A tale of two Britains

On the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birthday just about everyone wants to lay claim to the most famous author of Victorian England. The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall laying a wreath in Westminster Abbey surely takes the biscuit, however.

Dickens expressly stated his wish not to be buried there. And the privilege, wealth and inherited rank represented by Charles and Camilla, symbolising a Britain brutally unequal as it was in his days, would surely make him turn in his grave.

All this hero-worship (and blatant commercialisation) might queer the pitch for literary purists. But writers, actors and museum curators who have revisited the author’s life and work have brought him into the 21st century with a vengeance.

Actor Simon Callow, who is reading in a birthday tribute at St Mary’s church, near the author’s Portsmouth birthplace, who attacked the way that the Establishment ignored Dickens’ desire to be buried in Rochester cathedral, speaks movingly of the writer’s personal and literary achievement:

“The reason I love him so deeply is that, having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and in his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, perhaps by giving the dispossessed a voice. From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it, as do I.”

Dickens was one of eight children. When he was only 12 years old, his father was arrested for debt and sent to Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, where the young boy spent his weekends. He somehow lifted himself out this abject existence and, as Callow writes, “threw himself into life with a blazing enthusiasm, becoming a beacon of energy and fun. The rest of his life was a negotiation between those high spirits and the dejection with which he had been acquainted so early.”

While he shared prejudices of the era, including anti-Semitism, he responded to criticisms and sought to redress his portrayal of the Jewish criminal Fagin in Oliver Twist, by halting the printing of the book in order to change the text. On his first visit to the United States in 1842, he spoke out against slavery.

Best-selling Swedish novelist Henning Mankell, author of the outstanding Wallender detective series, sums up the multifaceted aspects of the man’s genius. Dickens introduced something “new and brave,” Mankell writes.

He points to Dickens’ sympathy for the large number of women who were forced into prostitution by their circumstances. Mankell rightly says that Oliver Twist is a political novel: “When young Oliver takes his empty bowl and asks for more food, it is one of the most revolutionary acts ever depicted in a novel. How many people have found courage and power from this act of defiance?”

Dickens’ stories seethe with a multitude of unforgettable characters, literary and stylistic innovations and above all, through the stories, there is an anatomical dissection of patriarchal, brutal Victorian capitalism.

Dickens’ close contemporary and the other supreme anatomist of 19th century capitalism, Karl Marx, wrote of him and “present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England” that they "...issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.”

Dickens’s greatest achievement was the way he embraced all the contradictions in the society of his day, setting the lives of individuals into a complex web of social relations. He showed the brutality of capitalist society economically and psychologically and, significantly, how people defied it.

The brilliant opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities could have been written about today:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...”

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

There’s an exhibition about Dickens and London at the Museum of London

The real looters

The coalition government has placed an emergency army battalion on standby and is considering authorising the use of water cannon and tear gas to quell disorder and looting around the country.

But the threat of a mailed fist is a desperate response to an out-of-control social and political crisis. It cannot possibly solve the deeper issues that lie behind the anger and contempt for authority seen in British cities since Saturday night.

The looting of sportswear and plasma screens from high street shops shrinks to insignificance in comparison with the havoc wreaked in the global economy by those in charge. The hard men and women who have come to the aid of the ailing capitalist system have their own economic wrecking ball.

Governments in the United States, Europe and elsewhere have sought to resuscitate growth and bring about a recovery of production following the 2007/8 credit collapse. But their attempts have precipitated a new, far deeper crisis as the debt tsunami engulfs the world’s richest nations.

The truth now emerging is that a return to profitable growth is impossible without imposing equally impossible intolerable conditions of exploitation. ‘Austerity’ doesn’t even begin to describe what must follow if capitalist society is to survive.

It’s not only government cuts that will hurt people. Over the last seven days alone, £200 billion was wiped from the market - and about £300 billion in the past month, drastically reducing people’s pensions and savings.

The United States, still the world’s biggest economy, is no longer able to inspire confidence in the global financial markets. On Friday it experienced a humiliating downgrading of its debt. Standard and Poor, one of the credit rating agencies which speak for the gamblers, speculators - so-called ‘investors’ - whose interests seem all-powerful today, expressed their contempt for the outcome of the US political process and are driving the crisis into a new, more dangerous stage.

