SAVE VESTAS - send messages of support now

Vestas is a wind turbine factory (the only one in the UK) on the Isle of Wight near where I live in Portsmouth. It is threatened with closure on the 31 July. with the loss of 600 jobs. This will have a devastating effect on the already weak economy of the Island and is a serious blow to the fight against climate change.

Last night I went, with Jonathan Neale of the Campaign against Climate Change and other comrades, to a meeting with about ten of the Vestas workers on the Island. It is clear that these workers want to resist and that what they need above all is confidence and the feeling that they will be supported. If they fight it will be of great significance for the British workers movement and for the general struggle to save the planet.

In this context messages of support from everyone, but especially international messages, to savevestas@gmail.com are very important.

Obviously it is quite urgent, as the key decisions may be made this week.

Left in Vision 3 - Launch Pictures 3

Photographs of the Left In Vision 3 launch 03-06-09 at Marxism 2009, courtesy of Richard Peacock and Nancy Lindisfarne

Left in Vision 3 at Marxism 2009 was a huge success. The standard of work was very high and the exhibition was very warmly received - see the extraordinary Comments Book posted below. Hundreds attended the launch and there was a steady stream of visitors throughout.

The whole thing involved an immense amount of work by lots of people and I would like to thank them all - especially Jacqui Mair, Wayne Clements, Richard Peacock, Roxanne Chappell, Keith Robertson, Tom Allen, Robb Waterfield, Lee Sprake, Ed O'Bryan, Nick Hicking, Charlotte Le Brecht,Emma Harris, Mike Bartlett, Martin Adams, David Sullivan, Anna Paczuska, John Levett, Nick Chapman, Colin Smith ( Marxism Organiser), and Jenny Eppler (ULU conference manager). I hope I haven't forgotten anyone.

One important aspect of the exhibition not reflected here ( I hope to post pictures soon) was the installation of David Garner's 'B for Defiance!', an exact replica of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from the gates of Auschwitz, on the grass near the Institute of Education. On Sunday (5 July) we staged a mass walk over this sign, as a way of saying 'Never Again!'. Hundreds of people took part and it turned into a spontaneous anti- BNP demo. The procession was led by socialist sculptors, May Ayres and Chanie Rosenberg (who lost family in the Holocaust) and was both moving and inspirational.

I also want to thank Tim Evans, who made three poetic contributions to the show: at the Launch with his stunning 'Do you want some?' based on the disability benefits form (which is also part of Roxanne Chappell's benefits office installation 'We Need to See Evidence of This'); at the David Garner walkover with his Response to Arbeit Macht Frei, and as part of the Sunday lunchtime 'Poems for the Economic Meltdown' session with Huw Pudner, Phil Knights, Claire Cameron and Nicola Field - who are also thanked.

Particularly nice was to have an Egyptian section of the show with great drawings (Nessma El Aasser), photos (Hossam al- Hamalawy, Nasser Nouri and Sarah Carr, and Yasser Alwan) and posters (Mohammed Gaber).

By far the most ambitious and difficult thing we did was transport (from Portsmouth) and bulid in ULU, Roxanne Chappell's brilliant 'Evidence' interactive installation. This was a stunning success thanks to the work of Roxanne herself, but also to the work and help of many others.


John Molyneux

Roxanne Chappell, We Need to See Evidence of This

Looking at Kim Barnett 'Bankers Say Sorry, or The Great Bailout'

May Ayres, Indifference

Nessma el-Aassar The Friends and Yasser Alwan Photographs

Mark Killian Solidarity Now!

Chanie Rosenberg, Tony Cliff

Keith Robertson, City of Dis

Nessma El Aassar, Self Portrait

Looking at Mike Bartlett, Welcome to Leigh Park

Mohammed Gaber, Posters from Egypt

Anna Paczuska with her work









Roxanne Chappell, We Need To see Evidence of This



Looking at Alke Schmidt's work



Looking at David Sullivan's paintings

Left in Vision 3 - Launch Pictures 2

Photographs of the Left In Vision 3 launch 03-06-09 at Marxism 2009, courtesy of Nancy Lindisfarne.

John Molyneux and Red Saunders



Chanie Rosenberg

Looking at Kim Barnett's work

Ditto

Richard Peacock

Martin Adams

Roxanne Chappell

We Need to See Evidence of This - the Security (Paul)

Anna Paczuska

Chris Price

Mary Smith

Tim Evans

Looking at Carrie Reichardt's Ceramics

Left in Vision 3 - Launch Pictures 1

Photographs of the Left In Vision launch 03-06-09 at Marxism 2009, courtesy of Nancy Lindisfarne

Maureen Delenian with friend

Looking at Nessma El Aassar's Self Portrait

Henny Woods with Keith Robertson's City Of Dis

Anon with Roxanne Chappell's La Lotta Continua

? with Maohammed Gaber's Posters from Egypt

Looking at Nessma El Aassar's work

?

