Why I am a Marxist

What is it that makes me a Marxist? What underlying principle guides my mindset in that direction? Those are the questions I have been asking myself, and I have come to a very basic conclusion. I am not an activist, I like to think, and to try to understand and to articulate the conclusions I come to. So, what conclusions have I come to on this specific area of my min? What is it that makes me a Marxist?

It isn’t about waiting for the “revolution” to come. It isn’t about nurturing an insane idea about a conspiracy in which global power and wealth is controlled by the Bilderbergs. It isn’t about praying every night for the state to control the means of production. It isn’t about ironically displaying a Che t-shirt everywhere I go, or trying to put myself into the exact same camp as Trotsky, or Lenin, or putting a little cross on a political spectrum. It isn’t about wishful rhetoric on stalls across England, handing out Socialist Worker leaflets and declaring that Capitalism is about to fall. It isn’t about turning a blind eye to the fact that thousands of people live off state handouts, purely because they do not wish to work. It isn’t about stooping to the absurdity that the Right Wing often stoops to when it points out the Soviet Union as the failure of Marxism or points to Cuba as the evil of Socialism, because if it were, I could point to Reagan an Thatcher’s support for Pinochet and right winged murderous thugs throughout Central America as proof of the brutality of Capitalism; but i’d be wrong to do so. What makes me a Marxist in the most basic terms, is the necessity to distrust authority that bases itself purely on abstractions, in this case; wealth. Capitalism in this sense, is like religion; we are expected to submit to a higher authority, an authority that actually doesn’t really exist and is purely a construction of the time period that we inhabit. If we look at that constructed power structure from “outside” of the confines of the context of our historical position, we must laugh at the absurdity of our apparent necessity to hand our lives over to people who pay the lowest possible fee for our labour, whilst extracting and squeezing as much out of us. It is degrading, and it certainly isn’t “freedom”.

To expand a little on that, it is the sense that the very foundation of Capitalism – the owner of a business is entitled to the largest piece of the profits, because he invested capital in the first place – is a man made ideal that is loaded with flaws. I will attempt to articulate a couple of the flaws I see.

Firstly, capital by itself is pointless. Capital must fuse with labour to be worth anything. Labour without capital is not pointless. Labour can build, create, innovate, feed and save lives. Capital by itself can do nothing. Capital is a seed in a dark room on a table. Labour is the soil, the sun, and the water. Therefore, the guiding force and the most important aspect of the deal between capital and labour, is labour. If my boss leaves the workplace for a week, the place still runs just fine. If the entire workforce leaves for a week, the company will be in financial peril. That is the practical example of the notion that labour is the most important force in the productive World. Profit on the initial investment, is simply interest, created by someone else. It is not productive in itself. Buying a road and charging people to use it, or buying a house and renting it out, is not productive. Capital is not productive. The fact that it is then passed down to the children of the Capitalists – which makes the claim that Capitalism is based on individual merit, seem laughably hypocritical – suggests a class consciousness within the Capitalist classes; a desire to perpetuate their class attacking meritocratic principles in a sort of Capitalist paradox in which inter-family socialism is desirable, as long as it doesn’t spread beyond their own class.

We talk of productivity of the workforce, not of the capitalists. The labour of the man with the capital is irrelevant. He will usually monopolise some sort of administration work within the company, which need not be monopolised. Apart from that initial injection of capital, he is largely pointless. Stock market speculation and gambling is also not a productive use of capital. The inherent flaws in this system, Marx believed would eventually lead to its downfall.

It is easy for a working public to take shots at people on benefits, as it is all the media tends to talk about. We seem though to turn a blind eye to Corporate tax cuts. It is odd, because people at the top of the Corporate ladder will have used a thriving public sector – education, health service, roads – at some time in their lives which provided the framework necessary to climb the ladder to great wealth. By announcing Corporate tax cuts, the Tory Government is effectively burning the ladder up which their donors climbed to make it difficult for others to follow, destroying opportunity for the next generation, whilst at the same time ensuring that those who used the system previously, now pay as little back into it as possible. Corporate tax cuts represent a huge piece of the Welfare pie, going to the people who need it least. That, is wrong.

