THIS JUST IN! Word of the Day

[Articles in this series will feast on random juicy statements about capitalism reported in the media.]

Erin McKean, a lexicographer writing in the Boston Globe, gives us a dictionary tour of today’s corporate capitalism and its private jargon that lights up a few interesting dark alleys. “The Word” of the day is “bonus” (as in “Bonus reduced”). For example:

…major financial institutions continued to pay massive bonuses to executives despite losing even more massive amounts of money. Last year Merrill Lynch essentially collapsed, but still paid almost 700 executives cash bonuses of more than $1 million each. (Boston Globe, 2/22/09)

Probably little folks like us just don’t understand how hard it is to run a complicated system like capitalism. We of course tend to weigh quantities against each other the way our parents and teachers taught us to do and draw the simplistic conclusion that someone is getting away with wasting a lot of precious money. Especially since the funds for these bonuses come from (among other sources) laying off millions and millions of workers around the world for the sake of making business more “cost-effective.”

But how are we ever going to manage cracking open a nice, warm fuzzy economics text again without laughing a blue streak, once we’ve learned that “unscrupulous executives may also engage in vest fleecing when they accelerate the vesting of their stock options, or they may get their companies to agree to imputed years of service, where their 10 or 15 years of employment are counted as 25 or even 40 years to bump up their pension payouts.”

Imputed years of service? Bump up their pension payouts? When was the last time you “bumped up your pension payouts” to get a cushier deal? And if you got away with inflating your years of service, did anyone (the IRS, maybe) come around wanting to know where all that nice money came from? Workers who still have real pensions should count themselves lucky, as corporate pensions are second only to the Big Black Lies told by CheneyBush during their Power Trip days.

Well, hold on! says a voice from the back. The hard work of oversight and supervision is well paid because it’s money well spent. Keeping profits from sagging isn’t for sissies. Some very special executives are so highly thought of, in fact, that they “are offered what is called a gross-up, where tax payments are made by the company (and thus borne by the shareholders) on behalf of those high-paid executives” (ibid).

What is a golden coffin? Don’t ask! But just imagine your skimpy little paycheck surviving you…

While it is true that even the Congress now sees such practices as abusive, the abuses don’t seem to cross the wage and salary line somehow. If they could, the uproar from the Top would be quite deafening. We knew all along, to be sure, that the rules work differently for “executives” than they do for everyone else. Now we understand too that the rules governing capital apply only to feeders at the trough of surplus value; ordinary (“little”) people Need Not Apply.

When you hear someone who dismisses all this as par for the course turn around and argue that common ownership and democratic control of the instruments for producing wealth by and for the whole community will never work because human nature is too weak to support it, you know you are listening to an ideologue who wants to sell you on the virtues of capitalism. Demonizing human nature is one of the time-honored tricks inherited from the past masters of civilization to justify their respective class rules, ever since humans first began planting seeds in the ground.

What do we learn from this? In societies that have Tops and Bottoms, the Top is usually made up of swindlers, liars and self-servers, protected by governments whose job is to limit the excesses of their pocket-lining. It is time for a society that has no Bottom, and therefore no Top.

— ROEL

Capitalism in Crisis: Reforms, Collapse — Or a Socialist Revolution?

The severe economic crisis has dominated newspaper headlines – day after day for at least the past six months – like no other story in recent history. The massive layoffs, losses and bankruptcies have grown as familiar as the daily death-count in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ranks of the unemployed are overflowing and no job seems secure.

Not only is the situation spinning out of control, but workers are being reminded how little control they have over their lives. Their own futures are in the hands of business leaders and politicians, who themselves can do nothing more than follow the inhuman impulses of capital.

One bright spot, however, is the market for solution-peddlers and doom-prophesiers, which is booming. On the one hand, there are the experts claiming to know the secret for getting capitalism back on its feet and curing the system of its manic-depressive tendencies; while on the other hand, there is the minority that views the crisis as the beginning of the final collapse of capitalism.