Chanie Rosenberg

Hazel in Roxanne Chappell's We Need to See Evidence of This

Noel Halifax with Alec Duff's Theory and Practice

Left in Vision 3 Comments

Left in Vision 3 – The Comments Book

Below are the verbatim contents of the Comments Book, except for many names which were often illegible. Nothing has been left out except for the ranting of one rightwing Christian and a few unreadable words. Clearly the response was extremely favourable and I think it is rare for any event on the left to meet with such warm and unanimous praise.

John Molyneux



“Great little exhibition” – Bill Brunt, Mcr

“Great exhibition! Mark Killian’s work springs out!!” –

“Beautful exhibition. Nice combination of contemporary, classic and digital art!” – Suzanne (?) Hogendoors, The Netherlands

“Loved it” – Dean ?

“Great art show!” –

“I am leaving with intense emotions of relief, satisfaction and plenty of thoughts which were raised by the works” – anon

“Good stuff! Very interesting! Well done!”

“Some very emotive pieces!!”

“An amazing exhibition, reminding me of the equal importance of artistic expression with theory and action in any revolutionary movement.” – Tom Hegarty

“Some really amazing things that actually made me think for once and get goosebumps. Thank you, thank you” – Laura Hegarty

“Inspiring.” – N.G.

“Very enjoyable.” – Jen

“I particularly liked ‘My Living Doll’. Very interesting. Overall really good!” – Mollie

“Some really interesting and innovative art. Great stuff!” – Robert Clarke

“Thumbs up.” – Liam

“Great to see such a range of images and styles.” – Jeremy

“The invisible girder in ‘Solidarity Now’ weighed with Woody on the other side…Genius. Ha! Ha. Loved it.” – ?

“A significant improvement and development on previous Left In Vision shows. A real success. I’ll be back.” – Colin (Joyce?)

“Andrew Warren, I am an artist too.”

“Revolution now+”

“Fantastic show guys. Get in touch worth Edinburough University Arts Society to promote your work. Magazine + exhibitions. SO808723@ed.ac.uk”

“I loved the exhibition. Seldom have I been so touched by so many works.” – Hella (art history student)

“Excellent – diverse. There are statements, there are ambiguities. Very inclusive of styles and materials – I’m sure the establishment would call it a mess!” – Sam Chambers

“Very stimulating – some fantastic thought-provoking exhibs. Well done to all the artists and those who pulled the exhibition together.” – Maxine Bowler

“Keep on keeping on.” – Mary

“A privilage to have been part of this exhibition, Left in Vision. I have learned a lot about artists and human kindness.” – Jacqui Mair

“I was shouted at. It was hot and the wine ran out far too quickly.” – Anon

“Fantastic exhibition in terms of, depth and impact. Pictures from Egyptian strike tremendous.” – Jon Woods

“Love the DHSS. It’s a fantastic piece of reality” – G. McCarthy

“Great addition to the usual talks + seminars + music events. Radical art! Look forward to next year!”

“Amazing pictures, every picture is a long essay, it talks itself. Wonderful art pieces. It’s a fantastic way to introduce your [illegible].” – Maher Deyab

“Amazing art themes. This not a biased message but a simple truth.”

“If only there were more artists and more spaces exploring these ideas.” – Anthony

“Like the work or Maureen Delenian plus the poem about the dole. Maybe I’ll submit an exhibit next year.” (?)

“Gets better every year.” – Jacqui Miller

“Like the crucifixion, excellent.” – Sophie Jongman

“Great art with political points. Fabulous talent used for a purpose.” - V. [Pap?]

“Very very interesting, well worth a visit.”

“So proud to be part of it. Technology permitted. Thanks.” – Nicola Field

“Very thought provoking. Many thanks.” – Alan Porter

“Fantastic. Spec ‘We Need to See Evidence of This’ – a really moving experience.” – Mike W

“Powerful and inspiring art entrenched in a springing from struggle. Excellent stuff.” – Tom Mycock

“Thought the installation was brilliant.” – Dave F

“This is a fantastic exhibition…the best! Roxanne Chappell has inspired me.” – Sanjay (UEL film student)

“Another inspiring exhibition – making me at least think of trying to create in the coming year.” – M

“This art exhibition is just the sort of event that enhances Marxism. I speak as one who has been attending Marxism for many years.” – Eddie Prevost

“Words fail me almost! What a wonderful show. Next year? Better? Of course!” – Maureen

“Brilliant! It gets better each year!” – Tim Evans

“Really fantastic – moving work, inspired!” – Katya

“So good and touching.” – Liz R

“Here’s to a radical and new wave of art via the Left In Vision and those involved.” – James N

“Work very good.” – L Jones

“Very interesting and moving. I find pieces representative of our realities.” – Ashraf Abdelhay

“Great stuff. See you next year.” – H.B.