Secondly, Marxists recognise the key element of Capitalism is the accumulation of capital. You set out in the market place with capital, you buy labour, you sell your product or service, and you make your capital back with more in profit. All well and good, until you hit what Marx termed as a limit to capital. Capitalism doesn’t deal too well with limits. Limits can include competition, and to get around that limit, capital will buy up competition until there is very little left. It is the reason why large coffee producers can flood African markets, buy up the small family run coffee producers, and put the staff to work for pittance in factories in poor conditions, working extremely long hours. Capital needs to consolidate power. Democracy used to be a limit. Capital bought democracy when it became the norm for multinationals and the super rich to fun political parties and candidates. It is the reason why 81% of the $19,000,000 that was spent on the 2006 election from the big oil lobby, went to the Republican Party in 2006. That money was well spent it seems, given that in the run up to the Bush Administrations refusal to sign up to Kyoto – the climate change UN protocol – briefing emails were leaked from US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky office before meetings which thank ExxonMobil executives “active involvement” in framing climate change policy. Which is odd, because in 2003, Exxon’s head of public affairs, Nick Thomas told a House of Lords Science Committee:

“I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto.”

He lied. The Bush Administrations climate policy, was dictated to them, by the most powerful and wealthiest oil companies in the US.

Democracy isn’t the only limit to be overcome. The limit in 2007/08 was 25 years worth of stagnating wages for everyone apart from the very wealthy, whose wages increased year on year in Western democracies, most notably in the UK and US. To ensure demand across the marketplace continued to thrive despite wages stagnating, Capitalism blew down this limit, by introducing a market for very very easy credit. The problem with this is that money is now entirely backed by debt and nothing else. The mortgage markets didn’t fail; Capitalism failed. This means that subprime mortgages and the securities that backed them were just products of a system that has crises after crises built into it. Don’t be fooled by the right winged rhetoric that instantly blamed and attacked the public sector and the welfare state. This sovereign debt crises is a crises of Capitalism that has been cleverly shifted away from the people who caused it (people who started off with vast amounts of capital, destroyed the system that allowed them the opportunity to make that fortune, and then left quietly with vast amounts of capital, whilst the rest of us are told we must suffer austerity) an onto the most vulnerable – those who do no have vast amounts of capital or political influence. Capitalism is amoral. Morality is not a part of Capitalism. That is why regulation is necessary.

And lastly, I am deeply suspicious of the very concept of Capitalism in regard to the individual worker. The idea being that the Capitalist advertises a job vacancy because he needs labour to fertilise his capital and gain the profit. The worker needs a job. The Capitalist buys the labour of the worker. The worker consents to allow the Capitalist to live comfortably off the back of his labour, for a very small amount of money – the lowest possible amount actually because the supply of workers is far greater than the demand for production. The worker consents to this rather odd deal, because if he doesn’t, he will starve to death. An example of this can be seen with “Family Dollar”, a chain of US discount stores. The CEO Howard Levine took home base salary of $948,654, a cash bonus of $1,894,615, stocks granted of $1,338,224, and options granted of $1,308,528. So you’d think, with wealth like that, Levine would have the human decency to pay his staff a decent wage, especially given that they are expected to work such long hours? Well, no, unsurprisingly he doesn’t treat his staff all that well. Most of the staff who are expected to work over time, are designated as “managers” at “Family Dollar“. This means that the company can get around the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, by designating the “managers” (who weren’t paid any more) as “exempt“, which meant they do not have to pay them over time. As employees struggle to cope with the horribly low pay and extremely long hours, “Family Dollar” managed to pay out $58 million in dividends in 2010. When workers have to take such awful jobs, working for horrendous bosses, simply to make ends meet, the scales are tipped firmly in the balance of the employer. The deal therefore, is not equal to start with. The Capitalist is driven by the desire to increase profits and buy a lovely new car, by using someone elses labour, to attach to his capital, and them claim some universal right over the product of that labour. The worker on the other hand is driven by survival, despite the fact that he is far more productive than the capitalist. If the business goes bust, it is more than likely that the Capitalist will have money saved, he will certainly have the experience needed to get a job in which he wont have to go long without a regular income. His workers on the other hand, having provided their old boss with the money he saved and now lives on, through their labour rather than his, will now have to either spend whatever little savings they’re likely to have on getting through a period of unemployment without starving, which could be twice as difficult if he lives in the USA and doesn’t have health insurance, and finds himself with a terrible illness.
One of the fathers of Capitalism, Turgot summed up it here:

“In all types of labour, it necessarily follows that the salary of the worker is limited to what is necessary for survival.”