President Obama whistled in the dark when he responded on Monday to the historic downgrade of US debt. “No matter what some agency may say, we have always been and always will be a triple-A country,” said the President, as he tried to reassure the investors whose power commands governments.

But whether or not Obama believed that his words could unite the warring factions amongst Democrats and Republicans into accepting his demand for slashing cuts to Medicare and tax increases, they failed to halt the world’s stock markets plunging into the darkness.

The Federal Reserve’s despairing decision to hold interest rates at historic lows for two years cannot restore the US economy any more than it has in the UK in the last two years or in Japan in the last decade. The towering edifice of fantasy credit and debt has to be eliminated, and as a consequence the capitalist economy will contract. Surplus productive capacity has to be physically destroyed.

The nature of the capitalist system is the heart of this crisis – a system first revealed around 150 years ago when Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital, his analysis of the capitalist mode of production.

The words of a critic were incorporated into an afterword to the second German edition in 1873. “The scientific value of such an inquiry” he said “ lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.”

Resolving the current crisis by replacing the present system with a democratised economic and political form of society is on the order of the day.

Gerry Gold

A World to Win economics editor

Dogma gives Marx a bad name

The merit of veteran Financial Times writer and noted economist Samuel Brittan is that he is not a dogmatist. He may not have all the answers when it comes to today’s crisis. But Brittan believes that summoning the writings or reputations of dead economists to back a policy is hopelessly wrong.

Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat business secretary in the Coalition government, claimed in the January 17 issue of the New Statesman that “Keynes would be on our side”. Two economists promptly called this “foolhardy”. Others, says Brittan, too often cite Karl Marx to justify a view.

“What a reflection all this is on the would-be scientific standing of political economy,” says Brittan who served in Labour as well as Tory governments. He himself was taught by Milton Friedman, the father figure of the monetarist theories of the 1980s implemented by Thatcher and Reagan.

There is indeed no merit in citing what Keynes or Marx (or even Friedman) said at a certain point in history if the aim is to prop up a preconception about today’s world. As Brittan says: “Can one imagine physicists trying to advance their views by showing that they were implicit in some obscure passage in Einstein or Isaac Newton?”

This is true. But any half-decent physicist will know that a modern understanding of the material world would not be possible without the advances made by earlier scientists. Their theories are incorporated into modern physics – not simply rejected as old hat.

So it should be with Marx, a revolutionary communist as well as a political economist. Turning his ideas into a tenet, a dogma to be repeated on suitable occasions, was not the responsibility of bourgeois economists like Brittan. Principal blame for this rests with the Stalinist movement, particularly the bureaucracy of the former Soviet Union. They did this to Lenin too, taking a phrase here and a quotation there to provide a rationale for every twist and turn.

Brittan himself is not averse to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, declaring that if Marx were alive today he would be 193 years old and, therefore, no one could know what he would say. This is indisputable; and the likelihood of Marx returning is not even up for discussion.

What Marx left, however, was a legacy of a philosophical method, an approach to understanding constantly changing reality. Marx himself, in the afterword to the second German edition, could do no better than cite with approval a critical review of Capital in 1872:

“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life.”

This dialectical method enabled Marx to reveal the contradictions inherent with the system of capitalist production. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the continuous drive to global expansion, the inevitable formation of monopolies – these and other scientific laws were expounded by Marx. They naturally need verification through a study of today’s conditions. Rescuing Marx from the dogmatists is essential in our preparation to transcend a capitalism that is in its deepest-ever and most threatening crisis.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

God’s banker appointed to Cabinet

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has ended his search for a new cabinet minister responsible for increasing British exports and attracting foreign investment. He will ennoble HSBC chair Stephen Green to ease his entry into government.

Green (who is not to be confused with Sir Philip Green, the billionaire retailer, recently appointed to oversee the Coalition’s upcoming spending review) is Cameron’s fifth choice. He failed to persuade Lord Davies to stay on. Davies, Gordon Brown’s ”favourite banker” filled the post during the final 18 months of Brown’s administration.

Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls-Royce, Dick Oliver, chairman of BAE Systems, as well as retailer Sir Stuart Rose, outgoing chairman of Marks and Spencer also declined the role.

No doubt there have been all kinds of influences affecting the decisions of the individuals concerned, but the pressures of history have conspired to bypass even the fraudulent electoral process and place Green in the key government role pursuing the interests of capital.

Green is well-qualified for the job and has now become - without a shadow of doubt - the personification of global capital in the 21st century.

