Will ministers eventually say, as they did after the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and after the raid on that house in Forest Gate when another innocent man was shot, that it’s better to err on the side of safety? Better a few innocents are shot than a terrorist act in which hundreds die?

Whatever the truth, the “security alert” last month in which a terrorist attack was said to be “imminent” allowed the state to project itself as the defender of the public. It is no such thing. The state is controlled by pro-capitalist politicians who pursue policies they consider to be in the general interest of British capitalism, even to the extent of putting the lives of the general public at risk.

The present government, led by Blair, has decided that it is in the best interest of the British capitalist class to tag along behind the US government’s global pretensions, especially its so-called “War on Terror", which is really a struggle with certain Middle East states and disaffected Arab elites and their supporters for control of that oil-rich region.

The US government is committed to furthering the interests of US capitalism, which don’t necessarily coincide with those of British capitalism, and there are pro-capitalist politicians in Britain, some apparently within the cabinet, who think that Blair might have gone too far in his pro-US stance. But it is not up to us as socialists to judge which politicians best represent the interest of the British capitalist class.

It is this pro-US capitalism policy option that has put the “British public” in danger by making them legitimate targets in the eyes of the Islamist opponents of US domination of the Middle East. It is just plain ridiculous for government ministers to try to deny this. What makes it worse is that neither the attack on Iraq nor (even less) giving Israel more time to bomb Lebanon enjoyed majority popular support.

But no government can leave such a vital decision as to whether or not to go to war to a popular vote. This is because the role of governments is to be “the executive committee of the ruling class” and, as the interests of the capitalist ruling class are at variance with those of the rest of us, such a decision cannot be left to us as there is no guarantee that our decision will coincide with what the ruling class judge to be in their interest. In fact, in the case of war, people spontaneously tend to be against it.

It is true that, as most people do support capitalism, if a government launches an effective enough propaganda barrage it can generally persuade people to support a war. But this takes time and decisions about war cannot wait. Blair is on record as saying that as a leader it is his duty to give a lead on going to war, even against majority popular opinion. In Britain, until recently and still formally, going to war was a government decision that didn’t require even parliamentary approval.

Democracy and war are in fact incompatible. States have to have a minimal degree of popular support to function, but this need not extend much further than allowing the populace to decide every few years which group of pro-capitalist politicians are to staff the state and, exercising “leadership", use it to further national capitalist interests.

Truth may be the first casualty of war, but civil liberties come a close second.

Whether real or manufactured, “terror plots” and “security alerts” provide a pretext for a state to further erode civil liberties inherited from a more liberal past, as the string of laws introduced by the Blair government to increase the powers of the state bears witness.

It can’t be denied that there is a conflict going on involving attacks on innocent civilians on both sides. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon the US and /or its allies bomb villages and villagers. In America on 11 September five years ago and in Britain last 7 July, the other side killed innocent workers at or on their way to work. Socialists condemn both sides. And we don’t swallow the propaganda that the state is there to protect us.

Ever fearful that foreign governments might, among other things, introduce labour and environmental legislation detrimental to US investments, Washington has opposed the principle of democracy on almost every continent, even helping to overthrow democratically elected governments whenever it felt its interests threatened (e.g. Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964. Greece 1967, Fiji 1987).

Nor have its methods been peaceable. Indeed its agents in the CIA have carried out assassination of prominent individuals with as much indifference as its embassies have supported right-wing death squads and bloody coup attempts throughout Central and South America. Across the world, the US has backed dictators of every hue, turning a blind eye to their horrendous affronts to the democratic process.

We are now to believe that the US, presently occupying “sovereign Iraq” (for President Bush has declared Iraq is now “sovereign”), a country with sizeable oil reserves, and which has lost 100,000 of its people since the US-UK invasion, will see that free and democratic elections take place on 30 January. Bush has since informed the people of Iraq - the same Iraq in which the CIA helped Saddam Hussein pull off the military coup that originally brought him to power: “We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.”

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Iraq, has been adamant that the US will not allow a delay in the 30 January vote. Speaking to reporters he stated that the elections would go ahead and that the security situation would be improved by then, and went so far as to say that conditions in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces were already safe enough for elections to be held.

He said: “I think once they realize that the elections will go forward as planned, then they [Sunni opponents of the election] are going to have to deal with that reality” (Washington Post, 1 December). However the Sunni resistance looks set to spiral, his comments coming just after it was reported that US deaths in Iraq in November matched the post-invasion record set in April - 135 troops dead.

In Washington and London, the claim is that the ongoing attacks by insurgents are an all-out attempt to disrupt the coming elections, when in truth the overriding fact is that many Iraqis still see the US as an army of occupation whose presence they have a right to oppose. An opinion poll carried out in September by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority confirmed that opposition to the US presence was widespread. It revealed that just 2 percent of Iraqi Arabs - that is, minus the Kurdish population - agreed wholeheartedly with the occupation. If anything, this shows that in spite of the age-old hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites, one thing that could unite them is their hostility to an occupying army of 138,000 - a figure set to increase before the election.

Securing the peace in Iraq in time for the elections has so far meant installing a pliable puppet regime, and implementing Order 39, which the Economist (25 September 2003) described as “a capitalist’s dream” and which opened up the Iraqi economy to complete foreign takeover. It has meant the deliberate bombing of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by squadrons of bombers and helicopter gun-ships, turning cities into rubble (Fallujah was napalmed), cutting off water, electricity and medical supplies and spreading hunger and disease.

A comprehensive new study by the British-based charity organisation Medact, which looks at the impact of war on health, reveals that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years has increased from 4 percent prior to the invasion to 7.7 percent since the invasion and that about 400,000 Iraqi children are suffering from ‘wasting’ and ‘emaciation’ conditions of chronic diarrhoea and protein deficiency.

Despite such facts as these, Washington would have it that people in Iraq are being irrational in not supporting US-organised elections.

As we go to press, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians are at odds over whether elections can take place on 30 January as planned. Iraq’s 60 percent Shia majority, who clearly suffered worst under Saddam’s reign, are keen for the elections to go ahead on time, knowing they are likely to consolidate the increased power they have enjoyed since overthrow of the essentially Sunni president Saddam. However, as rebels have continued their assaults on other towns since the fall of Fallujah, a campaign led by Sunni politicians has gathered momentum, with Shia leaders claiming that a postponement of the election date would only play into the hands of the insurgents.

The head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the elections go ahead. He has been backed by 42 mainly Shia and Turkmen parties who have issued a statement to say moves to delay the elections were illegal.

Conversely, Adnan Pachachi, a former Sunni minister, is heading a group of 17 political parties asking that the 30 January vote be delayed by six months because of the violence, fearing the insurgency in Sunni towns will discourage people from voting, thus disenfranchising them. Significantly, the two major Kurdish parties have also signed up to the delay

Alawi, the interim leader appointed by Washington to run Iraq, has said that in centres of resistance like Fallujah elections could be “delayed” until stability existed there, without the vote being invalidated, or in other words Washington-style democracy would will be available in the first instance only to those who did not resist the occupation by US forces.

Alawi, it seems, has no real control over the situation, and though it is said he has the power to cancel the election if he wished, there still exists the US hand-picked seven-member commission set up to run the elections, which can bar any candidate or party from standing and which will be deciding who is and who is not eligible to stand as a candidate.

Under the rules, the Iraqi electorate will vote for a 275-member Transitional National Assembly. Political parties will submit a list of candidates and every third name has to be a woman’s. Those Parties with alleged connections to militias are disqualified from taking part, along with former leading members of the Baath Party.

The US hopes to have 150,000 troops in place in time for the election, evidence if ever it was needed that the crisis in Iraq is escalating. It was not so long ago that Bush was boasting how US troops had been greeted as liberators and projected that the country could be policed with 50,000 troops by the end of 2003. Now military analysts are cautioning that the Iraq army and police force will not be in a position to police the country for another ten years. So much, then for Bush’s claim that once a legitimate Iraqi government is up and running the troops will be on their way home.

And as for the post-election situation, make no mistake, any government elected in Iraq will be permitted to function only so long as it kowtows to the dictates of Washington. Whatever, government is elected to ‘rule’ Iraq on 30 January it will only be allowed to do so with the endorsement of the White House.

Here in Britain, Bush’s sidekick, Tony Blair, is likewise looking forward to a post-election regime in Iraq that has no real say on foreign investment. Moreover, Blair is desperate for elections to take place in Iraq for the simple reason that he needs something resembling a foreign policy success to present to voters in the run up to the election. Indeed any good news at all at the moment would be welcomed by New Labour.

The essential goal of the Bush regime in the Middle East remains the same as that of preceding administrations going back to WWII, and that is to reinforce control of the region’s oil reserves and the profits that arise from them. Furthermore, Washington is well aware that control of Middle East oil gives the US enormous leverage over its economic rivals, Europe, Japan and China, all of whom are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the US. China in particular is expected to have the same oil demands as the US within 25 years.

That Iraq has huge oils supplies is the sole reason the US cannot allow a government - freely elected by its people and one advocating a US departure - to exist.

JOHN BISSETT

Nationalism is utterly opposed to socialism. Socialists therefore oppose nationalism in all its forms.

It might be supposed that people who profess an interest in the doings of human beings—such as, say, journalists—might well consider a solid and determined strike by nurses over pay to be a worthwhile subject for their notice. This should be especially so when such a strike is going on within but a few hundred miles of their offices, as happened when in October the nurses of Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority (90 percent for) to go on indefinite strike over their shoddy pay. Devoted consumers of the British media, however, would have found nary a whisper on the subject. Clearly, a story of dedicated health care professionals—usually referred to as “angels” by our sharp-eyed reporters—feeling so ill-used and battered by the system that they decided to take action for themselves, is not of interest to human beings on the other side of a small stretch of water. Instead we were treated to facile dissertations upon the constitutional significance of Prince Charles skipping dinner with the Chinese president.

The story is ever the same. Events that occur outside of Britain’s boundaries are of no concern to our intrepid observers of humanity, unless they somehow have a “British interest". We are not meant to be interested in the affairs of humans generally, but instead to be concerned with “the British” first and foremost. Indeed, when BBC journalist Kate Adie reported on the Dunblane massacre, using exactly the same style and technique as she would have reported a massacre in some far-flung war-torn region, she was execrated for her insensitivity. The deaths of British children are clearly more important than children dead in war.

Tool of rising capitalist class
Historically, nationalism and national feeling have been the tool of the capitalist class for both winning and retaining power. England, for example, can be seen as having developed through the growth of the economic power and influence of London. As London grew, and began to dictate the economic priorities of the surrounding regions, so to it began to need to control them politically, and socially, in order to protect its own interests. Up until the reign of Henry VIII the feudal barons had lived in almost total autonomy, specifically the far-flung magnates like the Percies of Northumbria. Most regions, villages even, maintained a distinctive identity, set of values and traditions. As their influence grew, it became incumbent upon the London capitalists to try and tailor these values and traditions to win over more support for themselves, or at least to ensure an absence of conflict.

In order to achieve this they adapted the traditions they found among the subjected communities, or even made them up when none suitable existed. A classic example was the myth of the Norman Yoke—that Saxon England had been a bastion of Freedom and Democracy, but that William the Conqueror had imported the tyrannical monarchy and feudalism with him. The historical record shows that the Saxons had extensive feudal structures of their own. Of course, that was irrelevant to the myth-makers. They had a tradition to invent, specifically, one which would unite people behind them against their feudal opponents.

The aristocracy itself maintained a preference of looking towards the complex familial power structures across Europe, rather than to a feeling of community with people of their own domain. Title, land and religion were the factors that mattered to them, not nation. They were more concerned with status among their peers. It didn’t matter what language the people who lived on their lands spoke. Further, avowal of the doctrine of the nation was seen as placing an ideological category above the monarch; where before the monarch was the state, now the monarch was to be subordinated to the state.

Making (up) a nation
As the power of the proponents of these ideas grew, so pronouncing an adherence to their ideas became a swift and secure way to win preferment. Hence the power of their ideas grew too, to become the dominant, ruling ideas. There was a further practical impetus for cultural standardisation: the extension of state and bureaucratic power further into life, in order to more efficiently control the economy and delineate property. Coupled with the increased capacity and need for rapid communication, this meant that standardised linguistic practices were needed. Language became a factor in establishing state power, and thus it became a factor in determining a “nation". It’s no coincidence that the rise of the nation-state coincides with the invention of the dictionary and the encyclopaedia. It’s no coincidence that nationalism is accompanied by a mania for classifying, delineating and defining people into categories. These practical considerations were made explicit by the Polish nationalist Pilsudski, who observed that “It is the state that makes the nation, not the nation the state.”

Nations have taken a great deal of building. There is almost no nation-state that has not had its boundaries drawn in blood, its foundations dug out of human flesh. England was nationalised by Cromwell with the deaths of the Cornish and the Irish. France was nationalised by bloody wars between the monarchy and local lords and interests (not to mention the interminable wars with the Germanic states to set the exact boundary between the two “nations"). America was built on the bodies of the native population. It is a process that continues today in the form nation-building, which has taken in Yugoslavia and Central Africa.

The effort, though, has to be ongoing. States have required the use of an education system, to standardise learning, spread a national history and a sense of shared culture. An example of this can be seen in the Thatcher government’s enforcement of the intellectually bankrupt notion of a Literary Canon in the National Curriculum: a gallery of literary luminaries, led by Shakespeare, that bored, uninterested children are told are great and something for them to be proud of. On the continent, it was the task of “turning peasants into Frenchmen” that the Republic set itself. Nations are made, not born.

In order to enforce the new system of property over the whole range of its influence, the capitalist class needed the state, and its legitimising idea of nationalism and the nation. Culture resides in sets of ideas, values and practises that set out a sense of precedent, self and future possibility. By imposing the idea of the nation upon a culture, complete with its inherent notions of territorial ownership and property, the ruling class impose their notions of property on the very self-image of the people within that culture.

All possibilities and plans are circumscribed by, or at least must be made in relation to, this logic. So long as people think in terms of the “common good” of the “national economy", in terms of the overall performance of one unit in the world-wide division of peoples, they are, whether consciously or not, serving the interests of the capitalist class. All evaluations, priorities and hierarchies of value within a “national culture” are made from the point of view, from the self-interest, and, indeed, the apprehended self-hood, of the members of the capitalist class. When the economy is “doing well” it is doing so for the capitalists, when the economy is ailing, it is ailing for the capitalists. Their interest and feeling is the condition for action and evaluation of a national culture.

The idea of “the nation", then, functions as a supreme good, beyond the physical and mechanical functionings of the state, to which any cause may appeal. Thus, both Blair and Hague are claiming that their position on the Euro is the true “patriotic cause". Put another way, it is a fantasy, a dream, which can be used to cover up for problems and contradictions in the practice of the state’s daily life. Its function is to legitimise both the state and class rule, and sustain a large quantity of support, through workers who identify with the ideals of nationhood and believe themselves to be the same as, and have the same interests as, their masters.

No common interest
Workers, of course, do not share a common interest with their masters. It does not follow that if the “national wealth” increases, or if trade increases, or even if profit increases, that higher wages will be gained by workers. In fact capitalists can only make a profit by appropriating the wealth produced by the workers to themselves; but in the topsy-turvy world of ideology, it seems that workers will only have good pay and wealth when the capitalists are doing well. So it appears that workers and capitalists share a common interest. In fact, the interest of workers is conditioned by the interest of the capitalist, in exactly the same manner as hostages held by a kidnapper: unless the kidnapper-capitalists’s demands are met, they will not allow the hostage-workers to have what they need to live.

There is a well-documented effect of hostage situations, called “The Stockholm Syndrome” in which hostages under duress began to identify with their kidnappers, and believe in their cause. Nationalism works in much the same way. It is the Stockholm Syndrome on a grand scale. The working class who are dependent (under the current system) on the capitalists, to whom they are bonded by state-boundaries across which they are not permitted to escape, begin to believe that they share an identity with them. Hence the ridiculous comments we’ve all heard from people flipping burgers in McDonalds, insisting blindly that they don’t like socialism because they’re capitalists. Hence further, the ridiculous spectacle of people wittering on about the Union Flag being on British Airways’ planes, as if BA were anything more than a vehicle for enriching share-holders.

Workers have no country

The only way to define such national identity is to define it in terms of what (who) it is not, i.e. negatively. Thus nationalism sets itself as being against other countries, striving to define a uniqueness of national cultureso as to once and for all set its country apart from others, to know itself by what is un-like it. At one extreme this can include myths about race and blood, trying to attach the national abstraction to some trait of genetics or similar such nonsense. Since people have a strong desire to retain their own perceived identity, and to have a good opinion of themselves, often the creeds based on such identities function in a highly irrational, and ultimately, defensive way. Thus it is usually a sign of desperation and of an incapacity to formulate a coherent argument when our masters resort to playing the nationalist card.

It is clear, then, that socialists must oppose nationalism in all its forms: not just refusing to espouse their creed, but defying the rituals, the anthem signing, flag saluting and other expressions of craven loyalty to the nation-state, that help enforce the idea of nation in our minds. There is no national interest for workers, and any attempt to reform capitalism must be based on a national interest and thus be opposed to socialism. Self-determination for “nations” just equates with freedom and self-determination for a ruling class. It must be opposed in favour of self determination for people, concretely and actually in their own lives. It must be opposed with socialism.

PIK SMEET

After being cancelled for years the Rising Commemoration has been restored by the Ahern government, anxious to maintain its republican credentials against the growing threat of Sinn Fein in the impending General Election. The excuse for originally cancelling the Commemoration was that the army was so overstretched on foreign UN peace-keeping duties that it couldn’t stage a march of a couple of hours’ duration in Dublin.

The real reason, of course, was that the genuine inheritors of the political lunacy of 1916, the Provisional IRA, were actively engaged in the killing business, intermixed with bank robberies and crimes of violence not only in Northern Ireland but in the Republic of Ireland as well. Celebrating the killings of those who had laid the foundations of the Irish state was regarded as honourable but the new killings of their latter-day progenitors were not. The fear was that the Provisional IRA might well be the political and military beneficiaries of a dramatic outburst of the patriotic emotion engendered by the establishment’s recognition of a Rising that had even less justification than the resuscitation of the IRA in 1970.

It was Dublin that bore the bloody birth pangs of the IRA when about 1,000 men of the Irish Volunteers coalesced with Connolly’s 300-member Irish Citizen Army on Easter Monday 1916 to become the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and challenge the might of the British army as well as units of the British navy in a fight for Irish political independence.

The Commander-in-Chief of the rebel army was a Dublin schoolteacher and poet called Patrick Pearse. At a practical level he appears to have been an inoffensive pedagogue but his writings reveal another side to the man, a side that might well have preoccupied a psychiatrist, for his alter ego was a soldier of destiny with an inclination for blood sacrifice.

In 1916 blood sacrifice was high on the agenda of world capitalism. Competition between opposing national segments of capitalism had spilled over into massive violence as hapless legions of working men contested on the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe in the interests of their masters. Pearse obviously felt the exhilaration of an absent participant; in 1915, when incompetent generals and field marshals were sending millions of men to assured death in northern France he wrote:

“The last 15 months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth+ It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august honour was never offered to God as this.”

In The Story of a Success, he complains:

“The exhilaration of fighting has gone out of Ireland+ when people say that Ireland will be happy when her mills throb and her harbours swarm with shipping they are talking as foolishly as if one were to say of a lost saint, ‘That man will be happy again when he has a comfortable income’. I know that Ireland will not be happy again until she recollects + that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet.”

Thus, the idiocies of the Commander-in-Chief of the armed wing of Sinn Fein who, in kindness, we can only see as deeply mentally disturbed. But, along with Pearse, in creating what W B Yeats saw as the birth of “a terrible beauty” was James Connolly, one-time member of the Social Democratic Federation, who broke with that organisation a short time before the founding comrades of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and was one of those who combined in establishing a Scottish section of the Socialist Labour Party.

Connolly claimed to be a Marxist and described Marx as the greatest of modern thinkers. In 1912 during the great Dublin lockout when the Irish Constabulary attacked the strikers, Connolly and James Larkin, the strike leader, had established a workers’ defence organisation with the grandiose title of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) that, in 1916, was to combine with a small section of the Irish volunteers as the IRA, whose political mouthpiece was Sinn Fein.

The Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, who was secretary to the ICA, said Connolly forsook the cause of the international proletariat for the insular romanticism of Irish Nationalism. In fact, Connolly’s espousal of Irish nationalism could be more properly defined as a betrayal of the worker’s trade-union cause as what he brought the impoverished members of the ICA out to fight for on Easter Monday was the right of a fledgling Irish bourgeoisie to establish legislative independence that would afford it trade protection, in the words of Sinn Fein, “+from English and other foreign capitalists”.

Ironically, then, the people whose economic interests were to be fought for was the nascent Irish capitalist class; the very people who had locked out the Irish workers in 1912 and called out Crown forces to attack those workers; the very people who had led Larkin and Connolly to conclude the need for a defensive Irish Citizen Army.

Sinn Fein, in its policy statement of 1907 had made clear the identity of the class it represented though it euphemistically referred to the Irish capitalist class as “home manufacturers and producers”:

“If an Irish manufacturer cannot produce an article as cheaply as an English or other foreign capitalist, only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection to that manufacturer.”

As an epilogue to the Rising we might recall the words of Patrick Pearse in The Coming Revolution:

“We might make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing.”

In the Rising of 90 years ago which the political agents of Irish capitalism are commemoratong this Easter, some 50 rebels were killed while more than four times that number of civilians died. It was the latter, innocent and, as it happened, uniformly poor, who were the real blood sacrifice and their deaths presaged even worse to come.

RICHARD MONTAGUE

In the late 1980s the Andean Group of governments further liberalized investment regulations to ease the repatriation of profits from foreign investments and to allow a greater foreign involvement in the national economy. This led to the Andean Pact free trade agreement in 1992. The most recent figures show that free-trade capitalism has done little to benefit workers in Colombia. World Bank figures show that the national poverty rate declined from 65 percent in 1988 to 64 percent in 1999. According to the FAO, the number of undernourished people in the population decreased from 6.1 million in 1990-92 to 5.7 million in 2000-02. If this is the World Bank’s current motto of ‘A World Free of Poverty’ in action, then Colombians will be waiting several decades before they even have enough food to eat in a country with the some of the richest natural resources on the planet.

In the late 1980s, when Colombia began to attract British capital, Margaret Thatcher sanctioned military assistance to Colombia’s notorious armed forces. This assistance continues to this day. Despite the efforts of journalists and activists, the British government refuse to disclose the full amount and nature of all the military assistance given to Colombia’s armed forces. It is known that British military officers have trained their members in the UK as well as in Colombia. The UK government has also aided the Colombian government to set up the National Intelligence Centre a co-ordinating body for the Colombian security forces. The UK government has also sanctioned arms sales to Colombia; indeed Colombian delegations have attended the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition (DSEi) in London and Farnborough International Airshow at the invitation of the Ministry of Defence. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued arms export licences to the value of ú£3.5 million in 2004. The British government can refuse to allow export of arms, for example, on the basis of risk of use for internal repression, risk of contributing to internal tensions or conflict in the recipient country or the preservation of regional stability. Perhaps the case of Colombia is an administrative oversight.

US security assistance amounted to $98 million in military financing, $1.7 million for military training and education and $474 million for counter-narcotic operations in the 2004 financial year. Corporations are also thought to make donations to the Colombian military.

The US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004 state that members of the security forces continued to commit serious abuses, including unlawful and extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances. Also police, prison guards, and military forces mistreated detainees in harsh, overcrowded and underfunded prisons. State security forces were responsible for 124 extrajudicial killings during the first six months of 2004 and at least 17 of the 65 cases of forced disappearance. Victims are often portrayed as guerrillas killed in combat.