In other words, when more people exist then wages are higher because the pool of labour is smaller, when less labour is needed, wages will slowly fall not because a worker is working less hard, but because a Capitalist can use the threat of starvation to insist on paying his staff less money. Capitalism posits that people are commodities.

To conclude and answer my original question; I am a Marxist because I do not believe the initial investment of capital into a business venture, provides a God-given right to claim the highest wage or the power of the business. The fact that we see this profit making right, as God-given, leads to dangerous games played by a very small amount of people who have accumulated great wealth, an it affects us all. When I sit back and really think about the current Euro zone crises, and the panic in the US over the raising of the debt ceiling, I wonder how humanity is so close to crumbling. We invented money. We invented the concepts of wealth and sovereign debt and price and wage and individual debt and stocks and we seem to think of it all as divine; untouchable; something beyond our grasp, when in actuality, it is all just one big illusion, an abstract concept, a web that we spun and eventually got stuck in. Productive people are still as numerous as they were in the 1990s, there is still the same amount of land, but there is an abundance of debt-backed money rather than savings. The difference is, productive people and land actually exist in reality, debt-backed money and capital on its own doesn’t.

That is why I am a Marxist.

The Theatre of New Labour

This is going to be the one time I ever give the Conservative Party any credit.
They are the only Party in mainstream UK politics, that stick to their ideology, and argue the case for it eloquently and precisely. The Labour Party is a party that has utterly compromised all its traditional values, for the sake of trying to appeal to the middle class, despite the middle class being collectively wrong, on many many issues. The Tories are not prepared to compromise values for popularity. They will tell the middle class when they believe they are wrong. Labour will pander to them (especially on immigration; see the utterly horrendous, slimy, principle-less Phil Woolas). Gordon Brown called Mrs Duffy a bigot. She was a bigot. He was right. But when he had learnt that he had been overheard referring to her as a bigot, he backtracked and apologised. Why? The woman was a bigot? New Labour is a theatre performance; to the public, they are just characters giving the audience what they want to hear. In private, they are entirely different people. This is true of all political parties to an extent, but New Labour epitomise the theatre of politicians.

The process of modernisation with the Labour party; leading to the rise of New Labour is an interesting subject. It would seem that the conventional wisdom (especially within the Labour Party itself) is that modernisation was something that needed to happen in order for Labour to become electable. The problem with this, is it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, because it presupposes that during the modernisation period when the country was under the rule of the Thatcher government, the Labour Party in its old guise, in its traditional and ideological guise, the guise that makes it a party of Labour, was dead. The truth is, it wasn’t.

Infact, by 1990, Labour had been ahead of Thatcher’s Tory Party in the polls, for a year and a half. For a Party that was apparently killed off by its attachment to Socialist values, beaten by a superior Neoliberal system, I would have expected them to be far far below the Tories in the polls, after ten years of Thatcher. Surely this great new system of Financial ingenuity/gambling that Thatcher had created and was going to enrich us all via a method of trickle-down economics, would have made her incredibly popular and created an amazingly strong economy. In fact, quite the opposite happened. Labour were ahead in the polls, recession was about to hit, mass unemployment reared its ugly head, inflation was on the rise, the CBI had now became the most powerful Union in the Country (and still is) and poll tax riots had taken control of the Country. She had also set in stone the failings of the Financial sector, that was to bring England and the World to its knees 20 years later. Which makes it even more funny, that her resignation included this:

Eleven years ago we rescued Britain from the parlous state to which socialism had brought it.

