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More old Korean articles The Fight for Abortion Rights in Ireland From Santiago to Seoul, El Salvador and the USA to Poland and India the struggle over women’s reproductive rights is global and increasingly consciously so. In this international war the island of Ireland is one of the key front lines – both in the Southern Republic and in the still British ruled six-counties of the North. In Ireland, as everywhere else, the question of a woman’s right to choose is a fundamental principle for socialists and feminists because without bodily autonomy it is impossible for women to achieve full equality. But in Ireland it is also a crucial faultline, a contradiction that strikes at the heart of the current social and political order and the focus of this contradiction in the Republic – the decisive issue in the overall battle – is the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution. This amendment, passed by referendum in 1983, states that the fetus has an equal right to life to the right to life of the mother. The effect of this is to make abortion totally illegal in all but the most restrictive of circumstances. As things stand even where pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or the embryo is afflicted with fatal fetal abnormality i.e. has no chance of survival, abortion is still not allowed. How this came about and why it is now being so strongly challenged is the outcome of the peculiarity of Irish historical development. For nearly one hundred and fifty years the Catholic Church held a grip on Irish society: it was Catholicism at its most conservative and the grip was cruel. It brought with it Mother and Baby homes run by religious orders where so-called ‘illegitimate’ children were taken from their mothers, sold off to America or allowed to die through neglect; it brought Magdalene Laundries where ‘fallen’ women were treated and slaves for decades and Industrial Schools where the children of the poor and the working classes were beaten and abused. This was not always so. It was not ‘age-old’ or in the Irish DNA. Yes, the majority of Irish people were Catholic but the church did not establish this fierce hold until after the terrible trauma of the Irish Famine, the Great Hunger, of the 1840s which claimed more than a million lives by direct starvation and forced millions more into emigration, cutting the Irish population almost in half (from 8 million in 1841 to 4.5 million in 1861).The Famine altered the structure of the Irish family establishing a pattern of late marriage, based on middle aged and older men marrying younger women after extended celibacy. The Church assumed the role of policing the sexual repression on which this rested. In 1840 the ratio of priests to Catholics was 1:3023; by 1911 it had risen to 1:210. The number of nuns in Ireland increased eightfold between 1841 and 1901. In 1926 2% of all single males aged 45-54 were priests and monks and 4.9% of single women of that age were nuns and lay sisters. The strangle hold exercised by the Catholic hierarchy was reinforced by the counter-revolution that followed the Irish Revolution of 1916 – 22. This revolution was part of the international wave that included the Russian Revolution of 1917, the German Revolution of 1918-23 and the Italian Red Years of 1919-20 . It began with the Easter Rising of 1916, led by the socialist James Connolly and Irish nationalist Padraig Pearse, and continued with mass strikes, workers occupations, formation of local soviets and the mass revolutionary War of Independence involving 100,000 people joining the Irish Republican Army. This struggle won partial independence from Britain for the 26 county ‘Free State’ in the South, but the counter-revolution led by Michael Collins, with the support of British imperialism, defeated the anti-treaty IRA, and enforced the partition of Ireland establishing two reactionary states – one Protestant, British and dominated by conservative Unionism, the other conservative, capitalist and Catholic. The alliance of the Southern Irish Bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church was personified in the association between two men: Prime Minister (later President) Eamonn De Valera and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid who between them ruled Irish society in the 1930s and 1940s and wrote its highly religious constitution. The Church dominated almost every aspect of civic society in the Republic: above all education and hospitals. Central to its ideology and practice was denial, hatred and repression of sex in general and women’s sexuality in particular. At the heart of this was total opposition to abortion. The persistence and strength of the Church’s hold is symbolised by the fact that only in 1978 was there even limited legalisation of contraception and divorce remained illegal until 1995! Northern Unionism and Orangism was rabid in its sectarian opposition to ‘Rome Rule’ i.e, Irish unification, but on one thing it was always totally in accord with ‘Rome’: its conservative attitude to sex and therefore to abortion. Ireland Changes Ireland remained economically backward, poor and church dominated, right into the 1980s but the combination of economic development from the nineties onwards and persistent struggle has brought fundamental change. The Celtic Tiger, Ireland’s spectacular economic boom, in the nineties and early noughties, transformed the country. It brought massive urbanisation undermining the rural social structures on which Catholic Ireland rested; it brought large scale immigration turning Ireland into a multi-cultural society; crucially it feminised the workforce. By 1996 there were 488,000 women at work – an increase of 213,000 since 1971. This compares with a growth of just 23,000 in male employment over the same period. In 1996 half the female workforce was married – 241,400 married women were working outside the home, an increase of more than 600 percent since 1971. All this produced new generations of women and men, unwilling to accept the old stifling restrictions and oppression. But, of course, change did not come by itself – mass struggle on the streets played a crucial role. In early 1992, nine years after the passing of the anti-choice 8th Amendment, there came what is known as the X-case. On 6 February the Attorney General Harry obtained an interim injunction restraining Miss X, a 14 year old girl, pregnant as a result of rape and reportedly suicidal, from travelling to Britain to obtain an abortion.. Up and down the country there was an explosion of anger. Thousands of mainly young women and men poured onto the streets to say, ‘Let her go.’ Day after day and night after night thousands of women and men took to the streets. In Dublin there were several semi-spontaneous marches of up to 10,000 people – the equivalent population-wise of over 100,000 in London. These numbers were matched proportionately in Cork, Waterford, Galway and smaller towns too. The country was convulsed. And, crucially, the Government and the High Court, terrified by this explosion, backed down. This victory was a massive breakthrough and in the new climate the deep hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy started to be exposed. Ireland’s best known bishop, Eamon Casey, was revealed by his partner, to have fathered a child, Another well known priest, famous for preaching chastity, was shown to have had two sons by his ‘housekeeper’..This gave courage to people who had been abused physically and sexually by priests and nuns under the old repressive regime. As they started to talk, news came almost weekly of priests being arrested. Between 1993 and 1997 priests from all over the country were convicted of sexual abuse, including rape, of children as young as eight years old. And it emerged that church officials, having been made aware of the allegations, had typically acted, not to protect the children and bring the culprit to book, but to protect the church and let the guilty go free – often to abuse elsewhere. The moral authority of the church never recovered. The dramatic change in attitudes that has taken place is shown in the fact that in 2015 nearly 4 out of 10 births were outside marriage and 59% of those were to cohabiting couples and above all in the resounding majority for same sex marriage in the Marriage Equality referendum in 2015 – 62.07 % to 37.93% with over 80% in favour in the Dublin working class areas radicalised by the water charges struggle. The battle is far from over, however. Ireland’s two main establishment political parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail who have dominated Irish politics for nearly a century, try to present themselves as ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’. The new Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, is