Are we finally on the ‘eve of destruction’?

In this week’s Socialist Hour I started by using a song by Barry McGuire called the “Eve of Destruction” to discuss the current political situation. It probably reveals something of my current state of mind because if the past 16 months have taught us anything at all it is that the political classes almost without exception across the globe have failed miserably when it comes to confronting a crisis. When the situation called for leadership what we got from London to Washington, from New Delhi to Rio de Janeiro was prevarication.

During the show my guest Luke Andreski makes the point that it is no use blaming individuals for the crisis it is necessary to blame the conceptual framework they are working with. In short, when given a choice between saving the lives of ordinary citizens who remain largely nameless and faceless or ensuring that business can continue to make a small percentage of the World’s population ever more wealthy, they chose the latter.

Conspiracy?

Hence, my assertion that we are on the eve of destruction. Of course, the pandemic has been hard to ignore, although there are plenty of people out there who are happy to deny that it exists, or if it does exist to see it as some giant conspiracy to remove your civil liberties. I have to say that wearing a mask to stop the spread of a lethal virus does not seem to me a major incursion on your rights, whereas being told you cannot protest does. Perhaps the two are linked somehow but if so I can’t see it because as far as the U.K. is concerned the enactment of legislation to curtail what you thought of as rights was always going to happen under a Tory Party whose MPs were selected precisely for their right wing views.

The catastrophic handling of the pandemic across the globe leading to over 4 million deaths gives us an insight of the inability of national governments to put narrow, nationalistic, agendas to one side. It reveals why as the global climate catastrophe looms over us the decisive actions needed to save our species are not being taken. Just so that we are clear on what we are talking about here, the World Population Review defines a greenhouse gas:

“A greenhouse gas (GHG) is a gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases let sunlight pass through the atmosphere but prevent heat from leaving the atmosphere, also known as the greenhouse effect.”

Since 1970, global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributing to about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase. In other words, the Earth’s temperature is increasing and this is leading to changes in the planet that could lead to it being unable to sustain human life. Let’s make this simple if your house was on fire would you douse it with water or pour oil on it? Or, perhaps you would stand back and say “houses catch fire we just have to learn to live with it”. I’m betting that most people would do what they could to stop their house catching fire in the first place, but were it to catch fire they would do all they could to stop the fire spreading to save their house.

Pouring oil on a burning house

Governments are doing the equivalent of pouring oil on a burning house by constantly putting off taking the measures needed to reduce greenhouse gases to an acceptable level. China, which is the World’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases has not pledged to reduce its emissions, neither has India who are second on the list. The USA withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord under Trump but Biden has now affirmed his commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions but without a definite plan of how to do so. In short, most governments are putting off doing too much, if anything, in the short term and making in many cases ambitious targets with no idea of how to meet them.

What we are seeing is that governments, much like those they govern, are fixated on the here and now (especially the pandemic but always their economy) and less concerned to save the future, especially a future which is beyond the next electoral cycle. The Pew Research Centre reported in 2019 that whilst there was a shift in attitudes toward seeing climate change as a threat the picture was very mixed. Whilst overall 68% of those surveyed saw climate change as a major threat to their country, this varied from 90% in Greece to 38% in Israel. In the USA it was 59% but a worrying 16% saw it as no threat at all. The largest percentage seeing it as no threat was 21% in Nigeria, followed by 18% in both Russia and Israel.

According to World Atlas in July 2020 the issues Americans care most about are poverty, healthcare and climate change in that order. Ahead of the General Election in 2019 The Independent reported that despite being at its highest level ever as an important issue the environment was still 4th behind Brexit, health and crime. In India, according to Pew Research, climate change hardly registers as an issue with unemployment, rising prices, crime, corruption, and inequality all more important than pollution, the only tangible reference to the environment.

Short termism

In the U.K. as my Socialist Hour guest Relish Hendy told me it is hard for poor working class families to think of much else when the loss of £20 per week can have a devastating impact on your chances of survival. Whilst Karl Smith on the same show described the brutal life of being homeless. When you are, literally, just trying to survive thinking about a global catastrophe that might not happen for another 30 or 40 years is a big stretch. But, this is the point, politicians have short term goals that are not conducive to long term problems.

