Within the System. By Richard Montague. Trafford Publishing, œ9.75.
Order from http://www.trafford.com
Richard Montague is well known as a contributor to the Socialist
Standard on both events in Ireland and the wider case against
capitalism and for socialism. Now a collection of 24 of his short
stories has been published. The author believes that the creative arts,
including short story writing, have an important role in exposing the
grim reality of global capitalism. Few socialists would disagree.
The star of the show, for this reviewer at any rate, is the longest and
arguably the most imaginative story, ‘General Immunity Serum‘. GIS
originates in a small drug research laboratory in London and is
marketed as a fortifying agent to reinforce the body’s resistance to
minor ailments. The makers produce leaflets, but the most effective
promotion turns out to be local radio. Callers swear that GIS has
solved their health problem: baldness, migraine, asthma, allergies,
arthritis – even cancer and AIDS.
Soon the huge popularity and success of GIS around the world causes
problems for the capitalist economy. Shares in drug and chemical
companies plummet, followed by insurance shares. Hospitals close;
doctors, nurses and auxiliary staff become unemployed. GIS’s conquest
of human sickness and disease destroys millions of jobs in industries
unconnected with medicine – the building trade, motor manufacture and
marketing, and so on. Millions of home owners with mortgages are thrown
into hopeless negative equity.
There is much unrest and civil strife on a world scale. The British
government sets up a Royal Commission. Its majority report urges “bold
initiatives to kick-start the economy”; its minority report wants GIS
to be declared an illegal substance. At a rally in Hyde Park a speaker
reveals the real problem and its solution. Because of the way society
is organised, GIS can be regarded as a terrible catastrophe. The answer
is a society based on co-operative production for needs and free access
to the means of satisfying those needs.
The ‘Last Story’ concerns a newspaper editor about to retire who
confronts his employer with a front-page story he knows won’t get
published: “Economy murders 40,000 kids!... Yesterday 40,000 children
died because economics, the way we order production and distribution in
our world, could not afford œ5,000 for food and medicines to keep them
alive!”
‘Maggie’s Dream’ is an amusing tale about how Margaret Thatcher has a
nightmare that she is in a strange new world without money and the
market. Dennis complains that his money won’t buy him even a nip. A
companion with an outsize briefcase containing £15m in paper money
finds that this won’t buy him a lump of bread. Maggie, shocked but
undeterred, says “They’ll have to learn to appreciate the magic of the
market.”
On a more sombre note, ‘Pieces of Paper’ is a moving account of how a
war-damaged man (“not crazy, just a bit... peculiar”) copes with a life
of poverty. George is employed, Saturdays only, as a cleaner and
gardener for œ10 a week. His far-from-rich employer has a wife who
wants a second-hand car. So they can no longer afford to pay George the
œ10. On learning this his reaction is remarkable but not angry or
self-pitying: “It’s all mad, isn’t it, sir?... There’s the world out
there, a veritable fairyland of everything, far more for everybody that
needs or wants more... And, y’know, few would really want more if
everybody had enough.”
The last story, ‘Contrasts’, is the only one outside, rather than
within the system. It describes a radio broadcast by a historian on 3
June 2077. The Revolution – free access democracy – had swept across
the entire planet in 2046. Elections, one spurring the other, brought
down the entire world capitalist political structures like a vast
domino trail. The old system was considerably modified in the period
preceding the Revolution. The capitalists themselves became frenetic
reformers as they tried to hold off their own downfall. “The new way of
life entailed a great ‘openness’ between people that was utterly alien
within capitalism... What was a fragmented, vicious and secretive world
of internecine greed and strife became a... a family, a human family of
equals.”
STAN PARKER
Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest
for Global Dominance. By Noam Chomsky. Hamish Hamilton £16.99.
This is the latest in a long line of books by Chomsky on US ‘foreign’
policy. Like the others, it presents a devastating critique of the
American ruling class’s support for dictatorships and readiness to use
military might to get their way.
