JUST KEEP PUMPING

City AM  is worth a glance should you come across a not-too-soggy copy outside your local railway station. It’s aimed at aspirant but none too bright city workers and offers them on their now less frequent commute to the office lots of jargon-rich financial gossip. It doesn’t often stray into anything with a time horizon exceeding six months; and, like most financial reporting, it’s obsessed with the immediate effect of central bank misdirected attempts to manage inflation and includes a large dose of snake oil around new financial jargon and technology. There is, for example, a whole page in the edition on Monday, 13 May, on what might best be described as crypto-jargon.

City AM typically ignores the climate crisis except when it has some short-term effect on share prices. Thus in the same edition it reports Barclays Bank’s huge investment  in oil extraction but only as an issue which might affect their share price by upsetting nominally ‘ethical’ investment fund managers, not as criminally irresponsible behaviour. Another article in the same edition entitled  ‘Climate change isn’t a culture war, either we all win or we all lose’ might therefore be seen as a welcome departure from this short termism. A closer examination of this article dashes this hope.

The author of the article is Frances Lasok. She describes herself as a ‘freelance writer’ but is,  in reality, a Tory campaign manager, failed local government candidate and parliamentary hopeful, although her prospect for the last form of employment will have been adversely impacted by the current Tory meltdown. In her article, she recognises, contrary to the typical City AM line,  the seriousness of the climate crisis but then argues that “we are all in it together” and can be addressed with unspecified policies that are “necessary and fair”.  She criticises  environmental campaigners like Just Stop Oil for implying that the crisis largely affects the poor or, as she refers to them “people who don’t pay the bills” . She exhorts us to “support policies that incentivise rather than punish, unite rather than split and focus on the collective challenge”.  She doesn’t specify what these policies are  –  “Just Keep Pumping” perhaps?

Just Stop Oil’s tactics might be questioned, but not their goal. Fossil fuels have to  be kept in the ground if the climate crisis is not to engulf the world. To deny that the climate crisis  is a class issue is to overlook that the 0.1% , buffered by AI and their huge, accumulated wealth, will confidently expect to survive it for centuries. Meanwhile, the 1%, cocooned in the ethos of short-termism promoted by City AM,  will mistakenly hope to share in this outcome. Meanwhile, the rest the world’s population faces the prospect of extinction. Just Stop Oil, other environmental campaigners and the CP will continue strive, in their different ways, to organise and call for the climate crisis to be addressed.   

NEW YEAR QUIZ

Our New Year Quiz this year only has one question –

Question: What do you do with a system that

• Allows extreme wealth to be accumulated and passed on by some while relying on foodbanks to support others.
• Is unwilling to curtail the extraction, importation and burning of fossil fuels sufficiently quickly to avoid climate collapse.
• Supports colonial expansion and genocide by its ‘allies’.
• Has no solution for the waves of immigration  caused by wars for which it shares responsibility.
• Fails to provide adequate housing for its own population.
• Under-funds its public health service and those who work for it.
• Claims that unproportional mass votes every few years choosing between two or three  undemocratically run and very similar parties represents ‘democracy’.
• Has a hereditary head of state and a second chamber stuffed with appointees, many of whom have donated to one of the above parties.
• Possesses at huge cost weapons of mass destruction targeted at civilian populations.
• Obstructs acts of solidarity by workers and imposes restrictions on their trade unions.
• Seeks to curtail demonstrations and prosecute demonstrators.
• Maintains a ‘free’ press owned by oligarchs.
• Turns a blind eye to tax havens and other methods of tax avoidance by the rich while imposing sanctions on those claiming its meagre levels of social support.

Answer:

You abolish it!

and start to build a replacement whose organisation and wealth distribution are initially based on the amount of work we perform or have previously performed.

To contribute to this task, apply to join the Communist Party of Britain by e-mailing croydon@communistparty.org.uk.

Happy New Year!

REVOLUTIONARY THEORY

A new book by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts entitled  Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value [i] is well worth reading. Michael Roberts is a prominent financial economist and commentator. Guglielmo Carchedi is one of the founders, along with Alan Freeman and Andrew Kliman, of the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s Labour Theory of Value – aka the “Law of Value”.

TSSI is important as it:

i.  demolishes the claim by Marx’s critics, and even some respected Marxists such as Meghnad Desai, that there is a ‘transformation problem’ in Marx’s LTV, rendering it ‘internally inconsistent’;  and

ii. confirms the inescapable tendency for the rate of profit across a capitalist economy to decline.