The articles on this website, in contrast to that commotion, might seem calm, or even complacent. Not unlike the quieter days before the crisis, we continue to advocate socialism in much the same tone and with the same arguments. Some readers might be wondering how this crisis affects socialists and how we are responding to it. How do we differ from those offering to solve the crisis or from those who say we are witnessing the end of capitalism?

Reformist solutions

As workers, socialists do not necessarily relish an economic crisis, as we face unemployment or wage cuts like everyone else. Being a socialist does not equip a person with a protective force field to block the harmful consequences of capitalism. There’s no question that the working class, including socialists, will suffer the most from this crisis.

It is in this atmosphere of anxiety that reformists of all kinds step up to offer sure-fire ways to relieve capitalism of its hangover and keep it sober forever more. Most on the Left remain confident that greater intervention and regulation on the part of the state will pretty much do the trick, pointing to how well it apparently worked back in the 1930s. That is certainly debatable, but these ideas will probably be tested by reality soon enough. Even if such measures are more or less effective, the crisis still may drag on for several years – although no one is really in a position to make clear predictions.

The clear aim of reformists is to get capitalism back on its feet again, yet many on the Left like to spice up their own Keynesian reformism with revolutionary rhetoric. They are able to get away with this thanks to the widespread misconception that any involvement by the state in the economy is “socialistic.”

The more imaginative reformists have viewed bank nationalization, for instance, as an integral part of measures to both overcome the crisis and put in place a new system of socialist production, rather than being a temporary measure to prop up the crumbling financial system. This brand of “socialism” may be very attractive from a marketing standpoint – as it offers something for everyone – but such reformists are in fact peddling a sort of state capitalism under a false label.

Take the Socialist Equality Party, for instance, which back in September, at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, confidently issued the following demand as part of a “socialist program”:

The entire financial system must be taken out of private hands and nationalized in the form of a public utility under the democratic control of the working class, with provisions taken to safeguard the holdings of small depositors and share-holders. It must be subordinated to the social needs of the people and dedicated to developing and expanding the productive forces in order to eliminate poverty and unemployment and vastly improve the living standards and cultural level of the entire population. (“The Wall Street Crisis and the Failure of American Capitalism”)

The author, Barry Grey, presents this demand as one part of a “socialist program that places the needs of the people before the profits and personal fortunes of the ruling elite,” necessary because “there is no solution within the framework of the profit system” to the “crisis of the American economic and political system.” So we can only suppose his nationalized financial system is operating in a socialist society (or a society that follows a “socialist program”).

But with socialism like this, who needs capitalism! There will still be a
financial system, so one would have to assume that goods are paid for with money and thus produced for the market. There would be no need for any of that, however, in a society where things are produced to directly meet people’s needs, as democratically determined by them. It may sound nice to say that the financial system will take the “form of a public utility under the democratic control of the working class” and be “subordinated to the social needs of the people”, but what would that mean in practice? (Even that “socialist program” sounds a bit dodgy, with its promise to “place the needs of the people before the profits and personal fortunes of the ruling elite,” which naturally assumes the continued existence of a wealthy ruling elite.)

Perhaps we should compliment the Socialist Equality Party for being ahead of the curve on this nationalization issue, as any good “vanguard party” should be, now that many capitalist governments are thinking about implementing such measures. And we might compliment them further if bank nationalization succeeds in stabilizing the financial system. But this organization and so many like it deserve our contempt for dressing up reformist measures to look revolutionary. Their sweet-sounding promises only block the path to revolution by utterly distorting the meaning of socialism.

A collapsing theory

On the other extreme from the reformists, or at least it would seem, are those who argue that the final collapse of capitalism has begun, and that efforts to prop up the system are doomed to fail.

The reasons given for this inevitable collapse vary quite a bit, however. Some argue, as many Marxists did back in the 1930s, that it is the result of capitalism’s internal contradictions, such as the tendency towards a declining rate of profit. But many more, including the adherents of peak oil theory, view the collapse as the result of capitalism colliding with some outside force that prevents the further accumulation and expansion which is the lifeblood of the system.