In the 1992 election, Labour lost, again. Neil Kinnock was still leader. He just wasn’t popular. But, Labour cut the Tory majority since 1979, from 144, to 21 seats. They were well on their way to victory come 1997, due to Black Wednesday and other economic and social worries, long before Blair became leader of the opposition. John Smith would have been our next Prime Minister, had he not died of a heart attack in 1994. Labour, under Smith, in 1994 were 21 points ahead in the polls. The Tories in May 1994, received their biggest defeat in Council elections for 30 years. Smith, was far more to the Left than Brown or Blair. Smith would have won the 1997 General Election.

But apparently Blair and New Labour agreed that the Party needed to move to the right, and so modernised to suit Thatcher’s rather twisted vision of “rescuing” Britain. John Major presided over a Tory England that went deeper into recession, offered no support for anyone during it, and saw unemployment at record highs. One has to wonder why Blair thought it necessary to move to the Centre; closer to Major economically, than ever before, given that Major and Thatcher had both caused major economic woes. Black Wednesday say interest rates, under Major rise from 10%, to 12%, to 15%, back to 12%; all within the space of one day. Black Wednesday also caused the Tories to pull sterling out of the ERM. All in all, it cost us £3.3bn.

From 1997 onwards, New Labour did absolutely nothing to reverse Thatcher’s policies. They didn’t reform the banking sector. They believed the bubble could go on forever. New Labour were essentially running on the power generated by the Thatcher government’s policy on finance.

When Thatcher won her third term in ’87, she gained 42.2% of the popular vote to Labour’s abysmal 30.8%. Now, this wasn’t down to Labour’s ideological stance at all. It is a cop out to suggest Socialism was killing the Labour Party. It was entirely due to the fact that Labour had no coherent message on the important issues of the day, and this was down to in-party fighting between an ever powerful future Blairite faction of upper middle class Thatcher-lites, and the old Labour party who were trying to argue that Socialism was not a discredited system. Two problems persisted because of this in fighting.

Firstly, the rhetoric was weak. They could not win the battle of words. Much like they were unable to do in 2010, despite people like me and other Progressives on the Left knowing it is damn easy to discredit much of the Tory rhetoric. I tried to do so at our University Question Time event. I think I succeeded to a degree too. If I were Gordon Brown, I’d have been stood on the steps of Downing Street saying:

Okay, we messed up. We followed the Tory line on economics, we modernised to suit this vision of Neoliberal heaven, and it failed miserably. We are as much to blame as they are. We thought the Financial Sector would act like a Government, protecting people, and growing to support the economy on the whole. We were massively mistaken. The Neoliberal modernising aspect of the Labour Party failed. Time to rethink our values, and reshape our core beliefs. Let us never move to the centre-right again.

Note, I will not use the term Centre-Left, because I find it a cop out, and a synonym for centre-right.

Secondly, the problem for the old Labour faction was that there was a concerted effort to paint them the same colour as the Soviets, who were at the time, perceived as a great threat, and about to crumble. It was a joint effort by a media who require a strong middle class in order to make money, and a government that liked to paint itself as the saviours of Britain, despite rioting and mass unemployment suggesting otherwise. No one in the Labour Party had the courage to point out that whilst Stock Markets might be growing, and the Banking system expanding; mass unemployment was still rampant.

Rather amusingly, in 1994, Blair took a swipe at the financial sector; a sector he would soon come to embrace like a child does its mother:

‘the new establishment is not a meritocracy but a power elite of money-shifters, middlemen and speculators people whose self-interest will always come before the national or the public interest’

An amazing statement to make. Amazing, because it is exactly right. It is also foreseeing the problems that were to come 13 years later. Which begs the question, why did he do fuck all to curb this new “power elite“, because it was on his Party’s watch, that the entire system collapsed. Thatcher created the new “power elite” Blair speaks of, but Blair and Brown perpetuated the problem ten fold. If being “centre-left” means capitulating to an inherently destructive Financial sector; a Financial sector that will never cease being inherently destructive, not least because it has the power to just create money out of thin air – then i’d certainly never wish to associate myself with the centre-left.

Blair did not try to discredit Conservative Party rhetoric on the power of the markets, or the disenfranchising of the unions, or on the subject of Nationalism, or on any other ground to which as a Labour Party politician (whether you agree with the Left or not) he really should have done.

