Capitalism, socialism, anarchism
Capitalism. A Very Short Introduction, by James Fulcher. Oxford University Press. £6.99
Capitalism is the system of production in which capital prevails. Capital, as Fulcher says, is “essentially the investment of money in the expectation of making a profit”; “money that is invested in order to make more money”. As such it existed even in Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages, but capitalism, as a system, only came into being when capital came to be invested in the production of goods rather than in trading or money-lending. This happened increasingly from the 16th century onwards, accelerating in the 19th century and coming to dominate the world before its end.
All this is well explained in the opening two chapters. Then there’s a rather sudden leap from a discussion as to why capitalism first developed in Europe to modern, 20th century capitalism, which Fulcher calls “managed capitalism”. The state has always intervened in capitalism (that a so called free market capitalism with no state intervention once existed is a myth), but in the 20th century the claim was that this was being done in the interests of all the state’s subjects rather than just the capitalist class, as patently evident before.
Capitalism is, and was from the start, a global system but it has different institutional forms in different countries due to their specific historical and political circumstances. So Fulcher is able to answer his question “Is capitalism everywhere the same?” with a no, different forms of capitalism exist. However, he does not go so far as to include the USSR in its time as having been capitalist. He sees it rather as some non-capitalist alternative, even though money there was invested in the expectation of profit - by the state; hence our view of it as “state capitalism”.
In discussing crises in the final chapter Fulcher points out that “the history of capitalism is . . . littered with crises. Periods of stable economic growth are the exception not the norm. The quarter century of relatively stable economic growth after 1945 may have shaped a generation’s expectations about capitalist normality but it was not historically typical of capitalism”. But, he says, “particular crises . . . come to an end” and that “contrary to what some of his followers have thought” Marx did not believe “that capitalism would end in some huge economic collapse. It would come to an end only when overthrown by the workers it exploited”.
Not that he thinks Marx was being realistic here since his book ends on a distinctly pessimistic note: “The search for an alternative to capitalism is fruitless in a world where capitalism has become utterly dominant, and no final crisis is in sight or, short of some ecological catastrophe, even really conceivable... Those who wish to reform the world should focus on the potential for change within capitalism”. Naturally, we disagree. That’s been tried before, and it doesn’t work.
ALB
Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, by Michael Newman. Oxford University Press. £6.99.
We are hard to please when it comes to books on socialism because it is likely they won’t mean by socialism what we do. This book is no exception but if “socialism” is understood as meaning “what has been considered socialism” it’s not too bad.
The definition of socialism we have inherited - a society based on the common ownership by all the people of the means of production - is logically and historically justified, but we don’t want such common ownership for its own sake. What we want primarily is a society where people are socially equal, have an equal say in how things are run, and feel, and are, part of a genuine community with a common interest; in abstract terms, where equality, democracy and community exist, arguing that this can only happen on the basis of the common ownership by all of the means for producing wealth.
Newman says that socialism involves “a belief in the possibility of constructing an alternative egalitarian system based on the values of solidarity and co-operation”, that such a system is not incompatible with human nature and that it can be brought about by conscious human action. We fall into this category, but so do others. Newman uses the word “socialist” in this book to describe all who do.
The two major movements in the last century which claimed to be committed to this were the Social Democratic and Labour parties and the Leninists. The former believed that an “alternative egalitarian system based on the values of solidarity and co-operation” could be gradually introduced through parliamentary action within capitalism; the latter argued (for most of the time) that it could only be done dictatorially, though still gradually, after the seizure of political power by a vanguard party.
Newman examines what he considers the most favourable cases of both strategies: Sweden for the Social Democrats and Cuba for the Leninists. He does conclude that less inequality came to exist in these countries than previously, but suggests that other factors than a desire to establish “socialism” were involved.
Our view is that all Sweden had under the Social Democrats (recently voted out of office again) was a reformed capitalism, while Cuba (Russia, China, North Korea and the rest) were state capitalist dictatorships which had nothing to do with socialism. And that both contributed to the alteration of meaning that the word socialism underwent in the last century.
Searching for more modern contributions to the idea of socialism, Newman comes up with feminism and ecologism. Socialists are of course feminists in the sense that we believe in equality between men and women, but nowadays only a few ageing feminists from the 1960s and 70s still see feminism as having some connexion with socialism; most now see it as meaning that women should be allowed to compete on equal terms in the rat-race capitalism imposes and have an equal chance of ending up capitalists, top politicians or army generals.
Socialists have become more aware of environmental issues than at one time, but most Greens think that these problems can be solved by gradual parliamentary action, and participation in running capitalism, as the old Social Democrat and Labour parties used to think working-class problems could be. They, too, are doomed to fail.
We can, however, agree with Newman when he says, in his conclusion, that as long as capitalism exists so will socialist ideas: “What can be maintained with confidence is that capitalism will not be able to resolve the problems and injustices it causes, that there will be constant protests in one form or another, and that socialist arguments remain relevant. However, it is the task of socialists to help create that consciousness” rather than assume that socialism will come automatically.
ALB
Anarchism, A Very Short Introduction, by Colin Ward. Oxford University Press. £6.99.
This is a reminder of what anarchists in Britain used to be like before the 1980s when a new breed, borrowing vanguardist tactics from the trotskyists, appeared calling themselves “class struggle anarchists”. Ward puts the case for a pacifist, reformist anarchism, concerned with gradually breaking down authoritarian attitudes in education, sex, the family, prisons, censorship and with promoting decentralization and voluntary self-help even within capitalism.