One of the controversial aspects of US-funded counter-narcotic operations involves the eradication of coca and opium poppy plantations by aerial herbicide spraying. The US Department of State’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs reports that 2004 was the fourth consecutive record-breaking year of aerial eradication: 136,500 hectares of coca and 3,061 hectares of opium poppy were defoliated. The use of broad-spectrum, non-selective herbicides means that not only is coca and poppy production affected but also food crops, pasture and forests, to say nothing of the possible effects of large amounts of herbicide on livestock and humans. The illicit crop eradication programmes have simply meant that new areas are brought into cultivation. The result is that the increasing destruction of immensely diverse natural forest as farmers are displaced by removal of their means of living and by poorly targeted spraying. Some compensation is available as part of the eradication programme but is inadequate when set against the losses, and not enough to act as a disincentive to further planting of illicit crops.

Commentators have suggested that US-funded counter-narcotic operations are little more than an attack on the financial supply lines of the guerrillas. Quoted in the New York Times last year, a spokesperson from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said ‘Key indicators of domestic cocaine availability show stable or slightly increased availability in drug markets throughout the country’. It seems that the eradication programme has had little effect on the supply of cocaine within the USA.

The Caûo Limùn oilfield in the Arauca region, which accounts for 30 percent of Colombia’s oil production, has seen some of the greatest violence in recent years. A pipeline which pumps oil to the Caribbean for export has been a major target for guerrilla forces seeking payment for not sabotaging the pipeline. The 18th Brigade of the Colombian military which is funded and trained by the US government and an oil company has been accused of abuses against civilians and of co-operation with paramilitaries. Health workers, trade unionists, teachers, journalists and activists as well as members of displaced peasant communities who lived near the pipeline have been victimised by the both the military and paramilitaries.

The US State Department and Amnesty International both state that despite the near impunity with which military personnel carry out atrocities, they continue to fight a ‘dirty war’ by collusion with paramilitary groups. The extent to which this occurs is unclear, reports vary from the merely sharing intelligence to paramilitaries and the military being trained, transported, armed and fighting together.

Paramilitaries were responsible for numerous violations of international humanitarian law and human rights according to the US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. There are approximately 12,000 paramilitary fighters in Colombia, mostly members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a coalition of paramilitary groups. Though officially the AUC is demobilising and announced a ceasefire in 2002 more than 1,800 killings and disappearances have occurred since then. Paramilitaries were responsible for at least 304 of such killings during the first six months of 2004, including journalists, activists, trade unionists, indigenous leaders, local politicians and others who threatened to interfere with their drug trafficking activities or those suspected of collaboration with guerrillas. There are also reports that paramilitaries continued to commit ‘social cleansing’ killings of prostitutes, drug users, vagrants, and the mentally ill in city neighbourhoods they controlled.

One of the most well publicised aspects of paramilitary killing in Colombia in recent years involved the Coca-Cola company. SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian food and drink workers’ union, claim that members and their families have been abducted, tortured and murdered by paramilitaries hired by the management of Coca-Cola bottling plants. With no means of redress in Colombia, the union with the help of the United Steel Workers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund attempted to bring a case against Coca-Cola in Florida under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victim Protection Act. The court found the Colombian government complicit with the paramilitaries but absolved Coca-Cola of responsibility as the bottling companies were separately owned, despite Coca-Cola then being the major shareholder in the company. The union’s case against the bottlers is unresolved. Since the beginning of the case SINALTRAINAL have called for an international boycott of Coca-Cola products.

The paramilitary groups and guerrillas have their roots in La Violencia, the war of 1948–1957 between supporters of the oligarchic landowners and supporters of a liberal state and land reform. At the end of La Violencia several independent republics existed within Colombia. The armed forces of the state, supported by the US military, took these areas by force. From one of these republics known as Marquetalia, the creator and future leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) emerged with a small band of guerrilla fighters to continue to fight against the official parties who had now formed a power-sharing coalition. It was later that they aligned themselves with the Colombian Communist Party (PCC). FARC and the PCC severed links in the late 1980s. However, despite the differences between Marxism and the PCC’s Leninism, and the obvious discrepancies between FARC’s openly stated political programme and that of Marx, FARC and the smaller pro-Cuban National Liberation Army (ELN) are often referred to as ‘Marxists’ in the popular press. In fact, FARC declare themselves to be Bolivarian and call for ‘Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty’, rather than for Marx’s call for workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of all existing social conditions.

FARC and ELN members were responsible for a large percentage of civilian deaths attributable to the armed conflict according to the US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. FARC are thought to be responsible for hundreds of intentional killings and have injured hundreds of civilians with bombings and land-mines. FARC also kidnap, torture, and murder off-duty members of the public security forces. Both FARC and ELN kidnap hundreds of civilians to help finance their activities. The Colombian Presidential Programme for Human Rights reports that from January to November 2004, the FARC killed at least 99 persons in massacres. Guerrillas targeted local elected officials, candidates for public office, religious leaders, suspected paramilitary collaborators, and members of the security forces.

The war in Colombia reminds us that we are living with a globalised capitalism. The war is of a global nature and not just a domestic war. Tragically most workers still look to a beneficial national government for amelioration of their conditions. However, as long as the social conditions of capitalism exist, and minority ownership of the means of production and distribution, competition to be that minority will all too often turn to war. Be it the benevolent liberal democratic state with a mixed economy, or the free-market economy or a government of nationalized industry free of foreign influence, this has ever been the case. World socialism will destroy the social conditions that create poverty and war.

PIERS HOBSON

We in the Socialist Party have always insisted on the advantages, for the advancement of the cause of socialism, of the fullest possible freedom of expression of political and social ideas, including when these take the form of religion (since all religions hold views on how society should be organised and are in this sense political). No view should be prevented from being expressed. And no view (not even religion) should be exempt from being criticised.

We have always practised what we preach. We opposed the banning of the Daily Worker in 1941. We have criticised the policy of “no platform for fascists” as censorship by direct action. We have debated against fascists and Islamists, exposing their views before their followers to the withering criticism of the socialist case.

The main case against censorship is that it considers that people are too ignorant to decide for themselves and so must be protected from hearing certain views. All censors, actual or would-be, consider themselves a cut above the rest. They are not corrupted by reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover but their servants would be. They are not affected by reading anti-Christian or anti-Muslim writings (as the case may be) but their followers would be. They are not affected by a BNP rant but other, less enlightened people would be.

Since ideas are thrown up by social conditions censorship never works to suppress them anyway. The Catholic Church was not able to prevent the rise in Europe of the secular, practical materialism generated by capitalism and has been forced to accommodate itself to this. The same fate awaits Islam, which seems to want to rival Catholicism for the title of the world’s most intolerant religion. At the moment its clerics are desperately trying to hold back the spread of capitalist secularism – and still have the power to mobilise fanatical mobs to rage against a few harmless cartoons – but, as capitalism progresses more and more in the areas where they now dominate they too will lose influence, painfully slow as this is turning out to be.

In any event, Socialists are opposed to the attempts made by Muslim clerics to prevent and punish criticism of their religion. We are under no obligation to respect the religious dogma of these obscurantists that places the so-called prophet Mohammed beyond criticism, not that he has anything relevant or sensible to say for 21st century conditions.

The last refuge of those who favour censorship is the proposition that people should be legally banned from insulting each other. It is true that if you want to persuade someone to change their views insulting them is not the best way to begin. But you can’t legislate for good manners or good persuasive techniques. To allow one side in an argument to cry “you’ve offended me” and appeal to the law to silence the other side would mean an end to free speech.

Our answer to all censors is to reaffirm that workers are quite capable of judging for themselves, quite capable of sorting out the wheat from the chaff and working out which ideas accord with their interests – and which do not. The best condition for the emergence of socialist understanding remains free and frank discussion.

How soon will the carrier groups in the Gulf, AC-130s in bases in Iraq and the nearby B-52s “liberate” another 100,000 or so Iranians? Well, the Iran Bourse will formally open on March 20 and allow countries to break the US monopoly on oil purchases in petrodollars. Central banks across Europe and Asia will trade in part of their 3 trillion US dollars for euros. So the Iran Bourse is a direct threat to extorting labor and resources from the developing world for worthless paper and Washington’s ability to print unlimited amounts of money to fund a powerful standing army and provide lavish tax cuts to the wealthy.

But, of course this little scenario differs only in the details from the last 300 or so war mongering scenarios that have taken place since World War I. The simple fact of the matter is that capitalism is a war-prone society, in that built into it is the perpetual conflict between rival states over sources of energy (oil), markets, raw materials, trade routes, areas of influence and the strategic points to defend them. You simply can’t have capitalism without wars, the threat of war and preparations for war. To end war we must end capitalism. To end capitalism, we must replace it with socialism. –PF

-Pablito Calvo de la Barba Larga

The figure 6 million is highly evocative – the same number as the usual estimate of Jews that were murdered in The Holocaust – possibly the most heinous act of mass murder in history as these millions were gunned down in pits or gassed in specially built camps for the extermination of a whole people. A crime of such infamy that its like has never been known and to this day in many parts of the world – as renowned liar David Irving is finding to his cost in Austria – it is considered a crime to deny that it happened.

What historians can and do dispute, though, is the extent to which The Holocaust was planned out in advance – whether Hitler always intended for the mass murder of Jews or whether slaughter grew out of local pragmatic responses to dealing with local populations in conquered territories. The so-called Intentionalist versus Functionalist accounts of The Holocaust.

The debate is complex – and probably irresolvable now. What is, perhaps, clear, is that the Functionalist case is somehow more horrifying. It would be comforting to human minds to know that a handful of monsters dreamed up and guided the mass-murder from their bunker – but it is more dreadful to conceive of low-level local officials going about their business : Item 5 – Merits of Gas over Bullets for extermination. Literally getting rid of some inconvenient people.

Perhaps, though, in future years, people will look back on the functionalist holocaust of our times – sit agog as they hear of committees sitting down to make policies knowing they will lead to millions of preventable human deaths because they can’t, won’t, daren’t raise the lives of these people above holy private property, the sovereignty of nation states or even God.

The autogenicide of the human race is why 6 million must die each year and why 850 million must live undernourished.

We will be as equally deserving of opprobrium as those who stood by and let the Holocaust happen if we do not act as soon as we may to end this preventable waste. If we lend our voices or our votes to political parties that put trade, business, capital and property before the rational good of distribution according to needs, we are contributing as culpably as the lowliest corporal genocide.

We urgently need to build a worldwide movement to bring a speedy halt to the carnage. The easy thing – the functionalist thing – is to go on supporting parties that offer small, possiblist solutions within the current system. But the right thing to do, the necessary thing, is to demand the impossible and turn the whole system over. Let’s make 2006 the monument to the beginning of the end of a murderous system.

The death of the two young lads who were accidentally electrocuted when they ran into an electricity sub-station in Clichy- sous-bois north of Paris following an all too routine police identity check in the area was not in itself the trigger to these events. The trigger was the reaction of the Interior Minister, Sarkozy, (France’s answer to Blunkett, marital problems included) who called the unruly young people in the suburbs “riff-raff", thus confirming a tendency towards the blanket stigmatization of the population who live there.

The equation suburbs = immigrants = delinquents, is, of course, the kind of brainless reasoning favoured by members of the National Front, and by some police officers, particularly those who “know” the immigrant population largely through their experience of the dirty Algerian war of independence. But the “immigrant” population in the suburbs have been there for three generations and as such they walk around with French identity papers. Unfortunately for them, they have Arab names and/or black faces and thus face discrimination in employment.

Their problems are a concentration of those faced by French workers as a whole and have nothing to do with their level of “integration” into the French nation. After all, those Arabs who fought for the French during the Algerian war of independence (the so called “harkis") have themselves vegetated in ghettoes, the victims of post- colonial benign neglect. Even these Arabs haven’t been allowed to integrate.

Can of worms

The background to this can of worms is not the state of the housing in the sink estates ("cités") in the suburbs of the major towns in France. Some of the housing, admittedly not all, is of fairly good quality having been built in the mid-1970s. British sink estates are a lot worse. Nor is the problem that of the absence of public services, education, health care, public transport and all the rest. These public services are present in these areas to an extent which could only be dreamt of in an equivalent American or British ghetto. Let’s not get things mixed up. No, the main problem of these sink estates is precisely the social and ethnic homogeneity of these areas or the concentration of people with profound social problems there. Family breakdown, sole parenting, low self-esteem, educational difficulties, problems of employment co-exist with an often violent social environment where young people grow up surrounded by delinquent gangs.

To make matters worse, the French police force is mainly installed in the quiet small towns, the spatial deployment of the flics having stayed largely unchanged since the Vichy epoch. The police trade unions haveresisted all attempts at redeployment. As a rule then ,the cops only come to thump people they don’t know in areas they get lost in. Calm “middle-class” areas have a plethora of police stations. Earlier experiments with community policing ("police de proximité") undertaken by the “socialist government” of Jospin succeeded in calming the suburbs but were abandoned by the super-cop Sarko on the ground that this allowed the proliferation of a parallel drug economy (true). In these terms, the more testosterone-propelled policing of the current administration is believed to be more effective (not true). As a resultpolicing in the suburbs has taken on the “wham bang and thank you mam” style with lots of media attention.

Funds going to the associations in the suburbs have been cut and job-creation schemes suspended. This is guaranteed to worsen community relations with little payoff in terms of the fight against thugs whose activities do, after all, provide some cash-flow in these areas where youth unemployment often hits 45 percent - the highest rate in Europe. No wonder then that the government has decided to park the riot police (CRS) on a semi-permanent basis in these estates. Although country bumpkins with a well-deserved reputation for brutality, they do at least know how to react when they get lost in an area they don’t know.

“Arab work”

In strictly capitalist terms nothing can nor perhaps will be done to change this sorry state of affairs. The current population of the suburbs largely consists of the sons and daughters of black Africans and Arabs brought over in the 1960s and 1970s to do the shit jobs in the factories that the French didn’t want to do. (A reality which was brought home to me when I saw an entire train full of exhausted workers returning from a night shift at the Peugeot works in Poissy. They were all Arabs.) Whilst this earlier generation now subsists on microscopic pensions and social benefits, the new kids on the block are showing a distinct tendency towards underemployment and delinquency. When mass unemployment hit these areas in the 1980s what complacent sociology calls the “visible immigrants” found themselves trapped and underemployed in the suburbs as the earlier ("invisible"?) immigrants of Spanish, Italian, Polish or Portuguese origin had succeeded in getting the hell out. Integration after all is not so much a question of religion as it is a question of timing.

Then came the trendy do-gooders who in the mid-1980s launched the windy humanistic movement “Touche pas à mon pôte” ("don’t touch my mate") with the help of heavy public subsidies from the Mitterrand government, “the Sphinx” having abandoned all pretence to defend working class interests sometime early in the 1980s. Ostensibly a worthy movement aimed at overcoming the problems faced by those French citizens who were unfortunate enough to have Arab or black parents, this current of thought succeeding in convincing gullible people that the real problem faced by people in the sink estates was the entrenched racism of the French and not simply shit jobs, unemployment and a brutal and ignorant police force: problems faced by workers everywhere.

Vomitorium

The other side of the political rainbow has seen the development of a far-right extremist party, the National Front, from out of the moribund Poujadist organisation of the 1950s. Led by Jean Marie Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper involved in dirty business during the Algerian war of independence, this outfit provides a convenient bogey-man for lefties who have got lost in the banality of left/right capitalist politics. The party, generously staffed by disaffected former colonists from Algeria (the so-called “pieds noirs"), has heavily underlined the failure of integration of the French citizens of Araborigin many of whom, incredibly, still don’t know how to conjugate the subjunctive of the imperfect in French and this after so many grammar lessons. The party even has a radio station called, curiously, “Radio Courtoisie” (Right wing French thugs have always had impeccable manners) to beam out its Christian message of hatred and prejudice. Fortunately, only boredhousewives and retired colonels listen to this drivel. Ordinary French workers have proved over and over again that they are not on the whole racist bigots, thoughthey can be a bit xenophobic. Nonetheless the party continues to garner votes inconstituencies where it doesn’t even have a local branch or even any kind of grass-roots existence. For the party exists in fact, as a convenient way for workers to express their disaffection with the French political establishment which is all too clearly in cahoots with capitalist interests. It’s a kind of gigantic publicly-subsidized vomitorium into which people spew their bile with Le Pen’s ugly mug providing a convenient emetic. In doing this, however, French workers have clearly been playing with fire Now they’re getting burnt.

Urban pariahs

Thus doubly confirmed in their status as urban pariahs, many of the young people in the suburbs have continued to study quietly and find work despite an ill-adapted educational system, material difficulties, postcode discrimination, the useless condescension of the politicians and crap jobs. The educational priority areas ("zone éducation prioritaire"), modelled on the earlier British fiasco, have been starved of resources and have thus done little to erode the inequalities of an overtly elitist educational system. They receive a piddling 8 percent more than the mainstream schools, hardly enough to compensate for the learning difficulties encountered by people from poor backgrounds, not to mention those from non-French speaking backgrounds in a country where national arrogance places on premium on speaking proper.

Despite the difficulties there are some fine, dedicated teachers in these areas whose efforts have been hampered by a sordid social environment and poor logistic support. In the final analysis then, 62 percent of French working-class people find their offspring back in the working-class background which they came from (the highest proportion in Europe) in a country which presents itself as secular and meritocratic. And that’s before we put the peculiar problems faced by the denizens of the ghetto into the balance.

So the real problem is the inability of people in these areas to escape from a highly stigmatizing spatial set-up. The association suburb = immigrants = delinquency is criminal stupidity. The Arab and black populations who live in areas in close proximity to mainstream French life do not riot. Nor did the Arabs who live in the centre of Marseilles. (In the same way quiet Alsatian villages with no Arabs vote National Front.) Where the sink estates did not riot is more important than where they did but no television cameras go to these areas. In fact, the vast majority of the third generation immigrants in the suburbs took no part in the disorders and many were as terrified by what went on as the French population in general.

The problem should not be thought of simply in terms of spatially delimited sink estates. The wider trends of the whole of French society should be taken into account. To a significant extent, the troubles should be seen as a reflection of the growing geographical segregation of the French population partly due to the booming housing market and the continuous rise in rents in the private sector. And the doings of the affluent in France should also be mentioned. The rich are beginning to privatize the French republic for their own ends. Rich ghettoes, like Sarko’s own constituency of Neuilly to the west of Paris has only 2 percent of council housing when the legal obligation is for 20 percent. The same is true of neighbouring Levallois and the pattern is repeated all over France. Clearly the rich are having some difficulty integrating into the Republic, perhaps they don’t want to.

After all, they send their kids to private,often catholic schools, where they learn how different they are from everyone else.Thereafter they take advantage of higher education facilities to propel their horrendous offspring into the better jobs. A short sojourn in the States completes the picture.

More importantly, recent events have allowed the government to sneak through controversial tax breaks for the super-rich whilst introducing more tax free enterprises into the sink estates - but then again, perhaps, this was what was really at stake in the first place.

MM (Paris)

We have received the following report on the recent riots in France as seen by a migrant worker there.

At the end of October there was a heavy riot in the suburbs of Paris as a result of a police identity card control. Three African immigrants, one from the west coast and the other two from North Africa were controlled by police around Seine Saint Denis in one of suburbs of Paris. There was a disagreement between the immigrants and the police on duty. So, the three immigrants raced for safety but, unfortunately, two ran into a high tension compound and were electrocuted. Another one ran in a different direction and alerted his friends to what happened. Before they could trace the two boys and call the fire service to rescue them, it was too late.

These suburbs have been neglected, segregated for people of the same ethnic and religious background, for the past thirty years. Some of those living there who acquired good skills in one trade or the other were denied a job opportunity because of their colour, location of their residence or Islamic names. An English adage says that an idle man is the devil’s workshop. Since these immigrants were denied social and economic integration into French society, they devised what means of livelihood they could in order to keep the body and soul together. For many years French society has regarded them as outcasts and vagabonds who have no value just because of their colour and fate.

When this incident happened the Interior Minister of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, a hardliner and the son of an Hungarian immigrant, supported the action of the police and said that they were on a drive to control criminals and drugs in those suburbs instead of showing compassion and regret over the
death of the two African immigrants. After his television broadcast, these immigrants, comprising black Africans and the North Africans, plus their sympathetic friends from Asia, Latinos, West Indies and other Europeans, joined hands in the riots.

On the second day of the riots, the Interior Minister bragged that he would beef up the police to one thousand to control the situation. And that night about eight hundred cars were burnt excluding houses. The riots started from Seine Saint Denis around Paris and spread all over France. These cities are
Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Tours, Belfort, Essonne, Roubaix, Strasbourg, Lyon, Vaucluse, Besancon, Aulnay, Marseille, Amiens, and many more cities in France.

The cost of the damage in the three weeks of riots in France amounted to 200 million, just because of racism, xenophobia, and segregation that was imposed on immigrants by capitalism. And this is the country that propagated a disguised colonisation to third world countries under the pretence of a policy of association and assimilation. And today their fake paradigm programme is exposed to the world for us to know the danger in capitalism.

On 11 November, BBC radio reported that the European Union Justice Commissioner, Franco
Frattini, told France to integrate its ethnic minorities in other to avoid further such occurrences. On 13
November, the same EU gave 50 million to France to rebuild their country. They had forgotten to pass
the message across to other EU member states that prevention is better than cure.

To my greatest surprise, on the streets of Paris and other cities that I visited in France many French people confessed in front of the television cameras that they had never seen riots like this in their life. And these were just riots with petrol bombs and stones thrown by few boys! And I asked myself, what if they had seen the genocides from Biafra to Rwanda that imperialism caused, because of its egocentric intent, at the expense of poor Africans in particular and the third world countries at large.What is happening in France today should be a lesson to nations like Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

As a socialist propagandist, I hate vandalism, I believe in peaceful social and political dialogue. But, when people take the law into their hands, that means that they have been oppressed beyond bounds and they are prone to explode. And their explosion can result to rioting, rebellion, terrorism and
sometimes total anarchy.

At this juncture, EU should use its tongue to count its teeth and know that the Fortress Europe has brought severe damage to France and that many more riots are on the way to other EU member
states that have refused to open up their immigration policy that encourages marginalised ‘illegal’ immigrants. Immigration policy in the West is based on corrupt western politicians conniving with the third world politicians; as a result, immigrants continue to cross borders and seas no matter what the risk ahead.

Sarkozy is a man who believes that he can become the President of France in 2007 by fighting immigration. Capitalism has blindfolded the world that our level of forgetting things is quite enormous. If not, how can some political riff-raff like Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the Belgium Interior Minister Patrick Dawael be propagating what their forefathers could not achieve ears ago? These two sycophants are looking for cheap popularity in their political party because they live in the land of
the blind that have eyes but cannot see. They will bring woes to the entire population of these two nations.

Lastly, I am advocating that the only solution that will enable people of different race to live in peace is socialism. And capitalism should be eradicated without further delay to enable us to enjoy the beautiful things of the world without fear.

Dele C. Iloanya, Paris

Of course, no one ever calls it America Gets Out of Economic Collapse Day, even though 2,390 deaths, 1,178 injuries, 21 sunken ships, and 323 planes destroyed seemed to have done the trick.

What this day really stands for is the day that got America in WWII, catapulting itself to world power that it is today. Aside from ridding the world of Fascism, corporations where formed, fortunes where made, and the restructuring of the worldwide balance of power was completed, paving way for the Cold War, the “most peaceful time in world history”.

While many Americans will take some time to reflect on the significance of this day, I would hope that we realize that this day also represents a day in which capitalism was to take one if its greatest leaps forward. The decision to attack Japan or its allies was not just one out of revenge, but out of politics and economics.

While capitalism continues to be the social system in which we live, politics and economics (and even a little revenge) will be the only basis for which decisions are made for us.

TC

Among the hunters are also animal rights groups protesting the hunt and fanning out through the forests to document the hunt and search for wounded bears. All legal challenges having been exhausted, the groups resorted to protesting the weigh station the dead bears are brought to.

The conflict between wild animals and human development into their habitats is a major environmental issue, and one that capitalism is not prepared to deal with. Capitalism, and its constant need to expand and develop, will slowly but surely continue expanding into the habitats of wild animals across the globe.