Those of us on the Progressive Left, even now, would say that calling an economic system built entirely around financial capital as “recovering” just because the stock market is picking up, despite people still losing their jobs and homes on a mass scale, is so absurdly wrong, it’s irrational. New Labour “modernised” by convincing themselves, that this new breed of Thatcherite financiers was, in Gordon Brown’s words, an “inspiration“. Thatcher could point to the success of the Financial sector in 1987, and say “look, we’re growing, I saved you all”. Except, we weren’t growing. The financial sector was growing beautifully. Unemployment was stagnantly high, wages were stagnating, house prices were rocketing, and more people were homeless than at any other time since the 1940s. Labour did not jump on the opportunity to point out that the Financial Sector had in fact only managed to grow, by offering cheap credit backed by money that doesn’t actually exist.

Blairism, and New Labour were not a new product in the political market. They represented, and still do, a capitulation to Thatcher’s legacy, and a curious understanding that propaganda through the media wins elections, not truth or reasoned argument.

Peter Mandelson sums up Labour’s capitulation to Right Winged economics with:

‘differences between left and right are obsolete, there is no alternative’; we have no objection to people becoming filthy rich’

Mandelson is saying that the economics of the Right Wing, and its financial sector commitments are correct, and there is no other way. That, from a LABOUR PARTY politician. It is staggering.
So, who do those of us on the Progressive Left now turn to, to place our vote? The ‘Third Way’ meant a commitment to Corporate Welfare, and an attack on social welfare. The spin of “social justice” and “Third Way” are weak when examined up close. Foundation Hospitals were spun to suggest a great social construct in the spirit of the Labour Party of old, as opposed to the reality; a class based healthcare system and creeping Privatisation. This isn’t a surprise given that Blair said that Labour’s commitment to the Public service, was going to force the public sector to:

deliver in a modern, consumer-focused fashion

Thatcher had created a consumer obsessed population fuelled by a system of very easy non-existent money. The failure of the Labour Party, was the failure of intellectuals within it (and still is), to apply Marxist scientific theory to critique and express the current abnormal and unbalanced purchasing power of finance capital related to the non-power of labour, and the future problems that would cause. This is reflected in the absolutely awful poll ratings of the Labour leader at the time, Neil Kinnock. Whilst Thatcher was at her most unpopular, even within her own Government, Kinnock was still far more unpopular. He was not strong. He could not communicate the position of the Labour Party, and he was weak dealing with the new breed of modernisers.

That is New Labour. CBI Labour. A synonym for the “Second faction of the Business Party“. A Labour Party should not exist to further promote the notion that the only true value to society is economical value. A Labour Party, built on the concept of social justice should never preside over thirteen years of the richest few in society having a bigger share of the Nation’s wealth, than they ever did under a Tory government. That is not modernising. That is becoming Conservative, and cannot be defended.

I will sum up what I believe “modernisation” means to the New Labour experiment: The total and unmoving capitulation to the idea that the power of finance capital and the stock market is far more important and needs to be protected and encouraged by government, than the power of labour. Coupled with the relentless rhetoric in the media and throughout the Party that anyone on the Left, is out of touch and out dated and negatively referred to as “old Labour”. The argument being that the Private sector needs to be defended by government because it provides the economic value of the Nation, and the public sector is less important purely because it’s societal value is beyond simple economic value.
That is the pathetic legacy of the modernisation of the Labour Party.

Thatcher created New Labour.

The North Korean Threat

The most frightening sight in the World is the cold robotic-like facial expressions of the North Korean Military Honour Guard. The N.Korean military is believed to be the fifth largest in the World. And since the Korean war ended in a ceasefire, rather than a peace treaty in 1953, the war between the North and South, is still technically, not over. Both sides view the other with intense suspicion. The Soviet North, and the American South. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that the U.S has troops stationed in South Korea. The situation is helped less by the North’s nuclear intentions.

Two months after the increasingly isolated N.Korea tested a ballistic long range missile, furiously antagonising the rest of the planet, Pyongyang today announced it has successfully carried out a Nuclear Weapons test, as powerful as the American attack on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Not only have the U.S, U.N and the entire international community condemned the test; N.Korea’s closest allies China and Russia, condemned the tests also. China is of course worried that further sanctions will push hundreds of thousands of poverty stricken Koreans over the border, into China. N.Korea responded recently to this worry, not by helping people to escape poverty, but by building a barbed wire fence, on Korea-China border, to keep people in.