ALB
Bone of contention
Bash the Rich by Ian Bone, Tangent Books, £9.99. 2006, ISBN : 0-9544177- 7-1
Like the notorious Class War journal he founded and edited, Ian Bone’s autobiography is a rather mixed bag; chaotic, energetic, full of aggro and humour a-plenty, and containing some sharp but sometimes ‘prole-ier than thou’ political observations. Subtitled True-Life Confessions of An Anarchist in the UK, this honest and entertaining book details up to 1986 the political adventures of the man dubbed “the most dangerous ... in Britain” by the excitable Sunday People newspaper. This was at a time when Class War, the paper founded by Bone, was at its peak, baring its political arse at the establishment and urging fellow activists to ‘bash the rich’.
Before arriving at this point, the book explores Bone’s family background and the formative years of his political activity. An early success came when he launched a local paper where he was based in Swansea. After writing a pamphlet detailing the corruption of the local council, Bone and his allies produced Alarm, a paper which reached sales of up to 5000 a week. Having built up impressive momentum, Bone and three comrades stood in local council elections, but it’s a surprising omission of the book that the results are not mentioned here. Bone describes the paper as “an organ of organised class hatred;” one which focused on corruption, gossip and scandal, and made a virtue of its lack of political theory.
Whilst in some ways a welcome antidote to the convoluted and often po-faced theoretical treatises beloved of the Left, this lack of political oversight was a weakness, and one which was only partly overcome by Bone’s most successful project, Class War. He had come to recognise the limits of localised activities, and Class War was launched with the specific aim of putting “class and violence back at the top of the agenda.” The idea was to link up those who were prepared to physically confront the State, from innercity rioters and miners’ ‘hit squads’ to animal rights activists and the occasional football hooligan.
In case it all seems to be about the (understandable) politics of revenge, Bone suggests that Class War was merely following in the hallowed tradition of popular mob violence. Aggressive direct action was not just intended to unnerve the well-to do, but to act as a rallying cry to a largely disinterested majority. However, the book isn’t really explicit enough on what kind of society the author wants direct action to lead to. It’s obvious what he’s ‘anti’, but the ‘pro’ bit needs fleshing out. This links to the issue of how such a society can be brought about, and what social force is necessary to achieve this.
One of the most thoughtful chapters comes near the end when Bone discusses the problems revolutionaries face in getting our fellow workers to take an interest in noncapitalist politics. He asserts that groups like the Anarchist Federation and the SWP seem to think that rational explanations of what’s wrong with capitalism are all that’s needed to effect revolutionary consciousness. “The truth, of course, is that people do not respond in a rational way, so painstakingly explaining injustice in rational terms gets you nowhere.” He then quotes with approval Wilhelm Reich’s view that revolutionaries, “must find the connection with the petty, banal, primitive, simple everyday life of the broadest mass of the people...” .For Class War, a good old scrap was as good a method as any to achieve this.
Such methods, however, can backfire and alienate. If a classless, moneyless, stateless society is to be attained, it surely needs the conscious understanding and desire of a large majority. To be fair, the author does state that “violence wasn’t the answer to every question...” In fact Bone cites the 1985 riots of Broadwater Farm and the death of P.C. Keith Blacklock as a turning point for Class War, although the organisation wasn’t involved there. “We needed to embrace our class not marginalise ourselves by walking into the ‘loonie category’ noose being dangled before us.” According to Bone, Class War’s scabrous column, Hospitalised Copper “was funny. ‘Dead Copper’ wasn’t funny.”
Unfortunately, the book ends rather suddenly, on the eve of the Wapping Dispute in early 1986. Questions of tactics and direction were exercising the Class War collective, but it had some years yet to run before eventually coming to a halt. Maybe a volume two is in the pipeline, and if so it will hopefully also combine this refreshing mix of humour and politics. Bone has certainly had a great deal of fun along the way, and made sure that such enjoyment was reflected in the various projects he was involved in. To end with an example, the first two Class War conferences are said to have been preoccupied with sexual politics, and Bone recounts with wry discomfort how one contributor earnestly proposed ‘forced bisexuality’ as a way of breaking with bourgeois convention.
Robert Whitfield
Red Rhymes
Bob Dixon: Make Capitalism History: Poems and Other Communications, Artery Publications £4.50. (available from 38 Pembroke Road, Bromley, Kent, BR1 2RU)
Socialists have made rather little use of poetry as a way of putting our ideas over, so a book of poems (and a few prose pieces) with such a title is at least eye-catching. Dixon is in fact an old hand at political poetry, and one of his previous books was reviewed in the Socialist Standard for May 2000.
The present volume contains some decent stuff: ‘War is of widows, of woe and of weeping . . . war is not glory, not glinting gold medals.’ A nice deceit depicts ‘colladeral’ as a disease which originated in a US military establishment. A poem titled ‘Demockracy’ contrasts anti-war demonstrators with the lack of those with banners saying ‘WE WANT WAR!’ or ‘POLLUTION IS FUN!’.
Yet there are a couple of problems. One may be gleaned from the title: there is no vision at all of what to replace capitalism with. Another is a tendency to apportion blame in the wrong quarters. The final poem in the book is called ‘To the parents of British soldiers killed in Iraq’, castigating them for not stopping their children from enlisting, and concluding, ‘I cannot extend my sympathy to you.’ This is misplaced — British generals, politicians and rulers more generally should be criticised, not the victims and their relatives.
PB