This conflict is better suited to be solved by socialism. Without a profit system to interfere, the workers can make decision about animal control and human development that allows for both to fit within the ecosystem. While the protestors are trying to stop the hunt itself, this conflict started long before, with the expansion of human development. It will continue after this hunt, because the current social system, capitalism, will not allow for the ecosystem, including the human population, to create a balance.

TC

While one might be inclined to say “politics as usual”, I think the phrase of “capitalism as usual” better fits this situation. Only in a social system where money is the main motivation will bribes and favors be exchanged for doing what is right. Only in capitalism can elected officials be turned against those who voted for him.

Scandals such as there are pervasive in cities across the globe. Its nothing new, and they will continue. While there may be certain individuals who participate in them, scandals such as these are a product of the social system that we live, capitalism.

In a socialist society, a society with no money and free access to all, none of these scandals would, or could exist.

California Kid

This milestone is a good time to take a quick look at capital punishment. It, like prisons, is a product of capital society, and would have no place a socialist one. Capital punishment is a form of revenge that is being placed on the guilty, people who, if living in a socialist society, probably would never of even had a chance to commit the crime.

Capital punishment is a clear example of the hypocrisy of the capitalist system, where a working class man can commit a murder, and be executed for it, and at the same time a president or CEO can make decisions that results in the unnecessary deaths everyday, and be lauded as heroes or responsible men.

Capital punishment is a tool that governments use to show the people that they are taking action against crime and murder, and that they are willing to take the burden of the execution that make society safe again.
Capital punishment is used not to the benefit of the working class, but to its detriment. It divides the working class into smaller groups so that we will remain scared, but at the same time feel safe and secure under “our government”.

Capital punishment today is a product of capitalism, and we can do away with execution only when we abandon our capitalist mode of thinking, and embrace a new society based on socialist organization.
California Kid

-An eye for an eye, and tooth for tooth, leaves us tooth-less and blind.

A pandemic may well be on the way. The government Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has announced his estimate of 50,000 ‘excess’ deaths (over and above the average annual death rate of 12,000 each flu season), stating: “We can’t make this pandemic go away, because it is a natural phenomenon, it will come.” However, other scientists dismiss the figure of 50,000 as a complete guess. “It could be worse, it could be better. I think initially it could be worse than that”, says Dr Martin Wiselka, consultant in infectious diseases at Leicester Royal Infirmary.

(BBC News Online, Oct 16).

The problem is that everybody is guessing, and governments are not willing to spend money on hunches. Currently H5N1 has an exceptionally high mortality rate of 50%, but is very hard to transmit, especially from one human to another, which is why only 60 people worldwide have so far died. The current guess is that the most likely threat is from H5N1 recombining with ordinary flu during the annual winter flu season. This is known to have happened during the Spanish flu outbreaks of 1957 and 1968, when the hybrid strain was much less deadly but spread very rapidly and thus killed more people. On the basis of this guess, a best-case scenario, the government plans to rely on its standard seasonal vaccination programme for at-risk groups including children, old people and asthmatics, with the additional purchase of the Tamiflu antiviral drug just in case. However, new research is showing that the 1918 pandemic, the deadliest ever recorded, which killed between 20 and 40 million people, was a pure bird flu, not a hybrid, and that H5N1 is evolving in ominously similar ways. The 1918 virus infected almost everyone on the planet within a year of its appearance, and without the aid of modern transport and cheap mobility. (New Scientist, October 8). Donaldson dismisses comparison with the 1918 pandemic because antiviral drugs and other advanced medical practices were not available then, yet many scientists are worried that the pandemic could spread so rapidly that it will outrun any attempt to contain it, and the government in any case has rejected plans to curtail population movement as largely pointless.

Capitalism is no more to blame for bird flu than for the recent earthquake in Kashmir, however it can be criticized for its way of dealing with natural disasters and threats. In capitalism, whatever the urgency, nothing can happen until agreement has been reached over money. As one example, the EU is currently unable to spend any money on purchasing vaccines and antiviral drugs because, according to officials, Britain is blocking agreement on the overall EU budget for 2007 to 2013 (Guardian, Oct 15). In another less publicized example, scientists have expressed horror that the team which has recreated the 1918 virus, ‘one of the deadliest viruses of all time’ have been testing it in live mice at only the second highest level of containment, and without wearing protective suits. The obvious question, when it is known that Soviet scientists in the 70’s accidentally released a mild member of the 1918 family of viruses into the environment, is: why not the highest level of containment? The answer can only be cost. If there is a chance to keep cost down, even if it involves a risk, capitalism will exert pressure to take that chance. It would be an incredible irony if H5N1 turned out to be a case of mild sniffles but we all died anyway from an artificially recreated laboratory virus because somebody tried to save a few quid from their research budget.

It could also be argued that capitalism’s peculiar and illogical ways of working can conspire to make a deadly pandemic more rather than less likely. The secrecy of the Chinese state-capitalist regime has already held back study on H5N1 as, like the SARS epidemic before it, China has refused to allow researchers access to samples or to reveal actual mortality statistics. Then there is the incentive for poultry farmers to allow isolated cases of flu to go unreported rather than see their entire stocks destroyed, as has happened in South East Asia, where billions of birds have been culled. The manufacture of an effective antiviral drug, once the infectious strain has been identified, would be enormously accelerated if the drug company making it were to provide the details to other drug companies, but in view of the money to be made by not doing so, we may not be able to rely on such public spirited cooperation. And if the worst happens, and governments give out the useless advice to stay indoors and not travel, how are workers supposed to make a living? Will bosses look kindly on any worker who takes a day off sick every time she sneezes or her kids have a temperature? Will banks look kindly on businesses that curtail activity because of staff absences? Will capitalism look favourably on anyone who falters in their perpetual and relentless pursuit of money because of an altruistic concern for social health and welfare, or will it instead reward those who have no such concerns?
Capitalist governments are gambling that H5N1 won’t mutate to humans, or that if it does mutate to humans, it won’t be deadly, or that if it is deadly, it won’t spread fast, or that if it spreads fast, it will be treatable with an antiviral, or that if no antiviral can be developed in time, that it won’t kill anyone rich or important. Workers, as so often in wartime, appear in this calculation in the section at the end, under the heading ‘expendable assets’. We’re just not worth spending too much money on, provided some of us survive to keep working.
Diseases among social animals are common, and since the agricultural revolution brought humans into close and sustained contact with other social or herd animals, we have acquired many of their diseases,(over sixty from dogs for instance). Many of these now harmless childhood diseases started life as epidemics that brought empires to their knees and destroyed civilizations. A new virus strain unleashed on a virgin population is a more terrible event than any volcano, any earthquake or any tsunami, and yet capitalism is content to gamble that it won’t happen, just as it did over the tsunami, or that it won’t be that serious, just as it’s doing over global warming. Capitalism is always gambling with our lives in this way, without giving us any say at all. If the gamble comes off, the rich win. If it doesn’t, we die.

Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. But to fight them and protect ourselves, we need something better than capitalism.

“This land is your land,
This land is my land, … “

It should be, but in fact it isn’t. Many millions of working people own no land at all. Those who are a bit better off own the small plot on which their house stands — a fraction of an acre.

So who does own the land? Over 95 percent of the privately held land in the United States is owned by just 3 percent of the population. (1) These are the people who own the land, the industry, the technology — all the means of life on which we depend. This land is THEIR land.

A land survey conducted in 1999 (2) found that the 53,000 largest landlords — those owning 2,000 acres (3 square miles) or more — own a total of 350 million acres, worth $366 billion. (3) On average each of these people owns about 7,000 acres (11 square miles), worth some $7 million.

Even this is quite modest by comparison with the largest landowners. King Ranch (Texas), owned by the Kleberg family, is worth about a billion. At 825,000 acres or 1,300 square miles, it is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Besides 60,000 head of cattle, the ranch includes farmland and game preserves. (4)

There are whole towns that belong to a single individual. The “developer” Ben Carpenter owns the town of Las Colinas near Dallas, with 12,000 acres, about 20,000 residents, and about a square mile of office space. Country and western singer Loretta Lynn owns Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. (5)

It is also possible to buy an island — if you have the money, of course. In 1919 William Wrigley, Jr. (of chewing gum fame) bought the 74 square miles of Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles offshore from Los Angeles. (6) There are quite a few privately owned islands scattered around the world. Even Josip Broz Tito, ruler of the so-called “Socialist” Republic of Yugoslavia, had
one — Vanga in the Adriatic, home to his three palatial villas.

Apparently Woody Guthrie did know whose land this really is. One verse of the original song went:

“Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me A sign was painted, said ‘Private property.’ But on the other side it didn’t say nothing. That side was made for you and me.” (7)

This was one of two verses that were later suppressed, turning a protest
against private property into yet another piece of patriotic drivel.

John Lennon’s “Imagine” is more difficult to distort:

“Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of Man.”

Stefan

While none of these 7 will ever have to work again, they have the option of choosing to do so if they wish. They could spend their money on numerous expensive items, take a trip around the world, or live like a movie star for a while, and still have money left over.

Or they could continue to go to work everyday, doing something they enjoy doing, knowing that they will not have to worry about paying the bills, sending junior to college, or having the resources to retire.

In a way, acheiving socialism is like the entire world winning the lottery jackpot. We will all have what we need, but could continue to work at something we enjoy doing, whether it is being a doctor, a janitor, or driving a bus. In socialism, like winning the jackpot, we will have the resources to live stress free lives where our needs will be decided by our selves, and where we can count on living the end of our lives as comfortably as the beginning.
The California Kid

Ps- The numbers drawn Tuesday night were: 2-4-5-40-48; Mega Ball 7.

While I don’t think that recalls will be inevitable in a socialist society, recalls in capitalist society are a result of a profit system that tries to cut corners any way it can. It is through these cost cutting decisions that millions of dollars can be made, while putting workers at risk to their very lives.

In a socialist society where people come first and profits don’t exist, safety standards will be higher then they could possibly ever be in capitalist society.
TC

The truth is that the differences between the parties really are quite superficial on a politico-economic basis. Political outlooks differ slightly on foreign policy, if only on the “how” and not the “what”. Economic stands differ mainly in the management style each party tries, eternally unsuccessfully, to apply to capitalism. Some people believe the Republicans are the tough foreign policy party, ready to protect Americans and ensure our number one spot in the global order, but Democrats have presided over both World Wars and numerous other smaller foreign acts of aggression. Others cite the New Deal and Great Society as evidence that the Democrats are for the working class - willing to use tax dollars to alleviate societal problems - when all they really have done are apply ineffective palliatives to avoid large-scale social unrest.

Make no mistake – the ultimate goals of both parties, the ones never talked about in polite company – are essentially the same though the methods may appear to differ. Both wish to hold on to power and wealth at all costs, so both parties desire to keep the systems of “law and order” and “free market” capitalism in place, ensuring they stay both powerful and rich. Just try to find one so-called Democrat or Republican who thinks otherwise!

Some will try to give credit to either political party for social political or economic changes that occurred during their tenures as evidence they are committed to making things better, however it really becomes hard to explain just who really benefits with out letting the cat out of the bag! Unfortunately, many of those who disagree with both political parties think that forming their own party, with an eye to reforming the system from within, end up wasting their energies by trying to force it to act against its own interests and rules set up to ensure the status quo. Worse yet, most are content to try to convince the powers that be to change their ways, enacting reforms or policies that would actually curtail their ability to remain in the class of the elite. They write their congressman, circulate petitions, demonstrate in Washington, and Rock the VoteTM, foolishly hoping that those behind marble walls will see it in their hearts to voluntarily champion the oppressed and downtrodden. This strategy has never really worked and never really will!

There is a solution to the hegemony of law, capital and property - defended and administered by whichever face of the coin is currently showing, and that is to be rid of them and their system completely and forever. Social problems can only be solved by eliminating their causes, and the global race for superiority will be meaningless in the face of a world united in freedom and owing allegiance to no leaders or borders. Now more than ever, as global politics and capital are pushing us to the brink of economic, environmental, and genocidal disaster, it is time for World Socialism. Depending on one indistinguishable political party or the other is not the answer!

Some things are obvious in the wake of this tragedy:

1. Repeated warnings by experts and other reputable sources were consistently ignored due the pressures
of a money-based economy (capital) – those “in charge” preferred to run the risk of avoiding disaster
and/or cleaning up the results to exercising preparation and prevention. Crucial resources were actually
cut.

2. A multi-leveled, overlapping and redundant scheme of authority cannot be counted on to effectively
respond to a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude.

3. Institutional racism still exists in deadly form in the 21st century United States. This is evident in the
response from our leaders, the media, and those involved in the despicable acts of cowardice in New
Orleans.

4. Those in charge of enforcing the law can easily operate outside of it, with little or no accountability.

5. Valuable resources that could have been used (money, equipment, personnel) were involved in the Iraq
and Afghanistan Occupations.

6. Our leaders spend considerable time maintaining their public image and deflecting blame. They also b
blatantly lie or spin the truth, often contrary to direct evidence.

7. Our leaders, and people associated with them who represent the ruling class, unwittingly reveal their true
attitudes toward their poor and “minority” constituents when speaking candidly.

8. The lives and property of the poor are considered expendable.

In short, most of the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina were a result of the present system of society – the intertwining of capitalism and the State.

Our movement holds forth that the effects would have been different in a world where no one is poor, cities and living conditions are planned with regards to safety and the environment, precious resources are not the playthings of war and politics, the bungling, selfish and corrupt leaders do not exist, and where people are not forced to compete with and hate others of different skin color or ethnic background. This type of world, one in which human lives are held to the highest value and where resources can be democratically administered for the betterment of all humanity, can only be possible with World Socialism. While the World Socialist Movement regrets every needless death, both human and animal, that resulted from this calamity, we also hope that they cause the survivors and the rest of the world to seriously question their faith in this system of money and leaders that is ultimately responsible.

The social relationship between capital and labour
translates itself into a class conflict - the class
struggle. The increase in capital presupposes an increase in
private luxury and wealth that any increase in wages cannot
compensate.

Capitalism has resolved human sympathy into exchange value
and reduced social relations into a mere monetary relation.
Capitalism is the last antagonistic form of social
production and the disparities between labour and capital
create conditions for the solution of this antagonism.

The working class cannot become the masters of the social
forces of production unless they have abolished the previous
mode of appropriation, wage slavery. We may infer that class
consciousness is the product of man’s political
consciousness. Socialism is the intensification of man’s
political consciousness within the political and social
antagonism between the state and civil society.

We advocate international working class solidarity.

Kephas Mulenga, Kitwe, Zambia

So the IRA has given up the gun for the ballot box – but not for the first time.

In 1956 it was reluctantly pushed by its young activists to begin a ‘Border Campaign’. Within a few months the campaign had deteriorated into cutting down a few telegraph poles and issuing grandiose statements about the activities of their commandos. Away from the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic this new phase of the interminable ‘troubles’ was hardly noticed. Everybody but the IRA knew their campaign was going nowhere. Internment, both in the north and in the south, emaciated the movement and inevitably internal disputes in the internment camps began to fester among the volunteers.

It took the IRA’s Army Council five more years before it announced the formal termination of the Border Campaign but at last, in 1962, Oglaith na hEireann, the Irish Republican Army, issued what was as near as possible a notice of surrender. It admitted that it had not achieved the necessary support from the nationalist (Catholic) community in Northern Ireland; in fact it castigated the nationalists claiming that they had sold ‘their heritage for a mess of pottage’ – a reference to the scheme of welfare capitalism introduced in Britain after the war and extended to Northern Ireland.

Henceforth, the IRA was taking the gun out of Irish politics – the IRA spokesperson, the legendary ‘P O’Neill’, actually said that – and would confine its activities to political campaigns on social issues.

Behind the scenes a coterie of Leninists had defeated the death-or-glory boys of traditional Republicanism and took control of the IRA’s Army Council. This element saw the IRA as the nucleus of a political movement that would use the atrocious political and social conditions in the North as a catalyst for uniting workers who traditionally opposed one another on religious grounds. The Rosary brigade, those for whom republicanism and Catholicism were synonymous terms, were appalled by this ‘rank communism’ and left the movement.

The IRA then transformed itself into ‘Republican Clubs’ in furtherance of its plans. Up to then, the Unionist government had claimed to accept the right of republicans to use constitutional means to achieve a united Ireland. Such a claim did not represent a political threat to Unionism, which, at the birth of the state in 1921, had helped demographically tailor the territory of Northern Ireland to ensure that they had a two-to-one majority based on the religious topography of the six north-eastern counties of the ancient Province of Ulster. Despite this guarantee, they immediately banned the Republican Clubs.

Traditionally, the IRA had based its claim to use physical force on the results of the elections of 1918 which was the last general election held in Ireland before the country was arbitrarily divided by the British government. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, won an overall majority in that election and established the first Dail Eireann which was effectively banned by the British.

Six counties

A brutal guerrilla war ensued during which the Westminster politicians showed that they were the ‘moral’ equal of those they called terrorists by recruiting mercenaries who terrorised the populace in an effort to frighten support away from the IRA. The tactic had the reverse effect but eventually, as now, British ministers sat down with the ‘terrorists’. Under threat, an unsatisfactory peace deal was negotiated which divided Ireland into the 26-county Irish Free State and the 6-county state of Northern Ireland.

This ‘solution’ split the IRA and resulted in a bloody civil war between Free State forces – armed by the British – and a rump of the IRA who were dubbed ‘Irregulars’. The latter, the ideological antecedents of the present Provisional IRA, were defeated and they and their followers glumly pronounced that both the new governments on the Island of Ireland were ‘illegal’ and a betrayal of the holy grail of ‘The Republic’ as proclaimed by the new-born IRA in the insurrection of 1916. Dail Eireann, the legend went, had transferred its executive authority to the Army Council of the IRA and, thenceforth, any group claiming to be the rightful heirs of the 1916 Declaration of the Republic could grandiosely claim to be the de facto government of Ireland.

The political leader and, then, icon of the defeated Irregulars was Eamon De Valera. Despite being the main architect of the politics that resulted in the Civil War ‘Dev’, as he was known, was a pragmatic politician who realised the absurdity of further military adventures against the Free State. In 1926 he formed a new political party, Fianna Fail, to challenge the party in government, Cumann na nGaedheal (later, as now, Fine Gael) and in 1932 Fianna Fail won an outright victory at a general election and De Valera became Taoiseach. It was a bad day for later incarnations of the IRA, for despite having created the genre of dissident Republicans, Dev, who held power until 1948, proved a bitter, even vicious, enemy of the IRA.

The modern IRA

It is important to take this brief look back at the history of the IRA because it raises an important question. Following the Civil War in 1922, the split within the movement and then the desertion of De Valera, the organisation never regained any real political influence in Ireland until 1970 and the establishment of yet another breakaway movement, the Provisional IRA.

The IRA admitted in 1962 that the Northern Catholic nationalists had not supported its brief, inglorious ‘border campaign’ but what were the new material conditions that brought about general Catholic support for the Provisional IRA after 1970? And what lessons may it have for the future, both in Northern Ireland and in Great Britain which is now facing a terrorist threat of an even more menacing kind?

The IRA’s 1962 decision to pursue a constitutional campaign based on social issues paradoxically fused with an aspect of the new mood of northern nationalists who had earlier rejected the IRA. Generally, after the war and the benefits of some UK social reforms, nationalists were becoming increasingly reconciled to acceptance of the northern state. In 1965 Britain and the Republic of Ireland signed a Free Trade Agreement and after this the few nationalist politicians in the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont accepted the role (and the salaries) of Her Majesty’s Opposition. But, if they were going to be loyal then they wanted the apparatus of religious discrimination and vote-rigging to be dismantled.

What happened was that the Republicans managed to tap into this mood. Unionist politicians and fascist-type bigots like the hot-gospeller Ian Paisley, were to claim that the subsequent Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement was a creature of the IRA but it wasn’t this simple; in fact it was established by a younger, more active genre of nationalists, products of the 1944 British Education Acts, and it resulted in a coalescing of anti-Unionist factions including the IRA in its Republican Clubs incarnation.

Taking its cue from the American Civil Rights campaign, the new movement adopted the name Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and proceeded to use the same tactics of massed demonstrations and protests in pursuit of its demands. The Unionist Prime Minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, was not averse to granting the basic demands of the NICRA and had he been able to do so it is likely that Catholic nationalist anger would have been defused and the violence of the following thirty years avoided but Paisley was rousing old anti-Catholic bigotries in the unionist community – and, incidentally, using that bigotry to forge a political career that would bring rewards well beyond his modest Bible-thumping talents.

Faced with government bans, NICRA turned to civil disobedience and the government ordered the armed police, which the Unionists had traditionally used as their private army, to use force against ‘illegal’ demonstrations. Television pictures showing the police (RUC) attacking non-violent marchers were flashed around the world much to the discomfort of the British government which was the ultimate authority in Northern Ireland.

Events were hurrying towards a bitter sectarian pogrom. Protestant loyalists, assisted by the B Specials (an exclusively Protestant paramilitary auxiliary police force) torched Catholic homes; some ex-IRA men went to the Dublin leadership of the IRA to seek arms to defend the Catholic ghettoes in Belfast and Derry and were told that IRA arms would not be made available for sectarian warfare. In Belfast, Republican dissidents were appalled at this response; the ‘communist’ leadership was denounced by much of the rank-and-file and the Provisional IRA was born, leaving two IRA’s –the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA, both claiming to be the executive heirs of the only legitimate Dial Eireann. Extreme Catholic conservatives within the Irish government, fearful of the consequences of ‘communist’ influences, helped to procure arms for the new PIRA

Pawns in a game

The rest is the story of the brutal conflict that became Northern Ireland’s ‘Dirty War’. Now the IRA is standing down its foot soldiers. There were three sides to the war: the British Army/RUC, the Provisional IRA and the various Protestant paramilitary organisations. As a first step in accounting, we can say that none can claim victory. It is always the working class that make up the pawns in armies, legal and illegal, and the end of a war never brings them victory. The other thousands who died were just the innocent victims of those who were at war.

Ironically, Paisley’s strident anti-Catholicism played a major role in galvanising the Catholics into open rebellion. ‘No truck with Dublin’ has been his war cry but his hard-line bigotry has now brought about a situation of virtual joint authority between London and Dublin in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Paisley, whose fight for Ulster went only as far as throwing snowballs at Jack Lynch when he visited Stormont as Irish Taoiseach, is obliged to discuss policy with both the British and Irish Prime Ministers.

On the other hand, the Provisional IRA, whose war aim was to end partition, drive out the British and abolish the state of Northern Ireland have succeeded only in establishing a claim to be part of the political administration of the state they set out to abolish!

Eventually the politicians on both sides will have to reach an accommodation to work the structures of government established by the Good Friday Agreement. The salaries and the expenses are good and the leaders can write of a finish to a satisfactory war.

But what have the workers across the infamous religious divide got? As so many times before, they have simply been used as pawns.

RICHARD MONTAGUE
World Socialist Party Of Ireland

The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata who led the Ejército Libertador del Sur (Liberation Army of the South) during the Mexican Revolutionary war from 1910 until his assassination in 1919. During the 30-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz which preceded the revolution much of the land farmed by the indigenous people was enclosed to form haciendas or ranches for the production of food for export markets forcing peasants into, both wage- and debt-slavery to the often cruel ranch owners. Zapata’s army sought to institute the Plan of Ayala for the repossession of the haciendas for landless peasants where pre-enclosure legal titles existed and partial expropriation of land, with compensation, where legal titles didn’t exist. The Liberation Army of the South initially fought the federal forces who sought to uphold the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Zapata’s army also fought the constitutionalist forces which eventually replaced Diaz as well as the intervening military dictatorship.

Despite the defeat of Zapata’s army, the 1917 Mexican Constitution contained a provision for the return of communal lands appropriated by the haciendas and to provide new lands called ejidos to landless peasants. Communal lands and ejidos are owned by the people of a village and plots within the designated areas are divided amongst individual families to work. However, this article of the constitution was never fully implemented, or yielded only small or unproductive land areas to the peasants. In 1992, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari revoked the constitutional commitment protecting communal land from private ownership in preparation for implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA would also remove agricultural price support affecting peasants who were increasingly reliant on small scale cash crop production.