“Enjoyed the installation and video works very much. Thanks.” – Katherine Stuart

“We need to help young mums…” – Anon

“Videos disturbing. DSS very disturbing. Hit a nerve for those who have experienced it. Encouraged by diversity of expression. My thanks for involving me.” – Marie Clegg

“A display with meaning and substance.” – R.H.

“Very interesting and powerful exhibition.”

“Very interesting…excellent initiative for SWP.” – John Bridge (CPGB)

“I found the installation particularly relavent being in wheelchair – other images are beguiling, disurbing, compelling, always important.” – Gareth Lawes

“Inspirational.” – Dean S?

“I think the exhibition is excellent. Wish I had more time to spend looking at it.”

“Very enlightening and fun – is that what good art should be?!” – Chris Kelly

“Absolutely fantastic. Shows the power of the messages art can give.”

“Well done again! Hope the exhibition will be here again next year – but nearer meetings hopefully.” – Debbie Rolls

“Many thanks, I really enjoyed it.” – Joan Deshpande

“Some terrific stuff. Loved ‘We Need Evidence’” – Pat Stack

“Amazing.” – Nancy Lindisfarne

“Fan-fucking-tastic.” – Carol (?)

“Ceramics by May Ayres were/are fantastic and installation excellent – powerful stuff.” – Maggie Farrell, Glasgow

Glasgow SWP/Stop The War interested in setting up similar Left In Vision exhibition in November/December 2009. Contact Maggie_Farrell@yahoo.co.uk.

“It’s great.” – Elizabeth Bond

“A fantastic and very interesting exhibition. Thanks very much.” – Paul and Jan X X

“Amazing exhibition. Every time you walk round, you notice something new! Brilliant work.” – Alys

“From admiration to horror. This is life in the raw. Well done.” – Marie

“That is very good. Works. Art works better than words to some people. Keep going. Thanks.” - Mirfat

“Great exhibition. Really inspiring. Thanks.” – Naomi

“Fantastic exhibition. Well done.” – Eve

“Remarkable exhibition. Aesthetically satisfying and politically uplifting. Underlining again that art and politics do go together. Congrats to all.” – Sabby Sagall

“Fantastic exhibition – great to be the last visitor. Thanks” – Chloe

“It has been good to have you here at ULU. Hope to have you again. Thanks” – Jenny Eppler

Protest and the Law

This is footage of speeches at a rally on April 18th 2009.

In January, John had spoken at a 500 strong demo in Portsmouth, against the bombing of Gaza by Isreal. The police arrested and charged him with organising a demonstration without asking their permission.

On the morning of the trial, there was a rally of about 30 friends and supports outside the courts, where John was asked to speak.



The trial was adjourned, on the grounds that the judicial process had become "compromised" by political arguments.

What Would Socialism Look Like?

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This is an audio recording of a public meeting on April 2nd 2009, on "What Would Socialism Look Like?".

John Molyneux outlines what a future socialist society might look like, then there questions and discussion from the floor, and finally John summarises the issues, giving his answers to the questions.

This was intended to be a video record of the event, but there were serious problems synchronising the audio stream with the video. As time was short, it was decided to publish as audio only.

Click the play button to stream the recording.


Click here to download the audio in MP3 format.

Discussion begins at roughly the 30 minute mark, and John's summing up at 55. This is an experiment, and somewhat rough. If it works, we'll do more, and get it better.

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Left in Vision 3 - Call for Art

LEFT IN VISION 3 – CALL FOR ART

Following the great success of the Left in Vision 2 art show at Marxism last year, Left in Vision 3 is being organised for Marxism 2009 (2-6 July). As before all artists who identify with the left are invited to submit work, and all forms of visual art – figurative, abstract, conceptual, sculpture, film, relational etc – are welcome. International contributions will be especially encouraged.

Anyone wishing to submit work should email John Molyneux, john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk or if necessary phone 07801 290411.
All work should be submitted by Friday 6 June, when curatorial decisions about what is to be shown will be made.

Mak Wallinger's Horse of Another Colour

Mark Wallinger’s Horse of Another Colour

This article appeared in the March 2009 edition of Socialist Review.

The selection of Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a giant White Horse for Ebbsfleet International Station site in Kent is an event of some cultural significance.

In terms of size alone it will be impressive, if not disturbing. An exact replica of a white stallion, it will be 164 feet tall, two and a half times higher than the Angel of the North and roughly the same height as Nelson’s Column, and stand on an area the size of fifty football pitches, making it by far the largest work of public art in Britain.

It is testimony to the huge shift in British public attitudes to modern art that has taken place over the last decade or so.. Britain has been very conservative in these matters: in the thirties Rima, Jacob Epstein’s mild relief sculpture in Hyde Park, was repeatedly defaced and in the sixties The National Gallery’s purchase of a Cezanne(!) was greeted with howls of derision.