openly gay and makes a point of attending Pride Marches. But in reality both these parties still depend on their base among conservative rural farmers and business people who remain unreconstructed. Moreover, the Church retains both a lot of institutional power (it still runs most schools and many hospitals) and considerable ability to mobilise its supporters. For these conservative forces the issue of abortion is their line in the sand and they will fight tooth and nail to keep the 8th Amendment: in a recent demonstration backed by almost every Catholic parish church in the country the so-called Pro-Lifers (i.e. Anti-choice) put at least 30,000 on the streets of Dublin. But there is also a vibrant movement for repeal. On March 8, International Women’s Day, earlier this year , thousands of mainly young women and men occupied O’Connell Bridge, the Main bridge in the centre of Dublin, and held it for several hours. Then in the evening of the same day about 30,000 marched to the Dail (parliament) demanding an immediate referendum. As this article is being written vigorous preparations are being made for a major March for Choice in Dublin on 30 September, followed by a march in Belfast on 14 October. At the moment it seems likely that the Government, after decades of prevarication and evasion, will be forced to hold a referendum on the 8th Amendment at some point but they seem to want to delay until the Pope comes to visit Ireland in 2018. There now seems to a solid majority in Ireland for Repeal but the real issue is likely to be what replaces the 8th. Will it be replaced by some new restrictive constitutional clause in the constitution which confines the right to abortion to a number of special cases or will it, as the left argues it should, open the way to free, safe and legal abortion for all? The Role of Socialists Revolutionary socialists, and in particular members of the Irish Socialist Workers Party and now People Before Profit, have played a leading role in this struggle since its inception. This is because we always a) took an absolutely principled stand for a woman’s right to choose; b) understood that this was a class issue disproportionately affecting working class women who lack resources (along with asylum seekers who are not allowed to travel) while the rich have always had access to abortion; c) argued for a ‘people power’ strategy based on mass mobilization in the streets. We have also been able to use our parliamentary representation to assist the struggle with our Deputies , especially our woman TD Bríd Smith, acting as ‘tribunes of the people’. People Before Profit moved a bill in the Parliament to effectively decriminalise abortion by reducing the current 14 year sentence to a 1 euro fine (this was defeated by the mainstream parties) and Bríd Smith became the first Irish TD (MP) to come out as having had an abortion. In the weeks and months ahead socialists have the particular tasks in the campaign of building its grass roots organisation in working class areas and fighting against any tendency to water down women’s demands in favour of some shoddy and unprincipled compromise which may well be the strategy of the Labour Party and Sinn Fein. Winning women’s right to choose will be a significant blow not just to the declining power of the Catholic hierarchy but to the overall hegemony of the Irish ruling class and its main parties. Speed the day! KOREA COLUMN 37 The Marxist Theory of Women’s Oppression In last month’s column I argued that patriarchy theory, although very widespread in feminist circles, is unable to provide a coherent or convincing explanation of why women were and are oppressed. In contrast, however, Marxism is able to provide such an account. A satisfactory theory of women’s oppression must be a) materialist and b) historical. By materialist I mean it must explain how the inferior or second class status of women is rooted in real material social relations which in turn are related to the level of economic development in society. It cannot simply say that is a matter of human nature, or all in the genes; nor can it just say that it is ‘cultural’ if by cultural is meant that women are oppressed because men believe themselves superior or women believe themselves inferior, without an explanation of the material causes of these beliefs. By historical I mean it must be able to show when and how women’s oppression began, (approximately, of course – it is not a question of a blow - by- blow account), why it has continued up to the present day, and, if it is to be a theory of women’s liberation, how circumstances have changed so as to make equality now a real possibility. We have already seen that patriarchy theory fails all these tests; we shall now see that Marxist theory passes them. Marxism begins by arguing that although the oppression of women has been in place for millennia, it is NOT universal or eternal. On the contrary, for hundreds of thousands of years, during the period when people were hunters and gatherers, which is how ALL humans lived prior to the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, women were not systematically oppressed at all. In other words for most of human history, well over ninety per cent of it, women and men lived in rough equality. Equality not oppression is thus the norm of human society. How do we know this to be the case? We know it primarily through studies of hunter-gatherer societies that survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and have been investigated by anthropologists. There was the pioneering work on Native Americans by Lewis Morgan on which Frederick Engels based much of his classic Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.(Some of this anthropological data is now considered false but the method remains valid). There is Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Myths of Male Dominance which investigated the Montagnais-Naskapi people of Canada, William Turnbull’s The Forest People on Pigmies in the Congo, and, especially, Richard Borshay Lee’s The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society which studied the so-called Kalahari bush people. What these studies show is that in hunter-gatherer societies general material equality was guaranteed by the fact that as nomadic people (following the game) foragers were unable to accumulate more property than could be carried daily on each person’s back. Broad gender equality was a product of the fact that more than half the community’s food was supplied by gathering which was mainly done by women. The emergence of women’s oppression, Marxism argues, was the result of two great and interlinked social transitions: from foraging to agriculture and from classless to class divided society. It is impossible to put a simple date on this process since it develops at very different times in different parts of the world. However it probably begins about 12-10 thousand years ago with the first signs of agriculture in the fertile crescent of the Middle East (from today’s Iraq to the Nile) and takes about 5-6000 thousand years to fully establish itself as the dominant form of social organisation. The coming of agriculture, a development in the forces of production, brought with it human settlement, first villages, then towns, and the first production of a social surplus – goods over and above what was needed for day-to-day survival - and thus the possibility of wealth accumulation. However because this early surplus was very limited and insufficient to provide a comfortable life for the majority, it meant that the wealth accumulation, the private property, was concentrated in the hands of a small minority, the ‘ruling class’.These new ruling classes used their property (cattle herds, land etc) to force others to work for them – as slaves or peasants – and to construct state apparatuses (armies, castles, prisons, judges etc) which would defend their property and privileges. The shift from foraging to agriculture also meant changing from a form of production in which women’s labour – mainly gathering – was equal in importance to that of men, to a form- ploughing and herding - where the bulk of society’s wealth was produced by men. This was because pulling the heavy plough all day and herding cattle were incompatible with nursing and rearing young children. Consequently control of the social surplus and, with it, of the state passed mainly into the hands of men With this came the abandonment of the loose pairing and collective child rearing practices typical of hunter-gathering societies and the development of the male dominated, exclusive, religiously and legally policed family in which wives were seen as the property of their husbands and as restricted to domestic duties and rearing their own children. This type of family, which took many sub-forms (for example polygamy) in different