On the day the NAFTA came into force the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) officially declared war on the Mexican government and invaded six main population centres and many ranches in the Chiapas region of south eastern Mexico. It is the EZLN and their supporters that are referred to as Zapatistas.

Open conflict in Chiapas lasted twelve bloody days in which hundreds lost their lives mainly due to aerial bombardment of EZLN-held towns by the Mexican army. By 1995, tens of thousands of troops were stationed in the region. There has been little open combat since, but a network of checkpoints, army patrols, military incursions and alliances with local paramilitary groups have been used to intimidate and wear down the EZLN. The EZLN signed an accord with the Mexican Government in 1996 to institute peace and political rights for the people of Chiapas, though the government later reneged on many of the provisions. Paramilitaries, who have subsequently been linked to local landowners and ruling party officials, assassinated 45 Zapatistas in the town of Acteal in December 1997.

Chiapas is about the same size (area and population) as the Republic of Ireland. The area has a long history of conflict over land. Peasants have been forced onto the thin, rocky soils and steep slopes of the highlands with the encroachment of cattle ranching, coffee and sugar plantations from the more fertile lowland regions. Land availability has also been reduced by forestry and mineral, gas and oil extraction operations. Migration from neighbouring Guatemala, migration of those fleeing poverty in Mexico and the return of many of those who had migrated to urban areas for employment after crisis of capitalism in the early 1980s caused rapid population increase and eventual retreat into the inhospitable Lacandon jungle where the Zapatista rebellion is centred.

The EZLN was formed in the early 1980s by Leninists who had migrated into the Chiapas jungle to lead the peasantry to revolution. One of those who joined the EZLN was the man now known as Subcommandante Marcos, the Zapatista’s military leader and most famous spokesman. The EZLN found that many of the peasants there could not support the idea of the revolutionary vanguard and language of ‘Marxism’. What followed was what Marcos calls a period of “indianization”. The Leninist founders of the EZLN steeped themselves in native Mayan culture. In the words of Marcos, quoted by Yvon Le Bot (El Sueno Zapatista, 1997):

“Suddenly the revolution transformed itself into something essentially moral. Ethical. More than the redistribution of wealth or the expropriation of the means of production, the revolution began to be the possibility for a human being to have a space for dignity.”

The “indianization” of the EZLN seemed to infuse the organisation with the local traditions of direct and decentralised democracy. However, in material terms the EZLN retained much of the previous reformist ideology. The Declaration of War, written in 1993, stated that the EZLN was acting legitimately to overthrow the ruling government because of their unconstitutional actions. The statement also says that the EZLN proudly carry the national flag into battle.

In June this year the EZLN announced a new political initiative in the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. They suggest a national campaign,

“which will be clearly of the left, or anti-capitalist, or anti-neoliberal, or for justice, democracy and liberty for the Mexican people, in order to demand that we make a new Constitution, new laws which take into account the demands of the Mexican people, which are: housing, land, work, food, health, education, information, culture, independence, democracy, justice, liberty and peace. We are also letting you know that the EZLN will establish a policy of alliances with non-electoral organizations and movements which define themselves, in theory and practice, as being of the left, . . “

The stipulations for organisations wishing to join the national campaign are a democratic structure and a “clear commitment for joint and co-ordinated defence of national sovereignty, with intransigent opposition to privatization attempts of electricity, oil, water and natural resources.” In addition, the Zapatistas offered food aid to Cuba for their resistance to the USA’s embargo, express admiration for Che Guevara and Simon Bolivar and offered to send handicrafts, coffee or soup to activists in Europe to help with the struggle against neo-liberalism. The Zapatistas clearly think that capitalism can be run in the interests of the workers through state possession of industry and with the absence of the intervention by foreign capital.

The EZLN stopped making demands for constitutional rights from the Mexican government in 2001 and began to form a state within a state. This is described by Marcos in Chiapas: The Thirteenth Stele as involving the withdrawal of the EZLN from civil matters and establishment of self-governing villages or Autonomous Municipalities, with recallable and rotated functionaries. In August 2003, the ‘Juntas of Good Government’ were formed. These are regional councils which take the functions of administering justice, taxation, healthcare, education, housing, land, work, food, commerce, information and culture, and local movement from the EZLN. Marcos states that there have been improvements in living conditions as well as improvements in gender equality in the notoriously patriarchal peasant societies since the formation of ‘Juntas of Good Government’.

However, the war is not over as EZLN recruitment and guerilla warfare training continues. The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor report for 2004 highlights instances of state and local police involvement in kidnappings and extortion, torture, unlawful killings, narcotics-related crime and the trafficking of illegal migrants in Chiapas. The report also states that there were numerous allegations of the use of excessive force and the violation of international humanitarian law against the Mexican Army as well as continued violence by paramilitary groups.

There is also US involvement in the Chiapas rebellion which is perhaps of no surprise given the proximity and the fact that Mexico has the third-largest proven crude oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere and is the third-largest foreign supplier of petroleum to the United States, behind Canada and Saudi Arabia. PEMEX, the state-owned oil corporation, is a vital source of revenue for the Mexican state which is heavily indebted to the banks in the USA. Oil fields with one billion barrel potential have recently been discovered in Chiapas.

According to the Federation of American Scientists’ Arms Sales Monitoring Project direct commercial sales of defence articles (e.g. machine guns, rifles, pistols, grenade launchers and ammunition) and defence services (e.g. missiles, rockets, torpedoes, bombs, mines and tanks) amounted to $112million and $436million, respectively, in 2003. The US military also spent $1.25million on training the Mexican Army in 2003. The US training programmes are officially for counter-narcotic operations, however the Mexican Army have been observed using techniques learnt from the US military against the EZLN in Chiapas.

From the initial uprising the EZLN has publicised their struggle using the printed media and the internet. The writings of Subcommandante Marcos are available in many different editions and languages. The Chiapas conflict has become a celebrated cause for many activists across the world and has, in part, been shaped by the involvement of activists. The Mexican Army’s ceasefire has been attributed to the protests in Mexico’s urban centres far away from the Chiapas. The presence of peace observers mostly drawn from Zapatista support groups in the USA and Europe, as well as Mexico itself, is thought to have prevented excessive violence and intimidation by the Mexican army in Chiapas.

So well-known across the world is the name and image of the Zapatista that co-operatives in the Zapatista communities are producing and marketing their own brand of coffee which is distributed in Europe through various ethical shopping outlets. In 1994 The Independent (1 March) reported that Zapatista t-shirts, dolls and even condoms bearing an image of Marcos and the word ‘uprising’ have been marketed. In 2001, workers of a trendy clothing shop in Covent Garden selling Zapatista-inspired merchandise spray-painted Zapatista imagery and slogans on walls around major shopping areas in central London as well as dressing up as Zapatista guerrillas to hand out advertising material.

For socialists there are several encouraging things about the Zapatista movement: their apparent reliance on direct democracy and the solidarity shown to them by workers across the world. However, it is clear that the Zapatistas think their rallying cry of ‘democracy, liberty and justice’ can be fulfilled whilst the greatest amount of wealth, all it commands, and that we all depend upon remains in the hands of a minority.

So are we all Zapatistas? The workers and peasants of Chiapas have experienced some of the worst poverty and violence that humans have inflicted on each other. Workers across the world experience poverty and violence to some extent on a daily basis – it is the common bond that transcends national boundaries. This feature of our class-based society, an inevitable result of the social relation of worker to capital, has never been abolished by national liberation, state capitalism or ‘good’ government. The Zapatistas’ desire for real democracy is commendable, however, this should not be limited to defence of perceived or actual gains within capitalist society but for the abolition of capitalism and establishment of world socialism.

PIERS HOBSON

“That same “reformed” Parliament (of 1836), which in its delicate consideration for the manufacturers, condemned children under 13, for years to come, to 72 hours of work per week in the Factory Hell, on the other hand, in the Emancipation Act, …forbade the planters, from the outset, to work any negro slave more than 45 hours a week.“

Curious I googled “average working hours US” and got this answer:

“According to a study by the National Sleep Foundation, the average employed American works a 46-hour work week; 38% of the respondents in their study worked more than 50 hours per week.”

Some system eh? We work more than plantation slaves in the early 1800s. And who profits from all this work?

The WSWS staff was understandably surprised and upset at this unsanctioned reproduction, but more surprising still were the threats and capitalist tinged language contained in their accusations. Terms such as “piracy” and “stealing” were used to describe the actions of the Amanecer, implying that the unauthorized copying of political literature is the equivalent attacking a ship, looting its cargo, and kidnapping or killing the people onboard. The WSWS claims its articles enjoy special status as “protected literary works”, as if to imply that copyright laws exist to prevent their articles from destruction or damage by malicious third parties.

While the SPC does not condone the Amanecer’s actions, it is clear from the WSWS’s reaction to this incident that their brand of politics has little in common with the Socialism we advocate. Not only is their conception of copyright and so-called “intellectual property” inconsistent with a Socialist viewpoint, it is also largely unsupported by the current legal systems of the US (whence the WSWS operates), Spain, and other countries. In short, the WSWS has a far more narrowly construed and materialistic view of its “property rights” than even capitalist copyright law affords.

The monopoly of information in nascent capitalism

Before examining this issue further, however, it is helpful to review a few basic concepts about copyright and its history in the Common Law world. Since the very invention of writing, the copying of literary works had traditionally been a painstakingly slow process performed manually by trained scribes. Almost all literature was commissioned or issued by the Church or the state, and nearly everyone outside the ruling and religious classes were illiterate. For these three reasons, the idea of placing restrictions on the reproduction and distribution of written information would have seemed ridiculous at the time. Indeed, there were countless benefits to the free flow of ideas — philosophers and mathematicians were free to borrow, critique, and expand upon the works of their colleagues; historians were free to compile and summarize descriptions of events recorded by others; storytellers were free to retell existing tales while adding their own embellishments. In fact, many ancient texts survive to the present day only through the liberal quotations found in the critiques and summaries of contemporary authors.
This state of affairs changed drastically with the perfection of mechanized printing in the 15th century, which opened up a whole new economic sector for printers and booksellers to exploit. The increasing availability of books led to increasing literacy among the general population, which in turn led to some output of literature that was not necessarily in line with the status quo. It is not surprising, then, that one of the first known laws instituting prohibitions on copying, Britain’s Licensing Act of 1662, was produced not to grant rights to authors but to censor works deemed objectionable by the government. The Act, whose full title is “An Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses”, essentially, granted legal monopolies to printers who agreed to restrict the dissemination of political and religious ideas the state found unacceptable. Books and leaflets from unlicensed printers, including foreign imports, were completely outlawed.

As the book trade grew, printers and booksellers rose in economic clout, and the Licensing Act was superseded by the Statute of Anne (1710) which established the principle of “sole ownership” of a literary work. Initially this ownership, or copyright, rested with the author, but in order to be paid for the work the author had to assign the copyright to a publisher. The lump sum or royalties the author earned from this sale helped support his upkeep while he produced his next work. In theory, an author could copy and sell the work himself, but because few authors had the capital necessary to purchase and operate their own printing presses, the Statute was clearly biased in favor of the bourgeois publishers.
With the Industrial Revolution, capitalism quickly established itself as the dominant socioeconomic system in Europe, and with it came more rules and legislation designed to protect the profits of the established publishing houses. Foremost among these was the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, a treaty which harmonized the recognition of copyrights among national governments. Prior to its adoption, a book published, for instance, in London, was covered by copyright only in Britain, and could be reproduced and distributed with impunity by French and German publishers. Of greater importance to the actual producers of literary works was the fact that any author was theretofore free to translate and incorporate text from foreign works into his own; he did not need to seek prior permission from the author (or more likely, from the publisher, to which copyright was almost invariably assigned). In this way ideas flowed freely across national borders with the same ease they did from writer to writer in the ancient world, allowing for the rapid development and improvement of science, philosophy, and the arts.

Recognizing that maintaining this sort of freely reproducible public pool of works was important for the synthesis of new ideas, the drafters of the Statute of Anne and the Berne Convention tried to strike a balance between the short-term profit motives of publishers and the higher goal of advancing human knowledge. They stipulated that copyright on any given work was in effect for a limited term, after which the work fell into the public domain and could be reprinted by anyone. The term specified by the Statute was fourteen years, renewable once if the author was still alive. The Berne Convention extended this to, at minimum, the lifetime of the author plus fifty years.

The Mickey Mouse Preservation Act

In practice, however, publishers realized that some of the works they owned remained potentially profitable well after the expiry of the original copyright term, and lobbied their respective governments to extend copyright terms to ever-greater lengths. For example, shortly before the copyrights on early Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other cartoons were due to expire, Walt Disney Co. executives led an intense and highly successful lobbying campaign to the US government. Through extensive public propaganda, direct proselytizing to legislators in secret hearings, and that form of legalized bribery known as “campaign contributions”, Disney and its allies in the Motion Picture Association of America were able to secure a twenty year extension to US copyright [5].

No longer able to maintain the pretence that copyright exists simply to benefit authors (the retroactive extension affecting only works whose creators were long dead), lobbyists and legislators seeking extension upon extension resorted to outrageous claims such as that “lack of copyright protection actually restrains dissemination of the work, since publishers and other users cannot risk investing in the work unless assured of exclusive rights” [1, pp. 134–5; 2, pp. 117–18]. Of course, this claim is patently false in the majority of cases; witness the continued sales and profitability of classic public domain works from Dickens and Shakespeare all the way back to Homer and Æsop. The true issue is not the profitability of older works, but the right to concentrate that profit in the hands of a single publisher. The total sales of Mickey Mouse cartoons would be the same whether one large company or a dozen different small ones sold them. As the owner of the reproduction rights to the cartoons, however, Disney is strongly motivated to do whatever it can to preserve its income from its legal monopoly.

Information under Fire in the Digital Age

The freedom of the common people to access and use published materials suffered an even greater blow in 1998 with the passing in America of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, most of the provisions of which were later adopted by the EU and 43 other countries as the WIPO Copyright Treaty. This radical new legislation essentially gives publishers of electronic media carte blanche to rewrite the law as they see fit. The key is the infamous “anti-circumvention” clause, which states that “[n]o person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” [4, §1201 ¶ (a); 9, §11]. This clause makes not only copying a book a crime, but even merely reading it or otherwise using it in any manner not approved by the publisher.

To recount one infamous example, in the late 1990s the Software company Adobe Systems developed a computer file format for storing and distributing books electronically, along with a program which could access these files. Along with each “e-book” in Adobe’s format was stored a series of computer readable rules specifying which actions were and were not authorized uses—for example, there might be a rule against transferring the e-book to another computer, or a rule against using a speech synthesizer to read the e-book aloud. It is important to note that neither of these uses is illegal in and of itself; there is no law stating that someone may not lend a book to a friend, or read a book aloud in private. However, Adobe’s proprietary Software for accessing these e-books would always abide by the rules encoded in the file, thus denying users the rights they would have enjoyed had the book been of the regular printed kind. When an independent programmer named Dmitry Sklyarov produced his own e-book reading Software that ignored the access restrictions, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with circumvention of the DMCA.

The benefit to the publishers of such a law may not be apparent at first, but consider the many freedoms people enjoy with printed books that with digital media can now be restricted and exploited for profit. When someone buys a printed book, they’re free to keep it as long as they wish and read it as many times as they wish. An e-book, on the other hand, might have limits on reading it more than a certain number of times, or after a certain date; if you wish to continue to access it afterwards, you need to pay. A printed book can be bought from, sold to, or traded at a used bookstore. An e-book, however, might be licensed for use only on one device, making transfer impossible. For the same reason, it might be impossible to give a used e-book to a friend or check one out from a library the way you can with a physical book. Any time someone needs to obtain a book, he or she will have to pay the full price.

All of these restrictions could also be, and in many cases already are being, implemented for other types of electronic media. Most DVD players, for example, are specially programmed to refuse to play any DVD purchased outside its regional market. This helps movie publishers and sellers maximize revenue by preventing people from mail ordering DVDs from cheaper markets. (In a case that grimly parallels that of Sklyarov, in 2000 sixteen-year-old Jon Johansen was charged under access circumvention laws when he published a simple computer program capable of playing DVDs from any region. Four years later, he was finally acquitted, but not without having accumulated nearly $30000 in legal costs [6].) In an effort partly to prevent people from copying music to their computers and partly to lock users into certain commercially produced media players, music publishers have recently begun releasing sabotaged CDs which can be played on a computer only with specially licensed Software. Those who do not have the necessary Software must fork over the cash to buy it before being able to listen to the music.

Production for use or sabotage for profit?

All these examples clearly show how, under capitalism, businesses use laws to manufacture scarcity of goods in the interests of turning a profit. Instead of allowing the public to freely reproduce and distribute venerable literary and artistic works that should belong to all of humanity, companies shackle them under restrictive copyright licenses, the contravention of which results in heavy fines and even prison sentences. Instead of distributing digital music and movies in standard, published formats which any device can understand, publishers and hardware manufacturers collude to engineer crippled discs which can be played only on certain proprietary systems, and prosecute anyone who builds a cheaper compatible player. Instead of innovation to improve existing media, businesses produce and promote digital books deliberately designed to deny readers the most basic of freedoms they enjoyed with the printed variety.

Faced with such evidence, how can anyone still believe the myth that capitalism works in the interest of the working class by providing us with useful consumer goods? With the advent of high speed computer networks such as the Internet and inexpensive home computers which can store and copy digital media with the click of a mouse, for the first time in history the working people of this world are finding themselves with access to the means of production and mass distribution of information. Those who previously enjoyed exclusive rights to these means are now scrambling to reestablish their privileged position as their sole beneficiary. They will do this even if it means stopping and even reversing the course of technological innovation. They will do this even if it means using the threat of violence (criminal penalties) to deter those who would avail themselves of said innovation.

The fact of the matter, as has been demonstrated in this article, is that the law is and has always been designed by and for the possessing classes, not for those who must work to create or earn enough money to purchase the literary and artistic works copyright ostensibly “protects”. True, copyright works in part to ensure artists are compensated for their works, but as with all other types of labor, in the vast majority of cases this remuneration is simply a pittance intended to tide the artist over while they produce their next work. Even many famous, multi-platinum selling rock stars don’t earn more than their country’s median household income [3]. The bulk of the money generated by writers and artists goes to the increasingly obsolescent and parasitic publishing and distribution companies; the artist who finds himself a millionaire is the rare exception, not the rule.

Copyright and socialism

Before we return to the story of the World Socialist Web Site, we need to point out one further tactic that capitalist publishers use to justify copyright to the public. They claim that information is a kind of property—”intellectual property”—and that unauthorized copying of information is the same as stealing. However, this comparison is deliberately misleading. Stealing is when someone walks into a library, takes a book off the shelf, and leaves without checking it out. Copyright infringement is when someone walks into a library, photocopies a book for later reading at home, and then replaces the book on the shelf. In the first case, here is one less book in the library, and the public has been deprived of the ability to use it. In the second case, the book remains in the library, and other patrons can continue to read it. Unlike with physical property, ownership of so-called intellectual property is not exclusory; like the atmosphere we breathe, information can be owned and used concurrently by any number of people. Even the legislative and judicial systems have grudgingly admitted to this, refusing to equate criminal copyright infringement with the•[7]. Nonetheless, publishers continue to propagandize to legislators and consumers that the unauthorized dissemination of information is akin to destructive crimes such as vandalism, armed robbery, and piracy on the high seas.

It is rather telling of the true motives and beliefs of le• wing organizations such as the WSWS, then, that they have no qualms about using the same misleading arguments and terminology respecting “intellectual property” as the capitalist class they purport to oppose. They nominally decry the artificial scarcity produced by capitalism’s laws while at the same time proudly espousing the property mongering ideals of the monopolistic corporations these laws were designed to benefit. We in the World Socialist Movement believe that the purpose of political literature is not to turn a profit, but to change people’s ways of thinking about government, economics, and society. We want the widest possible audience for our ideas, and in fact encourage people to copy and spread our writings to the greatest extent possible. The WSWS’s characterization of its writings as “protected literary works”, and of those who republish it as thieves and pirates, suggests that they think of political literature in quite a different sense. As is typical of Trotskyist vanguardists, they consider themselves to have a monopoly on political ideas and that the working class cannot be trusted with them. Only their official party vanguard is authorized to dispense and interpret political writings; groups who republish their texts are seen as rival sects seeking to usurp their authority as the true leaders of the working class.

In a true socialist society, however, there will be no need for leaders or owners. The means of production and distribution will be owned and controlled by the community at large. This includes not only factories and railways for the manufacture and transportation of physical goods, but also instruments for the production and dissemination of information: printing presses, film studios, the computers that drive the Internet, and the television and radio airwaves themselves. Everyone will have free access to goods and services, and society will orient its patterns of production to meet these use needs, rather than for the purpose of turning a profit, which often entails producing artificial conditions of scarcity for certain goods. We have seen in this article how the system of copyright is one of the means capitalism employs to artificially restrict a supply of goods—information—that might otherwise be plentiful. Whereas we currently have the means to produce mass digital copies of a book, film, or music album instantly and at virtually no cost, under capitalism the technology to do so has been crippled or criminalized at the behest of publishers.

While some leftwing groups, like the WSWS, hypocritically support the notion that ideas should be owned and controlled, other less authoritarian organizations like the Free Software Foundation, the Creative Commons, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation lobby governments to modify copyright laws to make information more accessible to the general public, or propose new information licensing schemes which operate on top of the existing copyright framework. Such efforts have sometimes succeeded in eroding the power of publishers’ monopolies, but they can never truly eliminate it. As long as capitalism is in place, governments will continue to institute and uphold laws to protect the profits of the publishers at the expense of withholding access to information from the working class. Only by replacing capitalism with a system of free access and common ownership will we be able to truly and finally liberate music, literature, and the arts for the benefit of all humanity.

Bibliography

1. Report 941476, United States House of Representatives Judiciary Commi•ee, 1976.
2. Report 94473, United States Senate Judiciary Commi•ee, 1976.
3. Courtney Love. Courtney Love does the math. Salon.com, 14 June 2000.
4. One Hundred Fifth Congress of the United States of America. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, October 1998.
5. One Hundred Fifth Congress of the United States of America. Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, October 1998.
6. Associated Press. ‘DVD Jon’ wants authorities to cover legal costs. Washington Post, 27 January 2004.
7. Richard G. Stearns. Memorandum of decision and order on defendant’s motion to dismiss. In United States of America v. David LaMacchia, Criminal Action No. 9410092RGS. United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, 28 December 1994.
8. Bill Vann. WSWS letter to Spanish website. World Socialist Web Site, 7 January 2004.
9. WIPO. The WIPO Internet treaties. WIPO Publication L450IN/E, World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva, 2000.
10. WSWS Editorial Board. Spanish magazine/web site engaged in theft of WSWS material. World Socialist Web Site, 7 January 2004.

—Tristan Miller

At this meeting the Canadian government attempted to overturn the 1998 international moratorium on the commercialisation of ‘sterile gene technology.’ The Canadian delegation, acting on behalf of the multinational seed companies as well as the US government – not a party to the UN Biodiversity Convention – fiercely attacked a UN report which urged governments throughout the world to ban this particularly nasty branch of GM technology. A reversal of the current moratorium would permit the unleashing of what is known as the Terminator seed with devastating consequences to farmers, particularly in the undeveloped world.

So why should this issue cause so much concern? The US Department of Agriculture first developed Terminator technology in conjunction with multinational seed corporations in the late 1990s. The primary inventor of this technology, Melvin J. Oliver of the United States Department of Agriculture, explained: “Our mission is to protect US agriculture and to make us competitive in the face of foreign competition. Without this, there is no way of protecting the patented seed technology” (www.earthisland.org). The avowed aim was to protect the investment in the production of superior genetically modified seeds. It gave scientists the ability to modify plants that would produce seeds that grow to maturity but would be incapable of germinating if planted. Put simply, this means that while farmers will get a good crop in the first year of sowing, if they try to save harvested seed for planting in the following year the crop will be sterile, hence the name ‘Terminator’.