Not only are there a myriad of reasons offered to explain the inevitable collapse, but there are starkly different conclusions reached about what will replace capitalism. There are those who see the collapse as radicalizing the population and bringing workers around to a revolutionary standpoint; while others depict a prolonged period of social anarchy or even a return to a pre-industrial life, and advise people to head to the hills after stocking up on gold, guns and vegetable seeds.

Regardless of those particular differences, however, the idea of an inevitable collapse of capitalism clearly implies that a great historical change could take place regardless of our actions. Instead of socialism
replacing capitalism, based on the conscious decisions and actions of workers, we would have capitalism ending at some point, and that collapse then stimulating a great social change (for better or worse).

One might wonder, though, what sort of society would exist in the interim, however brief it might be, between the collapse of the old and the emergence of the new. It would be “non-capitalist,” one would assume, but what would be the dividing line between the two? Is it possible for a society to not be capitalist, but still not be anything else either?

The reason for much of the confusion among the “catastrophists,” as they are sometimes called, is that – just like the reformists who confuse
nationalization with socialism – they do not have a clear understanding of what capitalism is, exactly. That is to say, instead of understanding capitalism on the most essential level, as a system of commodity production in the pursuit of profit, they get caught up in the various forms of capitalism, and imagine that some are more capitalistic than others.

It is certainly true that forms of capitalism or particular governments can collapse, but this should not be viewed as the collapse of capitalism itself. There are many examples of collapses to choose from, most notably the fall of the Weimer government in Germany that was followed by a fascist regime. For over a decade, Germany went through economic crisis, political upheaval, and a catastrophic war; and with no exaggeration, one can speak of that period as a collapse of civilization. Yet throughout it all the capitalist system remained intact.

It is easier to speak of the “collapse of capitalism” if a person has no clear idea of what capitalism means. And if its meaning is unclear, then the understanding of socialism will also be a muddle (just like those reformists who mistake state capitalism for socialism). It is important, therefore, to distinguish between an economic or political collapse, and the end of capitalism itself, which only workers can bring about by replacing it with socialism.

Optimism in depression

The criticism of those two tendencies might lead some to believe that we offer no solution to the crisis, or that we ignore the objective factors of reality and overemphasize the subjective ones.

We do in fact have a solution to this crisis and to economic crisis in general. But our approach to the problem is similar to how we approach other problems, such as the destruction of the environment or war, in that we do not propose a separate solution for each problem. This isn’t because we are indifferent to the problems, but because we recognize the relation between individual problems and the capitalist system.

In a sense, to solve one problem requires the solution of all of them. The fundamental solution to the problem of crisis, for instance, requires the introduction of a new system of production and consumption no longer mediated by the market, so that the basis for crisis would no longer exist. In other words, socialism is the solution to this particular crisis and to the problem of crisis itself, along with every other social problem that is specific to capitalism.

As for objective versus subjective elements, we would certainly recognize that the objective reality of the crisis has an impact on how people view capitalism. And this new situation may create a more favorable environment for explaining socialism.

Already, in the past six months, there has been a tremendous shift in “public opinion”, so that now it is almost fashionable to rebuke bankers for their greed and ignorance. There is no question that more people than ever are wondering whether capitalism is indeed the best of all possible worlds.

Of course, even while the changing reality has stimulated thought and debate, the conclusions people are reaching vary. Many see the crisis as the bankruptcy of “neo-liberalism”, rather than capitalism itself, while the religious minded might even say it is punishment from God. No matter how much the objective reality may influence ideas and test theories, it will not directly deposit the concept of socialism into a person’s mind.

So we still have the task of explaining socialism, and it is more important than ever as workers suffer under the crisis. The explanation we offer today, as before, is based on the recognition of the fundamental contradictions and limitations of capitalism, and the realization that this (obsolete) system cannot be reformed beyond a certain point. And it is during a crisis that those contradictions and limitations are most evident. Marx describes how the “contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed” during a crisis of the world market, which is a moment when there is a “real concentration and forcible adjustment” of those contradictions (Theories of Surplus Value).

With the problems so plain to see, and the limitations of capitalism so palpable, the explanation of socialism as the solution may very well begin to seem more concrete and practical – and urgent – than ever before.