The latter is important as, if not exactly guaranteeing the eventual collapse of capitalism  – global warming may well see to that – it does confirm the Marxist view that it’s capitalism, not Marx’s LTV, that suffers from internal contradictions; and these internal contradictions will ensure that capitalism can never be the ultimate mode of production or “end of history” in Francis Fukuyama’s notorious words. The ultimate mode of production, if humanity is to have any future, is socialism and, eventually, communism.

Much of Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value is concerned with applying, with some considerable success, Marx’s LTV to the problems currently confronting capitalism: global warming, pandemics, monetary instability , imperialism and robotics/AI. It also discusses  what a transitional economy advancing to socialism would look like and applies these criteria in a remarkably objective and unsectarian way to assess China and to the former USSR. A less successful aspect of the book is its attempt to summarise dialectical logic and use it to critique the Copenhagen Interpretation of Schrodinger’s wave mechanics. If Marxism is to retain credibility as a science, it needs to respect empirical findings and not dismiss those, such as quantum entanglement, that conflict with the authors’ definition of dialectical logic.

As Lenin proclaimed, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value is not an easy read, nor is it 100% persuasive in every area, but it does attempt push the boundaries of revolutionary theory in a number of important areas. Add it to your New Year reading list.

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[i] Pluto Press, 2023

GENOCIDE

Although the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect offers a more legalistic definition, ‘genocide’ is universally understood to refer to the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

Intent can be difficult to prove in a court of law unless the accused has been foolish or brazen enough to expound it. Netanyahu’s explicit reference on 28 October equating the attack on Gaza with to the destruction of the Amaleks[i] would appear, on the face of it, to be such an expression of genocidal intent.  A prima facie case for genocide would therefore appear to exist and it is hoped that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will respond soon to the request from Human Rights Watch on October 13 urgently requesting a public statement on the ICC’s mandate regarding Israel’s war on Gaza. See text of the letter here.

Meanwhile, the shameful silence of Keir Starmer and his stooges in the Parliamentary Labour Party over the attack of Gaza continues.

While we watch from afar the murder of Palestinians in Gaza, another genocidal threat continues to brew: the climate crisis. In the Guardian on 30 November, George Monbiot asks why the rich and powerful don’t apparently care about the world they will leave to their descendants. He points out that the richest 1% burn more carbon than the poorest 66% while multibillionaires each consume thousands of times the global average and many of these plutocrats thwart attempts to prevent ecological collapse.

Monbiot asks why oligarchs, even those who do not have a direct investment in hydrocarbons or environmental destruction, are universally hostile to environmental protection. His explanation is that:

• they fear it would curtail their personal economic and political power; or, possibly,
• they possess personality disorders, particularly narcissism and psychopathy, which may well have contributed to their acquisition of great wealth, but which stops them empathising with the rest of us.

There is, however, another, darker explanation which Monbiot overlooks. Great wealth offers the prospect surviving a climate catastrophe; and this survival, thanks to AI and robotisation, doesn’t require global population of 6 billion to serve them. A population of no more than a few million might suffice to do this.

If this explanation, with its intention self-evident, is even partially correct, it would it not also amount to genocide?

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[i]  God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. The exhortation is to  “totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”

Four and Half Wobbly Pillars – and one in reserve

The four permanent, structural pillars to society were traditionally the clergy, the nobility, the bourgeois and the press. In a supposedly ‘liberal democratic’ society, the four pillars might be more readily identified as  –

• The Civil Service – those who draft laws on behalf of the administration
• Parliament – those who pass laws
• The Judiciary – those who interpret and impose them
• The Police – those who enforce them

A case could be made to retain the original ‘Fourth Estate’, the capitalist press. Notwithstanding falling newspaper sales, it continues to prop up society; but, with declining newspaper sales, much of this support is now provided indirectly through its malign influence on the broadcast media, especially the BBC. As the 2017 general election demonstrated,  its effectiveness could be waning under the influence of social media. Furthermore, with its ownership by a handful of off-shore billionaires, it remains vulnerable to any government with even mildly social democratic pretentions.  Unfortunately, a Labour government led by Starmer would not qualify.

It tells us something about the state of the nation that all four of the permanent pillars are, if nor crumbling, showing signs of being shaky.