In the last U.K. election the Conservatives successfully made it about Brexit. In the US Presidential election Biden, according to The Atlantic: “won because he was a reaction to Trump, but also because he was a white guy who could connect with white guys even as his association with Barack Obama helped legitimize him with Black voters. He updated some of his policy positions to fit where his party had moved—and to respond to the pandemic. But he didn’t swing hard left, or hard right.”

These were not victories motivated by a desire for change, well not progressive change at any rate, but by people’s who wanted a return to a mythical normal. In Biden’s case it wasn’t the bombastic ‘make America great again’ but rather a reassuring ‘make America unassuming again but restored to its position as the World’s leader’. For Johnson there was no big idea just a simple message ‘taking back control’ which was code for ‘get rid of foreigners’. They are not unique but neither Johnson nor Biden are what anybody could realistically describe as visionaries.

World leadership?

What this means is a narrow focus on national capitalism at a time when we need to work on a global scale. It is always true that there is more that unites us than divides us. We have all been inconvenienced by the global pandemic rather than denying it or ignoring it we needed the World’s leaders to get together and to agree a set of actions. Disease is not ideological and although the poor always suffer more than the rich a highly contagious virus is a threat to all of us. It needed, but did not get, a global strategy of suppression where the entire human race united in their common opposition to the virus and where keeping deaths and long term illness to a minimum should have been the goal. The Worlds political elites failed us.

If they were unable to tackle the, relatively, simple task of suppressing a virus because they were too concerned to maintain a competitive advantage over each other, then what chance they can bring about the changes necessary to take on global climate change? Make no mistake business as usual will destroy the planet as a safe habitat for humanity. For it is business, specifically industrialisation, that is adding to the poisonous gases that are changing our environment. It is as if there was a small fire on your living room floor and instead of smothering it you decided to go to the pub and deal with it when you got back, at which point you are shocked to find your house and those of your neighbours ablaze. We are, it seems, on the eve of destruction.

Pockets of hope

But amidst this doom and gloom there are pockets of hope. They are not to be found in an MP calling Boris Johnson a liar, or in winning court cases against the Jewish Chronicle as welcome as they are. They are not even to be found in the brilliant and inspirational work of Extinction Rebellion, but are to be found in a realisation that if business as usual is a large part of the problem so is what we have come to regard as ‘normal life’. The problem is with a political system that wants to secure our future whilst denying our past and refusing to change our present. We had to change for the pandemic, but the fact that people began hankering after normal so quickly should give us pause for thought. Saving the planet won’t be achieved by turning off light bulbs when you leave a room or cycling to work (though those won’t harm either), but by major changes in our social system. 

Capitalism achieved marvellous things in terms of improving the living conditions of many. But, it did so at an, at the time, unforeseen consequence. It gave us a political system - parliamentary democracy - that provided the illusion of control. For a while we probably never had had it so good. But, if something is too good to be true, it’s usually got a serious downside. Capitalism survives on consumerism, the constant production of commodities for sale on the market. That means industrialisation on a global scale to satisfy global markets. It also means massive inequalities. Moreover, it has given us a political class that by any subjective measure is entirely unsuited for its position and ensures that most of us have no say in the decisions that affect us. If we are to survive as a species we need to move from our current state of stasis to evolve to a higher state.

Some people tell me that we shouldn’t use the word socialism because of its negative connotations. But whatever you call it a system where we produce for need rather than profit, a system of direct democracy where everybody (including our youngest citizens) have a say in the things that affect them, a system where we don’t pursue goods for the sake of esteem or because our neighbours have them and a system where we prioritise compassion and kindness over greed and acquisitiveness, community over individualism and nurturing the planet rather than abusing it, is what I think of as socialist. If you prefer to call it something else feel free but the point is that if we don’t change, and change soon, then it really won’t matter what you call anything because we won’t be here to disagree.

Save Our Democracy

 

How much do you value democracy? Seems an odd question to ask, doesn’t it? So ingrained is the idea that we live in a parliamentary democracy that, rather like the NHS, it will not be until it is gone that people will realise just how much they valued it.

I don’t want to be alarmist but the very fabric of our right to call ourselves a democracy is under a sustained attack, no less far reaching than that of the NHS. The government, with virtually no tangible opposition at all, are pushing through Parliament measures that will take away your rights and the national media, as myopically Tory as ever, have all but turned a blind eye.

