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Charity
versus equity
Just
before Christmas last year a letter arrived from Action Aid citing a
number of manifestations of the iniquities of global capitalism. The
letter was an appeal for funds, specifically for the ‘Global
Campaign for Education’ to ‘make sure the governments of the
world keep their promise to provide free primary education for all by
2015.’
Action
Aid stressed that a donation isn’t a hand-out or an imposed
solution but a project that puts power, decision-making and
responsibility back into the hands of a whole community. In fact the
appeal had a letter within the letter. Two teenage Guineans appealed
by letter for the world’s poorest people to the people of Europe,
wanting to give their message of a life of poverty in Africa,
believing that the people of Europe could bring a solution. All they
wanted was education, the key, they believed, to a better life in
their home country. They said that because their families were poor
the choice was between food and education. In attempting to carry
their letter to Europe (believing their oral message may not reach
its destination) they both perished in the undercarriage of the plane
in which they’d stowed away, but their message did arrive in
Brussels International Airport with their dead 14- and 15-year-old
bodies.
The
main points of their letter were wishing to seek help with the
development of Africa; help to fight poverty; and to bring war to an
end in Africa. (Guinea, with a population of about 9 million, shares
borders with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali,
Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and has had to contend with tens of
thousands of refugees and numerous cross-border incursions in the
last decade.) Finally, ‘however, our greatest need is education.’
Action
Aid and other charities may be able to make a dent in alleviating
some of the pressing problems affecting impoverished societies in
Africa and other areas of the world, but these can only be dents
because they don’t aim to change the system to one that can
continue to support all societies in an equitable and sustainable
manner.
Appropriate
development such as desired by local communities, poverty
elimination, an end to war everywhere and universal lifelong
education are some of the fundamental principles of socialism as are
power, decision-making and responsibility to be firmly in the hands
of the people.
Certainly,
support and compassion are needed meantime, but just imagine teams of
people like these already established with logistics skills, people
on the ground experienced in organising, a worldwide workforce
empathetic to the importance of working for and with the community
for common goals, at the time when the majority of the world’s
people – in Africa, in Europe, in Asia and
the Americas – are
intent on working together with the sole aim of establishing a
socialist world for the benefit of all, with no hindrance of class,
colour, religion or wealth.
What
better tribute could we give to these two courageous youths and to
the thousands of others dying daily from malnutrition and preventable
and curable diseases than to double our efforts at bringing about an
end to the horrific, inhumane system called capitalism and replacing
it with one based upon common ownership and democratic control by and
in the interest of the whole community?
JANET
SURMAN
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Back
to the seventies?
Last
year the Oxford economist Andrew Glynn brought out a new book called
Capitalism Unleashed. Thirty-five years ago he
was the co-author of a Penguin Special that came out in 1972 called
British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze.
In it he
and his fellow author (Bob Sutcliffe) argued that capitalism, at
least in Britain, had been brought to a life-or-death crisis because
working class militancy, on the one hand, and international
competition, on the other, had squeezed profits, the life-blood of
the system without which it couldn’t
survive. One more push from the workers, they suggested, and
capitalism could be overthrown.
We
ourselves were sceptical about the whole analysis, suggesting that
they were greatly exaggerating trade union “power”
and that the crisis was not a life-or-death one but just a phase of
the ordinary business cycle which capitalism goes through and from
which it would recover sooner or later (see our review in February
1973 Socialist Standard). Actually, it turned out to be a
bigger turning point than we thought, as capitalism has never since
returned to the “full employment”
days of the 50s and 60s.
In
any event, capitalism did survive. So what does Glynn think now?
Modern-day, “unleashed”
capitalism, he says, has its problems (financial turbulence,
corporate corruption, etc) but cannot be said to be in a state of
crisis in the sense of the Oxford Dictionary definition of “the
point in the progress of a disease when an important development or
change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death”
that he believed it to have been in in the 70s. In fact, his view is
that there is now no alternative to capitalism on the horizon, so all
we’ve got is a choice of different kinds
of capitalism.
“The
longer-term objective of socialism was always to facilitate the
development of people’s lives in a more
fulfilling direction”, he writes, and
asks: “Is it possible to make serious
moves in this direction even within what is still a predominantly
capitalist economy?”.
His
answer is, perhaps surprisingly from someone who was associated with
Militant for a while, “yes”,
in the form of the scheme proposed by the Belgian social thinker,
Philippe Van Parijs, for paying everyone a Basic Income as of right
and irrespective of whether or not they work, referring to an article
by him in a book with the revealing title of Redesigning
Distribution: Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants as Designs for a
More Egalitarian Capitalism. Or, as Van Parijs himself has put
it:
“In
classical Marxism, socialism is just an instrument for achieving the
society in which people can work freely according to their abilities
but still get enough according to their needs. If socialism doesn’t
work, because of threats to freedom and problems of dynamic
efficiency, then why not harness capitalism to achieve the same
objectives?” (The Bulletin,
Brussels, 19 July 2001).
It’s
a pipedream of course and a bit currency cranky (though to give Van
Parijs his due, he did come up with a brilliant title for one of his
books in What’s Wrong with a Free
Lunch?). A Basic Income paid as of right would have to be funded
(even squeezed) out of profits and would either undermine the wages
system (why work for a capitalist employer if the State is paying you
whether you work or not?) or make no difference (since wages would
fall by the amount of the State wage subsidy that a Basic Income
would represent). Or it would be fixed at so low a level as to be
just another name for “Income Support”.
The
simple fact is that capitalism can’t be reformed, humanised or made
more egalitarian. It must be ended not mended.
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