societies, was most strongly established in and for the ruling classes. It had the economic function of securing the inheritance and non-dissolution of accumulations of property (land, herds. etc) and power but socially it meant the subordination of women to men everywhere. Engels called it ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’. The Marxist theory of women’s oppression therefore sees it as deriving from a definite stage in the development of the forces and relations of production. It also sees it as linked to biology (woman and man are, after all, biological categories) but only at a particular long passed moment in history, and not at all in the sense of biology determining the destiny of women now or in the future. This raises the question of why women’s oppressive, beginning so long ago, has continued through thousands of years and still continues, albeit in moderated form, in modern capitalist society. Obviously, the whole story cannot be told here but in ancient, feudal and Asiatic or tributary type societies the function of securing property inheritance was probably the key to the survival of the male dominated family. In capitalist society this is still a factor but there are a number of other aspects of women’s oppression which benefit the system and in which the ruling class has a huge vested interest. First, making the care of husbands and children the ‘natural’ duty of women enables the capitalist class to obtain the refreshment and reproduction of this and the next generation of its workers, for almost nothing. Second, by stressing the primacy of loyalty to the family the ruling class is able to foster a narrow conservative view of the world which cuts across wider class consciousness and class solidarity. Third, undermining the ‘ right’ of women to work, especially in leadership roles, makes women into a second class sector of the workforce , who can be paid less and exploited more. This vested interest of the bourgeoisie in the family and in the oppressed condition of women is why the full liberation of women requires the overthrow of capitalism through a united struggle of the working class. While the unity of the working class requires that working class men , as well as working class women, fight for women’s equality and women’s liberation. John Molyneux 29 June 2008 KOREA COLUMN 12 What is Socialism? So far this column has been dealing mainly with what Marxism has to say about capitalism and how it can be overthrown. But, of course, Marxism is not only against capitalism, it is also for socialism and now seems a good point to say something about the kind of society Marxists aim for and struggle to bring into being. Interestingly, Marx wrote relatively little about the future socialist society ( though what he did say was profound and important). There are no detailed plans or instructions as to how the government should be organized, or how much people should be paid, or what forms of transport should be adopted or anything like that. But there is a good reason for this. For Marx socialism was not a blueprint for an ideal society which he had dreamt up, it was the form of society which would necessarily emerge from the victory of the working class in the struggle against capitalism. From this it follows that the precise features of socialism cannot be foreseen, first because they will depend on the specific circumstances in which that working class victory takes place, which cannot be known in advance, and second, because these matters will, precisely, be decided by the workers of the future themselves. Moreover the workers of the socialist future will be very different from the workers – or any of us – today because they will have been profoundly changed by the process of overthrowing capitalism. Just saying this, however, points to the fundamental feature of socialism as understood by Marx which differentiates it completely from the fake socialism of the Soviet bloc, China, North Korea etc., namely that it is a society really run by working people themselves. When Marx spoke of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ as the transitional phase between capitalism and socialism he meant not a dictatorship over the proletariat or a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat by an individual, party or elite, well meaning or otherwise, but the rule of society by the working class as a whole, real collective workers’ power. To rule society the working class has to create its own, new state apparatus. Marx understood this very clearly because he saw it done in practice in the Paris Commune of 1871, and today we know better than Marx what this will probably look like, not because we are cleverer than him, but because we have the additional historical experience of the early years of the Russian Revolution, and of a number of near revolutions in Germany (1918-23), Italy (1919-20), Spain (1936-37), Hungary (1956), Chile (1972) and elsewhere. From this experience we know that it means the creation of a network of representative bodies or councils (called ‘soviets’ in the Russian Revolution ) based on the working class in struggle, above all in its workplaces, but also (depending on circumstances) reflecting the army, the community and so on. And that these workers’ councils become the core of the new state, to which the government, military forces, ministries etc. are responsible and accountable. If the working class is really to run society this new apparatus has to genuinely reflect the collective interests and will of the working class. This means operating on highly democratic principles and again we know some of these from the experience of The Commune and the Russian Soviets, e.g. that council delegates should be immediately recallable by the bodies (mainly workplace meetings) that elected them, and that they should be paid no more than a skilled worker’s wage. It is also clear that to sustain itself workers’ political power must rest on a firm foundation of workers’ economic power (all political power rests ultimately on economic power). To this end the working class will use its state to establish collective ownership of the major means of production, distribution and exchange which will need to be managed by the workers themselves, through democratically elected committees. It should be noted that in this view of socialism it is workers’ power that is the basic principle from which follows the need for state ownership, not state ownership as such. State ownership by itself, without workers’ power and workers’ control, is state capitalism not socialism. We also know, both from Marxist theory and from what happened in Russia, that although workers’ power may be established first in one country it must spread internationally if it is to survive. Achieving this will doubtless involve great struggle, but if we allow ourselves the luxury of thinking about an internationally united socialist society run by working people themselves, then certain things will necessarily follow. Production will be democratically planned to meet human need. And if the immense productive forces already developed by capitalism are made to serve people’s needs it will be possible to abolish the poverty, malnutrition and deprivation that have for so long afflicted the majority of the world’s population. No one will have four mansions, five cars and two private jets but everyone will have the necessities required for a decent life. Indeed they will have more than just a decent life for such a society will also provide the education, leisure and, above all, the stimulating work to unleash a massive development in the intellectual life and human personality of hitherto ordinary people which in turn will feed into the further development of society. Such a socialist society will be a society of peace because the root causes of war in the past – the struggle between lords, dynasties, corporations and states for land, resources and profits – will have disappeared. It will also, once the remnants of the old class system fade away, become a truly classless society – like the classless societies of the hunter gatherers but with modern technology and international – because with production owned and controlled by the associated producers the very basis of class, exploitation of one group by another, will have been eliminated. This in turn will pave the way for the disappearance of the state i.e. of any special apparatus of coercive power standing over society. Real human freedom will be realized. This still doesn’t tell us whether the people of the future will choose to live in houses that hug the ground or reach for the sky, will travel by bus, bicycle or invention as yet unknown, or will eat peaches and cream or strawberries and yogurt but it does tell us why socialism is a goal worth fighting for. John Molyneux November 14, 