When the discovery was made public in 1998 it provoked global condemnation, particularly from Asian and African countries and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity was compelled to impose a moratorium on its further development. To all intents and purposes, the issue seemed closed, although this did not deter the seed corporations from continuing their research and registering patent rights over areas of this technology.

Better than patents
Commercialising Terminator would have a devastating impact on an estimated 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest farmers who depend on ‘saved seeds’ and who exchange seed to develop new varieties suited to their growing conditions as a primary source of seed stock, and hence food. In practice genetically modified Terminator seeds will be neither affordable nor relevant to the needs of farmers in the undeveloped world. Terminator or ‘suicide seeds’ have been developed to prevent the successful sowing of ‘saved seeds,’ with a view to forcing farmers to purchase new seed every year and making them reliant on the seed market dominated by the gene corporations. As a means of controlling seed usage this biological solution is more permanent and infinitely more effective than patent or legal restrictions that seek to deny farmers the right to raise their own seed bank. In short Terminator has been developed solely to maximise the profits of the seed industry.

Half of the world’s population cannot afford to buy new seed every year and typically depend on ‘saved seed’ and their skills to adapt a blend of varieties to suit growing conditions. Reversing the moratorium would enable the profit-seeking seed industry to enter completely “new sectors of the seed market — especially in self-pollinating seeds such as wheat, rice, cotton, soybeans, oats and sorghum” (www.earthisland.org). Until recently agribusiness had paid scant regard to crops grown in undeveloped countries, mainly because the industry had been unable to control seed reproduction. Those advocating sterile gene technology claim it could be a boon to undeveloped countries because the corporations that have developed new and better seed would then have the means of protecting their investment and could concentrate on the development of seeds suited to undeveloped countries, hitherto ignored, without having this investment undermined.

There can be little doubt that if Terminator is brought to market the logic of profit will mean the multinational seed corporations will seek to introduce genetic seed sterility into all genetically modified seeds offered for sale. Within a short time this could mean that the world’s two most important food crops – wheat and rice, on which three-quarters of the world’s poorest people depend – would come under the control of the seed monopolies. The notes to the first Terminator patent lodged by Delta and Pine Land explained that the company intended to make its technology widely available to competitors, but this was so as to penetrate the market with Terminator seed as quickly as possible and across as many varieties of crops as is feasible.

Investment follows profits and if the staple crops of the undeveloped countries can be ‘tied up’ by Terminator, investment will pour into the seed corporations commercially producing seed where market sales can be guaranteed year on year. It can be no coincidence that the agricultural chemical corporations including DuPont, Dow Corning, Novartis, AgroEvo, and Monsanto have acquired major interests in the seed breeding industry where the ten largest corporations control 40 percent of the global seed market.

Not surprising
The UN Bangkok meeting did not, however, conclude in the way the seed corporations had expected. Governments nurturing GM industries not as advanced as those of the US and Canada intervened to thwart the intentions of Canadian government and the multinational corporations. We should not be surprised by the stance of the Canadian government because it is the role of governments to act in the interest of the class who live by profit and it is only doing what is wanted by its masters. But even though the de facto moratorium remains intact the Terminator issue is still on the negotiating table. It will be discussed at the next UN Convention of Biodiversity in March 2006 and the meeting of the G8 in Scotland later this year and every other opportunity thereafter. The multinationals smell blood and have moved up a gear to bring the ‘suicide seed’ to market.

It is unimaginable that in any sane society scientists in GM technology would wish to identify and develop a terminator gene – only a society motivated by profit could consider this worthwhile with no other conceivable purpose than to boost profits to those who sell it. But this is capitalism.

It is often claimed that science is neutral – being neither good nor bad. This is an abstraction that ignores the social relations, the social context in which science develops and fails to address the question – ‘who benefits ’? Technology is almost always directed to the maximisation of profit and frequently has a detrimental impact on the environment or human well-being. With the pool of scientific knowledge reputedly doubling every twelve months people tend to be intimidated by ‘science,’ with no choice but to place reliance on so-called ‘experts’ who generally conceal a vested interest when urging a particular development. The real decisions that influence the world are made in secret and because we live in a society where the interests of the class that own the corporations and companies reign supreme, maximising profits will always head the agenda.

The prudent application of GM technology could be of some benefit to humanity and may be developed in socialism where food will be produced simply to feed people and not for profit. But like so many other scientific developments, the emergence of Terminator demonstrates that certain areas of science can become extremely dangerous when left in the hands of those whose only motivation is profit. In capitalism profit will always prevail over human need and research will normally be funded only into areas where profit can be maximised – regardless of the consequences on human welfare and the planet on which we depend.

Shefali Begum - her worries are easing
The prime minister of Bangladesh has intervened to help a poor woman who advertised to sell an eye to raise funds for her daughter’s future.
Shefali Begum has received offers of help from around the world and within Bangladesh after the BBC reported on her desperate newspaper advertisement.

Now Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has met her and arranged measures to support her, including a new house.

Ms Begum said she had no money for rent or to feed her daughter.

The 26-year-old mother lives with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter in a tiny bamboo and corrugated-tin room in the east of the capital, Dhaka.

She says her husband of four years left her in March, leaving her penniless.

‘So moved’

Prime Minister Zia has now met Ms Begum in her Dhaka office, her officials say.

“The prime minister was so moved by her story that she instantly decided to help this woman who has been abandoned by her husband,” a spokesman for the prime minister told the BBC.

Mother and daughter - their room has no furniture

Officials say Ms Zia made arrangements to allocate Ms Begum in a house in a government-built shelter for the poor.

She also assured her that the government would provide financial assistance for her daughter’s educational expenses. She will also receive the monthly allowance claimable by women abandoned by their husbands.

Officials also say the prime minister gave her some cash to pay for job training.

Ms Begum later told the officials that she would not now have to sell her eye after receiving help from the prime minister and many others anonymous donors.

The BBC in Bangladesh has also received calls and e-mails from all over the world offering to help Ms Begum after her story was broadcast by the BBC Bengali section and published on the BBC News website.

The recent Bankruptcy bill signed by President Bush makes this very clear. It attempts to limit the legal ability of working people to declare bankruptcy, which has apparently been costing credit card companies, mortgage companies, and car salesmen, among others, vast sums of money that “rightly” (according to the capitalist logic of property rights) belong to the owners and not to us. However, corporate bankruptcy law is unaffected in its ability to allow corporations to declare bankruptcy and gain protection from creditors for any reason at all (even mismanagement).

Most workers apply for bankruptcy for three key reasons: illnesses that led to multiple hospitalizations or expensive treatments (which can cost some patients hundreds of thousands of dollars whether they are insured or not, most private insurance plans leaving 15% to 25% of hospitalization costs to the patient), unemployment, and familial crises such as divorce.

The existence of vast allotments of credit to workers has produced such a cushion around the value of working people’s salaries and wages that the so-called credit economy is frequently referred to as “moneyless.” Wish that this were true, but not at all! This is a cause of great alarm among the capitalist class, who clearly has no intention of letting working people, who derive their existence by selling their labor-power to the owning class, obtain more money than the value of their labor-power in the form of excused debt. The recent Bankruptcy bill provides a salient illustration of Marx’s labor theory of value. For according to socialist economic theory, our wages or salaries are determined roughly by the values inherent in our reproduction as a class - in short, varying from the value of unskilled labor-power which is the minimum wage - aimed at providing the very minimum of existence - to increasingly skilled labor-power with a price hovering somewhere below or above the mean salary in the United States of $43,000 per family, according to an article read in the newspaper many months ago whose source I am unfortunately not able to credit. Ever wondered why we are paid the amounts that we are (and not, say, $100,000 or even half a million dollars for that matter)? These values are roughly determined by how much it is going to cost to send us to school, pay our rent or mortgage, feed the family, transport us to work and back, and provide a minimal degree of comfort and security.

The existence of credit obtained from credit cards, or the value of excused debt, muddies this relationship to a large degree, even despite the limits of credit available to the average worker. The capitalist class has no intention of truly offering us a “moneyless” economy, but rather one in which even the costs of medical services when ill should be borne entirely on our shoulders, or to a greater degree. However, there is clearly a double standard here, since the Bankruptcy bill does not apply to corporations, who are still legally able to declare bankruptcy and even to retire their key players with several hundred million dollar retirement packages.

It is very clear with this recent bill that the capitalist class is consciously trying to keep the working class from receiving more wealth than it ought to have in its wages or salaries, and that it is determined to maintain our labor-power’s value to include the costs of our class’ reproduction, including even any astronomical health costs we may incur.

This bill proves that the capitalist class is very aware of its war with us, by which I mean its attempt to see to it that we get as little as it can get away with, and the most that it can walk away with. We are expendable, we are merely the class of wealth producers, with the lowly status accorded to such as a class. While many in the press are criticizing the double standard inherent in the Bankruptcy bill (bankruptcy rights for the rich, but not for the rest of us), insufficient attention is paid to how this basic double standard reflects the inevitable logic of the class system, one class that produces and does not own and another that owns and does not produce. When fellow workers come to understand this, they will have achieved class consciousness, and will be ready to organize democratically for what the wealthy fear the most, that we will decide to take over their factories, their land, their workplaces, and place these in the common ownership and democratic control of the entire human race.

In other words, the Bankruptcy bill makes it very clear how antagonistic the capitalists see our and their interests as standing in relation to each other. They do not hesitate to fight the class war against us, not only in their laws but also in the very process of hiring us and exploiting us by virtue of their ownership of the means of producing life. It is in our interest to fight that same battle on the political front, but not through modifying the capitalists’ laws that act in their interest as they exist ultimately to protect property relations, but rather through the political act of democratically dispossessing our employers altogether, and thus through abolishing the miserable institutions of wage labor and buying and selling themselves.

We will then be able to achieve a real moneyless economy, in which the things and services we require will be ours as a logical extension of our needs. The so-called logic of economic costs inherent in the Bankruptcy bill shows itself to be itself illogical and bankrupt. The market system now stands as a fetter to human progress and the realization of our desires and our needs. It is urgent that we organize NOW to liberate ourselves from it. This is the most urgent task facing humanity at this time.

Educate yourselves about what real socialism is - a classless, moneyless society of production for use rather than for sale - and then please join us now to realize this most necessary and possible next stage in social evolution.

Dr. Who

A recent Blade reader wrote a letter blaming the Republicans for some of the problems Americans might be experiencing. I would like to remind him and everyone else that most of the problems plaguing America (and the world) are not the result of the actions of any political party. War, bigotry, crime, unemployment, hunger, homelessness and pollution are all, at their heart, economic in nature and therefore the sole responsibility of the possession-based economic system that creates them. The government, no matter which party currently runs it, cannot control capitalism. Only capitalists control capitalism; the government merely attempts to influence it according to the management style of the party in power. At the end of the day, it is this that constitutes the main differences between political parties.
When some people become well off, they are quick to give credit to the power of capitalism to make anybody that way, regardless of background. Rarely, if ever, do people assign it blame for making people poor, which it does with alarming efficiency. Indeed, most of the poor people in the world live under some form of capitalism. This system unfortunately is not and never was designed to solve the aforementioned problems. In fact, it thrives when those conditions exist! That is why governments seem to do such a bad job of controlling it. Capitalism works to concentrate wealth, property, and power in the hands of people who own capital – not to spread it out. Blaming the government or a political party for our woes is easy, but there is not much they can do to actually solve economic problems. Instead of working against the politicians we think are responsible, let’s say “enough is enough”, and build a system that works for everyone – one based on free access and direct democracy.

I check out my items under the watchful eye of the clerk. I ask her what she is doing there if this is a “self-service aisle.” She replies that while she no longer has to perform the code-bar swiping and bagging functions, she must spend her day watching customers self-service to ensure sure no-one steals the goods.

So a trivial and boring job in capitalism which at least involves some conversation with customers and their children, physical activity, and at least potentially customer-friendly interactions of other kinds surrounding bagging, gets replaced by an even more trivial, boring, and more completely isolated job with improved technology! Only in capitalism, my friend, does human technology possess such a perverse relationship to the humans.

In socialism, with money abolished, such technology could be a blessing in informing the common store’s computer of what items are close to depletion and must be reordered. But in capitalism, labor-saving technology is always at a cost to the working class whose job duties might be altered detrimentally or outright unemployed despite the need for money to live half-decently. Workers are basically like machines in capitalism, but machines who get paid in order to purchase their own lubricating oil (slavery was when the master purchased it). The worker is as much a machine serving the interest of the master’s profit as the machine itself.

Basically, profit is self-serving in any aisle.

Dr. Who (Chicago)

-Virgo

Ps- Go Dodgers!

Around here; a couple days before a holiday, prices drop about 20 cents on averate. The day after the holiday they are right back where they started. Hmm an oil abundance that lasted 4-5 days? Or a conspiracy to get people to travel and thus spend more money?

I also noticed last year that for every 3 cents gas fell, it soon rose 20 cents. So its no suprise to see that prices are over $2 now.
What I fail to understand is why folks are so lax about the situation. My father for example just chalks it up to “thats how it is; nothing can be done about it; you have to go along.” That’s just what most folks are doing too. I call these folks sheeple.

I’m not much of a people person, not because I don’t like people; but because peoples ignorance about simple things annoys the hell out of me.

I guestimate (from all the things I overhear, people I talk to, media ads) that 95% of the populaton is clueless about whats going on, or they simply don’t know how or don’t want to do anything to improve the situation.

Am I making an arrogant statement here that most folks are stupid? Perhaps but I call it as I see it. This isn’t to say that they can’t be brought around. It just means it will take more work.

I’ve concluded that the problem is the brainwashing that most people see from the day they are born. America, home of the free, land of the brave. Free market……

What they fail to mention is that to enjoy that freedom you must already be part of the capitalist class.

A don’t get me started about how the founding fathers were looking out for the best interest of the people. BS!! If any reads history (besides the poppycock that passes for history in our public school system) you will soon learn that many of the founding fathers were nothing more than thieves. Their interest was never in the common man; other than to make sure the common man could never reach an altitude to give them any control over their lives.

This is never more obvious than in the constitution where it’s states “life, liberty, and the PERSUIT of happiness. Note that this phrase originally read “persuit of land", but because of some debate between supporters of the confederation and the federalist parties, it was agreed it would be changed.

Now why do you suppose they wrote “Persuit” ? Maybe because they knew the working class would never be able to afford any luxury (or land, which the founders though of as happiness)

Also if you look at the way the founders setup “The Democracy” you soon see that it’s not.. They called it a Republic instead. Which implied that we would have representatives who would support our views and interest. Thus the electoral college was created.

What many may not realize about the electoral college is that YOUR VOTE DOESN’T MATTER. Suppose that in the recent election that Kerry had had 90% of the popular vote nationwide. That means nothing because the electoral college DOES NOT have to vote according to popular vote in their district.

They say this has only happend once (Teddy Rosevelt if I recall correctly). But how can we know that for certain. They certainly aren’t going to say othewise.

I fear I have gotten a bit off topic; I believe you can see where I’m going with this however. If we don’t stand up and do something then we will remain forever enslaved. How can so many people be so brainwashed (or braindead) as to think that everything that is going on is alright..

We see ads daily for homeless and hungry people in africa and other regions in the world. Yet we never hear about the homeless and hungry in America. It’s because these problems don’t exist in the land of milk and honey right? NO its the fact that the government doesn’t want you to know about it. We throw away truck loads of food that could go to feed the hungry. We charge close to 50% of low wage worker income for housing. Then we wonder why people don’t have any retirement funds. We treat low wage workers like dogs and pay them pennies on the dollar then wonder why their health and hygine is so poor.

If they can keep everyone “dumbed down” then they can do whatever they choose. Including taking away civil rights.

It’s obvious that reform can not work. Unions have tried and failed. In fact many companies are now outsourcing to save even more money. The capitalist say that outsourcing is the wave of the future, calling it globalization. Of course this is what they want. It means more payroll in their pocket. But what’s going to happen when there are no jobs left in America?

Will we become a third world country? Will we become even more of a caste system than we already are?

And how will the working class be seen by the government when they rise up? Will we be patriots or will we be “terrorist - because were not with the ruling class". Will this be a large uprising or will it be a few small “rebel” alliances?

There is no doubt in my mind that the government will do everything in its power to try to squash the “rebellion". But I believe when all the jobs go, people will start to wake up. In the end the almighty dollar won’t be worth a plug nickel. And that can be a good thing.

Money is the root of evil (greed, capitalism). I look foward to a Socialist society. I believe we will see a return to the old ways, meaning more ecologically sound practices. I also believe that kindness and common sense will return. After all what’s left to fight for if we’re all on equal ground?

The California Kid

Remember the folks who brought 100,000 dead Iraqis shock and awe? Well, one of the survivors, U.S. strongman Dick Cheney (temporarily out of the loop at Halliburton), galvanized an audience in Krakow, Poland, the day before the Auschwitz event with some poignantly immortal prose. “Gathered in this place,” he pontificated, “we are reminded that such immense cruelty did not happen in a faraway, uncivilized corner of the world, but rather in the very heart of the civilized world.” Baghdad, in one of its more ancient incarnations, was once on the site of what historians assure us was the cradle of civilization (Mesopotamia); it has always been “in the very heart of the civilized world.”

Is Poland more civilized than Iraq? Possibly it was six decades ago. This might depend, of course, on such things as the point of view of whoever decided the Germans must be taught a lesson and secretly ordered the firestorm-bombing of Dresden (Churchill), or saw in the uncivilized Japan of 1945 a target-rich opportunity to demonstrate some hot new WMDs (Truman).

As Herr Cheney so aptly pointed out, “The death camps were created by men with a high opinion of themselves – some of them well educated and possessed of refined manners – but without conscience.” Indeed, those who are not well educated could easily be the minority in the Game of War. We are, after all, the planet’s most successful species. Stripped of our sense of community, we are the very masters of evil. But if Cheney’s drive-by tears teach us anything at all, we should apply his reminder that “evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted” to the system that sponsored one of recent history’s bloodiest acts of mass murder, over which he presided as high priest invoking the sacred names of Capital and Profit.

Now, naming and confronting capital is not so fraught with trouble as you might imagine: like a bad dream, you need only wake up from it, get out of bed and replace it by putting the business of the world back in the hands of its rightful owners – its human communities. The world’s evils persist only because we stupidly persist in justifying them.

But be careful when you call profit by its name. Its other name is wages.

Don S.

The Palestinian suicide bombers may thus be but a mirror image of the Israeli policy, a policy which is both “suicidal” (sacrificing one’s own civilians, which the state has been wont to do since time immemorial) and also involves murderous bombing of Palestianian territory. While the capitalist class of all lands protects territories deemed politically and economically beneficial for its interests, it is not always easy to consider the benefits of even this Israeli policy, in light of the considerably negative international publicity it attracts. But then it is not for us, the capitalist class’ wealth-producing minions to question its motives. It is up to us only to dispossess it of its land so that it may be ours to control and to share. For how long must our Palestinian and Israeli children suffer the murderous insanity of the rich and powerful?

There is no questioning the oppression of the Palestinian people. However, their oppression will only come to an end, on the one hand, when Israeli workers stop supporting politicians of either the left or the right and begin to identify their interests with workers of all lands, putting the interests of their liberation from capital before those of the political and economic interests of their masters. And the same goes, on the other hand, for the Palestinians. They too should be organizing for a society that is post-national, in a sense, since the movement for their own determination is obviously not a real one unless they become the people that actually do the determining, and not merely their own leaders organizing a more peaceful society of Palestinian workers and employers.

The battle of rival capitalists for different sections of land and spheres of political influence should not be supported by any workers, Palestinian or Israeli.

For Palestinians to truly decide their own fate and control their own land, they must live in a society that is democratically organized and in which property belongs to everyone, or no one, depending on how you look at it. Otherwise, they will be supporting a society which is inherently undemocratic and exclusive, based on how much money you have, based on whether you are the person owning the farm or selling yourself to it, owning the factory or merely producing its profits for its owners.

Socialists celebrate instances in which workers begin to work together across national boundaries and within national boundaries to bring about a world worth living in. Away with states, employment, nationalism in all its forms, and money, and long live
the free society of socialism!

Help us make this a possibility in our lifetime! Workers have waited too long for the end of their oppression. We don’t want another century of futile blood-letting in the Middle East! Join us, Israelis and Palestinians, in an international movement of workers from all lands uniting in solidarity to create a world of common ownership that will bring lasting peace to your region and to all regions throughout the world.

Dr. Who (Chicago)

“The Yes Men,” is a brilliantly funny satire and pseudo mock documentary which chronicles the exploits a group of political activists, who use rogue media appearances, hoax lectures, and a prankster spoof of the World Trade Organization web site to criticize the social and environmental impacts of economic globalization. The film follows Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum two super-activist-pranksters around the world from New York to Finland and on to Australia. Their daring mission is to pose as WTO representatives and get invited to business conferences and trade forums. There they make outrageous arguments on the WTO’s behalf, arguments that expose what they see as the WTO’s underlying cruelty and absurdity. And the irony is that they succeed and their ideas are accepted by their corporate audience.

We are treated to a talk given in Finland, at a WTO meeting on textiles, to a bewilderingly funny lecture given by “Hank Hardy Unruh,” an impostor posing as a representative of the WTO. “Unruh” is a member of the Yes Men, an activist group that maintains a website at www.gatt.org that parodies the website of the World Trade Organization. The group received an email message inviting the WTO to send a speaker to the conference, which was attended by international business leaders and academics. The speech was well received, and the master of ceremonies praised it three times during the day.

He begins with the words: “the first leg of our journey is back to 1860s America. We all know about the U.S. Civil War–the bloodiest, least profitable war in the history of America, a war in which unbelievably huge amounts of money went right down the drain. And all for textiles!”

The pair of Prankster’s Bonanno and Bichlbaum then travel to Australia where they announce that the WTO, after acknowledging the fact that it is a major cause of poverty in the developing would, is disbanding. Much to the pairs apparent amazement the pronouncement is accepted by the group of accountants attending the lecture.

There is also a devastatingly funny scene where the pair speak before a group of upstate New York college students. One posing as an executive of McDonalds and the other as a WTO representative. Together they explain to the students the economic and nutritional benefits of post human waste recycled hamburgers.

The movie presents a strong anti-globalization message in an extremely palatable form. The Yes Men’s goal is simply: “Changing the world one prank at a time.”

Related web sites:

http://www.theyesmen.org/

http://gatt.org/

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” (Anon)

For the last twenty years there has been increasing public awareness that journalistic integrity and the capitalist press are uneasy bedfellows. Various writers, particularly in America, have highlighted the incompatibility between a supposedly ‘free press’ and the production of a newspaper as a commodity for profit. Those who have criticised the press have every right to be scornful. But this is no breakthrough in investigative journalism; capitalism has always corrupted the press and led to it functioning as a mouthpiece for the ruling class, a point explosively demonstrated by Upton Sinclair in 1919 when he first published The Brass Check (republished by University of Illinois Press in 2002). In a timeless and scathing attack on the capitalist press Sinclair asserted “that American journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor”, likening the journalist to a prostitute, enslaved in the business ideology of the owning class and functioning to work hand in glove with political leaders and big business to deceive public opinion.

Brass Check was written in the ‘Progressive Era’ at the beginning of the 20th century, a period that saw large swathes of US industry come under the sway of immensely powerful inter-linking monopolistic corporations controlled by a highly concentrated elite of powerful owners. The monopolistic ownership of the newspaper industry that spawned a new journalistic style that trivialised and sensationalised news, abandoning journalistic integrity and independence, caused particular outrage and was branded  ‘yellow journalism’. But the essence of this condemnation was more seditious than a simple dispute over the presentation of newsprint. Critics argued that the newspaper monopoly strangled public awareness, censored all anti-business opinion and now served solely to express the owner’s class interests that operated, in Sinclair’s words, for the “hoodwinking of the public and the plunder of labour”.  The press, it was argued, must be cleansed of corrupting class bias and function as a neutral conduit for the communication of meaningful information enabling the public to exercise informed democratic preferences. 

