

Stalin and the Stalinists turned a distorted anti-capitalist theory into dogmatic assertion and they tried to subordinate the world anti-capitalist movement to their own needs. They also displayed bitterness and poisonous hatred in dealing with rival anti-capitalists and even with their own members who dared to criticise them. They were often boastful and arrogant and had an unshakeable belief in their ‘correctness’ despite the contradiction between that conviction and the actual developments taking place. All these characteristics are those of sectarianism. (See article ‘Sectarianism and the General Strike’ at this blog.). Stalin frequently claimed to be a Leninist and a follower of Marx, but this latter assertion was also a delusion.

It is certainly possible to find evidence to support the claim to be following Lenin, but he was definitely not in the revolutionary-humanist tradition of Karl Marx. In fact when sectarianism is considered in some detail it is clear that the phenomenon of Stalinism was political sectarianism with full control of, and support from, state power. It was thus a form of sectarianism writ large. Yet Stalin was not the sole originator of sectarianism nor the only supporter of authoritarian state capitalism. If one examines the published volumes of Lenin from 1917 to 1923 before his illness and death in 1924, among other things, it is possible to identify the following repeatedly mentioned views.

1. Socialism could only be realised on the basis of a highly industrialised, centralised, planned state-run economy.

2. Workers could not be considered trusted until they were tested and approved by the Bolshevik Party.

3. Workers would have to voluntarily accept the work discipline ordered by the state planners or be forced to accept it.

4. Workers and peasants were by and large too uncultured to run their own affairs.

5. The politics of Bolshevism/Leninism alone must guide all aspects of economic, political and social life.

In the article, ‘Marxists against Marx’ (on this blog) and in the book, ‘Revolutionary-Humanism and the Anti-Capitalist Struggle’, I have detailed a number of the authoritarian positions of Lenin which indicate more than just a thin edge of subsequent Stalinist dictatorial practices. Of course, under Stalin, state terror against its own citizens was pursued to extraordinary lengths and depths of depravity. Even former close colleagues, for example, were tortured and killed on his orders, by his many supporters. As a former admirer and disciple of Stalin and later Soviet Leader, Nikita Kruschev remarked;

“Many of the leaders of our Party and our country were wiped out. Where had men like Molotov or Kaganovich or Mykoyan been when Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin and Rykov were running the country? Almost the whole of the Politburo which had been in office at the time of Lenin’s death was purged.”(Krushchev Remembers. Penguin. Page 102.)

Roy Medvedev, a Soviet academic also concluded in ‘Let History Judge’ that, “..these were not streams, these were rivers of blood..”. The fact that Stalinism was a distinct political tendency is born out by the evidence that it did not disappear when Stalin died in 1953. Indeed, it continued as a sectarian tendency throughout the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. During that period it polluted and weakened practically every struggle it became involved with. It was alive and well (or perhaps we should say alive but still sick) in 1993, forty years after Stalin’s death. In the Daily Worker of April 2, 1993 appeared the following sectarian assertion;

“Our central aim is to re-forge the Communist Party of Great Britain. Without this Party the working class is nothing; with it, it is everything.”

This group of alleged anti-capitalists were the inheritors of the Stalinist tradition. Their paper, the Daily Worker, had previously supported, state-control of economics, politics and social life in the Soviet Union. For decades they, and their comrades had silently or vociferously, supported Stalin’s every twist and turn, every show trial, every massacre, every Gulag and every incident of torture. Yet as the above quote illustrates, they were not just passive followers of the sectarian megalomaniac Stalin, they were active sectarians in their own right. They did not always need to be instructed by Stalin, they knew exactly how to continue being sectarian. Note that even in the 1990’s forty years after Stalin’s death, they considered that without them ‘the working class was nothing’.

This assertion displays the almost complete sectarian arrogance and patronising contempt for working people. So elitist was the public stance of this group that they reversed the real relationship between a class and those which sought to represent it politically. Yet in that particular ‘vanguardist’ tradition, they were not alone. Many 20th century Maoist and Trotskyist groups held to a similar, if not as publicly declared position as this. In actual fact it is more true to say that without the working class and non-sectarian anti-capitalist activists, this particular Party, or any other for that matter, would be nothing. Nothing that is, except an inconsequential sect.

Stalinism is now largely dead as a political tendency. It has hardly any roots in working and oppressed communities. However, its sectarian sub-soil, from which it developed has not yet been finally cleared and sanitised. Modern, political sectarianism, more often than not, adopts a more benign posture seeking to ‘lead’ the working and oppressed classes – for their own good. Many sectarian groups, still cling tenaciously to the neo-Leninist position that their political leadership alone – organised as an eventual ‘party’ – is capable of correctly leading and guiding (ie controlling) the struggle against capital and any subsequent re-construction.

Perhaps in a short article on Stalin and Stalinism a final word should be left to Stalin himself. Writing at the height of the purges, when up to a thousand people a day were being shot on his orders, when concentration camps full of diseased and dying workers and intellectuals were being worked to death, Stalin was able to state;

“We communists are people of a special mould. We are made of special stuff. We are those who form the army of the greatest proletarian strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honour of belonging to this army.” (History of the Communist Party. Foreign Languages Publishing. Page 268.)

Special stuff indeed! It takes very special people to distance themselves from their own humanity, throw away all morality, bury any feelings of guilt and lie, cheat, torture and murder – or look the other way. Thankfully there are very few people who are of such special stuff, but sadly there are some in every community in every part of the world. Indeed, this type of self-elected leadership of a ‘special mould’ now seems to have gravitated to religious sectarianism, where all the above characteristics are manifested against their own religious communities who think differently and against the members of other religions.

It is clear that any really positive and fruitful anti-capitalist movement will need to confront any remaining Stalinists and the contemporary benign political sectarians with the full implications of their tradition. The idea of any form of political control now and in any post-capitalist form of society, needs to be confronted well in advance of such developments. For as Marx warned;

“Where political parties exist, each party sees the root of every evil in the fact that instead of itself an opposing party stands at the helm of the state. Even radical and revolutionary politicians seek the root of the evil not in the essential nature of the state, but in a definite state form, which they wish to replace by a different state form.” (Marx/Engels. Collected Works. Volume 3 page 197.)

We now have the experience of the Bolshevik-led Soviet Union which confirmed the prognosis of Marx with regard to the political mentality; “..the keener and more lively it is, the more it is incapable is it of understanding social ills”.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2012.)

Posted in Critique, Politics | Tagged Marx, revolutionary-humanism, sectarianism, Stalinism | Leave a comment