2006 KOREA COLUMN 43 The Question of Charity About nine months ago it was suggested to me that I should write one of these columns on where socialists stand on the question of giving to charity. I never got round to it because there always seemed something more important or more pressing to write about. Right now in Britain, however, the question of one particular charity has suddenly become the hottest political topic of the day, and every socialist, every revolutionary – indeed more or less everyone engaged in politics – has had to take a position on it. How this came about I shall deal with in a while, but the episode has convinced me that the issue of charity is worth visiting after all. Posed in general terms the first point socialists have to make about charity is that, in most cases, it is manifestly unable to solve the very issues it is addressing. Take, for example, Oxfam, which aims to respond to world hunger and poverty. Oxfam is one the biggest, most successful and well known charities in Britain , if not the world. In the year 2007-8 it raised £299.7 million and spent £214.2 million. In itself this is quite a large sum but when it comes to solving world poverty it is no more than a drop in the ocean. It is not that the problem of hunger is insoluble, or even very difficult to solve. It is well known that there is more than enough food in the world to provide a decent diet for everyone. It is just that when it is a matter of dealing with ANY major WORLD problem nothing is serious till we are talking about hundreds of billions not millions. Children in Need, one of Britain’s best known charity events which receives a whole evening of BBC television coverage, raises about £20 million. The government bail-out for ONE bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was £20 billion (1000 times as much as Children in Need). According to Barack Obama the bonuses paid to Wall St bankers at the end of 2008 came to $20 billion. World arms spending in 2008 was $1.47 trillion with $711 billion contributed by the US, and so on. Of course the advocates of charity have an obvious answer to this. They can simply say we know we are not solving the problem but we are doing something – every little helps. Well yes…but we wouldn’t think much of a fire service that responded to blazing buildings with water pistols ( at least they’d be doing something) or tried to tackle a forest fire with watering cans and garden hoses. And the truth is that many charitable efforts, however well intentioned, are closer to the water pistol than to proper fire engine. And this is by no means the end of the story for there is more wrong with charity than it just not being enough. We also have to consider its political and ideological role Charity can easily be used by our rulers either to suggest they are doing something about a problem when really they are not, or even when they are actively engaged in making the problem worse. For example, the British government, which has been craven in its support for the state of Israel in general and the assault on Gaza in particular, has pledged a pathetic £20 million (20 million again) in humanitarian aid. Charitable and ‘voluntary’ efforts can be, and often are, used by governments to excuse their failure to meet their obligations in terms of education, health and welfare services. Every time I see a hospital launching an appeal for funds for some new piece of life saving equipment I find myself asking why the military don’t need to do this. How I wonder would the ‘Trident Appeal’ fare, with only £20 or so billion (billion again) needed to renew the nuclear submarine missile system? Another problem with many charites is that they become businesses in their own right, involving substantial administrative overheads and supporting lucrative careers for many directors, fund raisers and marketing managers. Even where there is nothing strictly illegal or underhand going on, as there sometimes is, there something obnoxious about people on $100,000 salaries appealing for the poor and needy – America’s largest charity United Way is run by Brian Gallagher, salary $973.000 p.a. This problem becomes especially acute with NGOs operating in poor countries where the NGO agents receive incomes many hundreds of times greater than those of the local people they are supposed to be helping. Then there are the fabulously wealthy celebrity charity merchants like Paul McCartney and Bono who stage concerts and suchlike urging ordinary people to give to good causes. For example Bono’s charity RED claims on its website to have raised $100 million for Aids in Africa in two years, but the truth is he could pay that out of his own pocket and still have more money than he could spend in a lifetime. still the ideological problems inherent in its nature that it focuses on symptoms not causes of social and humanitarian issues and it tends to depict its beneficiaries as helpless passive victims, not people capable of resistance or self liberation. For Marxists and revolutionary socialists the conviction that the fundamental problems of poverty and human degradation can only be and will only be solved by the collective struggle of working people themselves is fundamental. But despite the validity of all these criticisms this is not the end of the story, especially when we approach the question of charity not just in theory but as a matter of concrete day to day politics. For all its faults there is in the motivation that leads ordinary people to donate to charity an impulse socialists need to relate to and encourage and certainly not to dismiss or disparage. For example if someone comes round my canteen at work with a collecting tin for the homeless my inclination would be to make a small donation but combine it with a question about why we have homeless people in a rich country like Britain. Then, of course, there are many individuals or groups who are not able to help themselves or to wage a collective struggle and many situations where people need emergency help. In such circumstances there is no Chinese Wall between charity or aid and solidarity, which socialists enthusiastically support; moreover the question of aid, or lack of it from governments, can become an issue of political solidarity. Thus when the tsunami struck South East Asia in December 2004 the generous response from ordinary people {in Britain] embarrassed the British government into increasing its original miserly aid donation. Socialists needed to be part of that. Then with the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005, the appalling lack of help for the city’s black and poor, became a key event undermining the political credibility of George Bush. Which brings me to the circumstance I referred to at the beginning of this column. It is hard to think of anyone in the world at this moment more in need of emergency aid than the besieged people of Gaza. Yet the BBC, obviously under direct Zionist influence, has refused to broadcast the (standard) Disaster Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza. This blatant partiality, coming on the back of sustained pro- Israel, pro-Zionist reporting, has made aid to Gaza a matter of international solidarity of crucial political importance. Two general points in conclusion: first socialists have and need general theory and principles but the application of those principles to immediate practice does not always follow in a simple straight line and for Marxists truth is ultimately concrete. Second in the course of the overall struggle revolutionaries have to relate both to working people’s anger and their humanity and provide a political focus for both. John Molyneux 1 February 2009 KOREA COLUMN 40 Are the Media all Powerful? One of the immediate problems faced by socialists everywhere is that everywhere the vast bulk of the mass media is hostile to socialism and uses its considerable power to defend the status quo i.e. capitalism. Sometimes this bias is absolutely blatant and includes not only pro- capitalist but also pro –government propaganda as in most of the world’s dictatorships or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in America. Sometimes it more subtle and, as with the BBC, hidden beneath a veneer of impartiality and commitment to political neutrality and the representation of different points of view. But always the fundamental stance is the same: capitalism is the sensible, natural and inevitable way of organising production. Anyone who thinks otherwise is at best an eccentric and most likely a wicked ‘extremist’ because ‘everyone knows’ that ‘moderates’ are good and ‘extremists’ are bad and that anyone who wants to abolish capitalism is an extremist by definition. Where television, the most important mass media, is concerned this basic stance affects not only news bulletins but also the choice of panellists