The power and influence of the Civil Service has, of course, long waned since its heyday reported in the Crossman Diaries and lampooned in Yes, Minister. The sacking by Liz Truss of Tom Scholar, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, would have been unthinkable in that bygone era. Meanwhile, the rank and file are under-paid and demoralised ,while the mandarins have been side-lined. Traditionally recruited from the graduate elite with the promise of status, underpinned with gongs and only modest financial rewards, a career as a mandarin no longer offers much by way of status and the gongs have become devalued through over issue. Only the modest pay remains. Small wonder that the smartest graduates now seek jobs with banks and other financial institutions.

Parliament sails on with the lower chamber largely insulated from public opinion by a rotten First Past the Post electoral system and a huge upper chamber stuffed with those rewarded simply for funding the ruling political party.

The judiciary is, of course, expected not only to action the laws passed by parliament but to do so in ways that best serve the needs of capital. Given the upper-middle class echelons from which they are drawn, this generally comes easily. Recent ruling by judges denying climate protestors any opportunity to defend their actions as a legitimate response to the climate emergency and enforcing this with contempt of court charges requiring no jury interference appears to support this view of the judiciary.  It is, however, encouraging that, in an article in the March edition of Byline Times, Tom Hardy, a defendant in such a case, reports some signs of a  push-back from the judiciary against the role they are expected to play in respect of climate change. With the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act now in place and the Public Order Bill well on the way to enactment, it would be foolish to rely on any apparent growth in the kindness of judges.

On the police, following a huge 45% pay rise by Thatcher, they in general and the ‘Met’ in particular delivered for her, playing a crucial role in suppressing the Miners Strike. With the job done, Operation Countryman investigating the City of London Police, and then extended to the Met, revealed that police membership of particular Masonic lodges formed the nucleus of a criminal conspiracy, but requests for the findings to be disclosed, have always been refused, with ‘public interest immunity’ being cited.

Tory Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke tried in 1992 to reform the Met and prune its senior ranks, but these attempts were quickly abandoned by his Tory successors and left well alone by New Labour. With institutional misogyny and racism now confirmed by  Baroness Casey in her report,  the Met, after some 30 years of neglect, is now facing institutional meltdown with neither the government nor the public having any confidence in it.

Behind these shaky pillars lurks of course, the military – ready to step from the shadows when needed. A chilling reminder of this was provided by the warning in 2015 from an anonymous senior serving general in the Sunday Times that the military “wouldn’t stand” for a government led by Jeremy Corbyn that tried to scrap Trident, pull out of NATO or shrink the size of the armed forces.

So we live in a system with four and a half shaky pillars and a fifth one in reserve. Our protection when the roof falls in?  These are our trade unions and the insight to what’s going on and what to do about it that only Marxism can provide.

A Proportional and Reasonable Response

The jury at Southwark Crown Court who unanimously refused on Wednesday to convict five activists  who threw red paint  over the entrance of the London office of Elbit Systems are to be commended. The defendants were drawing attention to Elbit’s manufacture and supply of arms used against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Gaza. Their defence was that this was a proportional and reasonable response to what they took to be a war crime. We can assume that, in acquitting them, the jury accepted this defence.

It takes guts for a jury to stand up to a judge directing them on the letter of the law and return a verdict that respects natural justice. The jury at Southwark Crown Court last week are to be commended. They set an example to those of us who will find ourselves as jurors in similar cases in which demonstrators are pleading not guilty on grounds of proportional and reasonable response . When it comes to war crimes, including ownership and deployment of nuclear weapons, genocide and government’s failure properly to address CO2 emissions, it is hard to imagine acts that would not be proportional and reasonable.

Between 2008 and 2013 Sir Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service under the Tory government (with LibDem complicity at the start). Sympathy for independent minded juries would have been an anathema to him then. Now, having undermined and then ousted Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party and moved to expel any obvious socialists from the Labour Party, he now supports Tory plans for longer prison sentences for demonstrators who inconvenience the public.

One explanation for Starmer’s conduct is that he is, and always has been, a Tory at heart. Another, more charitable, view is that, notwithstanding his legal training and lauded ‘forensic skills,’  he is just not very smart. When questioned in the clip below about his attitude to Just Stop Oil demonstrators he not only arrogantly told them, in true Tory fashion, to ‘go home’, he went on to say he had earlier been told by some clever young scientists at Imperial College about carbon capture. It’s ‘this sort of thing’ that will solve the climate crisis, he prattled on, not keeping hydro-carbons in the ground.