MS

The severe economic crisis has dominated newspaper headlines – day after day for at least the past six months – like no other story in recent history. The massive layoffs, losses and bankruptcies have grown as familiar as the daily death-count in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ranks of the unemployed are overflowing and no job seems secure.

Not only is the situation spinning out of control, but workers are being reminded how little control they have over their lives. Their own futures are in the hands of business leaders and politicians, who themselves can do nothing more than follow the inhuman impulses of capital.

One bright spot, however, is the market for solution-peddlers and doom-prophesiers, which is booming. On the one hand, there are the experts claiming to know the secret for getting capitalism back on its feet and curing the system of its manic-depressive tendencies; while on the other hand, there is the minority that views the crisis as the beginning of the final collapse of capitalism.

The articles on this website, in contrast to that commotion, might seem calm, or even complacent. Not unlike the quieter days before the crisis, we continue to advocate socialism in much the same tone and with the same arguments. Some readers might be wondering how this crisis affects socialists and how we are responding to it. How do we differ from those offering to solve the crisis or from those who say we are witnessing the end of capitalism?

Reformist solutions

As workers, socialists do not necessarily relish an economic crisis, as we face unemployment or wage cuts like everyone else. Being a socialist does not equip a person with a protective force field to block the harmful consequences of capitalism. There’s no question that the working class, including socialists, will suffer the most from this crisis.

It is in this atmosphere of anxiety that reformists of all kinds step up to offer sure-fire ways to relieve capitalism of its hangover and keep it sober forever more. Most on the Left remain confident that greater intervention and regulation on the part of the state will pretty much do the trick, pointing to how well it apparently worked back in the 1930s. That is certainly debatable, but these ideas will probably be tested by reality soon enough. Even if such measures are more or less effective, the crisis still may drag on for several years – although no one is really in a position to make clear predictions.

The clear aim of reformists is to get capitalism back on its feet again, yet many on the Left like to spice up their own Keynesian reformism with revolutionary rhetoric. They are able to get away with this thanks to the widespread misconception that any involvement by the state in the economy is “socialistic.”

The more imaginative reformists have viewed bank nationalization, for instance, as an integral part of measures to both overcome the crisis and put in place a new system of socialist production, rather than being a temporary measure to prop up the crumbling financial system. This brand of “socialism” may be very attractive from a marketing standpoint – as it offers something for everyone – but such reformists are in fact peddling a sort of state capitalism under a false label.

Take the Socialist Equality Party, for instance, which back in September, at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, confidently issued the following demand as part of a “socialist program”:

The entire financial system must be taken out of private hands and nationalized in the form of a public utility under the democratic control of the working class, with provisions taken to safeguard the holdings of small depositors and share-holders. It must be subordinated to the social needs of the people and dedicated to developing and expanding the productive forces in order to eliminate poverty and unemployment and vastly improve the living standards and cultural level of the entire population. (“The Wall Street Crisis and the Failure of American Capitalism”)

The author, Barry Grey, presents this demand as one part of a “socialist program that places the needs of the people before the profits and personal fortunes of the ruling elite,” necessary because “there is no solution within the framework of the profit system” to the “crisis of the American economic and political system.” So we can only suppose his nationalized financial system is operating in a socialist society (or a society that follows a “socialist program”).

But with socialism like this, who needs capitalism! There will still be a
financial system, so one would have to assume that goods are paid for with money and thus produced for the market. There would be no need for any of that, however, in a society where things are produced to directly meet people’s needs, as democratically determined by them. It may sound nice to say that the financial system will take the “form of a public utility under the democratic control of the working class” and be “subordinated to the social needs of the people”, but what would that mean in practice? (Even that “socialist program” sounds a bit dodgy, with its promise to “place the needs of the people before the profits and personal fortunes of the ruling elite,” which naturally assumes the continued existence of a wealthy ruling elite.)

Perhaps we should compliment the Socialist Equality Party for being ahead of the curve on this nationalization issue, as any good “vanguard party” should be, now that many capitalist governments are thinking about implementing such measures. And we might compliment them further if bank nationalization succeeds in stabilizing the financial system. But this organization and so many like it deserve our contempt for dressing up reformist measures to look revolutionary. Their sweet-sounding promises only block the path to revolution by utterly distorting the meaning of socialism.