on discussion programmes, the themes of and commentary on documentaries, the story lines and characters in soap operas and drama series, the nature and tone of game shows- in short the total output. And obviously it is the same with newspapers. Their pro-capitalist standpoint is reflected, first and foremost in what is and, most importantly, in what is NOT reported, as well as in how it is reported, how it is commented on in editorials, and opinion pieces, and again it runs all the way through to the cartoons and the sports coverage. Nor is the basic position any different in thefilm industry, radio or any of the other forms of mass media. This should not surprise us. Mass media are forms of communication which enable small groups of people to communicate simultaneously with vast numbers of other people. They all involve considerable capital outlay and are therefore owned either by people with lots of capital i.e. capitalists or by states which at bottom represent the interest of the capitalist class. The pro-capitalist bias of the media is therefore, under capitalism, absolutely inevitable. It is one part of the general phenomenon of ruling class ideological dominance noted and explained by Karl Marx in 1845 (before most of the modern mass media even came into existence) The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (The German Ideology). The questions that arise therefore are how much does this ruling class control of the media matter, and how can it be challenged? Let’s take the second question first. It is obviously vital that socialists should develop their own means of communication - newspapers such as Counterfire or other forms such as posters, leaflets, magazines, websites, blogs, films etc – and they should also try, wherever possible, to get their ideas across in the capitalist media. However, while capitalism exists and the capitalist class remains in power, socialist media will not be able to displace the bourgeois media, and socialist ideas will not be able to obtain more than marginal representation , anymore than it is possible for socialist education to replace state schools and bourgeois universities. Thus the crucial issue becomes how strong is the grip of the bourgeois media on the minds of the majority of working people and how can that hold be broken? Clearly the media, taken as a whole, are very influential and sometimes it seems like they can manipulate people at will, stirring up xenophobia and racism one minute, whipping up war fever the next, and always blotting out any challenge to the system. But it is important to understand there are always definite limits to the media’s power. For a start there are always some people in society (albeit a minority) who reject the media view of the world pretty much as a whole. If you are reading this article it is likely that you are part of this minority. Moreover, we (I am part of it too) are not in any fundamental or innate way different from other people who don’t (as yet) reject the dominant view – it is simply that we have had experiences that have led us to question the system more than others. Secondly, the vast majority of people who accept much of what the media says, nevertheless remain sceptical of some of its messages. For example, in Britain, throughout the twentieth century the large majority of newspapers supported the Conservative Party and only a small minority backed the Labour Party but this did not stop Labour winning a number of general elections. And in America today the media is overwhelmingly behind the Bush administration’s $700 million bail out of Wall St. but this doesn’t stop it being highly unpopular with the American public. Then there are things which are so unpopular that the media themselves know they would be wasting their time trying to sell to people - for example, mass unemployment. There are times when the ruling class, privately, thinks that a dose of mass unemployment would be just the thing to undermine the unions and break working class resistance, but they know they can’t say this openly. The best they can hope for is to convince people that some scapegoat (immigrants, refugees, greedy trade unions etc) is to blame, but they always have, at least to pretend to care about unemployment. In general it is clear that where media influence is at its weakest is when reality diverges most radically from its preferred message and especially when the issue is one which affects people directly as part of their everyday experience. One of the reasons why capitalist economic crisis creates opportunities for socialism is not just that workers are radicalised by the suffering inflicted on them but also because the crisis dramatically exposes and undermines the story the capitalist class wants to tell about itself. However, the circumstance in which working people are particularly likely to see through and reject the lies of the media is when they are engaged in collective struggle, because then they themselves become the news and their own actions and experiences are what is being lied about. When the collective struggle is also a MASS struggle, when it starts to involve the majority of the majority of the working class in action, for instance in a general strike, then the hold of the mass media really starts to break down., especially as this is also a situation in which the working class gets a sense of its own power and develops the confidence to look for alternatives. Combine conditions of crisis with mass struggle and one further ingredient is needed, the mass revolutionary workers party with its own media to articulate an alternative socialist worldview. Include that in the equation and we will break not only the grip of the media on the minds of working people but the power of the capitalist class as a whole including its power over the media. John Molyneux 29 September 2008 KOREA COLUMN 38 Is Democratic Centralism anti -democratic? Democratic centralism is a principle of party of organisation which combines democratic debate and policy making with united action by all party members to implement the policy. Since the days of Lenin and the Bolsheviks most Marxist parties have operated, or claimed to operate, on the basis of democratic centralism. I say ‘claimed’ because in numerical terms the big majority of so-called Marxist parties have, in fact, been Stalinist parties loyal to the Soviet Union and in such parties the centralism was overwhelming, with every party and every individual expected to toe the line decided in Moscow, while the democracy was virtually non- existent. Not surprisingly this experience has given democratic centralism a bad name. Now, it is clear that if we reject Marxist concepts or practices on the grounds that they were used, perverted or discredited by Stalinism then we have to reject Marxism and socialism in their entirety, but it also clear that hostility to democratic centralism is not confined to its Stalinist incarnations. There are many on the left – left reformists, libertarians, autonomists, anarchists etc. - who criticise Trotskyist and other strongly anti-Stalinist parties over this issue. For example, in Britain, the Respect MP George Galloway, attacked the Socialist Workers Party for its democratic centralism, saying its members were like ‘Russian dolls’. (If this ‘Russian doll’ metaphor is circulating on the left in South Korea it is doubtless because it was picked up from Galloway). However, leaving George Galloway aside, there is clearly a widespread view on the left, that democratic centralism is a deeply flawed, inherently anti-democratic organisational model. Despite this I intend to argue a) that democratic centralism is ESSENTIAL for a revolutionary workers party to perform effectively as a leader of the working class in struggle; b) that far from being anti-democratic it is really the MOST democratic form of party organisation. To grasp the importance of democratic centralism it is necessary to understand that the attempt to combine democracy and centralism is not some arbitrary organisational principle dreamt up by Lenin or any other Marxist, but is rooted, in embryonic form, in the very nature of working class struggle. The working class struggle is a struggle from below, a struggle of ‘the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’ From its earliest days (for example, the Chartists in Britain) one of its most important demands was for political democracy, the democratic republic. When workers realised that political democracy was not enough to change society they demanded not less but more democracy, democracy extended to production and society as a whole, hence social democracy. It was therefore natural and inevitable that workers’ organisations, trade unions, associations, parties and the like adopted – at least at first – democratic constitutions and procedures. But