Wouldn’t it be great if clever scientists like the ones he had just spoken to really could invent something that would allow us to continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere? A nuclear driven vacuum cleaner with a CO2 filter, perhaps? But no such device exists and our current scientific understanding indicates that it never will. Meanwhile, politicians who sit back hoping for a magic fix before the world becomes completely uninhabitable are the ones not responding in a proportional and reasonable way. One day, they will be the ones in the dock and any defence they might then seek to rely on that their inaction was a proportional and reasonable response won’t wash with the jury.  

GREAT BRITISH ENERGY GREENWASH?

In his conference speech on Tuesday, Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer claimed that the road to net zero was no longer about “stern self-denial”, it was about “modern, 21st century aspiration”. As climate denial is no longer credible, Starmer apparently shares with the most reactionary elements on the Right the fall-back position that the climate crisis is real but can be addressed while maintaining “business as usual”. This is delusional. Net zero cannot be reached, let alone the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere halted, without denying such “aspirational” activities as frequent long-distance flying for pleasure, private jets, second homes, Chelsea tractors and other gas guzzling automobiles and low tax rates only sustainable by starving public services and public transport of funds.  These activities are currently enjoyed by only a small proportion of the population, but they are nevertheless “aspirational” for many, albeit unattainable by most in a habitable world.

As Labour’s contribution to addressing the climate crisis without interfering with the consumption of the rich and powerful, Starmer announced that, in its first year, a Labour government would create a new publicly owned company, Great British Energy, to “take advantage of the opportunities in clean British power”. Its purpose, he said, would be to promote jobs, economic growth and “energy independence”. There was no mention of promoting significant reduction in our CO2 emissions. The impression of greenwashing is difficult to dismiss.

Starmer’s commitment to creating any new publicly owned corporation is, nevertheless, to be welcomed. But let’s not forget that we once owned the British National Oil Corporation, BP, British Gas, water companies  and many other publicly owned companies and public corporations before they were flogged off cheaply by subsequent Tory governments to fill their coffers and reward their friends in the City. If this is not to be repeated, we cannot rely on Starmer’s middle-of-the-road Labour Party to banish the Tories forever from government. This is not what Starmer’s Labour is about. It doesn’t seek system change, just its own turn at governing. Great British Energy will therefore require a ‘doomsday’ provision in its constitution to ensure it cannot be privatised by subsequent Tory governments. The case for such provisions in relation to new publicly owned financial institutions was made in Banks and Banking[i], the Communist Party’s discussion paper on our financial system. The case for such a provision for Great British Energy is overwhelming.

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[i]  A discussion paper by the Political Economy Commission of the Communist Party, available for purchase at  Banks & Banking | CPB Shop (communistparty.org.uk)

System Change, not Climate Change

The Labour Movement, including that element represented by the Communist Party, has until now not been in the forefront of those calling for government action to reduce CO2 emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. The call for System Change not Climate Change has come from environmentalist rather than the Labour Movement. With the events of the last few weeks – fire and flood followed by a damning report this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – this may be beginning to change.

While there have been some initiatives such as the TUC’s paper A Just Transition to a Greener, Fairer Economy (2019), it cannot be said that the climate crisis has been top of the Labour Movement’s agenda. Short term considerations have prevailed and there has been an absence of analysis from a Marxist perspective. As illustrated by Ian Angus in his otherwise excellent book A Redder Shade of Green (2017), many on the green left considered the threat of climate change too pressing to be diverted by a call for socialism.  The discussion paper published in January 2019 by the Communist University in South London (CUiSL) was an exception, but it drew little attention at the time and generated even less response.

Marx noted how changes to the means of production result in changes to the society they support. The example he gave was the watermill supporting pre-industrial society and the steam engine its successor. The latter was built on fossil fuel extraction and consumption and is still recognisable in capitalist society of the 21^st Century. If fossil fuels are indeed to be kept in the ground – and this is the only way we know how to limit climate change – it will inevitably undermine the foundations of capitalism. This doesn’t mean that socialism will inevitably triumph, but if we work for it, it could. The alternative to socialism isn’t, however, the perpetuation of a system that has failed, capitalism. It is barbarism followed by global extinction.