The way the public warmed to the Angel of the North in 1998 was one definite sign of the shift, the success of Tate Modern another It confirms the trend whereas until recently a commission such as this would have been almost unthinkable, the White Horse seems to have been met with substantial approval.

As far as local opinion is concerned there is a bit of pattern with this kind of project. The announcement and construction is met with a certain hostility but after a while the new arrival becomes familiar, accepted as part of the landscape, and thereafter an object of local pride. The White Horse is likely to follow this pattern, except with less initial hostility.

Certainly it meets the standard requirement of such a monument in that it combines a number of local and historical references. Kent is a horse breeding area and Horsa, the semi- mythological Anglo-Saxon figure, who gave his name to the horse, allegedly landed at nearby Thanet in the fifth century, with the result that a white horse became the emblem of Kent. There are nods in the direction of the Bronze Age White Horse of Uffington in Berkshire and its modern Folkestone equivalent, as well as the underlying chalk and the White Cliffs of Dover. Though, significantly, Wallinger resisted pressure from Kent Council to depict the horse prancing or rampant as in, the Kent emblem, preferring the less stylised, unheroic image of a grazing horse.

Both Wallinger and his work come distinctly ’from left field’ as it were. Wallinger is best known for his 2007 Turner Prize winning piece State Britain, an exact recreation in Tate Britain of Brian Haw’s anti-Iraq war protest in Parliament Square. In itself this doesn’t make the White Horse good or bad but it does suggest a closer look at Wallinger’s thought processes, especially as he always been quite an ‘intellectual’ theorised artist.

In fact Wallinger has long been making artwork with ‘horse’ motifs in which horse racing / breeding serve as a analogue or symbol of the class system , English identity and other issues. In 1992 he made a series of photo-realist paintings of horses called ‘Race, Class and Sex’ which looked at the relations between breeding, eugenics and class – Wallinger called horse breeding ‘ eugenics by proxy’
.
He also made a black and white replica of Stubbs’ famous 18th century race horse painting Whistlejacket, often hailed as an icon Englishness, added a unicorn horn and called it Ghost – the spectral fantasy of English ‘identity’.

Later he bought an actual race horse which he called ‘A Real Work of Art’ and ran it in suffragette racing colours (purple, green and white) while dressing himself up in the colours as Emily Davison, the suffragette who through herself under the King’s horse in the 1913 Derby. At the same time as commenting on class and gender this work was an exploration, as its name implies, of the issue of realism in art and the perennial ‘what is art?’ question.

Marcel Duchamp, with his ready mades, floated the idea that a work of art was simply what an artist designated as such, and the philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, responding to Warhol’s Brillo Pads, developed the idea that art is what the institutions of the art world (galleries, critics, art colleges etc) say it is. Wallinger regarded the latter as a ‘patently conservative position’ (both are philosophically idealist positions) and set out to challenge it by nominating as art something from life outside the gallery or art world. Clearly there is also an element of playfulness here – imagine the race commentator intoning “ it’s A Real Work of Art coming up on the rails … and the winner is … A Real Work of Art!”

A neglected aspect of realism and naturalism in artistic representation is the question of scale. How can we regard as ‘realist’ an image which is a completely different size? Wallinger investigated this in reverse in Ecce Homo, an exactly life-size representation of a man as a Christ figure, placed on the vacant Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Because all the other figures on plinths in the Square are much larger than life size, Wallinger’s figure looked uncannily small. The Ebbsfleet horse reverses the issue again by trying to be ‘uncannily realistic’ (Wallinger’s words) on a gigantic scale which somehow manages to recall a tiny model in a child’s farmyard set.

None of this tells us how The White Horse will actually turn out but it does suggest it will be one of the more interesting pieces of public art of recent times.


John Molyneux
15 February 2009

The Question of Charity

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

A Better World is Possible

A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Capitalism isn’t working, so what is the alternative? This question must have at least crossed the mind of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, round the world as they watched the credit crunch, financial meltdown and recession unfold over the past few months. The problem, of course, will have been that for those same millions most of their conditioning, from politicians, media, education, and a good deal of their experience, will have been to answer that there is no alternative, at any rate no alternative to capitalism as such, no alternative that goes beyond a modified version of capitalism as represented by the ‘new’ Keynesian Gordon Brown or, perhaps, Barack Obama.

In fact a definite and clearly articulated alternative – socialism - has existed for at least 160 years (it is 160 years since Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). Socialism is very straightforward and, compared to capitalism, extremely simple. It means social (or collective) ownership and control of the main means of production (land, factories, businesses, banks etc) and production for human need not profit, and with this the abolition of class divisions.

The trouble for many people is not that this is very complicated or hard to understand but that it just sounds too good to be true. We all, or many of us, get so ground down and demoralised by living under capitalism that we become convinced that nothing as evidently sane and good as socialism could possibly ever really happen – life just isn’t like that, so there must be a catch somewhere.