Election Bill

The Election Bill currently being pushed through the House of Commons by multimillionaire Home Secretary Priti Patel, is the latest “undercover of darkness” assault on your democratic “rights”. And, were you to stand at a bus stop or at a pub bar, my guess is that the vast majority of people would not have a clue what was happening. And, in most cases would care even less. Whilst the popular media distract us with the Euros, Wimbledon, and demands for lockdown easing, the Home Office has been busy ensuring that Britain is sleepwalking into a one-party Tory state.

In future it will be easier to vote if you have chosen to leave this country than it will be if you actually live here. This is not just about voter ID, but a significant, and ultimately corrupt, change to our democratic systems. It is a deliberate attempt to make elections less fair and less representative. For all those that have wanted PR you are getting it. From now on elections will go to the party with the highest number of Tories in it, which of course does not rule out Labour entirely!

It may surprise you to know how many people who don’t reside in the UK voted in December 2019. It was a record breaking 233,000 according to the House of Commons Research Library. It’s worth remembering that the Tories only gained an additional 200,000 votes in that election but they put one hell of an effort into encouraging overseas voters and postal votes, many of which seemed by a strange coincidence to go their way. Let’s not open up the whole debate about whether the Tories cheated their way to an election victory, after all it was not only the Tory Party that had no intention of allowing Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister, but the point is that if elections are not fair then the whole point of them is undermined.

Defend The Electoral Commission

I am not a big fan of electoral politics for reasons I have outlined elsewhere. But, given the absence of other effective means to make the voices of ordinary people heard they remain something worth defending. The Elections Bill not only makes it harder for people to vote in elections but makes a substantial change to the way in which elections are actually run.

At first sight a change to the Electoral Commission which oversees elections would appear to be just a minor administrative change. The Commission which is nominally independent of parliament is to be brought under a ‘Strategy and Policy Statement’ approved by parliament containing guidance they must follow. It also moves to prevent the Commission from bringing criminal prosecutions. By bringing the Electoral Commission under the remit of the Speakers Committee, which takes away the independence the Commission has previously enjoyed. The Speakers Committee is one of those little known, and even less cared about, parliamentary committees which has enormous power and wields it remorselessly. The committee is made up of 9 MPs, five of whom are currently Conservative.

In April this year the Commission announced that it had launched an investigation into the funding of the £200,000 Johnson and his latest wife spent on “doing up” the Downing Street flat. In September 2020 the Commission told Open Democracy that they were concerned about donations to the Tory Party from Russian donors including Lubov Chernuhim, the wife of a Russian finance minister. She has given around £1.7 million to the Conservatives over 8 years. In 2017 the Commission fined the Conservative Party £70,000 after it was found to have underreported election expenses in 2015. Now, you might think it is putting two and two together, but the Tories have been playing fast and loose with election rules for a number of years. Now, they intend to effectively neuter the only organisation that has the statutory duty to hold them to account.

News Blackout

Whilst the mass media are not entirely up in arms about the assault on your rights, they have covered it. The BBC, for example, had a page on their website (on July 5th) with a headline ‘New election bill to “protect democracy”, says government’. Despite the inverted commas it is noticeable that the piece by Lucy Webster seems to have been substantially written by Conservative Central Office and is most concerned about voter ID quoting Labour’s Cat Smith as saying “Voter ID is a total waste of taxpayers' money, set to cost millions of pounds at every election.Voting is safe and secure in Britain. Ministers should be promoting confidence in our elections instead of spreading baseless scare stories which threaten our democracy. First it was using the cover of the pandemic to hand out taxpayers' money to their mates, now it's using the cover of the pandemic to threaten British democracy. These plans must be stopped.” As if Labour would say anything different. In truth the fact that they say anything these days should be headline news. The plans to neuter the Election Commission are hidden at the bottom of the piece and simply note that the Commission said the bill: "represents a strong commitment from the UK government to modernising our electoral system and addressing areas that need improvement.” And, that represents the entirety of the BBC’s coverage to date. The only newspaper that I could find with anything like coverage of this bill was The Observer on 4th July which covered exactly the same ground as the BBC and concentrated entirely on voter ID without even mentioning the fact that the only statutory body currently able to prevent fraud will, in future, be unable to do anything other than what the Government want it to. Well done, the Guardian, that bastion of liberal thought!