The editorial in the Morning Star reflects the policy and line of the Communist Party. On Tuesday it concluded that “democratic control of the economy is a prerequisite for the action we need” to address climate change and mitigate the now unavoidable effects. Such control will not be achieved by replacing the current bunch of trough feeders with a Labour government led by Keir Starmer or any likely replacement from the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party. It’s indeed time for System Change, not Climate Change

References

A Redder Shade of Green, Ian Angus, Monthly Review Press, 2017

“https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/”

“https://communistuniversity.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/global-warming-a-discussion-paper/”

“https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/A_Just_Transition_To_A_Greener_Fairer_Economy.pdf”

LIES AND BORIS JOHNSON

Everyone knows Boris Johnson lies. It is his default strategy for extricating himself from each new self-induced mess in which he finds himself. Anyone looking for documented proof need only refer to The Assault on Truth by Peter Oborne (Simon and Schuster, 2021). It’s well worth reading and asking your local library to stock a copy so that others can do so. The Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons must also have been aware of this evidence, but she nevertheless felt obliged under parliamentary convention to eject Dawn Butler MP from the chamber yesterday for pointing out that Johnson repeatedly lied to parliament. Dawn must now be concerned that she could be ejected, like Jeremy Corbyn, from the Parliamentary Labour Party. Starmer expects his MPs to concentrate on purging socialist from the Labour Party, not attacking the government.

The discovery of 800 million barrels of oil 80 miles west of the Shetlands does, however, present Johnson with a dilemma from which it will be very difficult for him to extricate himself simply by lying. Despite the high cost of extracting this oil – perhaps $40 a barrel compared with around $4 a barrel for Saudi Crude – the oil companies, confident that capitalism isn’t serious about confining the increase in global warming to 1.5% and that profits are to be made even from this expensive crude, are keen to start pumping. A decision by the government on whether to grant them a license is due in 50 days.  In 100 days Johnson is due to host COP26 in Glasgow – billed as the last opportunity for governments to agree policies to keep global warming under 1.5%. How will he resolve this dilemma?  Can he find a solution by lying?

Joseph Goebbels’s strategy for lying was to tell big ones and keep on repeating them until people eventually come to believe them. Under this approach, Johnson could argue that we should continue to open up new oil fields because the government has been so successful in its other green policies. Like Brexit and Covid, the job is done. Eventually, of course, as Goebbels found out, one can find oneself in the proverbial bunker surrounded by the proverbial (in his case real) Red Army. Similarly, claims today that global warming is ‘sorted’ will result in cataclysm tomorrow.

The alternatives to lying that global warming is already sorted are, however, limited. If Johnson refuses the license, he risks being dismissed by his financial backers and his own backbenchers who represent similar interests. Could he grant the license but lie about it? He could claim that conditions attaching to it contained sufficient off-setting – more trees on Shetland etc. Most likely, he will lie about why the decision on the licence must be deferred until after COP 26. Then he could say that he had to issue the license or the UK would be sued in an International Arbitration Court. Quite possibly true by then, but he would have to lie about his responsibility for entering into such trade agreements.

Meanwhile, we are experiencing floods in Germany and Belgium and fires in the USA, Canada and Siberia. Best lie about them being caused by global warming.

SOCIALISM OR EXTINCTION

The leader in the Morning Star today criticising Extinction Rebellion’s objection to the YCL slogan Socialism or Extinction is a timely reminder that there is a significant element in the X-R movement that is deluded enough to think that capitalism can address global warming. It’s OK, apparently, to rally behind a slogan saying System Change, Not Climate Change, provided it remains unclear which at system is being referred to.    

The only solutions available under capitalism to address global warming are boosting energy efficiency and promoting alternative sources of energy. Implementing unstable technological fixes such as continuous release of aerosols into the upper atmosphere and ocean seeding are literally last gasp measures to ward off immediate catastrophe. As the discussion paper by the Communist University in South London (CUiSL, link below), concluded last year, the only way to address global warming is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Capitalism is incapable of doing this while fossil fuels remain the cheapest form of energy and huge profits are to be made from their extraction. It doesn’t matter how many windmills we build or how well we insulate our homes, if fossil fuels continue to be extracted, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will continue to increase and the global temperature will inexorably increase until a tipping point is reached.

Extinction Rebellion have their argument back to front. They fear that by associating themselves with communism  they will frighten people away from their well-meaning efforts to opposing global warming. However, if they conceal from their supporters that capitalism is the block to addressing global warming, their efforts to oppose it will come to nought.

As CUiSL argued, the capitalist elite have a route out of global warming. They don’t need a global population of 7.8 billion people to survive. They can retreat to a secure secure environment, say on top of a mountain, and let most of the rest of humanity die. For the rest of us the only route that avoids extinction is socialism – it’s as simple and stark as that.

GLOBAL WARMING – a discussion paper