On the 21st August this year, the 20th anniversary of the failed coup against Gorbachev by Leninist-Stalinist hardliners in the USSR, Tony Brenton, former ambassador to Russia, wrote an article in the Times headed, “The siren voices calling for a revival of Marxism ignore the tragic lessons of its past”. We explain that what happened in Russia between 1917 and 1991 had nothing to do with Marx or with socialism or communism.
Karl Marx was not simply volunteering his name to a way of life that would exist in post-capitalist society. Throughout his years of intensively investigating capitalism, his main purpose was to expose that system as the final form of class exploitation while demonstrating that it had created the economic potential for the establishment of universal freedom.
Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism. By Keiran Allen. Pluto Press. 233 pages.
Venue: 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN Directions: Five minutes walk from Clapham North on the Northern line Speaker: Paul Bennett China recently overtook Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Like other capitalist countries, it has been taking steps to ensure supplies of raw materials and secure export markets, as seen by the …
Read more ““The Rise of Chinese Capitalism” (London) – 10th December 2011″
Socialism won’t be got by evolution but by intelligent design, though it would be nice to think there was an easier way. The political shortcuts turned out to be circular, but some people never give up hope that technology might open up some fast track to the Promised Land.
It was always so. Probably when the plough was first invented there was some Neolithic version of futurist Ray Kurzweil running around the Fertile Crescent gibbering about the Coming of the Singularity, while autodidactic peasants sat around in the smoke-filled back rooms of tribal longhouses discussing the revolutionary implications of the social democratisation of agriculture. Much to their chagrin what they ended up with was kings, wars, plagues and a lousy diet. With the later invention of the printing press some people no doubt foresaw a new flowering of subversive thought and the imminent rising of the masses, just prior to being drowned in a tidal wave of pulp fiction and religious junk mail.
Self-regarding and typically under-employed, those exotically nominated experts in human behaviour have offered many wordless thanks for the unheralded events that enlivened the streets during those August nights. Suddenly they found the immediate future looking decidedly rosy with the prospect of well-paid sessions of unexciting analysis from TV sofas responding to badgering by equally tedious chat-show figureheads. Then there was the blossoming market for anaesthetic contributions to the newspapers, offering the seamier among them some help in recovering from the consequences of their exposed habit of phone-tapping. All of which sprang from the reassuring assumption that there was an easily accessible explanation, handily encapsulated in a slogan or even a single word, for the mobs with their rioting, looting and violence. This was a process to be helped in accordance with the weight of the qualifications of the “expert”.
Capitalism has shown that it cannot meet people’s needs properly, not even in the developed countries of the West, let alone in the rest of the world. In a world capable of providing enough for all, austerity is being tightened on people everywhere. Political democracy, despite its advantages, has become an empty shell, with popular participation limited to giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down every few years to rival bands of professional politicians and with fewer and fewer people bothering to do even this. Social disintegration is gradually spreading, with increasing mental ill-health, drug addiction, crime and anti-social behaviour.
Most people are aware of this, but don’t think they can do anything about it. They don’t like it, but accept it as something they have to put up with as they try to make the best of their life and that of their family. This has been called apathy, but it’s really more resignation or fatalism.
Unfair Shares
‘Deadly Waters: Inside the Hidden World of Somalia’s Pirates’. By Jay Bahadur. (Profile £12.99.)
Somalia is often referred to as a ‘failed state’, one with no effective central authority. Instead there are a number of autonomous enclaves, owing little if any allegiance to the official capital, Mogadishu.
The capitalist system is the most productive mode of production in the history of humankind. In the space of a few centuries the world has been transformed beyond all recognition. Average life expectancies have more than doubled. Technological developments occur at a rate that would have been previously unimaginable. More food, clothing and shelter can be produced using less labour than ever before. It would seem that the material problems of survival have finally been solved.
Yet capitalism is a system at odds with itself. The need for constant accumulation is the driving force of society, determining where and in what way human energies will be used. Instead of humankind controlling the fulfilment of its own development, humanity is at the mercy of an economic system which it has itself created.
Starvation – the inability to buy the things to sustain life – is still stalking Africa.
George Soros is one of the great men of capitalism. He’s the Chairman of Soros Fund Management, a Hedge Fund that is estimated to have assets of approximately $27 billion, and the vehicle that has enabled him to become the 35th richest person in the world. He’s admired in the financial world as the “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” when he pocketed a reported $1 billion in 1992 from the Black Wednesday UK currency debacle. He’s renowned for his philanthropy and as a supporter of liberal ideas. He has been described as a “distinguished thinker”.