Capitalist business

In Britain, a similar concentration of ownership had already dramatically altered the newspaper industry that stifled and later decimated the popular press. During the first half of the 19th century Britain had enjoyed a thriving and vigorous popular press that criticised appalling working conditions and was spurred on by the ‘betrayal’ of the 1832 Reform Act and anger at the 1834 Poor Law.  The radical press produced numerous papers that  “promoted greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasising the potential power of working people to effect social change through the force of ‘combination’ and organised action” (James Curren and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, p.24). The radical press was a major source of antagonism to government and the propertied class but neither libel actions nor stamp tax on newsprint were effective in subjugating it. Nevertheless, by 1865 the radical press was in decline, broken not by laws but by a combination of rising costs and market forces.

By the second half of the 19th century the rising cost of printing technology to support national newspaper circulation required major investment. Newspaper set-up costs in Britain rose from £1,000 to over £50,000 between 1840 and 1870 while in America these capital costs rose by 600 percent between 1855 and 1875, a huge investment that excluded all but the extremely wealthy. In addition to rising costs, the growing importance of advertising in Britain greatly disadvantaged the alternative press because successful advertising meant appealing to people who had money. The readers of the radical press were mainly working people on low incomes and advertisers discriminated against these newspapers because “their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much money thrown away” (quotation from 1856, in James Curren and Jean Seaton, p.43). Advertising revenue acted as a subsidy enabling newspapers to be sold at a price below the cost of production and, once exposed to the realism of commercial capitalism, competitors without advertising revenue were forced from the market or sufficiently weakened to be taken over by larger companies. Newspaper production had become a capitalist business.

Sinclair too identified advertising as a main corrupting agent enabling wealthy advertisers to drive-out the US radical press and exert pressure on editors to mould content and editorial comment. “Everywhere in the world of journalism, high and low, you see this power of the advertiser,” Sinclair declared at a time when advertising, accounting for two-thirds of US newspaper income, greatly enhanced the concentration of ownership. Little has changed in an industry that allows little opportunity for new entrants to enter the market. Today, twenty-four inter-linking US corporations control over half of newspapers and most magazines, broadcasting, books and movies, while Britain is reputed to have the most highly concentrated newspaper ownership in the world, being dominated by five immense corporate groups.

Newspapers must appeal to wealthy corporations as a platform for advertising and to a readership with sufficient purchasing power to satisfy the advertisers’ selling aspirations. Making a newspaper attractive to advertisers is achieved by altering content to suit the values and prejudices of those who pay advertising revenues, as was pointed out in 1910 by US Professor Edward Ross: “When the news-columns and editorial page are a mere incident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, in it is strictly ‘businesslike’ to let the big advertisers censor both”(cited by Robert McChesney and Ben Scott, Monthly Review, www.monthlyreview.org/0502rwmscott.htm May 2002) A newspaper  boasting a large circulation but lacking content that appeals to advertisers will rarely survive, a fact that provides an explanation for the disappearance of ‘labour news’ and the widespread growth of lucrative ‘business news’ aimed at a minority audience. The demise of the Daily Herald and Sunday Citizen in the 1960s also illustrate the point. In its final year the Daily Herald enjoyed 8 percent of daily circulation but attracted only 3 percent of the net advertising revenue while the Sunday Citizen received barely one-tenth of net advertising income of the Sunday Times. Both newspapers were considered hostile to business and therefore denied advertising patronage, while in the US the corrupting influences that Sinclair so scathingly criticised have free rein, frequently suppressing news carrying anti-business content by threatening to cancel corporate advertising accounts.

Self-censorship

But besides advertising other, less obvious, factors have also worked to make newspapers a willing mouthpiece for corporations and for government. Newspapers demand a constant flow of low-cost material from reliable sources that avoids expensive research. With budgets squeezed, newspapers must focus where ‘meaningful’ news is most likely to occur. Government, corporations, trade groups and business lobbies with press and PR offices feed the press with stories that are presumed accurate, with mutual benefit derived by delivering cost reductions to the newspaper while tending to mute criticism by limiting the access of alternative views. Similarly, purchasing news from enormously powerful agencies like Associated Press or Reuters has cut costly international newsgathering. Of course, not all news can be printed, but when reputedly less than 2 percent of the world’s news gathered by these agencies is actually passed on to the news media, it raises serious questions about the criteria used to filter news deemed fit for our consumption. News that seriously threatens the status quo is given scant exposure or will simply be omitted – as if it never existed. Clearly, not all capitalism’s misdemeanours can be simply ignored because the consequences cannot always be hidden. The press must be seen as criticising the behaviour of a company or government, for no other reason than to maintain credibility, though such incidents are generally quickly forgotten as the press moves on to the next story.

But although censorship by omission certainly occurs it would be wrong to assume that journalism, in Britain at least, is consciously censored or that a conspiracy amongst journalists exists to hide facts from public scrutiny. Instead self-censorship linked to the personal economic necessity to conform to institutional and company requirements make journalists, in Sinclair’s words, drift “inevitably towards the point of view held by their masters”. This is precisely what George Orwell meant when he wrote in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban” (Times Literary Supplement, September 1972.)

In capitalist society the production of a successful newspaper means journalistic integrity and editorial objectiveness are subordinate to the institutional requirement of production for profit. There can be no other way, for as Professor Edward Ross pointed out in Sinclair’s era:

“To urge the editor, under the thumb of the advertiser or of the owner, to be more independent, is to invite him to remove himself from his profession. As to the capitalist owner, to exhort him to run his newspaper in the interests of truth and progress is about as reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work his property for the public good instead of for his private benefit.” (Edward Alsworth Ross, ‘The Suppression of Important News’, Atlantic Magazine, March 1910, quoted in Monthly Review May 2002).

More recent testimony to this enduring law of capitalist newspaper production was expressed by Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror, when he stated, “I only judge a story on what sells and what doesn’t” (Guardian, 30 November 1996).

Unreformable

Today, newspapers perform in much the same way as they did in Sinclair’s time, precisely because they operate in the same economic conditions. They lock-in our views to prevailing ideology by playing on prejudices and aspirations, incessantly communicating messages that instil working people with beliefs needed to integrate them into a life of wage slavery, with advertising assisting to create a ‘virtual’ world conducive to buying. “Journalism,” Sinclair wrote, “is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day to day, between elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they can go to the polls and caste their ballots for either one of the two parties of the exploiters”.

Sinclair’s book is a penetrating analysis of the early US capitalist press. But it is also the work of an author who, despite his stinging criticisms of the capitalist newspaper industry, believed that the press could in someway reform itself to stand outside class struggle and be recreated as a neutral independent force within capitalist society. Sinclair held the views that capitalism and genuine democracy could co-exist and journalism could be freed from the economic laws of capitalism to give expression to popular demand and abstract ideas of ‘social justice’ and ‘fairness’ that were divorced from the actual material conditions. But the reality is that as long as newspaper production is a profit-driven business it can never be free from the corrosive economic influence of capitalism. We need not lament this fact – for the press can perform in no any other way in capitalist society. But nor should we waste our energies on bankrupt delusions of press (or any other) reform, as Sinclair did, that at best can offer only temporary respite. Instead, we should organise to replace a society that corrupts and debases everything it touches and build socialism where a free and equal people will enjoy a free and informative press.

S.T.

The reform–revolution issue is a long-standing one that has occasioned much debate over the years. In 1890 William Morris wrote an essay ‘Where are we now?’, as he left the Socialist League and looked back over his time in that organisation and the Social Democratic Federation. He saw two ‘methods of impatience’, as he termed them. One was futile riot or revolt, which could be easily put down. The other was, to use the then-popular label, ‘palliation’, what we would now call reformism. Morris resolutely opposed both, since they would be carried out by people who did not know what Socialism was and so would not know what to do next, even if their efforts were successful on their own terms. Instead he advocated propagating Socialist ideas:

Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, i.e., convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles in practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible.

Morris thus rejected the reformist ideas that permeated the SDF and prefigured the Socialist Party’s view on this issue.

Another important discussion took place a few years later in the German Social-Democratic Party (the SPD). Eduard Bernstein, who enjoyed the prestige of being Engels’ literary executor, argued that reforms were all that should be aspired to: ‘The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything’. This was partly because Bernstein considered that some of the unpredictability of production under capitalism could be mitigated by the provision of credit and the founding of employers’ organisations (cartels and trusts). He also envisaged reformist politics and trade unions as gradually eliminating capitalist exploitation and ushering in Socialism.

 Bernstein’s main critic at the time was Rosa Luxembourg, in two articles reprinted as the pamphlet Reform or Revolution. Damning his work as ‘opportunist’, she pointed out that trade unions could only limit exploitation, not abolish it, and claimed that his views were tantamount to abandoning Socialism. Certainly we can agree that reforming capitalism will not turn it into Socialism. But even Luxembourg did not oppose reforms:

Can the Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal — the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means: the social revolution, its aim.

And she made no real attempt to relate reformist policies to the final goal, other than in statements such as:

as a result of its trade union and parliamentary struggles, the proletariat becomes convinced of the impossibility of accomplishing a fundamental social change through such activity and arrives at the understanding that the conquest of power is unavoidable.

This, however, offers no reason why a revolutionary organisation should advocate reforms.

And how has the reformist argument fared over the last hundred years? Have reformist movements and reforming governments made any contribution to Socialism? The answer to this question is a resounding No! Reformist governments, like all governments, do what they have to do: they administer capitalism in the interests of the ruling class, though they do make some effort to claim that their actions benefit the whole population. The Labour Party, for instance, has abandoned any pretensions about fundamentally changing society, and is now unashamedly the Tory Party Mark II.

Reformist movements try to get elected to government or attempt to influence the government of the day, all with the aim of carrying reforms into practice or of defending the status quo against some ‘anti-reform’. For the reformer’s work is never done under capitalism, which continually throws up new problems which need the reformer’s attention and constantly undermines any existing ‘gains’, however feeble. The list of potential reforms is as long as your arm; in the course of just one recent week in Manchester, there were meetings/campaigns dealing with ‘rights’ for homeworkers, the new Immigration and Asylum Act, the police ban on a picket outside Marks and Spencer, flood relief in Bangladesh, and the pollution caused by urban 4x4s. Which of these and many other worthy causes should the committed reformer give priority to?

The ‘Left’ may claim that it enjoys the best of both worlds, both supporting reforms and advocating revolution. But in fact its revolutionary posturing is just a matter of words, for its practical policies are purely reformist. Take the biggest Left organisation in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, for instance. The 18 December issue of its weekly paper Socialist Worker carried an article on the pension myths being peddled by the government (for the Socialist take on this, see the November Socialist Standard). Here is part of the SWP’s ‘solution’ (from their website at http://www.socialistworker.co.uk

We don’t want the present miserly level of pensions and care, we want better.

So say we did want to increase the share of GDP spent on the old by 5 percent of GDP or more. This only means increasing the tax rate by 0.1 percent of GDP a year for 50 years, a tiny amount.

It might mean returning top tax rates to closer to the ones which Margaret Thatcher’s governments used for most of their time in office.

Or it might mean taxing private pensions of the rich, or returning corporation tax rates on big business to a decent level.

It is obvious that, in speaking of the rich and tax rates, the SWP envisage the continuation of capitalism, rather than its abolition. It might be argued that they are only trying to attract support on the basis of reformist policies but that they really aim at revolution. But firstly, it would be quite dishonest to do this, to get workers’ support on the basis of saying one thing while really wanting something quite different. Secondly, there is no reason why anyone who goes along with increasing corporation tax should, as a consequence of supporting this, somehow be won over to Socialism. And thirdly, the SWP are utterly silent about revolution and Socialism, suppressing all mention of ‘the suppression of wage labour’. Rosa Luxembourg, as we saw, viewed reforms as the means and revolution as the aim. Like the rest of the Left, the SWP have effectively embraced Bernstein’s view, abandoning revolution for reformist measures.

The Socialist response to all this is straightforward. If you want to get somewhere, aim for that destination directly, rather than going on detours and trusting that you will eventually, by however roundabout a route, arrive at where you want to be. There is, and can be, no reformist road to Socialism, nor can there be a mixture of reformist and revolutionary policies. The Socialist Party has just one aim, the establishment of Socialism.

PB (SPGB)

Ever fearful that foreign governments might, among other things, introduce labour and environmental legislation detrimental to US investments, Washington has opposed the principle of democracy on almost every continent, even helping to overthrow democratically elected governments whenever it felt its interests threatened (e.g. Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964. Greece 1967, Fiji 1987).

Nor have its methods been peaceable. Indeed its agents in the CIA have carried out assassination of prominent individuals with as much indifference as its embassies have supported right-wing death squads and bloody coup attempts throughout Central and South America. Across the world, the US has backed dictators of every hue, turning a blind eye to their horrendous affronts to the democratic process.

We are now to believe that the US, presently occupying “sovereign Iraq” (for President Bush has declared Iraq is now “sovereign”), a country with sizeable oil reserves, and which has lost 100,000 of its people since the US-UK invasion, will see  that free and democratic elections take place on 30 January. Bush has since informed the people of Iraq – the same Iraq in which the CIA helped Saddam Hussein pull off the military coup that originally brought him to power: “We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.”

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Iraq, has been adamant that the US will not allow a delay in the 30 January vote. Speaking to reporters he stated that the elections would go ahead and that the security situation would be improved by then, and went so far as to say that conditions in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces were already safe enough for elections to be held.

He said: “I think once they realize that the elections will go forward as planned, then they [Sunni opponents of the election] are going to have to deal with that reality” (Washington Post, 1 December). However the Sunni resistance looks set to spiral, his comments coming  just after it was reported that US deaths in Iraq in November matched the post-invasion record set in April – 135 troops dead.

In Washington and London,  the claim is that the ongoing attacks by insurgents are an all-out attempt to disrupt the coming elections, when in truth the overriding fact is that many Iraqis still see the US as an army of occupation whose presence they have a right to oppose. An opinion poll carried out in September by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority confirmed that opposition to the US presence was widespread. It revealed that just 2 percent of Iraqi Arabs – that is, minus the Kurdish population – agreed wholeheartedly with the occupation. If anything, this shows that in spite of the age-old hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites, one thing that could unite them is their hostility to an occupying army of 138,000 – a figure set to increase before the election.

Securing the peace in Iraq in time for the elections has so far meant installing a pliable puppet regime, and implementing Order 39, which the Economist (25 September 2003) described as “a capitalist’s dream” and which opened up the Iraqi economy to complete foreign takeover. It has meant the deliberate bombing of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by squadrons of bombers and helicopter gun-ships, turning cities into rubble (Fallujah was napalmed), cutting off water, electricity and medical supplies and spreading hunger and disease.

A comprehensive new study by the British-based charity organisation Medact, which looks at the impact of war on health, reveals that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years has increased from 4 percent prior to the invasion to 7.7 percent since the invasion and that about 400,000 Iraqi children are suffering from ‘wasting’ and ‘emaciation’ conditions of chronic diarrhoea and protein deficiency.

Despite such facts as these, Washington would have it that people in Iraq are being irrational in not supporting US-organised elections.

As we go to press, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians are at odds over whether elections can take place on 30 January as planned. Iraq’s 60 percent Shia majority, who clearly suffered worst under Saddam’s reign, are keen for the elections to go ahead on time, knowing they are likely to consolidate the increased power they have enjoyed since overthrow of the essentially Sunni president Saddam. However, as rebels have continued their assaults on other towns since the fall of Fallujah, a campaign led by Sunni politicians has gathered momentum, with Shia leaders claiming that a postponement of the election date would only play into the hands of the insurgents.

The head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the elections go ahead. He has been backed by 42 mainly Shia and Turkmen parties who have issued a statement to say moves to delay the elections were illegal.

Conversely, Adnan Pachachi, a former Sunni minister, is heading a group of 17 political parties asking that the 30 January vote be delayed by six months because of the violence, fearing the insurgency in Sunni towns will discourage people from voting, thus disenfranchising them. Significantly, the two major Kurdish parties have also signed up to the delay

Alawi, the interim leader appointed by Washington to run Iraq, has said that in centres of resistance like Fallujah elections could be “delayed” until stability existed there, without the vote being invalidated, or in other words Washington-style democracy would will be available in the first instance only to those who did not resist the occupation by US forces.

Alawi, it seems, has no real control over the situation, and though it is said he has the power to cancel the election if he wished, there still exists the US hand-picked seven-member commission set up to run the elections, which can bar any candidate or party from standing and which will be deciding who is and who is not eligible to stand as a candidate.

Under the rules, the Iraqi electorate will vote for a 275-member Transitional National Assembly. Political parties will submit a list of candidates and every third name has to be a woman’s. Those Parties with alleged connections to militias are disqualified from taking part, along with former leading members of the Baath Party.

The US hopes to have 150,000 troops in place in time for the election, evidence if ever it was needed that the crisis in Iraq is escalating. It was not so long ago that Bush was boasting how US troops had been greeted as liberators and projected that the country could be policed with 50,000 troops by the end of 2003. Now military analysts are cautioning that the Iraq army and police force will not be in a position to police the country for another ten years. So much, then for Bush’s claim that once a legitimate Iraqi government is up and running the troops will be on their way home.

And as for the post-election situation, make no mistake, any government elected in Iraq will be permitted to function only so long as it kowtows to the dictates of Washington. Whatever, government is elected to ‘rule’ Iraq on 30 January it will only be allowed to do so with the endorsement of the White House.

Here in Britain, Bush’s sidekick, Tony Blair, is likewise looking forward to a post-election regime in Iraq that has no real say on foreign investment. Moreover, Blair is desperate for elections to take place in Iraq for the simple reason that he needs something resembling a foreign policy success to present to voters in the run up to the election. Indeed any good news at all at the moment would be welcomed by New Labour.

The essential goal of the Bush regime in the Middle East remains the same as that of preceding administrations going back to WWII, and that is to reinforce control of the region’s oil reserves and the profits that arise from them. Furthermore, Washington is well aware that control of Middle East oil gives the US enormous leverage over its economic rivals, Europe, Japan and China, all of whom are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the US. China in particular is expected to have the same oil demands as the US within 25 years.

That Iraq has huge oils supplies is the sole reason the US cannot allow a government –  freely elected by its people and one advocating a US departure – to exist.

JOHN BISSETT

Traveling-Soldier.org

From their mission statement:

Telling the truth - about the occupation, the cuts to veterans benefits, or the dangers of depleted uranium - is the first reason Traveling Soldier is necessary. But we want to do more than tell the truth; we want to report on the resistance to those on top - whether it’s in the streets of Baghdad, New York, or inside the armed forces.

For this, we might be criticized for not being “objective” or “balanced”. We aren’t. We proudly take the side of our class - working people and the oppressed the world over - against those who use their wealth and power to make our lives hell. But producing this newsletter for people in the armed forces is about more than telling the truth. Our goal is for Traveling Soldier to become the thread that ties working-class people inside the armed services together. We want this newsletter to be a weapon to help you organize resistance within the armed forces - and that can’t happen without you.

Ever fearful that foreign governments might, among other things, introduce labour and environmental legislation detrimental to US investments, Washington has opposed the principle of democracy on almost every continent, even helping to overthrow democratically elected governments whenever it felt its interests threatened (e.g. Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964. Greece 1967, Fiji 1987).

Nor have its methods been peaceable. Indeed its agents in the CIA have carried out assassination of prominent individuals with as much indifference as its embassies have supported right-wing death squads and bloody coup attempts throughout Central and South America. Across the world, the US has backed dictators of every hue, turning a blind eye to their horrendous affronts to the democratic process.

We are now to believe that the US, presently occupying “sovereign Iraq” (for President Bush has declared Iraq is now “sovereign”), a country with sizeable oil reserves, and which has lost 100,000 of its people since the US-UK invasion, will see that free and democratic elections take place on 30 January. Bush has since informed the people of Iraq - the same Iraq in which the CIA helped Saddam Hussein pull off the military coup that originally brought him to power: “We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.”

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Iraq, has been adamant that the US will not allow a delay in the 30 January vote. Speaking to reporters he stated that the elections would go ahead and that the security situation would be improved by then, and went so far as to say that conditions in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces were already safe enough for elections to be held.

He said: “I think once they realize that the elections will go forward as planned, then they [Sunni opponents of the election] are going to have to deal with that reality” (Washington Post, 1 December). However the Sunni resistance looks set to spiral, his comments coming just after it was reported that US deaths in Iraq in November matched the post-invasion record set in April - 135 troops dead.

In Washington and London, the claim is that the ongoing attacks by insurgents are an all-out attempt to disrupt the coming elections, when in truth the overriding fact is that many Iraqis still see the US as an army of occupation whose presence they have a right to oppose. An opinion poll carried out in September by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority confirmed that opposition to the US presence was widespread. It revealed that just 2 percent of Iraqi Arabs - that is, minus the Kurdish population - agreed wholeheartedly with the occupation. If anything, this shows that in spite of the age-old hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites, one thing that could unite them is their hostility to an occupying army of 138,000 - a figure set to increase before the election.

Securing the peace in Iraq in time for the elections has so far meant installing a pliable puppet regime, and implementing Order 39, which the Economist (25 September 2003) described as “a capitalist’s dream” and which opened up the Iraqi economy to complete foreign takeover. It has meant the deliberate bombing of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by squadrons of bombers and helicopter gun-ships, turning cities into rubble (Fallujah was napalmed), cutting off water, electricity and medical supplies and spreading hunger and disease.

A comprehensive new study by the British-based charity organisation Medact, which looks at the impact of war on health, reveals that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years has increased from 4 percent prior to the invasion to 7.7 percent since the invasion and that about 400,000 Iraqi children are suffering from ‘wasting’ and ‘emaciation’ conditions of chronic diarrhoea and protein deficiency.

Despite such facts as these, Washington would have it that people in Iraq are being irrational in not supporting US-organised elections.

As we go to press, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians are at odds over whether elections can take place on 30 January as planned. Iraq’s 60 percent Shia majority, who clearly suffered worst under Saddam’s reign, are keen for the elections to go ahead on time, knowing they are likely to consolidate the increased power they have enjoyed since overthrow of the essentially Sunni president Saddam. However, as rebels have continued their assaults on other towns since the fall of Fallujah, a campaign led by Sunni politicians has gathered momentum, with Shia leaders claiming that a postponement of the election date would only play into the hands of the insurgents.

The head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the elections go ahead. He has been backed by 42 mainly Shia and Turkmen parties who have issued a statement to say moves to delay the elections were illegal.

Conversely, Adnan Pachachi, a former Sunni minister, is heading a group of 17 political parties asking that the 30 January vote be delayed by six months because of the violence, fearing the insurgency in Sunni towns will discourage people from voting, thus disenfranchising them. Significantly, the two major Kurdish parties have also signed up to the delay

Alawi, the interim leader appointed by Washington to run Iraq, has said that in centres of resistance like Fallujah elections could be “delayed” until stability existed there, without the vote being invalidated, or in other words Washington-style democracy would will be available in the first instance only to those who did not resist the occupation by US forces.

Alawi, it seems, has no real control over the situation, and though it is said he has the power to cancel the election if he wished, there still exists the US hand-picked seven-member commission set up to run the elections, which can bar any candidate or party from standing and which will be deciding who is and who is not eligible to stand as a candidate.

Under the rules, the Iraqi electorate will vote for a 275-member Transitional National Assembly. Political parties will submit a list of candidates and every third name has to be a woman’s. Those Parties with alleged connections to militias are disqualified from taking part, along with former leading members of the Baath Party.