In this article I intend to argue that socialism is NOT too good to be true, that it is a perfectly reasonable and practical way of organising society – and that the various objections to it which spring into our minds because they have been planted there by the dominant capitalist ideology are illusory or even downright silly. I say silly because when people are deeply prejudiced they often think arguments are obvious, because they are based on their prejudice, which are in fact absurd and which disappear like a puff of smoke the moment the matter is tested in practice. For example in Bristol in 1963 there was a dispute about whether black workers should be allowed to drive buses and some of the racists argued that black people lacked the speedy reactions needed for bus driving [ like Pele and Mohammed Ali had slow reactions!]. Another example: before Angela Rippon started reading the TV news in 1974 it was actually maintained by some dinosaur sexists that the public wouldn’t take the news seriously if it was read by a woman. Obviously such arguments evaporate as soon as the colour or gender bar is breeched.

Let us begin by looking at something absolutely basic: feeding people. The world is currently richer and more productive than it has ever been in history, yet, according to the United Nations, 800 million people live in hunger and fear of starvation, and about 25,000 people, mostly children, actually die of hunger or hunger related causes every day. Is this because of a shortage of food. Not a bit of it

Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs-enough to make most people fat!. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. [ Food First : The Institute for Food and Development Policy.]

Perhaps the problem the problem is transport – maybe the hungry are in remote parts of the world where the food can’t reach them. On the contrary many of them are in huge cities where planes, and sometimes tourists, fly everyday – places like Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro or Dhaka. Even when they are in rural refugee camps the TV cameras and crews seem to get there when they want to, but not the food. Besides we know we have the means of getting of getting planes with bombs to the all the remote places of the earth.

Perhaps people just don’t care if thousands of children starve. Actually this is not so. The UN is full of people who ‘care’. There are numerous international charities like Oxfam and Save the Children, who care a lot and depend on donations from people who care, and the poor countries themselves are full of NGOs doing their best, yet the hunger and the malnutrition continue. Why? There is one answer you can read on any website dealing with this issue and which all the agencies and charities from the UN down would agree on: poverty. People go hungry because they are poor and can’t afford to buy the food available.

But actually this is only part of the story. What would we think of parents with four children and a larder full of food, who allowed one of the children to starve on the grounds that the child could not afford to pay for the food? In fact poverty only leads to people going hungry for a reason that you don’t find on the charity websites, namely that in capitalist society food like almost everything else is a commodity, a good produced for sale on the market in order to make a profit.

Socialism would deal with this seemingly intractable problem of hunger in the easiest and most obvious way, the way any ordinary family deals with it, by NOT treating food as a commodity and simply distributing enough of it to people to ensure that everyone had enough for a healthy diet.

Just think what this would mean – no more starving children, no more distended bellies and vacant staring eyes, no need for kids to work twelve hours a day in sweatshops or for old people to die in the gutter or beggars to crawl in the dirt; so much human suffering ended. Even if it achieved nothing else this ALONE would be enough to justify socialism a thousand times over. But, of course, it’s too good to be true, there must be a catch somewhere!

This is where those ‘standard objections’ pop into our heads just as they have been programmed to do. If food was distributed free there would be no incentive, wouldn’t people all stop work? Actually, no. Very few people reading this article will ever have literally gone hungry, very few people in Britain do, but we haven’t all stopped work. The truth is the opposite; if you are starving you soon lose the ability to work at all and people with a decent diet work much more productively than the malnourished.

As it happens there are two major ‘catches’ to distributing food to the hungry: the first is that the big corporations would not be able to make their billions in profits out of it; the second is that if it would work for food it would work for other things too. Housing for example.

Shelter is one of the basic requirements of human life. Yet even in the richest cities in the richest country in the world, the US, there are homeless people sleeping on the streets, just as there are in London. In the mega cities of the world’s poorer countries, with their favellas and shanty towns, the problem is horrendous.

Socialist planning would solve this problem very simply. Take Britain as a starting point. Strictly speaking there is no housing shortage in Britain, only a shortage of affordable housing, and dealing with the immediate problem of homelessness would just involve requisitioning the empty properties, the mansions and second and third homes of the rich etc. But a permanent solution is easy to envisage. Use the census to estimate the housing needs of the population (something like this happens all ready) and establish a public house building programme, employing thousands of bricklayers, carpenters and other building workers, to build slightly more houses than are needed. Then make the provision of a modest but decent residence to every family or individual citizen a basic right, in the same way that every child has a right to a place in school or the NHS provides free health care for all. In other words, stop treating houses as a commodity and distribute them on the basis of need.

The same principles could be applied to transport. At present transport is a complete mess. Technologically, of course, it is possible to transport people round the world more efficiently than ever before in history, but under capitalism the organisation of transport is both inefficient and destructive. The main form of transport is the private car and car ownership and use has become so widespread that the roads are clogged up (to the point where in London travel by horse and carriage in the 19^th century was as quick) and the pollution generated is a major, contributor to climate change.