One of the key points of this text is the extent of the USA’s current
ambitions. With effectively no rivals, the US can aspire to ‘permanent
global hegemony by reliance on force where necessary’. This strategy
involves ‘preventive war’: invading (or just threatening to invade)
countries which step out of line or present any kind of challenge to US
power. The US has a virtual monopoly of large-scale violence, can
almost do what it likes in the global arena, and intends to keep things
this way.
While the exact degree of US aims is new, it is of course just an
extension of previous policies. In the early part of the 20th century,
British companies were driven out of Venezuela, leaving US firms in
charge of its vast oil industry (as they still are today). While other
countries were weakened in the Second World War, the US emerged as
economically dominant and strategically secure. It moved to gain
effective dominance over the Middle East, which had the extra advantage
of giving it control over Japan’s energy supplies. In 1958, independent
Arab nationalism was fought with help from Israel and Turkey, while the
same year mass slaughter in Indonesia ‘eliminated the mass-based
political party of the poor and opened the doors wide to Western
investors’. This last quote unfortunately reveals one of Chomsky’s
shortcomings: his uncritical enthusiasm for reformist anti-Western
movements which in reality stand for a more nationalist version of
capitalism. (This kind of logic has reached its nadir in his
endorsement of John Kerry for US president, as a lesser evil than Bush!)
In more recent years, the US has consistently supported tyrannical
dictators and then claimed credit for their overthrow. At the same time
it has done its best to undermine any government that did not bow down
before it, as in Cuba and Nicaragua, leading to the conclusion that the
US is ‘a leading terrorist state’. Domestically, the tactic has been
for whichever faction is in power to maintain it by instilling fear in
the population – 9/11 of course made this much easier. At the same
time, the government has cut back on welfare spending, from schools to
social security. Chomsky’s summary of all this is:
“Maintaining a hold on political power and enhancing US control of the
world’s primary energy sources are major steps toward the twin goals
that have been declared with considerable clarity: to institutionalize
a radical restructuring of domestic society that will roll back the
progressive reforms of a century, and to establish an imperial grand
strategy of world domination.”
Note that this passage again shows Chomsky’s support for
allegedly-progressive reforms which in fact do not challenge the power
of the capitalist class or modify the subordinate status of workers.
The ambitions of the US rulers are no longer confined to terra firma,
as they wish to extend their control to space. This is not an arms race
exactly, as the US is the only real competitor in the militarisation of
space. Ballistic missile defence (BMD) is yet another tool for global
dominance, designed to make the US practically impregnable yet able to
strike almost anywhere. In some variants, BMD will be so all-embracing
that the US will effectively ‘own’ space (the jargon is ‘full-spectrum
dominance’). US hegemony is apparently seen as more important than mere
human survival (hence the book’s title).
Chomsky’s persistently ironic style will not be to everyone’s taste,
but his book does give a thorough picture of the leading superpower’s
plans for all our futures.
PB
Marx's Capital. By Ben Fine and
Alfredo Saad-Filho, Pluto Press, 2004.
This book was favourably reviewed in the Socialist Standard when it was
first published in 1975 and again with the third edition of 1989. This
fourth edition is substantially rewritten, doubling the text length,
yet still coming in at under 200 pages. This is quite an achievement
for an introduction to the thousands of pages in the three volumes of
Marx's Capital, as well as some of the multi-volume Theories of Surplus
Value, the so-called fourth volume of Capital.
As the authors point out, “Marx is not interested primarily in
constructing a price theory, a set of efficiency criteria or a series
of welfare propositions; he never intended to be a narrow 'economist'
or even a political economist”. Rather, they argue that Marx sought to
challenge the assumptions that political economy (the older and more
accurate term for economics) makes about capitalism:
“the monopoly of the means of production by a small minority, the wage
employment of the majority, the distribution of the products by
monetary exchange, and remuneration involving the economic categories
of prices, profits and wages”.
As an introduction to Marx's Capital, this book offers a much more
reliable guide than the late Ernest Mandel's 1976 introduction in the
current Penguin edition of Capital. Mandel, in common with other
Trotskyists, defended the then USSR in the misguided belief that it had
overthrown capitalism.
LEW
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