Add it all up : head of the second richest company in the world (measured by assets held), unelected member of the House of Lords, privately educated graduate of Exeter College, University of Oxford, ordained minister in the Church of England.

It is clearly Green’s “moral” status which makes him attractive to the Coalition. He has said there was a need for the banking sector to operate on a more ethical basis – i.e. a need to at least be seen to rein in the unadulterated greed of the City and the financial sector.

But just in case anyone still thinks Green is the wrong man for this exalted post, Lib-Demo business secretary Vince Cable was at hand to assure anyone worried about the unchecked influence of corporate banking on government policy. “He is one of the few to emerge with credit from the recent financial crisis, and somebody who has set out a powerful philosophy for ethical business,” Cable purred yesterday.

And sure enough, to cleanse his Christian conscience and guide a generation of newly emerging players in the global financial casino, Green some years ago penned a tract called titled Serving God Serving Mammon.

According to one reviewer, “he explored whether you can do the Lord’s work whilst also commuting to Canary Wharf every morning to do battle in the boardroom and kick ass on the trading floor.” Green’s reply to this question was: ‘Christians can serve God in the world of finance and commerce, but it is also possible to fall into the trap of serving Mammon there,’ he wrote. ‘Yet the kingdom of God can be found in the thick of the markets.’

Arguing that the financial markets are a place where temptation could be too much, it was important that Christians should be at hand to demonstrate that honesty and integrity can be seen to work. Why, he argued, should financial markets be left to non-Christians?

Karl Marx, who wrote the definitive book on the subject of Capital in the 19th century, coined the term ‘the personification of capital’, or ‘capital personified’ to characterise people occupying a certain social role. They became and are the owners of capital and represent its interests in the processes of production, distribution and exchange.

This is the true role that Green is being called upon to play – and his Christian morality will be at hand to provide a fig-leaf for the interests of British and global capital.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Britain - a failed state

A system that produces a government intent on forcing people to cut their own throats is a failed state and we ought to find a democratic replacement for it as soon as possible.

The Conservative-led coalition of public school-educated ministers wants to make the whole of the British electorate party to decisions that will “change our way of life” over the next few years.

Cameron and Clegg’s already damaged coalition – together with the entire media circus – are engaged on a campaign of attempted mass hypnosis. If they had their way, they’d draw the entire population into a self-inflicted tsunami of devastating cuts in wages, jobs, pensions and public services on a scale never seen before. This is change for the very worst.

As the government’s new “independent” Office for Budget Responsibility will reveal, the economy is on much shakier ground than previously thought. Treasury growth forecasts which, if true, would have cut the budget deficit, are pure invention by the outgoing New Labour government. The OBR, by the way, is headed by Sir Alan Budd, who, in 2005 became a director of IG Group, which trades in financial derivatives and spread betting. Very “independent” then!

Attempts to restart economic growth through the printing of money inevitably came to nothing, both in Britain and in the United States. The crisis of the capitalist system has not gone away. Far from it, as John Authers writes in his new book for the Financial Times, "The fearful rise of markets”:

“The financial disaster of 2007 to 2009 … has not cured any of the underlying factors that led markets to become intertwined and overinflated and to endanger the world economy. This does not mean that another synchronised bubble followed by a crash is inevitable, but it does mean that such an event remains a distinct possibility.”

The global capitalist system has failed – economically and politically. So what follows is a short list of the changes to the social relations that define “our way of life” we think are worth considering.

First to go should be the profit-based financial system and all the associated wasteful, absurd activities that turn reasonable, well-educated, clever, potentially socially-useful people into crazed traders and wild-eyed speculators. They have gambled with everyone else’s pensions, savings and futures, and now hold governments around the world to ransom. Sure we’ll need a system of credit and money, but why not run it as a not-for-profit community service?

Then there’s the system of land and property ownership. This has survived more or less intact in Britain since the Middle Ages. It ties millions of people into paying the major part of their income as rent or interest in exchange for temporary occupation and use or the mirage of security as a house owner. It’ll be better, much better when all property is held in common. Socially-owned land and housing for all!

And that also applies to the ownership of capital – factories, offices, machines, tools, knowledge – all the durable things we’ve created that help us to produce what we need to live. As Marx explained, capital is value accumulated from many workers’ labour. For little more than 350 years the ownership of capital has given employers control over their employees.