A collapsing theory

On the other extreme from the reformists, or at least it would seem, are those who argue that the final collapse of capitalism has begun, and that efforts to prop up the system are doomed to fail.

The reasons given for this inevitable collapse vary quite a bit, however. Some argue, as many Marxists did back in the 1930s, that it is the result of capitalism’s internal contradictions, such as the tendency towards a declining rate of profit. But many more, including the adherents of peak oil theory, view the collapse as the result of capitalism colliding with some outside force that prevents the further accumulation and expansion which is the lifeblood of the system.

Not only are there a myriad of reasons offered to explain the inevitable collapse, but there are starkly different conclusions reached about what will replace capitalism. There are those who see the collapse as radicalizing the population and bringing workers around to a revolutionary standpoint; while others depict a prolonged period of social anarchy or even a return to a pre-industrial life, and advise people to head to the hills after stocking up on gold, guns and vegetable seeds.

Regardless of those particular differences, however, the idea of an inevitable collapse of capitalism clearly implies that a great historical change could take place regardless of our actions. Instead of socialism
replacing capitalism, based on the conscious decisions and actions of workers, we would have capitalism ending at some point, and that collapse then stimulating a great social change (for better or worse).

One might wonder, though, what sort of society would exist in the interim, however brief it might be, between the collapse of the old and the emergence of the new. It would be “non-capitalist,” one would assume, but what would be the dividing line between the two? Is it possible for a society to not be capitalist, but still not be anything else either?

The reason for much of the confusion among the “catastrophists,” as they are sometimes called, is that – just like the reformists who confuse
nationalization with socialism – they do not have a clear understanding of what capitalism is, exactly. That is to say, instead of understanding capitalism on the most essential level, as a system of commodity production in the pursuit of profit, they get caught up in the various forms of capitalism, and imagine that some are more capitalistic than others.

It is certainly true that forms of capitalism or particular governments can collapse, but this should not be viewed as the collapse of capitalism itself. There are many examples of collapses to choose from, most notably the fall of the Weimer government in Germany that was followed by a fascist regime. For over a decade, Germany went through economic crisis, political upheaval, and a catastrophic war; and with no exaggeration, one can speak of that period as a collapse of civilization. Yet throughout it all the capitalist system remained intact.

It is easier to speak of the “collapse of capitalism” if a person has no clear idea of what capitalism means. And if its meaning is unclear, then the understanding of socialism will also be a muddle (just like those reformists who mistake state capitalism for socialism). It is important, therefore, to distinguish between an economic or political collapse, and the end of capitalism itself, which only workers can bring about by replacing it with socialism.

Optimism in depression

The criticism of those two tendencies might lead some to believe that we offer no solution to the crisis, or that we ignore the objective factors of reality and overemphasize the subjective ones.

We do in fact have a solution to this crisis and to economic crisis in general. But our approach to the problem is similar to how we approach other problems, such as the destruction of the environment or war, in that we do not propose a separate solution for each problem. This isn’t because we are indifferent to the problems, but because we recognize the relation between individual problems and the capitalist system.

In a sense, to solve one problem requires the solution of all of them. The fundamental solution to the problem of crisis, for instance, requires the introduction of a new system of production and consumption no longer mediated by the market, so that the basis for crisis would no longer exist. In other words, socialism is the solution to this particular crisis and to the problem of crisis itself, along with every other social problem that is specific to capitalism.

As for objective versus subjective elements, we would certainly recognize that the objective reality of the crisis has an impact on how people view capitalism. And this new situation may create a more favorable environment for explaining socialism.

Already, in the past six months, there has been a tremendous shift in “public opinion”, so that now it is almost fashionable to rebuke bankers for their greed and ignorance. There is no question that more people than ever are wondering whether capitalism is indeed the best of all possible worlds.