It was left to the Constitution Society to point out that “the most concerning are steps which appear designed to limit the independence of the Electoral Commission”, which whilst welcome are hardly likely to rattle the Home Office. The left have been no more vocal. Neither The Socialist (paper of the Socialist Party) nor the Socialist Worker had anything to say on the Bill, whilst the Morning Star did no more than The Guardian repeating a Labour Party press release. If the left media in this country really cannot see that this bill represents a nail in the coffin of British democracy then we really are in trouble.

What is to be done? Clearly, voter ID is an unnecessary and costly way to fix a problem that does not actually exist, but that is not the main thrust of the bill. As always it is necessary to read the small print. By encouraging people who don’t even live in this country to vote the Tories hope to ensure a permanent Toryocracy. At the last election the numbers of overseas voters, those who so love the UK that they decided to leave it, was just short of a quarter of a million. But, this was after a campaign to encourage them to register because in 1985 the number had been around 11,000. It is expected that the numbers could now reach 4.4 million.

Toryocracy

It is worth bearing in mind that in 2005 the last time Labour won, they only had 767,000 more votes than the Tories, in 1997, they won by 3.9 million votes. But the fact is that the constituencies where these votes will be counted will not be spread evenly. The Tories would not be committing £2.5 million of taxpayers money to making sure that these people can vote if they did not benefit them in some of their marginal seats. There is little actual hard data on how overseas voters cast their votes, but you do not have to be abroad long to find a Union Jack bedecked ex-pat bar where pictures of the Queen vie for wall space with Churchill, and where locals who haven’t set foot on Blighty for years will happily regale you with stories about how England (its invariably England, not Scotland or Wales) has gone to the dogs and that most of this is due to the influx of foreigners. If they have a sense of irony it bypasses them as they go full Nigel Farage on you. Okay, you might say that is a stereotype and I have only ever been to a handful of countries outside the UK so it is certainly not scientific, but my point is this: I don’t want the future of the country I live and work in and in which I pay my taxes to be decided by people who have abandoned us, often through their own prejudice and are living in some mythical past where they are part of an Empire which bestrides the World.

Democracy, as flawed as it is, remains worth defending. For a beleaguered left, with an NHS to defend, the right to protest under attack, a Unite leader to elect, anti-racists to root out, and, still inexplicably, a Labour Party to try to get elected in next years local elections, fighting to defend the very democracy that they depend on for their lifeblood may seem abstract. Stopping people from voting or defending the Electoral Commission may not seem an ideal campaign focus but as the very idea of democracy comes under sustained attack around the World (similar moves are afoot in the USA for example) the road to socialism requires us defending and extending our right to vote in fair elections in which our ideas and our side have a fair chance of being heard. That has not been the case for a number of years, and if the Tories are allowed to pass this Election Bill with only the rump of Labour to oppose it then we are on a slippery path indeed.

Reasons to be hopeful

Generally when I sit down to write an article I’m pretty clear what I want to write about and very clear on the positive note I’m going to end on. But, this week I have been filled with a growing sense of despondency.

A despondency which turned to anger as it began to dawn on me just how selfish and short sighted many of my fellow citizens can be. This week over 100 of my fellow citizens here in the U.K. died from Covid related causes. Over 32,000 new cases every day, and yet what was trending on Twitter #CovidIsOver.

Now I can understand how people are really fed up with the absolute inconvenience of having to wear a 2 inch piece of cloth on their face, but New Zealand which has had a grand total of 26 deaths since the pandemic began is considering making mask wearing compulsory when they have not had a single case of Covid since February.

Freedom Day

Britain is sliding into a very dark period in our history and it is easy to think that the majority of Britons support the authoritarian, yet libertarian direction we are currently taking. Interestingly, though, support for so-called restrictions has had overwhelming support since day one. In January the Evening Standard reported that 79% supported a new lockdown.  Of course, at this time the Government were about to announce a lockdown so the media were, naturally, supporting them. That support though was limited to an acceptance that things would get considerably worse without a lockdown. But as soon as Johnson announced that all restrictions would be lifted on June 21st, amended of course to July 19th, the tabloids have gone into a frenzy over so-called Freedom Day. Surprisingly, none of the major polling companies offer any assessment as to how this is being viewed by the public.