When an isolated, Marxist State, dedicates it’s resources to creating weapons that threaten the security of the whole of Asia, rather than elevating it’s growing poverty levels, the motivation moves from one of simply wanting to deter potential invaders, to absolute provocation of all international bodies.

There is suggestion that the tests carried out, could be the result of two issues. Firstly, that Pyongyang is attempting to reach out to President Obama, in order to prioritise the relationship between the two nations. In essence, a “look at what we can do” statement. If the tests continue, and improve as they seem to be doing, it would give Korea much more control of international diplomacy, and from a rogue State that doesn’t take too kindly to international Law, that is a worrying scenario. Former South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung Joo has said of the North Korean Nuclear Weapons program “They want to change the game“. He is adamant the tests are to pull the attention of the new Obama Administration, toward N.Korean. “It’s one way of breaking in the new US administration to the North Korean way of doing things.“

Whether the U.N calls emergency meetings or not, and whether the Security Council issues strongly worded statements or not, it isn’t going to change anything. The U.N is a powerless body in essence, and even more so with such a dangerously isolated Nation such as N.Korea. The U.S is unlikely to change it’s position on N.Korea, and so the tests could continue.

The second potential reason for such tests, is the growing instability centred around a potential succession struggle, within N.Korea following the erratic Leader, Kim Jong Il’s stroke in August 2008 (the same time the six-party talks were abandoned). For the past few months, following the stroke, N.Korea has stepped up it’s show of secrecy, in a number of ways. Firstly, in March, twoU.S Journalists were arrested on suspicion of spying, and will face trial in a couple of weeks time, which could see them imprisoned for up to 10 years in a N.Korean jail; Stephen Bosworth, the chief Envoy of President Obama, to N.Korea has not been granted the right to visit Pyongyang; N.Korean recently dropped out of six-party talks to end it’s nuclear program in exchange for aid and stronger diplomatic ties and expelled international Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from the Country. The fear being that N.Korea, desperate for aid, may develop Nuclear arms that it could potentially sell on to terrorist organisations or Nations like Iran, especially if further sanctions are placed on the Country by a U.N Security Council resolution, following this latest Nuclear test.
It is suggested that there is internal strife over the succession, with various figures within the regime fighting for the succession, when Kim Jong-Il passes on. With no definite leader, and Kim’s sons all vying for power, the internal struggle could explain increasingly erratic behaviour within the Country. Although it is widely believed that Kim’s son Kim Jong-un will be named as likely successor to his father, Jong-un is diabetic, and so this lessens his chances, but doesn’t deter from his ambitions for power.

Another name is making a bid for power. The husband of Kim Jong-Il’s sister, Jang Seong Taek took up an important role on the North Korean National Defence Commission, the most powerful institution in N.Korea, which Kim Jong-Il himself is Chairman of. Taek is already Vice Director of the Worker’s Party, and has supreme oversight of the Police and Judiciary within N.Korea. It is suggested that if the Leader’s health continues to deteriorate, Taek may emerge as Chairman of the National Defence Commission, and that leaves him with a huge amount of power. It has been suggested that Mr Taek is already making key decisions within the Country. Taek may well be the key player, and apparent successor. Which, may not please too many family members of Kim Jong-Il, specifically, his power hungry sons. A peaceful transition of power is unlikely, given that there are indeed far too many ruthless players in search of extreme power within the World’s most secretive, and dangerous state. What is apparent, is that an isolated State under a ruthless Communist dictator is deadly enough, but an isolated State with no obvious Leader and multiple parties playing for control, is so very much more dangerous.

Perhaps the tests, and the arrests and the further secrecy is to keep a veil of privacy around the failing health of the ailing leader, and a likely fight for supremacy. Asia is all about honour, dignity, saving face, and so these provocations from N.Korea, may exist to show that the Country is not weak, to show strength. Of course, all N.Korea is achieving is further isolation, which is worrying on a number of levels.
The next year or two, for the international community will be interesting but for all the wrong reasons.