The socialist solution is obvious: set up a comprehensive integrated system of free public transport. This would involve a huge expansion of the railways for freight and intercity travel, since they are clearly faster, more cost efficient and more environmentally friendly than cars and lorries. Within towns it could be a combination of trams, buses, subways, monorails, minibuses, and bicycles. The precise details don’t matter here. The point is that provided the public transport was sufficiently extensive and effective the private car, with its attendant problems of parking, congestion, accidents, petrol and pollution, could virtually be eliminated in urban areas (and rural areas too if the public network was extensive enough).

So at this point we have free food, housing and transport along with, I assume, free health and education. Inevitably the question arises ‘How would all this be paid for?’ Given the unbelievable sums raised to bail out the banks in recent months this question loses much of its charge, but in any case there are two answers to it depending on how far we look into the matter. The first answer is simply that it would be paid for out of taxation, as the NHS and schools and, of course, the armed services and their wars are at present. Clearly if food, housing and transport were all free people would have more money to pay tax with.

However looking a bit further we have to remember that money does not itself create wealth, or goods or services, only the application of labour to nature does that. Money is just a means of exchanging goods and services that have become commodities. The less goods and services are treated as commodities, and socialism would systematically reduce commodity production till it disappeared, the less role money will have. So the real question becomes would it be possible for society to allocate sufficient labour to grow and distribute enough food to feed everyone adequately, to build enough houses for everyone and to make and operate enough trains, trams, buses etc. to move people around. And we know the answer to this is yes because we more or less do it already.

But how would all these collectively owned industries be run? Wouldn’t it involve vast armies of state bureaucrats, at best soulless jobsworths and at worst monstrous tyrants?

Given the history of state ownership and planning in the 20^th century – Stalin’s Russia and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea at one end and British Rail and the NHS at the other – this is a natural and important question. And the answer to it goes to the very heart of what we mean by the socialist alternative. Socialist planning will not be socialist and will not work practically unless it is democratic and actively involves the mass of ordinary people. Again the years of conditioning ensure that here a little conservative ideologue pops up in our head and says, ‘That’ll never happen. Ordinary people, working class people, can’t run things, they are not clever enough, they haven’t had enough education or management training etc. etc. Besides there will always be someone who gets to the top and takes advantage.’

But to see the capabilities of working people just look at any workplace you know. If the manager is off sick or away on holiday does it grind to halt? Of course not because the workers, between them, already know how the place works. A few years ago in my workplace, a University, the boss [the Vice-Chancellor] was suspended and then sacked for corruption and it was awhile before he was replaced. The uni ran perfectly normally. But if the caretakers [apart from the cleaners, the lowest paid workers in the institution] stop working the whole place shuts down or rather doesn’t even open in the morning!

As for some people getting to the top and abusing their position this will be a problem, not because it is human nature but because socialism has to be built by people brought up under capitalism, not by saints and angels. The answer is to develop mechanisms for controlling and removing such individuals, and since the Paris Commune of 1871, the first real experiment in workers power before it was crushed by the army, we have known what those mechanisms are: make all public officials subject to election and recall and pay them a workers wage. And since the Russian Revolution we also know that these mechanisms work best when they are based on elections in workplaces and other institutions where collective debate can take place.

This was the great contribution of the soviet or workers’ council, which was first created, spontaneously, by the workers of St. Petersburg in the Russian Revolution of !905 and then went on in October 1917 and subsequent struggles, to show that it was the main institution through which working people can establish political power over society as a whole. And that is the starting point for everything we have talked about so far.

Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, ending inequality and class divisions, democratic planning of the economy, stopping climate change, establishing international peace and unity and all the changes that socialism would bring have as their precondition the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class, first in one country and then internationally. Workers’ councils are key to this. They begin, within capitalism, as organisers of the workers struggle against the bosses, growing out of mass strikes and factory occupations. They develop into an alternative centre of power, rivalling the old capitalist state, and then in the decisive step of the revolution they replace the capitalist and establish workers’ power – a power which rests on the objective position of the working class in the modern world economy but which also liberates and mobilises the creative energies and talents of tens of millions. Once that happens a better world, a far better world, will move from being a possibility to being a reality .

John Molyneux

8 December 2008

A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Capitalism isn’t working, so what is the alternative? This question must have at least crossed the mind of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, round the world as they watched the credit crunch, financial meltdown and recession unfold over the past few months. The problem, of course, will have been that for those same millions most of their conditioning, from politicians, media, education, and a good deal of their experience, will have been to answer that there is no alternative, at any rate no alternative to capitalism as such, no alternative that goes beyond a modified version of capitalism as represented by the ‘new’ Keynesian Gordon Brown or, perhaps, Barack Obama.