Listen, people who read me regularly, are intelligent, you don’t need me to tell you that the Government have abandoned any pretence that they are following the science. Or that they are gambling, dangerously, with other people’s lives. But this was not the only thing giving me a feeling of despondency this week.

I’m English. It’s an accident of birth and it wasn’t my choice. I’m also a football fan and have been since I was around 9 years old. My Father, who died 18 months ago disagreed with almost everything I stood for politically. But, as he succumbed to dementia in his final years, and as he lost the memory of me and my siblings the one thing we would still be able to chat about was Tottenham Hotspur. No doubt my Dad would not have supported footballers taking the knee because he was a racist to his dying day, but as an English football fan I find myself unable to enjoy the success of the national team because I can’t bring myself to make common cause with people who boo the national anthems of other countries and boo their own team for making a show of solidarity with the likes of Raheem Sterling (their best player this tournament incidentally), Marcus Rashford, and all the other black players who are simply saying that their lives, and those of their fans with black or brown skin, actually matter as much as white people. 

Racist football fans

An Ipsos-MORI poll, taken just before the tournament began, found that less than half of fans supported the players, with 42% suggesting that it was because “the Black Lives Matter movement represents a political ideology that I oppose”. Whilst Ipsos-MORI put a positive spin on the results with a headline that read ‘Almost half of football fans in England support the England team taking the knee at Euro 2020’, the fact that 30% of football fans supported the booing of their own team shows that the fight against racism in England has a long way to go. 

When people say that they oppose the political ideology that BLM supports they are simply repeating the line taken by the racist tabloid press who, accuse BLM of being a Marxist organisation, an appellation the majority of football fans could barely spell, let alone hope to critique. The reality is that a significant number of England football fans are racist and what I find as appalling as that is that the pundits keep telling us that imitating a Nuremberg Rally is what we deserve for 16 months of suffering, as if the pandemic has affected only England. And, you can’t say we want to stamp out racism on the one hand, whilst on the other, completely ignoring overt racism when it is occurring right in front of you.

Whether England win or lose a football match is not really very important. My shame at my country is not related to its highly paid, pampered football stars ability to win a series of matches where they alone were allowed to play nearly every match on home soil. My shame, and what should shame us all, is a growing intolerance, supported and nurtured by our political elite toward foreigners. This week Priti Patel quietly introduced into the Commons the U.K. Borders Bill which when (I no longer assume bad legislation will not make it to the statute books) passed will make “knowingly” arriving in Britain without permission a crime punishable by up to four years in prison. As Tim Naor Hilton, chief executive of Refugee Action said, the legislation was “built on a deep lack of understanding of the reality of refugee migration.”  Indeed. But what he is not saying is that the legislation is founded on a deep hatred, by the daughter of a Ugandan immigrant, of foreigners. In short, Priti Patel is a racist.

Draconian legislation

We are witnessing a slide into authoritarianism fuelled by some of the most draconian legislation anywhere in Europe. On the one hand the lying, thieving, corrupt Tories play the so-called ‘freedom’ card in order to abrogate any responsibility for the health of the ordinary people who are too busy celebrating to notice, whilst on the other they are pushing legislation such as the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill through Parliament to ensure that those same ordinary people cannot legally take to the streets to protest as the economy tanks.

The U.K. economy is on the edge of a recession even more severe than the one in 2008, yet all we hear in the press is ‘Freedom Day’, English football, which Minister has been caught shagging his aide and, of course, Diana. We don’t hear about Gaza, Yemen, the mess that is social care, Julian Assange, the selling off, salami style, of the NHS, or the fact that the poor are being robbed by the rich and driven into ever deeper cycles of despair. But I digress. The economy.

It is important to recognise that the economy of the U.K. is not solely in the control of the government but is connected to the World economy. However, whilst most countries, with the possible exception of China, are heading into recession, the U.K. is being doubly affected. Whilst the pandemic is being blamed for the global recession, and it has clearly had a profound effect, the reality is that the recession was being forecast before the pandemic hit. In December 2019 Rabobank’s quarterly forecast was predicting: “In the next two years, we expect the global economy to show the slowest rate of growth since the global financial crisis.”