Of course, even while the changing reality has stimulated thought and debate, the conclusions people are reaching vary. Many see the crisis as the bankruptcy of “neo-liberalism”, rather than capitalism itself, while the religious minded might even say it is punishment from God. No matter how much the objective reality may influence ideas and test theories, it will not directly deposit the concept of socialism into a person’s mind.

So we still have the task of explaining socialism, and it is more important than ever as workers suffer under the crisis. The explanation we offer today, as before, is based on the recognition of the fundamental contradictions and limitations of capitalism, and the realization that this (obsolete) system cannot be reformed beyond a certain point. And it is during a crisis that those contradictions and limitations are most evident. Marx describes how the “contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed” during a crisis of the world market, which is a moment when there is a “real concentration and forcible adjustment” of those contradictions (Theories of Surplus Value).

With the problems so plain to see, and the limitations of capitalism so palpable, the explanation of socialism as the solution may very well begin to seem more concrete and practical – and urgent – than ever before.

MS

Five more benefits of not having money

We continue describing how things could be like in a socialist society, where there would be no need for money.

1. Environment

Bear in mind the aim here is an excursion into the benefits of money totally disappearing from our lives; for all to have access to the necessities of life and in return to contribute their effort for the common good. Havoc has been wreaked on the environment by corporations and others with the full consent of successive governments around the world – for the acquisition of necessary resources but using unnecessarily harmful methods. Peak oil and climate change are terms on everyone's lips and the general consensus from Joe Public is that something needs to be done – and fast.

If we remove the agents for profit (corporations and governments of the capitalist system) and engage in honest democracy of the people, by the people and for the people decisions can be made to halt damaging practices and implement methods of farming, fishing, mining, extraction, energy production, manufacturing etc. that do no harm to either man or environment. Safe working practices will be the norm. Resources can be protected and used carefully when incentive for their rape and pillage is gone. Energy usage can be reduced drastically in 1001 ways using alternative energies, building using integral insulation and energy conservation techniques, vastly reducing transport as work and societal practices change, stopping air freight of “luxury” and unnecessary goods, producing and manufacturing locally wherever feasible, etc.

Local communities could have the final say on resources in their area with the possibility that sometimes the resource will be deemed off-limits and so remain untouched, and if no one is prepared to work mining or tunnelling to extract a particular resource then an alternative will need to be found. With a system of no money there can be no forced labour or unacceptable working practices. Resources will be valued for what they are, not what price they can be sold for, and protection of the environment can be put firmly on the agenda as demanded by the world's majority.

2. War and Conflict

Envisaging this newly emerging moneyless world, it is apparent that cooperation rather than competition will be the driving force to its development and the glue that will bind communities. Having removed the profit incentive and made access to resources free, production will be for use only. There are no losers in this scenario, all are to benefit from the new world order. It's just that a tiny minority might have difficulty in coming round to see it that way. As a consequence of this totally different emphasis – freedom of access and no monetary element – it isn't difficult to accept that military forces will become redundant.

Wars have always been about control of territory for resources and are usually promoted in the name of democracy, expansion abroad or protection of the domestic population from threat of real or manufactured enemies but which always utilise armies recruited from the mass of the population and sacrifice workers in the service of the capitalist cause. Internal conflicts involving government backed forces against “insurgents”/“freedom fighters”, breakaway independence groups/terrorists – when looked at rationally are (a) about lack of rights for certain sections of the community, groups deprived of their own self-determination; tensions deliberately fostered betweens sections of society so the elites can keep control (divide and rule) and (b) only temporarily dealt with (if at all) through force. If the causes aren't dealt with the effects are sure to reappear. Dealing with the causes, injustices, lack of access, etc. needs the pawns in the game to recognise that that is what they are and to join forces against those controlling them, putting the power of decision making into the hands of the majority and ending the reasons for future conflict.

No need for ownership or use of war material will render a massive service to the environment, saving resources on a huge scale and stopping pollution of the planet from the harmful waste created in both their production and deployment besides avoiding millions of deaths. Saving lives could become the new unarmed forces raison d’être. Bodies of fit, well-trained, well-resourced, motivated men and women available to deal with the effects of natural disasters and unexpected calamities would be one of a number of ways to deploy the willing volunteers, a civil action force for true humanitarian intervention.