The US hopes to have 150,000 troops in place in time for the election, evidence if ever it was needed that the crisis in Iraq is escalating. It was not so long ago that Bush was boasting how US troops had been greeted as liberators and projected that the country could be policed with 50,000 troops by the end of 2003. Now military analysts are cautioning that the Iraq army and police force will not be in a position to police the country for another ten years. So much, then for Bush’s claim that once a legitimate Iraqi government is up and running the troops will be on their way home.

And as for the post-election situation, make no mistake, any government elected in Iraq will be permitted to function only so long as it kowtows to the dictates of Washington. Whatever, government is elected to ‘rule’ Iraq on 30 January it will only be allowed to do so with the endorsement of the White House.

Here in Britain, Bush’s sidekick, Tony Blair, is likewise looking forward to a post-election regime in Iraq that has no real say on foreign investment. Moreover, Blair is desperate for elections to take place in Iraq for the simple reason that he needs something resembling a foreign policy success to present to voters in the run up to the election. Indeed any good news at all at the moment would be welcomed by New Labour.

The essential goal of the Bush regime in the Middle East remains the same as that of preceding administrations going back to WWII, and that is to reinforce control of the region’s oil reserves and the profits that arise from them. Furthermore, Washington is well aware that control of Middle East oil gives the US enormous leverage over its economic rivals, Europe, Japan and China, all of whom are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the US. China in particular is expected to have the same oil demands as the US within 25 years.

That Iraq has huge oils supplies is the sole reason the US cannot allow a government - freely elected by its people and one advocating a US departure - to exist.

JOHN BISSETT

Bush has promised $15,000,000. Which is 79 minutes worth of Iraq War funding.

News is in that in an emergency ministerial meeting, India’s Prime Minister has just promised $22,896,393 for Sri Lanka alone. With $1,144,819 more for the Maldives.

Oh wait! That’s right we need to pay for tax cuts for these folks.

Such priorities! Why put up with a system which puts sports cars above people? Capitalism is promoted as the most rational economic system, it what way is this rational, compared to the war effort, the US spends 0.00015% to aid millions of living people in what may be the largest disaster in modern times.

Is this rational? Why do we agree to let this continue?

FB

No capitalists were killed in Iraq this week. Although several were injured when the rich dinner they were eating gave them indigestion. Several others complained of injuries resulting from profits not being as high as promised.

FB

There are so many things worth celebrating, for sure. Our children’s birthdays. And a thousand victories for slaves, minorities, workers and women. But the birth of a baby who likely never existed and who spearheaded a movement whose work ethic seemed to fit in rather nicely with the decline of slavery and the rise of capitalism? Capitalism requires a censoring of egoism since its basis is the benign production of profits for the ruling class by us, the idiot wage slave class. Never mind that the egoism of our employers is not in question, we who produce their wealth must slavishly do so with a sense of pride and joy. And then the rich have the cheek to expect us to give generously from our hard-earned but meager wages and salaries to a host of charities that promise to somewhat alleviate the suffering of fellow workers who would not be suffering in the first place if most of the wealth we produced went to us, the producers, instead of to them, the owners. Charity? Let’s have a little CLARITY! Let’s get real. This Christian ethic is what keep us in our place. What we need is a lot MORE egoism, not a lot less. What we need is to demand nothing less than the entire world for ourselves. And then I won’t feel quite so silly singing Jingle Bells. Such a revolution would certainly give the capitalist class something to sing about.

It is hard to understand all this gift-giving if not in the context of our poverty. In our relative poverty as working people (relative because we might not be in absolute poverty, we might earn a half-decent salary but still never have enough to stop working for the class that owns the means of production) the things we produce have acquired a fetishistic quality. We yearn for next year’s model, every year. In our state of propertylessness, commodities acquire a special quality, a magical sheen of wholesomeness. Our separation from the goods of our own production which makes us incomplete has lent commodities a voice that promises to render us whole again. It is indeed a joy to give and to receive when our lives are always spent paying bills and budgeting those pieces of paper the bosses give us for working so hard.

In this world of alienation from the things we produce, it is the very act of exchange that has risen to an angelic level, as high as the angel on the top of the Christmas tree. The feeling of saintliness obtained by giving objects produced by other workers to members of the family is an example of this perversion. We are like pigeons rejoicing over the crumbs dropped by humans on the sidewalk. Where is our own substance, our own value, or have we become entirely subsumed by the values of commodity production?

Yes, it is really nice to take off a few days from work to revel in gift-giving and merry-making, but it is no substitute for taking off our lives from work on a permanent basis. Capitalism is a society that has transformed the planet into a giant labor camp only because most of humanity is denied access to the means of production. We are forced to work most days of the week, most weeks of the year, and most years of our lives, as there is no other way for us to get what we need to survive. But get a little greedier, and start demanding your right to enjoy the fruits of the modern age without working so damn hard, and all of a sudden taking becomes more important than giving. Paradoxically, the more we insist on taking, the more we will have to share. It is as though the Christmas values of giving maintain our lot as those without enough to share amongst us in any meaningful sense. But the more we contrast the Christian value of giving with the revolutionary value of taking, the more we have to actually share! And I don’t just mean the last roll of wrapping paper and the bowl of punch either. I mean the whole bloody world.

DR. WHO (CHICAGO)

We can admit that these corporations are pretty bad as employers go. However, we feel that it does no service to fail to point out that the problems of bad employers will not go away if you stop the worst ones.

Bad employers are created by a economic system which is driven to create profits through cutting back on labor costs. It’s as simple as that. Even if a new round of economic gans could be made- as were in the 1950s, it would only be a postponement of the inevitable.

That is the futility of fighting for reforms. Sure you may be able to win some day-to-day gains- and good on you for that- but you will need to be mobilized forever to protect them. And even that’s not guarenteed.

So why not work for the elimination of the root source? Why not step up to build a working class consensus for a new economic system?

FB

More info:
End of “Full Employment” (pdf file)
Tha-that-that-that’s all folks! On the US economy.

We feel it is important that radicals understand why the backroom financial dealings within pseudo-socialist organizations such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO) as anti-working class.

Real working class organizations run on the rotation of organizational duties and anti-careerism. These principles have guided the WSPUS since its inception in 1916. They also animate such unions as the IWW, United Electric (UE) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). If an organization pays the staff, they pay them the average members wage. Working Class organizations also limit the length of time members can serve as officers and staff of the organization. These principles are necessary to prevent careerism, staff led organizational conservatism, power cliques and to safeguard internal democracy.

One also has to wonder what effect upon internal organizational democracy the fact that one individual underwrites over $200,000 a year of wages and publication costs. Would such an organization jeopardize their income to take position which the sugardaddy disagrees with?

FB

infoshop.org post:

In the last few years, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has gotten pretty consistent with their presence in various places; the International Socialist Review is a slick, professional-looking left magazine, and the ISO conventions are attended by thousands. You can set your watch to when they will show up at various spots to sell the Socialist Worker. If you think it is hard to believe that the ISO can pay for all of this with dues money and Socialist Worker sales, especially when publications with no advertising do not turn a profit, then you’re on to something.

According to the 990 IRS forms filed in 2001, the Center received a large donation–perhaps a good chunk of the startup funds, from a man named Kevin Neel, who donated over 1.2 million in stock. The stock acquired by the Center is in Oracle and Phillip Morris. The Center has been selling off portions of this stock every year in excess of several hundred thousand a year, to fund a huge payroll, including $45,000 a year plus benefits to the Center’s president Ahmed Sehrawy. For the year 2000-01, the total payroll in wages and benefits was $185,000 (presumably disbursed to several party organizers and staff-only $27,000 went to pay two officers of the Center.); in 2001-02, over $400,000, and in 2002-03: nearly $500,000. In 2002-03, Sehrawy made nearly $60,000 in wages and benefits.

For the past three years, the Center has also derived its funding from a handful of activists, much of it in cash. What this tells us is that the workers do not support the Center and the ISO–a few men with disposable income do. And given that fact that the Center’s bottom line continues to show a net loss, these funds will soon dwindle, and magazine and paper sales will be as crucial as ever. This is in spite of a net increase of literature sales and monies raised at their yearly socialist conference in Chicago.

In the left, all one has to do is follow the money, to see who controls the politics. More research will reveal specifics on the relationship between the ISO and the Center’s stock “trust fund". These “trustifarians” simply wear a blue collar. Thing is, who’s on the rest of their payroll is not a matter of public record. And it would be too much to expect an organization for the workers to actually tell the workers who on the payroll.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul on Saturday condemned same sex marriage as an attack on the fabric of society and called on Catholics to combat what he said was aggressive attempt to legally undermine the family.

“Attacks on marriage and the family, from an ideological and legal aspect, are becoming stronger and more radical every day,” the 84-year old pontiff said in the unusually strong statement.

“Who destroys this fundamental fabric causes a profound injury to society and provokes often irreparable damage.”

What hypocrisy! What utter crap! Here is the spokesmodel for an organization which has either perpetrated or condoned:

Genocide of indigenous peoples of Americas and Australia
Subjugation and whole-scale theft of entire continents
“Perpetual Slavery” for African peoples
Sectarian wars against peoples who didn’t share their vision
Insisted on and enforced the social inferiority of women
Anti-Semitism
Anti-democratic movements such as fascism

As well as many more despicable acts

So let’s get this straight. If gays get married, civilization will collapse. But wholescale slavery- in many different forms- is not an attack on the “social fabric"? The insistence on the subordinance of women isn’t an attack upon the foundations of society?

And when an organization such as the Catholic Church gets caught in changes of social history, all the Pope needs to do is ask for forgiveness. Like he did for the genocide of indigenous peoples in 2000.

But that doesn’t mean that the Pope is going to return the gold they stole from the same tribes. Heaven forbid! Even second-tier spiritual organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous insists you make amends by paying restitution. So much for kicking the money changers out of the temple.

Liberty will never come about through religion or within societies who use religion as an ideological prop. Relgions complain that liberty is licence. Socialists point out that religion is licence as well- licence given to states and organizations to murder, cheat and vicitmize.

Which kind of licence do you want? Liberty or theft?

FB

More info:
Will The Vatican Repeal The Inter Cetera? from Indigenous Law Center
A listing of Catholicism’s “Sins” from the American Catholic.

Their concerns are not all pious moralism about improvidence, nor solely anti-Americanist fears of Vegas firms muscling in on the British gambling scene. The redoubtable Polly Toynbee noted the possibility that the current 350,000 gambling addicts in the UK might rise to some 700,000; and that American research suggests that 6 percent of people living near casinos become addicts (Guardian, 20 October). Since many of the new casinos proposed would be part of regeneration schemes for run-down parts of the country this is likely to be rather counter-productive.

The government themselves are on the back foot over this. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, maintains fiercely that the bill will increase regulation of gambling – removing slot machines from small cafes and the like, creating an offence of encouraging children to gamble, etc. Ministers maintain that new regulations are needed to take account of new forms of betting, as via the internet, that weren’t covered by the previous legislation from the 1960s, and that jobs will be created.

Sheen of gold

A clear indication of their thinking can be seen from the debate in Parliament, after which Jowell commented, regarding calls for tight regulation, that: “It’s perfectly possible also that investors will find our regulatory regime just too tough because our over-riding concern will be protection of the public and protection of the vulnerable and children” (BBC interview). Quite how this can be squared with the possibility of more casinos being opened, more gambling happening and more profits being made is difficult to see, conceding as it does the profit motive behind the gambling industry.

The attraction for Ministers is that casinos, and their associated leisure facilities, attract money. They do not make money, since they cannot make it out of thin air, but it increases a form of circulation of money, drawing it into the areas where the casinos will be and, of course, when money circulates there is more opportunity for the Treasury to grab a slice. It would thus allow for new developments (more building of casinos and leisure parks), and more jobs – staff to work in the casinos and associated facilities. Tony Blair defended the Bill in the Commons on the grounds of new jobs – the traditional bribe politicians offer the working class to buy their support. It would provide the veneer of economic activity to run – down areas, without adding to the sum of wealth in the world.

That is, in short, that the Labour government has been taken in by the sheen of gold. Blinded by the bright lights of casinos and money both. Indeed, this is the very trick that the gambling industry lives by – the promise of infinite wealth. Money has no use in itself, save to buy other goods. The more money you have, the more it appears you can do with it.

As Marx noted in Capital :

[M]oney has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and, therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative boundlessness, continually acts as a spur [to acquire more] (Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 3).

Of course, gambling concerns want to make it appear easy to get hold of vast sums of money – the archetypal get-rich-quick scam. Who can blame those hundreds of thousands of people who gamble, from taking up this modern secularisation of Pascal’s wager – choosing between the certainty of a life of scrimping by in poverty, versus the finite chance of (effectively) infinite riches?

Hence why casino operators want to install slot-machines with unlimited pay-outs. They want to offer the promise of a shot at the big time, and thousands upon thousands will pour their coins into such machines, because, one day, their turn will come and they’ll strike it rich.

Spendthrift lords

When capitalism was still young it set its face against such temptations. In his section on money Marx discusses how the urge to hoard produced an urge for thrift, spending as little as possible whilst selling as much as possible, living to acquire more money, rather than living to live.

The expanding capitalist class faced an obstacle in the increasingly redundant aristocracy. One of the features of the great lords was living off income from estates, simply having money fall into their laps from no effort (and a class structure that actively meant they couldn’t go into business). They had nothing much else to do with their disposable income other than to consume and display their status – hence the ostentatious clothes of aristocrats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What they also did was gamble, tremendously, precisely because they had the means to do so, and because they were rapidly becoming economically redundant and had no useful outlet for such money.

It was this relationship that forged the stern-faced Puritanism that still informs the debate, the reflex reaction against the old class enemy – the feudal class. It is, of course, a feeling that comes despite the reality of modern day capitalism, and how much it has come to depend on gambling.

Some government supporters have accused the bill’s opponents of being elitist kill-joys, for wanting to keep casinos as a preserve of the very rich, a luxury item. In reality, the vast majority are excluded from the main strands of gambling that go on, the gambling that is now at the heart of capitalism.

Financiers on the Stock Exchange regularly gamble on the price of stocks. For example, they will agree to buy stocks, bonds, etc. on a given date at a given price, in the hope/expectation that on that day the price agreed will be below the general market price, so they can immediately sell off for a vast profit. Millions of pounds are ‘won’ that way in rewards and bonuses, but no real wealth is produced. Increasingly, this is normal behaviour for financial companies, and on this sort of practise hang the pensions and benefits of millions of workers whose funds are in the gamblers’ hands.

The likes of Nick Leeson, who borrowed and invested, inveigled and manipulated until (back in 1995) he bankrupted Barings bank – one of the oldest banking firms in the world – are the ones behind this system of gambling. Far from being a system of communicating vital market information, as some ideologues of capitalism maintain, it is a giant poker table where stock brokers bluff and counter bluff their way to fortune.

Gambling, though, is even a respectable business all of itself – the insurance industry. Every time someone buys insurance, what they are actually doing is placing a bet that their house will burn down, or their car explode, or that they die horribly of a heart attack soon, etc., and the insurance agency is betting against, and setting the odds. Of course, just as you never see a poor bookie, so too will you find insurance agents have ways of making sure they’re not over exposed by their own gambling. When the going gets tough, insurance companies increase the premiums – that is, they shorten the odds they’ll give.

Corporate gamblers

This industry too lives by the illusions of money – that property has an immortal soul in the form of monetary value, which can be protected. The reality is that losses due to natural risk and hazard can only be replaced out of current production anyway – all insurance firms exist to do is to keep the property system immune to such shocks.

Much like the misery and pain that gambling problems cause on an individual or family level, so too do these corporate gamblers on a national and world level. Their mistakes and misfortunes ripple in seismic shocks throughout the whole of society. We are all of us asked to carry the costs for the risks the gambling addicted capitalists find themselves wanting to take. Gain is privatised, risks are socialised.

This has political ramifications as well, because the tantalising prospect of a way out, of a chance to get up the ladder, that things will change, means a great many people accept the status quo, and don’t begin to see that they are the ones who will actively make the change, rather than it falling into their laps. This goes not just for the less well-off but also for politicians looking for painless quick fixes to the more intractable problems of our society.

The idea that money is a cure-all, that if we can roll some dice and enough of it will land to change the landscape of our lives is inherently disempowering. It is a part of commodity fetishism, the handing of the control of our lives to the mysterious power of marketable things, rather than seeking to master our own goods. Socialism is about seeing beyond the money trick to look at and administer the real wealth, so that we may take charge of our own environment, rather than wait for a changed figure in an accounting column to fall our way.

Of course, risk will always be with us, and we need to find ways of dealing with it: what we don’t need is people trying to take a profit from the risk, or trying to avoid helping people when the going gets rough. We don’t need to balance imaginary account books, only the productive capacity to deal with people’s needs as and when they arrive.

Without money, the false dreams of gamblers become impossible. So if the Guardian and Mail readers are interested in opposing gambling, they should look not to casinos, but to the economic system that profits so much from it.

PIK SMEET

The New York Times reports that, according to Spanish Prime Minister Rodriguez Zapatero, before leaving office in April the Aznar administration erased all records related to the Madrid bombings:

“There was not a single paper, not a single piece of data in computer form or on paper, absolutely nothing in the executive offices of the presidency because there was a massive erasing,” he said during more than 14 hours of testimony before the parliamentary commission investigating the attacks.

The erasure was performed by a private company, because of course corporations always perform tasks better than the government, and the bill for 1200 euros was left behind.

Of course, we already know that the Aznar government engaged in a massive campaign to lie about the attacks and place the blame on ETA rather than an Islamist jihadi group, even when the idea was ludicrous from the beginning to anyone familiar with ETA’s MO and that of al-Qaeda-like groups.

It also must be observed that often governments infiltrate and use Terrorist groups for their own political uses- a good example being the Red Brigades, etc. in Italy in the P2 scandal.

What’s the problem? Simply, if the US dollar declines against other currencies, it will become harder for Americans to buy foreign products- such as all the Chinese made consumer items, Mexican, Canadian and Chilean grown food, etc. Look around you and see how much is made in other countries and add on 10-20% to the cost.

How will that affect your life?

Ah, but every cloud must have a silver lining, right? And the lining here is for those who control the silver. With a falling dollar those items the US produces with the most ‘efficiency’- technical items, manufacturing machinery, software, etc. become cheaper on the world market.

Also, it must be observed that the US economy has been propped up for the last decade or more by heavy investment by foreign nations. Japan’s capitalists nearly cannibalized its economy- once robust and now in decades of recession- to invest in the US during the 1990s. Likewise, the Saudi’s and the various Persian Gulf Emirates invested heavily in the US- as was discussed in Fahrenheit 911. The Saudi’s own perhaps 10% or more of the US.

So when the dollar comes down, those foreign capitalists who invested in the US get to be paid with cheaper US dollars. So the banks and investment houses make out like the bandits they are.

But ask yourself where YOU fit into the scheme of things. What can you do? Plant a garden? Buy Chinese made goods now while they’re cheap? Move to Korea and start a Mom and Pop store? Turn on a box and veg out? Pray to god for deliverance in these troubling times?

Why is it that our lives are ruled by an irrational economic system based in gamboling? Why is it that in a world that can provide enough for everyone, that we must be doing without?

FB

Some backround reading:

Socialism As A Practical Alternative (pdf)
Why the Market System must go! (pdf)
Why we don’t need money (pdf)

This leads to one of the big questions of the film: if corporations are legally defined as people, then what kind of people are they? One way the film addresses this question is to call in the FBI’s Consultant on Psychopaths, Dr Robert Hare. Hare proceeds to run through a check-list of the traits of your run-of-the-mill psychopath before concluding that the modern corporation, bearing no moral responsibility for its actions, is very much the prototypical psychopath.

Much of the remainder of the film is given over to proving this claim beyond all reasonable doubt and many authoritative witnesses are wheeled in to testify. And what a selection of witnesses there are! Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, Anita Roddick, Vandana Shiva, Michael Moore; experts from every field and all manner of labour rights organisations and grass roots activists, economists such as Milton Friedman and many CEOs. Their statements amount to a damning examination of the nature and personality of the modern corporation, charting its growth, its extending influence and downright indifference to democracy and how, as one commentator observes, it has turned into a “monster, trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone’s expense.”

No such thing as enough

What we are presented with is an image of all-powerful organisations running wild, rabid with greed, superpowers, for whom there is “no such thing as enough” (Moore), for whom “everything is legitimate in the pursuit of profit” (Roddick). Modern corporations are presented as the “new high priests”, more powerful than governments and accountable only to their shareholders, their brand labels protected by more legislation than covers the rights of the children who sew them onto their overpriced merchandise.

The film pits competing ideas on the modern corporation against one another. We are at one stage shown the offices of the National Labour Committee and hear Executive Director Charles Kernaghan revealing the level of exploitation of workers in the Dominican Republic (who for instance earn 75 cents for each Nike jacket that sells for $178 and 3 cents for a tee shirt that retails at $14.) We are shown the living conditions of those same desperate workers and hear their own testimony as to the level of their destitution and then listen to Michael Walker of the corporate think-tank, the Fraser Institute, expounding his views on the role competitive markets play in providing for the economic and social well-being and how he believes firms such as Nike are an “enormous godsend” to people in the Dominican Republic

The film contains much that is totally fascinating. One section looks at big business and its penchant for the dictatorial regime. We are shown how a punch card system devised and regularly maintained by IBM (operating out of New York) processed millions of concentration camp victims, and how Coca Cola, faced with the possibility of having its operation curtailed in Nazi Germany, simply changed its name to Fanta. Much evidence is presented as to how corporate allegiance to profit transcends its loyalty to national flags and we are presented with one startling fact: that in one week 57 US companies were fined for trading with enemies of the US. Contemplating big business’s links to tyrannical regimes, one commentator asks “is it narcissism that compels them to seek their reflection in the regimented structure of fascist regimes?”

One of several cases studies the film presents is that relating to Monsanto (famous for Agent Orange and 50,000 birth defects in Vietnam) and its manufacture of Posilac. This was a drug which, when injected into cows, increased their milk yield. That the world was awash with milk did not concern Monsanto; they were far more interested in profits and eventually were supplying a quarter of US dairy herds with the product. But because cows were not meant to produce so much milk, their udders went into overdrive and became infected with mastitis, the pus from which infected the milk. Not only were humans suffering the effects of the chemicals injected into the milk, their milk was now infected with mastitis pus. Monsanto’s reaction was to deny all allegations and to lie like condemned murderers.

Reckless pollution

The modern corporation is perhaps most vilified for its total lack of respect for the environment and biosphere on which all life on Earth depends. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Inc, who has won much acclaim promoting the idea that environmental responsibility makes good business sense, is seen addressing an audience of business leaders in North Carolina. Greeting them as “fellow plunderers”, he goes on to tell them that there is “not an industrial company in the world that is sustainable.”

Robert Weismann of Multinational Monitor reminds us that the cost of getting caught for their corporate transgressions – i.e. environmental pollution – is, more often than not, less than the cost of complying with existing environmental legislation. Dr Vandara Shiva, physicist and ecologist, despairingly contemplates the suicide gene built into new strains of cash crop seeds, the new terminator technology that makes the third world farmer dependent ever on the seed supplier (instead of traditionally putting aside a portion of the harvest as seeds for the following year), and calls them inventions of a ear), and calls them inventions of a “brutal mind”.

For the corporation, nothing is sacred. Even the US Patent Office has conceded defeat in its attempts to stop them patenting life forms, bearing out Roddick’s sentiment that every means is legitimate if the end be profit. Climbing down from one seven-year battle with big business, the Office had this to say: “You can patent anything in the world which is alive except a full birth human being.”

The film nears an end with a case study of the privatisation of the water supply of Cochabamba, Bolivia, at the behest of the World Bank, focusing particularly on the town’s residents and their run in with the forces of the state acting on behalf of Bechtel, a San Francisco based company who bought the water company. So keen were the powers that be to force the people to bow to the power of Bechtel that they demolished their homes for non-payment of their exorbitant water rates and made the collecting of rain water illegal. The frustration spilled onto the streets with huge demonstrations and riots and violent clashes with the police. Eventually, though, Bechtel were forced to pull out of their Bolivian venture, but not before they had put in a claim for $25 million in compensation.