Economic recession

Meanwhile, the British shot themselves in the foot by withdrawing from Europe. In November 2019 the Bank of Englandnoted: “Brexit will fundamentally change the nature of the UK’s relationship with its largest trading partner. The wide range of potential outcomes appears to have both increased uncertainty and made people more pessimistic about the economic outlook. Those effects, which are difficult to separate, are already influencing the UK economy. They have lowered business investment in particular, and may have weighed on productivity and consumption.”

You probably don’t need me to tell you that an economic recession is a bad thing. Business website Oberlo provides a list of what happens in a recession: “ Business profits take a hit and many go bankrupt. People lose their jobs. It becomes difficult to find work and make ends meet. In particular, young people entering the job market find it difficult to secure a job. Wages go down. People reduce their spending, invoking a paradox of thrift. This typically leads to reduction in aggregate demand and, consequently, economic growth  People struggle to pay their debts, which damages their credit scores. This makes it more difficult for many to borrow money in the future – which in turn contributes to more economic stagnation. People default on their debts and families lose their homes, cars, lands, and other assets. Interest rates go down as federal governments attempt to simulate growth.  Most people have to reign in their lifestyle expenses. This means fewer leisure activities, vacations, dining out, etc.”

This has already started, but as we know recessions don’t hit everybody equally. This week the Government of the U.K. decided not to retain the £20 Universal Credit uplift and will remove it from October. As The Morning Star reported benefits charity Turn2Us said the government must keep the uplift or risk facing a “tsunami of poverty, hunger and ultimately destitution.” The charity’s director of impact and innovation Jo Kerr said: “Over the course of the last decade, we have seen our social security system cut, capped and frozen beyond repair. What is left is a threadbare security net.”

Fighting back

As Charlotte Hughes wrote in her blog: “The announcement to end the uplift payments was made after ignoring the advice of six former Conservative work and pension secretaries whom have requested that the Chancellor make the £20 uplift permanent. They warned that if they failed to extend the uplift it would cause immense damage to living standards, health and the opportunity to improve their lives.” As Charlotte well knows improving the lives of poor people has never been a priority for the Conservatives. As the Government continue to line their own, their families and their friends pockets from the public purse the poorest and most vulnerable are thrown under the proverbial bus cheered, or perhaps more accurately jeered, by a baying mob intent only on their own narrow, egotistical pursuits.

In a recession it is difficult to fight back. When you cannot afford to feed your family, when homelessness is not just a distant threat but a lived reality, when all around you is devastation, the last thing on your mind is attending a meeting of the local socialist party. Moreover, when businesses are facing multiple challenges just to stay afloat the last thing on their mind is maintaining the planet. Climate catastrophe, even if only 20 or 30 years away is still not today’s priority. The lesson today is: survival. The fact that the means of your survival in the here and now mean that somebody else’s survival in the future is compromised is, well, a problem for the future.

The pandemic, which incidentally came with a warning some 30 years before it happened, has put climate change on the back burner. Unfortunately, nobody has explained this to the ozone layer or greenhouse gases that continue to erode it. The future looks bleak. Is there any cause for optimism? George Orwell used the novel 1984 to remind us “all hope lies with the proles”. In other words hope does not lay with governments nor leaders nor well intentioned philanthropists, but with people like you and I who have most to lose. But for that hope to turn to reality people who can must act. Which is particularly difficult for those of us in a country which scientists writing in The Lancet described as “embarking on a dangerous and unethical experiment..”

Raping the planet

Many more U.K. citizens will die needlessly through allowing Covid to treat England as a Petri dish, many more will die from stress and starvation caused by the latest, but surely not the last, blitz on benefits. Many more will die needlessly because we (by which I mean the ruling elite) have failed to take the responsibility they wanted seriously and have continued to, in the words of my Socialist Hour guest Azzy Aslam, “rape the planet”. If there is hope - there surely must be hope - then it lies in those like Extinction Rebellion who are prepared to act. It lies with those trying to defend our NHS which at the point it is most badly needed faces it’s gravest threat. It lies with those who take to the streets to declare “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. It lies with every worker who opposes the imposition of worse conditions. It lies with people like you who sign petitions, demonstrate, take to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, give up their time to attend meetings, and do all you can to offset and eradicate the dire consequences of our social system.