there is also an element of centralism inherent in workers struggle. The power of capital is by its nature highly centralised Decision making in any capitalist enterprise is top down, from the owner or the Board of Directors, and enforced with virtually military discipline. As capitalism ages and the ownership of capital becomes more concentrated, so this centralisation becomes ever more extensive and intense. If Samsung, Ford or Exxon, make a strategic decision on pricing, plant closure or dealing with an industrial dispute, they will expect that decision to be implemented by every manager in the company across the world. To assert their rights against this power, workers have no choice but to combine their forces, to agree to act together. Consider the most basic form of the class struggle, the strike. The workers of a particular workplace, company or industry decide, democratically (ideally through voting at mass meetings) whether or not to go on strike, but that decision is then binding on everyone. If the decision is against striking and some individuals still walk out, they will almost certainly simply be sacked. But if the decision goes in favour of the strike then every worker involved is expected to come out and anyone who does not is a scab and a traitor. This is democratic centralism in embryo. And to those who rail against democratic centralism it is worth pointing out that bourgeois liberals have always denounced trade union solidarity and discipline as an infringement of the sacred rights of the individual, but have never even noticed how the centralised power of capital affects the rights of working people. The democratic centralism of the revolutionary party is based on the democratic centralism of the astrike, but there is also a difference. In the strike it applies, and is limited, mainly to the economic struggle. In the party it applies also to the political and , to an extent, to the ideological level. This is because the revolutionary party is a voluntary, minority organisation, within the workers’ movement as a whole, whose aim is to lead the working class in the conquest of political i.e. state power and which, in order to achieve that aim must, wage a many sided ideological struggle against the dominance of bourgeois ideas in the working class and against rival political tendencies (reformism, Stalinism etc) who experience has shown, will hold back the workers’ struggle and betray it to the bourgeoisie. The necessity of this political democratic centralism can be seen if one replaces the example of the strike with the example of a revolutionary situation i.e a situation where the masses are in action, where the old state machine has been undermined, where, perhaps, there are elements of dual power – workers’ councils, occupied workp[laces etc. – and the fateful decision has to be made, for or against insurrection. How can such a decision be taken in the middle of the most intense class warfare?. Some kind of national referendum is not possible, nor can there be a series of parliamentary style public debates, not without alerting the class enemy and inviting counter-revolutionary repression. In fact only a party with roots in every section of the working class and a strong tradition of internal democratic debate will be able to assess correctly the mood of the masses and the chances of success. But once the decision has been made it must obviously be carried out in unity (in Seoul, Gyeongju and Busan, or London, Manchester and Birmingham) if the revolution is not to be crushed. Be that as it may, the critics will say, we are not in a revolutionary situation, and the trouble with democratic centralism is that it too easily manipulated by bad leaders in the hear and now. In fact anti - democratic manipulation is always possible, whatever the formal constitution of a party, but democratic centralism makes it more difficult not easier. This is because it disciplines not only the rank and file of the party but also the leaders. Imagine a party with, apparently, a high level of democratic debate and discussion but very little centralism. Such a party was the old British Labour Party before Tony Blair got his hands on it. Its annual conferences were full of passionate debates, criticisms of the party leadership, and resolutions democratically proposed and voted upon. Yet it all counted for nothing . Because there was no centralism the party leadership, especially when it was in government, simply ignored the decisions of the party. Without centralism there was no democracy because the working class majority of the party had no means ensuring its views were acted upon. At bottom the question of democratic centralism is a class question. The working class needs both democracy and centralism because it is a movement from below which can succeed only by acting together. John Molyneux 27 July 2008 KOREA COLUMN 39 Should workers cooperate with employers to make their firms successful? In times of economic difficulty or recession employers frequently turn to their workers and say something like this: ‘Times are hard; we all need to tighten our belts and sacrifice a bit at the moment, but if we all pull together the company will soon return to prosperity and that will benefit us all in the long run’. This is an extremely popular argument which virtually unanimous support – among employers. In fact I doubt there is an employer on the globe that doesn’t claim to want the cooperation of its workforce. This is hardly surprising. Oppressors through out the ages have urged their victims to cooperate. Doubtless the Egyptian Pharaohs were pleased when their slaves cooperated in hauling the vast stones that built the Pyramids. The slave owners in the Americas showed their appreciation of cooperative slaves by making the ‘house’ slaves and granting them small ‘privileges’ relative to the ‘field’ Negroes. The SS secured the Jews’ cooperation in boarding the cattle trucks by not telling them their true destination. The problem with the ‘cooperate with company’ argument, however, is that it is widely accepted not just by bosses (and their allies in government and the media, of course) but also by many workers. Evidence for this can be seen in the way trade union officials so often bend over backwards to appear ‘reasonable’ and to stress that it is the management who are being uncooperative. Indeed the argument can be made to sound like simple ‘common sense. Let us confront it in its strongest form. Company X, which makes widgets, is in trouble. It has just announced huge losses for the last two quarters and the management admit they are on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a multinational company and there is also the possibility it will close its operation in South Korea and shift production to the Philippines where wages are lower. If, however, the workers will accept a pay cut of 10% and a no strike deal for two years, management pledge to keep the factory open and say they are confident of winning new orders. The Government is backing the deal and there are rumours, if it is accepted, of massive investment. Besides unemployment is high and if Company X closes its workers will struggle to find new jobs. Surely, in these circumstances, it makes sense to cooperate? There are parts of this argument, which as any decent trade union representative will know, have to be challenged immediately. How real is the threat to move production overseas? Multinationals are always trying to blackmail their workers this way, when often the costs and disadvantages of relocation are prohibitive (which is why they are in South Korea, not the Philippines, in the first place). What guarantees are there for the promises about the future? What is stop the management from coming back in six months time and saying we are very sorry, we meant what we said at the time, but things have changed and now we are closing anyway, or we want another 10% cut? PLUS what about management salaries ETC However these points do not really get to heart of the matter. Let us assume for the moment that the employers are, broadly speaking, telling the truth, at least as they see it and as far as they can know it (I strongly advise against making this assumption in practice). Then let us ask what Company X being ‘in trouble’ and facing closure really means. Obviously it means not making a profit or not making enough profit and the most likely reason for that is either: there is another company, Y or Z, capturing the widget market by making them better or selling them cheaper; or there is a decline in the widget market, due to other companies or the public being less willing to spend their money on widgets; or some combination or variation on both these reasons. Now let us assume that the workers of Company X agree to the 10% pay cut demanded. This will give the profits of Company