3. Media and Advertising

Media without money? In today's system we buy newspapers and magazines, a licence to watch television plus payments to a provider for umpteen other channels and subscribe to internet providers for access to the world wide web. If something arrives at your house for free, it has been paid for by advertising and advertising gets its money from services provided to businesses, and businesses get their money from customers buying the products and services.

Without the profit motive it would be possible to watch a film or interesting documentary uninterrupted by advertisements that always intrude at a higher level of decibels. Junk mail would be redundant; another positive for the environment. Ugly advertising hoardings crowding town spaces and roadsides would give way to more thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing additions to our visual surroundings. Many talented artists would be freed up to turn their expertise in more socially acceptable and useful directions. Media, in general, could become what the people want, not what they're told they want. Real choice, real variety, true information and not warped by an individual proprietor's view. This could be such an exciting area with much more community involvement from planning to production. Released from wage slavery and with the intellect free from worry about unemployment, housing, health care etc. etc. the capacity for individual personal development will expand considerably.

4. Education

In its broadest sense education is just that – individual personal development. The most fulfilled individuals are those who can reach the end of their lives knowing they have spent their time exploring to the limits the areas that most interest and motivate them. These individuals are not satisfied by or limited to an eight-hour day, they continue willingly for extended hours because they enjoy and are motivated by what it is they are doing. Conversely, of the various officially recognised systems of education available in the world today none come close to encouraging youngsters to pursue their own individually chosen path in life. Institutional education is about fitting young children to become compliant teenage students who can then be steered in one of the very limited directions on offer. This is called choice. The best time to learn anything is when the individual is motivated to do so at whatever age. The best way to learn is usually by doing – a combination of observation and practice. Sitting at a desk in a room with 20, 30, 50 or so others for several hours a day is not conducive to good learning and not conducive to producing free thinking adults, but it is a good preconditioning for adult life in a money-oriented world which requires both a compliant workforce and passive unemployed.

To hear a nine-year old's response when asked what he would like to do when he leaves school, “Well, I'll go and get my Giro” is a shocking indictment of a system which by its very nature excludes many people. Whether in the examination system or later in the work situation, a certain percentage every year must be expected to fail. How humiliating and degrading is that? But that is how this system works; there is only room for so many to achieve.

When the work situation changes so that all are contributing regularly to the common good by the work they perform and all are freely taking their daily needs from the common store youngsters will experience a totally different example from today's. Education will be embraced as offering ongoing opportunities for all to succeed in their chosen areas in societies which value all members regardless of their so-called IQ.

5. Quality of Life

In a world of money “quality” is equated with cost. A quality item costs more than a shoddy or mass produced one, e.g. Rolls Royce v a standard Ford. “Quality” chocolate costs the consumer more but doesn't give more to the grower. Quality is a term used to convey superiority and status, something better than the rest, better than the others. Unfortunately when coupled with time most families have little of it and the cost can be great. Quality of life is talked about as something desirable, to be aspired to and implies a certain level of income but, in fact, everyone has a quality of life, a comparative quality which could be measured against many different yardsticks. Most people would admit they are looking for ways to improve their own.

In order to achieve the positive changes to be gained by the disappearance of money, power has to be taken away from the elites and placed firmly in the hands of the people. None of the proposals posed above could become reality without the will of the majority – but what is the will of the majority, the popular perception of the “system” today? Active consent for the system is generally lacking and people have allowed themselves to become resigned to it instead of opposing it, believing that there is no alternative. Surely it is within the capacity of this miracle of evolution to reason its way back from the headlong rush to condemn billions of its own to degradation and misery, whilst destroying its own habitat with the philosophy that money can solve all problems? With money gone the generally accepted meaning of “quality of life” can become a reality for all to contemplate and world citizens will be free to aspire to achieving goals worthy of humankind.

JANET SURMAN

Darwin and the Intelligent Design Brigade

Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics

"The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.