If there is hope it does not lie with leaders (no matter how much you may like them), neither with parties regardless of their policies and supposed principles, nor with elections (with their false promises of change), nor with attempts to ameliorate the problems with reforms. We are beyond this. Hope lies, as it always has, in socialism. But not a socialism that tells you how to live your life and demands allegiance to the leader or the party, but rather a socialism that frees the creativity and imagination of ordinary people. A socialism predicated on a society of equals acting together to provide a present for everybody free from poverty and degradation and one in which future generations can take the baton and create a World without profit, but founded on principles of comradeship. A World where everybody was truly free. Now, that would be a freedom day worth celebrating.

This article also appears on The Dangerous Globe as part of a collection of articles under the banner of Creating Socialism. Please check out our collection of socialist writers by following this link.

Is socialism exploitative?

 The great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once famously said: “Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it’s the other way round.” As Clive Crook wrote in an obituary following Galbraith’s death in 2006: “ If he didn't say it, he might as well have. It has an authentically Galbraithian ring: It seems profound, and it's funny. .. And it is a travesty of the truth.”

Let’s imagine for a second that there is a truth in there, what is it? Obviously the intent is to say that communism, what I would prefer to call socialism (despite the fact that socialism itself has a range of meanings), is essentially the same as capitalism in that both are exploitative social systems. Clearly, if that is the case there is no point in putting our effort into “creating socialism” as it would simply replicate the inequalities that characterise capitalism with a different set of exploiters. But Galbraith’s aphorism, if indeed he ever said it, needs a little addition. 

What it should say is: “Under capitalism a minority of people (a majority of which are probably men to be fair) exploit the majority of people.” Is this true? Defining a capitalist these days is not easy. Everybody who runs a coffee stall describes themselves as a “capitalist”, and actually many people who work think if they like money this makes them a capitalist. People often tell me that the word ‘socialist’ has become a nonsense because it has so many definitions, does anybody seriously think that is not true of the word ‘capitalist’ too? 

Let’s try to narrow this down, who are these ‘exploiters’? I’m going to suggest for sake of simplicity that it is the people who control industry. We all know there are a handful of billionaires in the World, according to Forbes there are currently 2,775 billionaires in the World. There is little doubt that these people are capitalists in the classic sense that they use their capital to make more capital. They are very successful at this Forbes reports that they increased their wealth by $8 trillion in 2020. Yes, 2020 the year when most people were struggling to maintain their standard of living through a pandemic that saw many ordinary workers across the globe with zero incomes and having to spend what small amount of capital they had merely to stay alive.

Billionaires are prima facie cases of exploiters, but they are not entirely alone. There are, approximately, 1.7 million people in World who are Chief Executive Officers of large companies, according to one estimate. I am not sure that all of these are technically capitalists, but they might be exploiters. When we talk about exploiting it tends to have negative connotations but the Labour relationship in a capitalist economy is both exploitative and based on a freely entered into relationship. Many people would argue that so long as the contract is entered into freely then it cannot possibly be exploitative. But, exploitation here just refers to the nature of that labour contract not that you entered into it freely. 

Nobody employs you as an act of altruism. Companies do not exist for your benefit, whatever they might try to convince you. The 50 largest companies in the World employ over 23.5 million people Worldwide. The global workforce consists of approximately 3 billion people Unsurprisingly, there is no list of every person on that list, unlike the lists of billionaires or CEO’s. The absence of a list tells us a number of things. Perhaps, it is because a list of 3 billion people would be unwieldy. Perhaps, given that all of us are on lists for tax, social security or employee lists, it is that our employers are keen to protect our anonymity. More likely, however, it is that the majority of workers do not matter very much. At least to the people who employ them.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) report’Global Wage Report 2020-21’ real wage growth in the four years 2016-19 was between 0.9 and 1.6 per cent. But, the report notes that in 3 of the G20 countries real wages fell.Take a bow Italy, Japan and, you guessed it, the U.K. What this shows is that whilst we live in a globalised economy how you are treated in that economy is largely dependent on local conditions. It is unlikely, for example, that the British media will tell you that whilst your wages are falling in real terms in Germany they increased over the same period by 15%. Of course, whether wages are falling or rising, and remember this is on average, is less important than what they are rising or falling from. A 1% increase on a minimum wage is of little help to a family struggling to survive, whereas a 1% decrease on somebody earning in the upper quartile of wages is hardly likely to dent their lifestyle. That’s why what should worry us all is the fact that globally one in five people, 327 million workers, are paid less than the minimum wage.