In fact a definite and clearly articulated alternative – socialism - has existed for at least 160 years (it is 160 years since Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). Socialism is very straightforward and, compared to capitalism, extremely simple. It means social (or collective) ownership and control of the main means of production (land, factories, businesses, banks etc) and production for human need not profit, and with this the abolition of class divisions.

The trouble for many people is not that this is very complicated or hard to understand but that it just sounds too good to be true. We all, or many of us, get so ground down and demoralised by living under capitalism that we become convinced that nothing as evidently sane and good as socialism could possibly ever really happen – life just isn’t like that, so there must be a catch somewhere.

In this article I intend to argue that socialism is NOT too good to be true, that it is a perfectly reasonable and practical way of organising society – and that the various objections to it which spring into our minds because they have been planted there by the dominant capitalist ideology are illusory or even downright silly. I say silly because when people are deeply prejudiced they often think arguments are obvious, because they are based on their prejudice, which are in fact absurd and which disappear like a puff of smoke the moment the matter is tested in practice. For example in Bristol in 1963 there was a dispute about whether black workers should be allowed to drive buses and some of the racists argued that black people lacked the speedy reactions needed for bus driving [ like Pele and Mohammed Ali had slow reactions!]. Another example: before Angela Rippon started reading the TV news in 1974 it was actually maintained by some dinosaur sexists that the public wouldn’t take the news seriously if it was read by a woman. Obviously such arguments evaporate as soon as the colour or gender bar is breeched.

Let us begin by looking at something absolutely basic: feeding people. The world is currently richer and more productive than it has ever been in history, yet, according to the United Nations, 800 million people live in hunger and fear of starvation, and about 25,000 people, mostly children, actually die of hunger or hunger related causes every day. Is this because of a shortage of food. Not a bit of it

Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs-enough to make most people fat!. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. [ Food First : The Institute for Food and Development Policy.]

Perhaps the problem the problem is transport – maybe the hungry are in remote parts of the world where the food can’t reach them. On the contrary many of them are in huge cities where planes, and sometimes tourists, fly everyday – places like Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro or Dhaka. Even when they are in rural refugee camps the TV cameras and crews seem to get there when they want to, but not the food. Besides we know we have the means of getting of getting planes with bombs to the all the remote places of the earth.

Perhaps people just don’t care if thousands of children starve. Actually this is not so. The UN is full of people who ‘care’. There are numerous international charities like Oxfam and Save the Children, who care a lot and depend on donations from people who care, and the poor countries themselves are full of NGOs doing their best, yet the hunger and the malnutrition continue. Why? There is one answer you can read on any website dealing with this issue and which all the agencies and charities from the UN down would agree on: poverty. People go hungry because they are poor and can’t afford to buy the food available.

But actually this is only part of the story. What would we think of parents with four children and a larder full of food, who allowed one of the children to starve on the grounds that the child could not afford to pay for the food? In fact poverty only leads to people going hungry for a reason that you don’t find on the charity websites, namely that in capitalist society food like almost everything else is a commodity, a good produced for sale on the market in order to make a profit.

Socialism would deal with this seemingly intractable problem of hunger in the easiest and most obvious way, the way any ordinary family deals with it, by NOT treating food as a commodity and simply distributing enough of it to people to ensure that everyone had enough for a healthy diet.

Just think what this would mean – no more starving children, no more distended bellies and vacant staring eyes, no need for kids to work twelve hours a day in sweatshops or for old people to die in the gutter or beggars to crawl in the dirt; so much human suffering ended. Even if it achieved nothing else this ALONE would be enough to justify socialism a thousand times over. But, of course, it’s too good to be true, there must be a catch somewhere!

This is where those ‘standard objections’ pop into our heads just as they have been programmed to do. If food was distributed free there would be no incentive, wouldn’t people all stop work? Actually, no. Very few people reading this article will ever have literally gone hungry, very few people in Britain do, but we haven’t all stopped work. The truth is the opposite; if you are starving you soon lose the ability to work at all and people with a decent diet work much more productively than the malnourished.

As it happens there are two major ‘catches’ to distributing food to the hungry: the first is that the big corporations would not be able to make their billions in profits out of it; the second is that if it would work for food it would work for other things too. Housing for example.

Shelter is one of the basic requirements of human life. Yet even in the richest cities in the richest country in the world, the US, there are homeless people sleeping on the streets, just as there are in London. In the mega cities of the world’s poorer countries, with their favellas and shanty towns, the problem is horrendous.

Socialist planning would solve this problem very simply. Take Britain as a starting point. Strictly speaking there is no housing shortage in Britain, only a shortage of affordable housing, and dealing with the immediate problem of homelessness would just involve requisitioning the empty properties, the mansions and second and third homes of the rich etc. But a permanent solution is easy to envisage. Use the census to estimate the housing needs of the population (something like this happens all ready) and establish a public house building programme, employing thousands of bricklayers, carpenters and other building workers, to build slightly more houses than are needed. Then make the provision of a modest but decent residence to every family or individual citizen a basic right, in the same way that every child has a right to a place in school or the NHS provides free health care for all. In other words, stop treating houses as a commodity and distribute them on the basis of need.