Calling the second law of thermodynamics “a deeply disturbing scientific principle that threatens our children’s understanding of God’s universe as a benevolent and loving place,” they are spearheading a nationwide grassroots campaign to have the law removed from high-school physics textbooks. The plan has already met with significant support in the state legislatures of Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi.”

Before you start worrying, this was a satirical item from The Onion, back in 2000, aimed at religious people who reject Darwinian evolution. However it’s not really an exaggeration. Religious fundamentalists who reject evolutionary theory are also rejecting geology, astronomy, Einsteinian and Newtonian physics, in fact the whole body of scientific knowledge going back to first principles, and replacing it with a couple of anonymous books and a God who, as Bill Hicks pointed out in relation to dinosaur fossils, must be a liar and a practical joker.

Yet these religious people don’t choose to attack Newton, or the theory of gravity, or light, or quantum physics. Why evolution specifically? If you haven’t already seen it, try watching Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (2007), which is freely available online. This is an award-winning documentary describing the headline-grabbing court case between parents and the School Governors in Dover, Pennsylvania in which the governors were trying to force creationist ideas into biology classes and the parents were trying to stop them.

In the end the parents won, and the creationists were humiliated. But as you follow the interviews with protagonists on both sides of this celebrated case, you begin to see what it is that motivates those on the religious side of the debate. It is fear.

They are afraid that without God as first cause there really is no relevance to life. They fear that science is taking the heart out of the human experience and replacing it with numbers. They fear that a world with no meaning is a world with no mercy.

It was fear that originally incited the famous campaigning reformer William Jennings Bryan to take the prosecution case in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, fear that naked social darwinism would rampage across any possibility of social justice, would justify the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism. This was the fear – and the profound misunderstanding of Darwinism – which drove Christians to break themselves against the juggernaut of science, and continues to drive them today.

It would be, from a scientific or a socialist perspective, so easy to laugh at these people as superstitious children. After all, they cannot win. Despite the recent avalanche of anti-religious books from the likes of Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Christopher Hitchens and others, there is no real danger of a return to a religious Dark Age. Of course they are wrong. Of course their arguments are ludicrous.

At the same time it is possible to feel some compassion for the fear and the desperation these, mostly ignorant and uninformed, people have, confronted with a world they don’t understand and in which they feel utterly helpless. Science to them is gas chambers, nuclear bombs, death rays, spy satellites and mind control. Wild stories about Earth-eating black holes and ‘strangelets’ guaranteed front-page coverage worldwide for the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, an event only normally of interest to particle physicists.

People fear what they don’t understand, and in general society is scientifically illiterate, a situation many scientists find worrying. In public surveys on the supposedly dangerous substance Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO), which can corrode iron and kill humans if inhaled, up to 90% of respondents voted that it should be banned (DHMO = H20). (Source: New Scientist, 27 Sept 2008, p.76).

Socialists should care about the religion versus science debate because the theory of socialism is built on scientific principles, and anything which threatens rationality and evidence-based thinking must be anathema. However we should also be capable of seeing the larger picture. This isn’t really about Darwin, or the laws of physics.

This is about people who need to have a reason to go on living, which capitalism isn’t giving them. It’s about people’s need to believe in something, which capitalism doesn’t supply or has taken away. And it’s about having some hope for the future, of which capitalism has none. The world really does need some intelligent design, but in its business of living, not in its biology.

Socialists, as atheists, have to understand what some scientists seem unable to grasp, that the battle of ideas is not just a battle of the mind, it’s a battle for the heart. We can no more win hearts with economic methodology than scientists can with peer-reviewed research. If we scoff at notions of ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ because these things are not measurable in laboratory experiments, we utterly miss the point. The desperate argument of creationism is at one level a comedy of human stupidity. But at a deeper level it is a tragedy, the pathos of a human condition adrift and desolate in a world which cares only about money and believes in nothing at all. This is what Moslems and Christians despair about, and this is something with which we can surely empathise. This is the ‘sigh of the oppressed’ in the heartless world of the 21st century. Despite appearances to the contrary, capitalism is slowly and methodically destroying religion. What we need to do, as socialists, is recognise the emotional vacuum this is creating, and strive to fill it, before something infinitely worse does.

PADDY SHANNON