Weakness

It is from this case study and other cited instances of green activism that we are meant to draw inspiration; the message being that the corporation should not underestimate the power of the people, that “the workers, united, can never be defeated”. Of course, corporations are advised to tidy up their act too. Michael Moore tells us that there should be more governmental controls and the film ends with Moore hoping the film will prompt people “to do something, anything, to get the world back in our hands”. This suggests that Moore, and others who promote similar ideas in the film, are missing the point. Granted, it is commendable, heroic even, that workers are prepared to often risk life and limb to defend themselves and to confront the most harrowing acts perpetrated by corporations. But it is a dangerous to believe that such grassroots action amounts to wresting control of the world away from its current owners.

If anyone considers this film a trumpet call for social change, a reveille for revolution, they are mistaken. The capitalist system is left unscathed. Nowhere is the market-driven profit system as such challenged. Nowhere are all of the case studies and criticism of corporate power and abuse rooted in a wider context. Nowhere does a commentator lambast the global “can’t pay, can’t have” society that consigns the greater portion of the population of the planet to lives of abject misery. And no interviewee comes near to demanding the abolition of the capitalist system and its replacement with a system of society based on free access. Capitalism is taken for granted as being immutable and all that is being asked at the end is that corporations wear a smiley face and stop behaving so horridly.

Moore may well contemplate why such films are broadcast by TV corporations, in spite of the fact that they attack corporate power; for the record, he suggests it is because there is profit to be made by them and he may be partly right. But he fails to grasp that this, and similar films like Fahrenheit 911, nowhere query the basis of class society – the set-up that allows the ownership of property by one privileged class, and the consequent enslavement of one class by another, is in no way threatened and the TV company broadcasting programmes that reveal corporate crimes is aware of this.

I don’t really want to rubbish the whole film but, in truth, The Corporation simply echoes the sentiments of the anti-globalisation movement – the demand for greater corporate responsibility, reform of international institutions, expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions, for instance – while allowing capitalism to carry on perpetrating every social ill that plagues us.

The Corporation is undoubtedly a remarkable exposé of the modern corporation at its ugliest, of the lengths corporations will go to and the depths they will stoop to in the search for profit. The film stands as a brilliant critique of corporate power and everything we associate with it and is a much needed resource in revealing the insanity of the present system. And as far as enthusing green activists and lending weight to the anti-globalisation cause is concerned, the film is a powerful tool. But that’s not the way out.

John Bissett

From the Socialist Standard, Dec. 2004

The Fallujah insurgency, if you remember correctly, was destroyed last month.

US Military spokespeople gave no estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths or causualties caused by US bombing. That’s because the dead would only be Iraqi workers- they don’t count- as the rich got to run off. Besides, you may have sympathy with the workers if you actually got the information and that would be bad for your rulers.

FB

Former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, has been indicted today on human rights “abuses", including kidnapping of 9 leftists and the murder of one.

According to the Guardian newspaper this is the second attempt to put Pinochet in prison:
The first attempt to put Pinochet on trial in Chile in 2001 involved charges relating to the killings carried out by the Caravan of Death, a mobile death squad that executed 75 political prisoners in the weeks after the 1973 coup… A recent (Chilean) government report accused the Pinochet regime of torturing some 28,000 people. An official report issued soon after the restoration of democracy in 1990 found 3,197 people had died or disappeared during that period.

We have no doubt that Pinochet has acted in a vile manner. And perhaps this case will slow some of Chilean Ruling Class more thuggish elements to slow down a bit. But there will be more Pinochets. Maybe not in Chile soon, but they seem to pop up wherever greed and power is what runs the social system.

In other words, Pinochets are made by capitalism. Augusto Pinochet was born into a position of power and arogance over “little people". In the world of the Ruling Class, they have their place in the world and working people like you and I- have our place. We are to be ruled and bossed. Shut up, go to work and go to church. That is our life under the ruling class.

Why settle for a fleeting feeling of smugness that a bad guy is going to get his due? Think of the emotions we will have, and the possiblities available to all of us if we eliminate the social system- capitalism- that makes people like Pinochet possible?

FB

For more about Pinochet’s coup, the supposed socialism of Salvador Allende and our views read the SPGB’s article Pinochet and Socialism

Another family (Scott’s) will be victims of an another untimely death- this time done in your and my name. Just because he is a murderer doesn’t mean he is not a son, brother, friend and human. Another mother will have to do the unthinkable and bury her own child.

Woohoo, the world’s a better place now isn’t it? Surely our streets will be safer because Scott Peterson will no longer be around. And our lives more full and rich.

Why is it, that in a country full of purported fundamentalist Christians, nobody seems to want to be like Jesus and to turn the other cheek?

Because Christian morality isn’t Christian and can never be so. Religions are systems that reflect the society in which they exist in not vise-versa. There’s no going back to the social system of Roman occupied Palestine. Christianity is a religion based in capitalism and stinks of capitalism’s morals, not those of Jesus.

In capitalism there always needs to be a scapegoat. There are no problems with the system. No problems if workers keep watching the smoke and mirrors of Scott Peterson trials, TV, movie star scandals, video games, etc.

We all know it’s nothing but a waste of our time, but what else is there to do?

A wasted life! What a tragedy. And workers’ lives- our lives- are meant to be wasted. We are expendable, and it doesn’t matter how we are spent. It can be too much consuming, overwork or war.

OR to a poison syringe on a sacrificial alter in a California Penitentiary.

So fellow worker, look behind the smoke and mirrors and come beyond the stench of capitalist morality. Socialism means a world where all of us have worth. Even in fighting for Socialism you find worth, dignity and skills you never thought you had.

A better world is possible if you want it.

Think about it.

FB

As always, wars for “freedom” are not about liberating working people like these victims, it is for the freedom to exploit markets effectively. Images From The War in Iraq

President Thabo Mbeki says war remains one of the central causes of disabilities on the African continent. He was speaking at the end of the World Blind Union’s conference in Cape Town today. Delegates from 60 countries attended the event.

Mbeki says government will continue to fight for peace and stability in Africa. “War is one of the central causes of disability in Africa … therefore we should not only have correct policies and programmes to meet the needs and aspirations of blind people and others with disabilities. We must also act vigorously to address the causes of disability,” he said. Mbeki also pledged to be an ambassador for the blind in Africa and elsewhere in the world.

Meanwhile, delegates urged governments of the world to employ blind people. “The visually impaired people of Africa are blind … but they have a vision and a life to live,” said Paul Tezanou, the president of the African Union for the Blind.

SABC-South African Broadcasting

And if the leading cause in Africa, which has endured one of the worst wars in History in recent memory - in the Congo - what about in other parts of the world? I reiterate the poiunt, surely it is better to fight for a world without wars, than posture for or against the wars we have now - over 851 million people (according to the UN) are starving, isn’t the war on want the first war we should be fighting?

From Reasons To Be Impossible

Daimler Chrysler announced on Friday that it was recalling 600,000 trucks because a problem with the suspension could cause the wheels to fall off, but, said a company spokesman, “We do not think it rises to the level of a safety defect.”

Seems to me that what is important isn’t the drivers, but the bottom line.

Published by The Socialist Party of Great Britain to mark the centenary of its formation,

‘Socialism or Your Money Back’ presents a

” . . .running commentary from a socialist perspective of the key events of the last hundred years as they happened. Two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the General Strike and the rise of Hitler are covered, as are the civil war in Spain, Hiroshima, the politics of pop, democracy and the silicon chip, and much more.

The book will be of interest to those wanting to study the political, economic and social history of the twentieth century, as well as to those committed to the interests of the majority class of wage and salary workers and who want a different society to replace the profit-wages-money system that is capitalism.”

Now available from WSP-US
for US$12 Postpaid

Send cash or check payable to WSPUS to

WSP(US)
POBox 440247
Boston, MA 02144
USA

The government is worried, the police are pretty much baffled but nobody really knows what to do. We hear of spectacular police ‘busts’ where they come across huge amounts of drugs with a street value of millions of pounds but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the overall picture. Apparently this is a problem that has no solution. In a probably futile attempt to control it the government in Britain is considering making some drugs such as cannabis, legal or rather partially legal. One question that never seems to get asked though is – why?

“Why?” of course is a question spectacularly lacking in politics, and the reason for this is simple – they dare not ask it because the answer would lie in the nature of capitalist society. And of course there is the point that a very workable diversion exists to keep workers’ minds off their real problems. Capitalism is content, or has to be content, with a good many expensive circuses to maintain itself in existence.

However there are other aspects to drugs that never get mentioned. These are the problems of the other sorts of drugs – the legal ones. One may come across an odd mention of a particular drug that is having “side effects” (an outrageous euphemism if ever there was one). Scandals such as Thalidomide made the headlines, but there is no sustained coverage in the media such as is given to Ecstasy where one death will make the headlines, especially if it happens to a young girl. Legal drugs, that is drugs prescribed by doctors to treat disease are never described as a problem. Yet problem it is, because legal drugs kill far more people than the illegal ones.

This is a shocking statement. Yet it is true, as records published in the USA and the UK show. According to the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association at least 106,000 Americans die every year as a result of some adverse reaction to a prescription drug. A further 7,000 die from an error relating to a drug such as a wrong dosage or a wrong mix (drugs which do not combine). This finding was only for drugs administered in hospital. The Institute of Medicine, which carried out this survey, admitted that its findings did not include drugs consumed outside of hospital as a result of GP or consultant prescription.

In the UK, according to a study by University College London, estimated medical errors, which include unwanted drug reactions, kill 40,000 people every year. This again only applied to hospitals, and did not take into account the many more fatalities that occur at home. Figures taken from Secrets of the Drugs Industry, by Bryan Hubbard, suggest that the monitoring system used to test new drugs for efficacy and “adverse reactions” (the name given to unwanted effects) is far from foolproof, and can be pretty sketchy. Children and the elderly are not often included in the tests though many drugs may be aimed at just such people. The real test comes when they are put on the market.

To cover this, doctors are expected to report the side effects that they come across, that is, that are reported to them by patients. In the UK adverse reactions to prescription drugs should be monitored by the Yellow Card system, whereby if a doctor suspects a drug has caused a reaction not intended by the manufacturer, he or she notes it down and sends it to the Medicines Control Agency. They oversee the safety of drugs once they are licensed but the system has many loopholes. It is estimated by Dr Bill Inman, the man who initiated the system, that only about ten percent of all reactions are ever reported, either because a link is not suspected or because GPs are overburdened with paperwork. In France researchers estimated that doctors report only one in 24,000 adverse reactions. And if the adverse reaction is not already noted, many doctors will tend not to believe the patient.

So far one could conclude that all of these are unfortunate results due to human error from over-worked doctors under a lot of pressure. The true picture is far more sinister than that and has to do with drug companies, profits and the nature of the social system we are all living under, capitalism.

Drugs, as with all else that is produced in this world today, are produced for one reason only – to make a profit. Not a profit for the producers, the workers who actually make the stuff of course – they are the source of profit. The owners of capital in the drugs industry make the profit. And what profits! The drugs industry is one of, if not the most, profitable industry in the world today.

The ten top drug companies are so large primarily due to a series of mergers that have consolidated their position. The largest single company is Pfizer closely followed by the British Glaxo-Wellcome-Smith-Kline-Beecham, now calling themselves GSK. Other major pharmaceuticals are Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers–Squib, and Merck. For the ten leading drug companies their profits topped the Fortune 500 companies in the US by a large margin. In the UK GSK alone had sales of £20.5 billion in 2001, and a pre-tax profit of £6.2 billion.

Why is this? Most drug companies admit to making massive profits but seek to explain this away by pointing at the costs of research, which, they claim, is necessary to put new drugs on the market and keep up with the increasing demands of modern medicine. New research is very costly and does seem at first glance a valid justification. A closer look at the marketing habits of drug companies will reveal a very different story. While the money required for completely new formulations is indeed massive, there are not as many completely new research discoveries as they would like us to think. Whilst the cost of producing an entirely new drug can rise to £350 million and can take from ten to fifteen years to bring on to the market, the reality is not quite so clear cut. Many “new” drugs are not new as far as involving new chemicals but are re-formulations of existing drugs. A study in America discovered that, of all the drugs approved during the 1990s, only 15 per cent contained new active ingredients.

But for the drug companies launching a new product on the market is a matter of vital importance because that’s where they make their money. Prices charged for a new product are substantially higher. In America in 2000 the average price per prescription for the most innovative new drug was $91.20 compared to an average price of $37.20 for older drugs that were approved before 1995.

Share prices

The launch of a new drug can also have remarkable affects on the share price. For example, shares in Cambridge-based drugs firm Alizyme rocketed from 34.5p to 114.5p after second-stage trials of the anti-obesity drug ATL-962 dramatically aided weight loss without the damaging side effects of its rivals. “This will definitely be a blockbuster drug” said Finance Director Tim McCarthy. “We would anticipate sales of at least $1bn a year once it is fully approved.” The Daily Mail commented: “The £110 million company’s future is virtually guaranteed. On top of a hefty one off fee, it is likely to secure a double digit percentage of any future royalties” (20 September 2003.)

Once a “new” drug is approved pharmaceutical companies can usually look forward to a rosy future. They have a patent, which usually extends to 20 years, and no other drug firms may produce that drug. However other companies may produce what is called a generic drug, given permission from the parent company. That is a drug containing the same ingredients but not entitled to use the same name. These can be produced much more cheaply and there is, for example, a long-running dispute between companies producing anti-aids drugs and governments in Third World countries over permission to produce generic drugs. The nascent drug industry of Pakistan would like to build on the production of generic drugs but a big demand from South Africa is being blocked by the parent companies, who see their profits threatened. Needless to say both parties are on their moral high horse. In this connection it is worth noting that most drug companies spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on research.

Enormous amounts are also spent on lobbying governments especially in the United States. “Overall, drug companies spent $78.1 million on lobbying in 2001 bringing the total lobbying bill for 1997-2001 to $403,071,467. The companies employed 623 different individual lobbyists in 2001 - or more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress”. (source. Public Citizen, 12 June 2002: http://www.citizen.org/congress/reform). The reason for this is that after such huge amounts have been paid out on research the costs have to be recouped by an aggressive selling campaign. Development of a new drug can take up to fifteen years after its initial licensing, leaving a mere five years before the patent runs out. And since these are prescription drugs that are dependent on doctors to administer, the main promotional target must be a doctor. Doctors, who, after all, we must believe have their patients’ interests at heart, have to be persuaded that a new drug will be more efficacious than one they have previously relied upon. It must be pointed out that development in drugs moves at such a rapid pace that within a few years from graduating the average doctor will be heavily dependent on outside sources for any knowledge of their usefulness. And the companies concerned do their level best to ensure that such knowledge comes from the producer.

How is this done? The short answer is bribery, but this is carried out in such subtle ways that doctors themselves are unaware that they are being wooed. Expense-paid ‘holidays’ to seminars in foreign locations are one such, but there are many other methods pursued to persuade doctors. Articles in medical journals are heavily influenced by biased reports from company funded research. Drug companies are very powerful entities and they use every method they can to sell their products. Remember, to them drugs are a commodity, and a commodity is something that is put on the market to make a profit for the shareholders.

That the pharmaceuticals industry is way up there as one of the more unpleasant features of capitalist society does not need much proving. To degrade what should be an honourable attempt to alleviate the ills suffered by humankind, (many of them caused by capitalist society itself) into a sordid scramble for wealth should be sufficient indictment of the capitalist system, but what is the solution? All those who consider that state regulation is an answer should look closely at other attempts by the state to regulate some of the ‘unacceptable faces of capitalism’ such as the arms trade. They should also perhaps reflect on the fact that in Britain up to one third of MPs receive some funding from drug companies to help pay for administrative expenses etc.

Will drugs be as big a menace in socialism? As far as legal drugs are concerned there should be no problem. Without the commercial pressures of today and the drive for profit it would be possible for researchers to behave in a responsible manner and pool their findings. What is now called the problem of illegal drugs might not be so easy to solve. One prime factor, however, would immediately disappear in a socialist system – the monetary incentive to produce such drugs. We believe that socialism would fill up the gaps in people’s lives making it less likely (if not completely unlikely) that they would turn to drugs to fill an empty life or escape from an intolerable one. One thing is for sure that there is no solution within capitalism. The consensus of opinion is that the problem is growing.

But the question has still to be asked – why is it that the terrible death toll from prescription drugs is so under-reported in the media?

The answer is that the powers that be are quite prepared to tolerate all manners of injustices and deceptions in the pursuit of profits, as long as they don’t rise to an uncontrollable level and get out of hand, and the drug companies are in a very powerful position in setting social and political agendas.

Moore has clearly made a first-rate documentary here, showing George Bush up as the first class moron we always knew him to be and heading a corrupt administration drooling oil and dripping from every pore with workers’ blood, unashamedly prepared to go to any lengths in the name of profit.

However, nowhere, does Moore locate his film in a wider social and political context-in the capitalist system itself, in a system racked with contradiction, an exploitative social system that consigns hundreds of millions throughout the world to abject poverty. While he clearly makes the link between oil, profits and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he nowhere suggests that war, all war, is the continuation of business by other means; that in capitalism wars are fought over trade routes, overseas markets, mineral wealth or areas of influence; that if you build empires you have to be prepared to kill people

But Moore is no revolutionary, no class warrior. In the film he talks to a woman whose family have a long military tradition and who proudly unfurls the stars and stripes outside of her house each morning. Moore, ever the patriot, suggests she must be a proud woman and himself qualifies her pride in her soldiering offspring with the line “it’s a great country”-and well worth dying for, no doubt? Later on, and referring to the many US soldiers from impoverished towns-such as Flint, with 50 percent unemployment-who have been killed since the invasion of Iraq, Moore says: “They offer to give up their lives so we can be free”. In this, Moore shows he holds the same ideas of freedom that Bush and his ilk are always asking workers to defend. In a land where there exists a ‘Patriot Act’ that restricts many hitherto taken-for-granted ‘freedoms’, where trade unionists have recently been forbidden to engage in strike activity, where speaking out against the status quo is seen as dangerously subversive, where the prison population borders on two million, freedom only means that workers chooses which capitalist is to exploit them. Moore leaves the capitalist system very much unscathed and so free to go on killing.

The documentary, with its frontal attack on the present Republican administration, has viewers assuming that a USA headed by a more liberal-perhaps Democrat-government would not be so militaristic or so friendly with its corporate elite. In truth, any new government, a one headed by Nader included, would have to serve primarily as the executive arm of corporate America, charged with pursuing the interests of the profit-hungry US ruling elite at home and aboard, ready always to call in the troops and bombers if US profits are threatened. The history of US foreign policy since 1945 is testament to this fact.

Bush may well lose the coming election, perhaps partly thanks to the production of this film, but capitalism will continue in the US as it does everywhere else on the planet, and the myriad injustices Moore himself catalogues in his book Stupid White Men will continue. Whilst one can clearly understand why audiences, who have watched Fahrenheit 911, have chanted “Bush out, Bush out” as the film ended, they are clearly mistaken in thinking the unseating of the Texan idiot will better their lot one iota. They will exist as wage slaves, every aspect of their lives subordinated to the dictates of capital, just as much under Kerry as under Bush.

But socialists are aware that in the workplace workers, anti-war campaigners and not, are soldiers in an economic war on behalf of the generals who own the businesses where we work. We thought it ironic that workers should be so strongly united in an anti-war outlook on a Saturday, and then, back at work on the Monday, would go to war with each other, united only in an effort to win the battle for production, sales or work over their anti-war friends engaged in a similar process for other generals. A common lament from the weary and dismayed proletarian soldiers in the American Civil War of the 19th century was, We are all Americans! We socialists have a similar cry to workers in both the commercial and military wars of today – We are all fellow workers! If non-socialist anti-war campaigners only knew it, the wars of commerce lie at the root of all the military wars.

Sadly not a common view among anti-war campaigners, but all the signs of war are readily available if one cares to look and reflect on our day-to-day activity for just a moment. Do not most of us work for a business to produce or sell products or provide some type of service in competition with those produced by our fellow workers who work in other businesses in the same field of activity? The products from one worker look almost identical to products from another, are made in similar environments by similar processes by workers who perform similar tasks in similar numbers and using similar tools. These commodities, whether we make them, sell or deliver them as a service, perform the same function, serve the same need, and sell for almost the same price. It is made clear to us, no matter where we work, in a supermarket, in a car or clothing factory, in a bank or a TV station, for example, that the company we work for, and by implication ourselves, are engaged in national (and international) rivalry with similar businesses all across the world. Every one of these businesses would if they could keep the whole market to themselves, and they struggle to get as much of it as they can in a game of competition – war by another name. And the obvious end result is that the task is overdone and thus a glut is produced.

Commercial conflicts are like military ones, with resources being trashed in a war for survival. And the ruin of products coincides with the dissipation of the human effort employed in their production as well as the squandering of the quantity of the Earth’s natural resources as ingredients for their production. Perishable commodities which cannot be sold at their intended price are jettisoned into the bargain basement saleroom and then, if necessary, churned back into the soil even before the needy workers, who produced them, are allowed to have them free. The owners of the businesses where we work care not a jot for the workers when their particular war is over and they are no longer needed, due to sickness, injury on the job, the employment of new technologies, improved methodology or bankruptcy, which brings on our redundancy and poverty.

War includes struggles between classes, class wars between capitalists and workers. In 19th-century France, a short civil conflict was fought between the bourgeois French National Assembly, and Parisian workers as republicans, known in socialist annals as the Paris Commune. In Britain, a civil war was waged between a feudal class and the rising bourgeoisie in the 17th century. A war can also involve rival sections within a particular class who compete for power, as in America, where a civil war was fought between rival members of the American bourgeois class in the 19th century. There is another type of civil war which socialists cite, where in the arena of commerce, battles are waged between corporations, assisted by their (home-based) state authorities, first within national borders then steadily growing in stature to a transnational arena.

The now universal culture of ‘market ideology’ is the primary influence on the behaviour of humans everywhere. The more power or money an individual or group can secure for themselves, the better their quality of life. To be effective in their pursuit of power and wealth, whether solely by the means of commerce, or upgrading their war to the military stage, they must be indifferent to the needs and plight of their competitors; otherwise, their ability to wage war is diminished.

Whether a war in society is within a nation or between nations, the causes of these wars between the protagonists are of a similar nature. While the circumstances surrounding each war may remain peculiar to the time and place (the extent of dictatorship/democracy, class structure, mode of production, laws, parochial cultures or ideas or religions etc), the pattern seems to be repeated all over the world. The owning class of one nation possesses something which that of another nation, or groups within a nation would like to possess. These could be land, foreign trade deals, cheap labour, talented labour and property (as businesses or complete/established industries), home markets, and a natural resource as marketable asset – oil, gas, coal, iron ore, gold, diamonds, water, etc. These are all requirements for success in making money, and with money comes power and influence for businesses and individuals. As no one country has been endowed with a complete set of resources, there will often be a need to plunder.

Wars in human society take place between nations when the dominant men and women within them (the capitalist class) pursue wealth or the means to create wealth in society, using the power of their state and their labour (workers) as battering rams to defeat their enemies, which are themselves comprised of their opponents’ state machinery and workers. And where a conflict occurs within the territory of one nation, outside influences are often brought to bear. If resources are up for grabs, the capitalist grabbing class join the fray to see what they can win.

Only socialists can claim to be the true anti-war campaigners. Fellow workers around the world participate in anti-war campaigns, which call for the end of military wars, but none that we know of make that connection, as socialists do, to the wider society and particularly, to its mode of production and guiding ideology which promote competition among all sections of society. In campaigning solely for an end to military wars, which are but a bloody climax to the wider commercial war, there can be no hope of addressing the problems of human society today as a whole.

WILLIAM DUNN

Worse than thought: In the article on Terror last month we quoted a figure of 35,000 for the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion. Since then the medical journal, The Lancet, has estimated the number as being more like 100,000.