The same principles could be applied to transport. At present transport is a complete mess. Technologically, of course, it is possible to transport people round the world more efficiently than ever before in history, but under capitalism the organisation of transport is both inefficient and destructive. The main form of transport is the private car and car ownership and use has become so widespread that the roads are clogged up (to the point where in London travel by horse and carriage in the 19^th century was as quick) and the pollution generated is a major, contributor to climate change.

The socialist solution is obvious: set up a comprehensive integrated system of free public transport. This would involve a huge expansion of the railways for freight and intercity travel, since they are clearly faster, more cost efficient and more environmentally friendly than cars and lorries. Within towns it could be a combination of trams, buses, subways, monorails, minibuses, and bicycles. The precise details don’t matter here. The point is that provided the public transport was sufficiently extensive and effective the private car, with its attendant problems of parking, congestion, accidents, petrol and pollution, could virtually be eliminated in urban areas (and rural areas too if the public network was extensive enough).

So at this point we have free food, housing and transport along with, I assume, free health and education. Inevitably the question arises ‘How would all this be paid for?’ Given the unbelievable sums raised to bail out the banks in recent months this question loses much of its charge, but in any case there are two answers to it depending on how far we look into the matter. The first answer is simply that it would be paid for out of taxation, as the NHS and schools and, of course, the armed services and their wars are at present. Clearly if food, housing and transport were all free people would have more money to pay tax with.

However looking a bit further we have to remember that money does not itself create wealth, or goods or services, only the application of labour to nature does that. Money is just a means of exchanging goods and services that have become commodities. The less goods and services are treated as commodities, and socialism would systematically reduce commodity production till it disappeared, the less role money will have. So the real question becomes would it be possible for society to allocate sufficient labour to grow and distribute enough food to feed everyone adequately, to build enough houses for everyone and to make and operate enough trains, trams, buses etc. to move people around. And we know the answer to this is yes because we more or less do it already.

But how would all these collectively owned industries be run? Wouldn’t it involve vast armies of state bureaucrats, at best soulless jobsworths and at worst monstrous tyrants?

Given the history of state ownership and planning in the 20^th century – Stalin’s Russia and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea at one end and British Rail and the NHS at the other – this is a natural and important question. And the answer to it goes to the very heart of what we mean by the socialist alternative. Socialist planning will not be socialist and will not work practically unless it is democratic and actively involves the mass of ordinary people. Again the years of conditioning ensure that here a little conservative ideologue pops up in our head and says, ‘That’ll never happen. Ordinary people, working class people, can’t run things, they are not clever enough, they haven’t had enough education or management training etc. etc. Besides there will always be someone who gets to the top and takes advantage.’

But to see the capabilities of working people just look at any workplace you know. If the manager is off sick or away on holiday does it grind to halt? Of course not because the workers, between them, already know how the place works. A few years ago in my workplace, a University, the boss [the Vice-Chancellor] was suspended and then sacked for corruption and it was awhile before he was replaced. The uni ran perfectly normally. But if the caretakers [apart from the cleaners, the lowest paid workers in the institution] stop working the whole place shuts down or rather doesn’t even open in the morning!

As for some people getting to the top and abusing their position this will be a problem, not because it is human nature but because socialism has to be built by people brought up under capitalism, not by saints and angels. The answer is to develop mechanisms for controlling and removing such individuals, and since the Paris Commune of 1871, the first real experiment in workers power before it was crushed by the army, we have known what those mechanisms are: make all public officials subject to election and recall and pay them a workers wage. And since the Russian Revolution we also know that these mechanisms work best when they are based on elections in workplaces and other institutions where collective debate can take place.

This was the great contribution of the soviet or workers’ council, which was first created, spontaneously, by the workers of St. Petersburg in the Russian Revolution of !905 and then went on in October 1917 and subsequent struggles, to show that it was the main institution through which working people can establish political power over society as a whole. And that is the starting point for everything we have talked about so far.

Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, ending inequality and class divisions, democratic planning of the economy, stopping climate change, establishing international peace and unity and all the changes that socialism would bring have as their precondition the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class, first in one country and then internationally. Workers’ councils are key to this. They begin, within capitalism, as organisers of the workers struggle against the bosses, growing out of mass strikes and factory occupations. They develop into an alternative centre of power, rivalling the old capitalist state, and then in the decisive step of the revolution they replace the capitalist and establish workers’ power – a power which rests on the objective position of the working class in the modern world economy but which also liberates and mobilises the creative energies and talents of tens of millions. Once that happens a better world, a far better world, will move from being a possibility to being a reality .

John Molyneux

8 December 2008