You might think that people in, let’s say Indonesia, earning below the minimum wage is of little consequence to a person in York, New York or Berlin. But, you are in a globalised economy in which competing capitals are trying to better one another. As I’ve mentioned before every year companies post their profits and each year it is assumed that profits will rise. What this means is that companies are constantly competing with one another for new markets, cheaper production and bigger profits. And, this is one of the biggest contradictions of a capitalist system. Cheaper production inevitably means fewer and less well paid workers. But, whilst that benefits one capital, as you reduce people’s incomes they consume less and other capitals find they are over producing. Companies, quite literally, go to the wall. And, when they do it is the workforce who pay the ultimate price in terms of being driven into poverty. Globally some 197 million people are officially unemployed, millions more simply do not show up on any statistics at all and are scraping by through begging, scavenging or petty crime.

To return, then, to the point. Only a tiny minority of people in the World are exploiting others, whilst the vast majority are being exploited. Now, let me just make the point. In a capitalist economy people are exploited if their labour power is used to produce surplus value for somebody else. Exploitation occurs at the point where the person with nothing to sell but their labour power mixes their labour with raw materials provided by somebody (or something) that owns and controls the means of production. You may think it follows, therefore, that the unemployed - denied the opportunity to use their labour power - are not being exploited. In an economic sense that is true, but what they do is act as a brake on the demands of the employed. Unless you are in highly specialised work, and to some extent even then, unless you have accumulated the wealth necessary to sustain you, then unemployment hangs over you like Damocles sword, ready to fall at any moment.

One final point is worth making. In a social system based on free markets and democracy you are given the illusion of “power” through national elections which allow you to choose between approved political options. The idea is that you are given a choice between a narrow, but pro-capitalist, set of candidates or parties who may offer this or that reform but who can never seriously threaten the ability of individual capitals to continue with business as usual. The idea of universal suffrage (though still age restricted) is now the dominant representative democratic system throughout the World (there are one or two obvious omissions), but electing a government (no matter how ‘radical’ they may appear) simply shuffles those enacting the law. What it cannot do is change the social system itself. The exploiting class are rarely in parliament they are in boardrooms and elections of CEO’s are restricted entirely to shareholders if they are not simply appointees.

So, to return to Galbraith’s “under socialism it’s the opposite”. Far from showing in a witty form how socialism is simply the opposite side of an exploitative coin with capitalism, it offers the possibility of real change. When you reverse the positions what you end up with is socialism as a system where the majority of people exploit the minority. Already a massive improvement. Imagine we could list every single person who was impoverished because that list consisted of only 2,775 individuals? But the reality is that in such a social system exploitation, in a capitalist sense, would not exist. The very idea of socialism is to have production for need not for profit. If you remove the profit mechanism you do not, as is often asserted, remove motivation. People are motivated by all types of things and, for most people, profit is probably low on the list. Of course, in a society where success is measured by wealth people will certainly be motivated by the acquisition of wealth, but with different social relations some of those other motivations, particularly happiness and self-fulfilment, would be able to flourish.As even Forbes, a capitalist cheerleader, notes in a discussion on motivation: “ In the end, happiness is one of the greatest motivations to achieve.  Happiness fuels ones self-esteem and gives people hope for a better tomorrow. ”

Nobody becomes a socialist because all they care about is themselves. People who are attracted to socialism tend to be motivated by a deep concern for those less well off than they are. But, socialism is not a pity creed, it is a recognition that all of us are better off if none of us are worse off. It is a recognition that work is not just a way of filling your hours to earn enough to pay your rent/mortgage and put food on your table (assuming you can afford a table), but is also a way in which we can develop as human beings and nurture parts of our emotional development that require challenges and comradeship. When we turn the World around the role of exploiter will simply not exist because it won’t need to. That is why Galbraith and the millions of people who cling to these dangerously outmoded ideas are so wrong. They underestimate human beings capacity for compassion and thoughtfulnesss, a mistake incidentally, people on my side of the political fence often fall into out of their frustration with their fellow citizens seeming lack of engagement with others suffering.