X a boost and restore its competitive edge over Company Y. Now it will be Y’s turn to be in trouble and Y’s workers turn to face redundancy. Obviously the Y management will say to their workers, the X workers over there took a wage cut, you must do the same or we will be uncompetitive. But if the Y workers follow the example of the X workers, all it means is that the relative competitive positions of Companies X and Y will be restored with both their workforces earning less. This ‘race to the bottom’ has been the essence of neo-liberal globalisation adopted by ruling classes nearly everywhere in their drive to raise profits. If we look back over this ‘workers should cooperate argument’ it is clear that workers’ ability to see through it is bound up with their ability to see beyond themselves as workers in one isolated workplace and look also at the workplace and workers down the road and ultimately round the world. For the only real answer to the bosses’ strategy, and it is a strategy as well as an idea, is for the workers of company X to link up with the workers of Company Y (and Z etc) and together reject wage cuts and redundancy. It should also be clear that workers ability to do this is a matter not just of their intellectual understanding, their consciousness, but also of their confidence and organisation. For workers the crucial question is not just the abstract argument, but the calculation: if we here at X resist will the workers at Y and elsewhere fight with us? This why trade union organisation is so important, so that workers in one workplace, then across different workplaces, and ultimately across the class as a whole are linked to each other and can take action together. It is also why a revolutionary party is vital. In practice in most workplaces there will some workers whose whole inclination is to accept the bosses’ cooperation argument and others who consciously reject it. Between these two poles there will be those, probably a majority, who are unsure. What actually happens, the course of the class struggle, depends on which pole is able to win over the waverers. The revolutionary party is simply an organisation of the rejectionists, in every possible workplace, across all boundaries, to increase their ability to win the argument against the collaborators and lead the majority of the class in struggle. Thus we see that this single argument contains in essence the whole logic of the class struggle. Either collaborate with the boss and compete with other workers, or join with other workers to fight the boss. The first road leads, in the end, to racism, nationalism, war and fascism, i.e. to barbarism. The second road leads to socialism. John Molyneux 1 September 2008 KOREA COLUMN 41 Some Thoughts on the Crisis This month it is very hard for a Marxist to write about anything other than the astonishing crisis that has swept through world capitalism in the last six weeks or so, especially as this crisis is now beginning to have a serious impact in South Korea. However knowing that Candlelight Resistance (along with every other newspaper) will already have been analysing this crisis I will offer only some Marxist observations on the situation rather than an overall account. Watching the crisis unfold I have wanted both to laugh and to cry. To laugh at the contradictions and contortions the western ruling classes and their political and ideological representatives have fallen into as they have been forced to abandon all the economic doctrines they have been proclaiming with such certainty over the last twenty years or so. To cry at the misery that, without a shadow of a doubt, will be inflicted on the working people and the poor of the world as we are expected to pay up the bill for their crisis. There has been plenty to laugh about. For example George Bush’s right wing neo- conservative neo-liberal government being forced into the biggest nationalisation in history, with the takeover of mortgage firms, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, followed by a series of other nationalisations. But isn’t that … socialism? Well actually it is state capitalism not socialism but Bush and co. would have denounced it as socialism a few months ago. In Britain it was particularly funny to see the British government complain about the Irish government guaranteeing deposits in Irish banks on one day (unfair competition you know, distorting the market i.e. people would take their money out of British banks and put it in Irish ones), only to complain equally bitterly the next day about the failure of the Icelandic government to guarantee British deposits when the Icelandic banks went bust. Then there was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve Bank and the Pope of the free market, admitting there was a ‘flaw’ in his ideology. In truth the whole spectacle of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, HBOS, Wachovia, - these giants of capitalism, masters of the universe with centuries of accumulation and exploitation behind them - falling like nine pins and going cap in hand to the state has made schadenfreude impossible to resist [if this wont translate put ‘ has afforded a degree of pleasure’] But, of course, we know that their embarrassment is going to be followed by real suffering for ordinary people. Wage cuts and job cuts, unemployment and poverty, house repossessions and homelessness – these are the inevitable consequences of recession. Cuts in welfare benefits and social services, in health and education – these, before long, will be the responses of capitalist governments. In the poorest countries there will be famine and starvation, in the developing countries their development will falter and some will collapse, and even in the richest, most advanced countries the working class will feel the pain. Torn between laughter and tears I am reminded of the motto of the great 17th century philosopher, Spinoza, ‘Neither laugh nor cry, but understand!’. And as a contribution to understanding this crisis I want to make three points. First it is not some natural disaster or weather calamity. Greenspan described it as ‘a once in a century tsunami’, and the media is full of phrases such as ‘economic typhoon’ or ‘hurricane’. This is nonsense: the crisis is neither natural nor an act of god but entirely man made; it was, in broad outlines, predictable and predicted for example by Marxist economists such as Chris Harman and Robert Brenner; and, pace Greenspan, these crises recur a lot more frequently than ‘once in a century’. Second, it is not basically a crisis of confidence. The capitalist media and its commentators always try to suggest that these crises are fundamentally just a question of investors, speculators and even manufacturers’ confidence. Sometimes they try to get away with the old claim that ‘the underlying real economy is sound’. Now obviously confidence does play a role: if you are worried that a bank is going to go bust you will be tempted to take your money out of it, thus making it more likely to go bust. If you anticipate a low rate of return on your investment in a company you are likely to invest elsewhere, and if you anticipate a general recession you will probably put your money in gold, and this in turn contributes to the depth and length of the recession. BUT this ‘confidence’ or lack of it is not arbitrary or random. It doesn’t just float into the minds of investors from the ether. It is based on evidence and experience from the real world. For example the problems in the US sub-prime mortgage market, which initiated the credit crunch, were not just problems in people’s heads, they were real problems of people who really couldn’t keep up their mortgage repayments, and from the standpoint of the mortgage lenders the real problem of not being able to sell repossessed houses profitably in a falling house market. One of the great achievements of Marx’s economics was to show that all wealth creation depends ultimately on the application of labour to nature, and all [exchange] value rests on the expenditure of socially necessary labour time. If prices in the elevated worlds of stock exchanges, hedge funds and currency speculation depart too far from these real material values then, sooner or later, they will spring back like overstretched elastic. Which brings me to my third point, namely that this is not just a crisis caused by greedy bankers and financiers on Wall St etc. This is not to excuse the bankers and financiers who are undoubtedly greedy, and whose greed is an important component of the dynamic of the crisis. But let’s be clear, in their relentless pursuit of maximum profits the bankers were only following the same logic that drives Exxon and Shell, Wal-Mart and Samsung and every other capitalist company in manufacturing, retail or any other sector, i.e. the inherent logic of capitalist competition. ‘Accumulation for accumulation’s sake’ as Marx put it. The over lending by banks is only a variation on the general tendency towards overproduction in booms, long ago identified by Marx. Moreover the roots of the present crisis lie not just in the financial sector but in the so-called ‘real’ economy. In Britain figures have just been released showing that the British economy moved into recession in the July-September quarter, the quarter BEFORE the financial meltdown. Clearly it has been problems in the KOREA COLUMN 42 The Working Class and Social Change According to Marx the working class or proletariat is ‘the only really revolutionary class’ [The Communist Manifesto] and ‘The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’ [The Rules of the International Working Men’s Association] and between capitalism and socialism there will be a transition which ‘can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat’ [The Critique of the Gotha Programme]. This conception of the revolutionary role of the working class was described by Lenin as ‘historically the main thing in Marxism’ but it is the idea many people find hardest to accept. On the one hand there are intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and T.W. Adorno of the Frankfurt School who identified with much of Marx’s critique of capitalism but concluded that the working class was hopelessly bought off and indoctrinated by the system. On the other hand there are ordinary people, workers themselves, who simply say, ‘It will never happen’. This is not surprising. The notion that working class people are obviously not capable of liberating themselves and running society is an absolutely central pillar of bourgeois ideology – the capitalist view of the world that pervades the media, the education system and our whole society. It is an idea that is particularly appealing to middle class intellectuals and is reinforced by their conditions of life. It also reflects much of the life experience of working class people who, from early childhood on, are treated as subordinates and have their confidence sapped. Nevertheless, Lenin was right; the self emancipation of the working class is the main thing, the key idea in Marxism. Without it all the economic and historical theory becomes at best a passive commentary on the world rather than a means of changing it, or, at worst, as in Stalinism and Maoism, an ideology masking the interests of a different class [typically the state capitalist bureaucracy}.So let us look at Marx’s reasons for identifying the working class as the principal agent of social change and examine whether they still apply today. We should begin by noting that Marx’s view was NOT based on the existing consciousness of the working class. Marx was well aware that the dominant ideas in society are those of the ruling class and that most of the time most of us are subordinate to them. For the mass of workers it would not be socialist consciousness that produced revolutionary struggle, but revolutionary struggle that produced socialist consciousness. Nor was it based on workers’ suffering and oppression. Of course, workers do suffer grievously under capitalism and Marxists fight against this, but not more so than the peasants, serfs and slaves whose poverty and oppression stretch back to the dawn of civilisation and who history shows were not able to abolish class divisions or create socialism .Rather it was based on their potential power deriving from their economic position in capitalist society that made the working class the revolutionary class. As Marx showed, workers in capitalism are not just badly paid but exploited. Wealth, Marx called it surplus value, is extracted from their labour. This surplus value is the source of all the profits of the capitalist class and of the bulk of wealth in capitalism as a whole. The bourgeoisie therefore needs the working class (not as individuals, of course, but as a class). The working class is the special product of capitalism and at the same time it is the producer of capitalism. Exploitation also puts the working class into an antagonistic relationship to capitalism; it creates an ongoing conflict of interest between labour and capital over wages, hours, conditions, and ultimately every other issue in society and this conflict turns into industrial and political struggle which is ‘now hidden, now open’ as Marx put it. Most of the time victory in these struggles goes to the bourgeoisie, who have at their disposal both far more wealth and state power (the law, police, judiciary, army etc) but no matter how many times they defeat the working class they cannot escape their dependency on its labour. As capitalism grows so the working class grows too, until it becomes the large majority of society. In addition to increasing its numbers capitalism also concentrates the working class in large workplaces and great cities. This gives the modern working class far greater potential political power than the scattered peasantry or the old artisans employed in small workshops. This is not only a negative power AGAINST capitalism but also a positive force FOR socialism. The working class is, by virtue of its economic and social position, a collectivist class. It can only resist the employers and improve its conditions of labour by collective action and it can only take possession of modern industry collectively i.e. by turning it into social property. When peasants seized the land from the feudal lords they could divide it up into small farms; this cannot be done with modern industry. Moreover, political power in all modern societies is based in big cities where the key means of production are also located. The urban industrial character of the proletariat enables it to exercise political power [the dictatorship of the proletariat] while also remaining the principal producing class. In this way it fundamentally undermines the division between rulers and ruled, thus opening the way to a fully classless socialist society. Such, in essence, was the case made by Marx more than 150 years ago. Since then there have been many actual instances of the working class playing a revolutionary role, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the German Revolution of 1919-24, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974. However it is clear that there is now no shortage of commentators, pundits and academics eager to pronounce Marx out of date. As an aside I have to note that when I first became a Marxist 40 years ago the academics and pundits all said Marx was out of date then. But what I’ve never been able to find is a moment when most of these thought he was in date. Nevertheless we should look at the arguments. They say that the working class has lost its revolutionary character because it is no longer poverty stricken as it was in Marx’s day. It is true of course that living standards have risen substantially for many, though by no means all, of the international working class, including in Europe and South Korea, but what is key is not the absolute level of pay but the conflict of interests involved in securing that pay. Relatively well paid workers can be forced into collective struggle in order to defend their high wages and that struggle can lead to revolutionary action and consciousness. They also say that with the demise of the old industries such as mining, steel and the docks, the working class in the advanced capitalist countries is fast disappearing and certainly no longer the majority. But this argument is based on a false and superficial view of the working class as defined by certain traditional forms of work In reality what counts is not the nature of the work, manual or white collar, but the relations of production. Employees of call centres, supermarkets, hospitals and schools are just as much forced to live by the sale of their labour power as miners and car workers, are also exploited and also possess great collective power. For example call centre workers and supermarket workers who went on strike could have a devastating affect on their bosses’ profits. Finally the notion that the working class is disappearing is the reverse of what is happening in the world as a whole. In reality the second half of the 20th century saw a huge spread of the working class in the great cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America such as Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Cairo, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Sao Paulo now even further augmented by the dramatic economic growth of China (and to a lesser extent, India). The global working class is today infinitely larger, more internationally integrated and potentially more powerful than it was in either Marx or Lenin’s day. Now more than ever it is the force than can change the world. John Molyneux 1 December 2008