Life will be better when private ownership, production for profit and the wages-for-labour employment contract is ended, and capital is under the control of the people who do the work that produces it.

We’ll need a new democratic process to make this happen. When Cameron’s campaign of persuasion meets popular opposition, he’ll either resort to force or the coalition will be driven out of power. Let’s build a real, much more democratic system of Peoples Assemblies that can make this new “way of life” a reality.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The spectre of Marx looms large

As Bank of England governor Mervyn King warns that UK is entering recession and the pound plunges, websites and newspapers around the world are noting that the ideas of Karl Marx have a new relevance.

Yesterday Marx’s iconic bearded face graced the front page of The Times, followed by four pages about the German refugee who eked out an impoverished existence in Soho when he arrived here on the run from the Prussian authorities. Under the headline, “He’s back”, The Times' newest leader writer and former Blair speechwriter, Philip Collins asks: “Could it be that Marx’s hour has come at last?”

The Times' idiot’s hop, skip and jump through Marx’s most famous book Capital is jaundiced and superficial, as one might expect. But at the same time, Collins is compelled to recognise that “Marx was on to something”, adding: “Capitalism wasn’t just nasty, it was doomed. It would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A bit like Lehman Brothers.”

Collins in fact ignores Marx’s core analysis of what capitalism actually is and what makes the system tick. Marx showed that capitalism is a system of commodity production for exchange, and that money (and credit) arose on the basis of the exchange of goods.

Through vast research and an epic intellectual effort, he demonstrated that things only acquire value as a result of the power of living human beings – labour. From this basis, he analysed the historic evolution of capital and how the growth of credit was central in capital’s need constantly to expand. Marx explained the fundamental contradiction between private ownership for profit and the vast, socialised nature of the productive forces as the source of capitalism’s inherent tendency to crises.

What the renewed interest in Marxist ideas proves without doubt is that the financial crisis and its effects have brought a widespread distrust combined with huge anger about the system and the governments like that of Brown. So, for the ruling classes the race is on to find pseudo-Marxists who can discredit any thoughts of a revolutionary transition to a different system.

Enter the media’s favourite “radicals”, longstanding not so ex-Stalinists Martin Jacques and Professor Eric Hobsbawm – who provided the ideological rationale for New Labour in the late1980s - closely followed by Frank Furedi, Mick Hume and Claire Fox, formerly leading lights in the dodgy Living Marxism magazine and now prominent within the so-called Institute of Ideas. Jacques, now visiting professor at Renmin University, Beijing, yearns for a return to Big Government (echoes of Stalin?) and social democracy while Fox looks forward to “a period of enforced austerity”.

Environment campaigner George Monbiot some time back outed the sinister way in which Fox and company have infiltrated the media and discussion circles. As Monbiot points out: “The LM network promote an extreme libertarian ideology - no restrictions on paedophilia, race hate etc. - and eulogise technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and human cloning.”

Clearly people like Fox have nothing to do with Marxist ideas and everything to do with promoting the interests of Big Oil, Big Pharma, and global agro-business. They are paraded in Murdoch’s newspapers (and on the BBC where Fox appears as an “expert” on the Moral Maze) to discredit Marxism and revolutionary ideas in general amongst students and young people looking for alternatives to the ideologies and stereotypes of the media and education system.

Corinna Lotz
Secretary, A World to Win

Too much 'civilisation'

Nothing sums up the insanity of the capitalist system more than unemployment. Just think about it. People want to work; the means of production like offices, shops, factories, plant and equipment all exist; yet all of a sudden, workers are thrown on the dole.

People desperately need affordable housing, for example. Yet tens of thousands of building workers have lost their jobs this year, developments have been abandoned and stockpiles of bricks are growing. And so does homelessness. The causes are not difficult to establish and lie right at the heart of capitalism.

Developers and house builders can’t make a profit because house prices have soared beyond many people’s reach and sales have slumped; the banking system has seized up so there are no mortgages in any case; and levels of personal debt weigh like millstones on the population’s necks. So, no profit equals no building work equals unemployment.

While the bankers are bailed out to the tune of £37 billion – with taxpayers’ commitments possibly rising to £3 trillion – the people who actually do the work and create real wealth as opposed to fantasy finance, are discarded without as so much as a by your leave. No bail-out for them!

Long quotes from 19th century philosopher-revolutionaries can be a bit dry and seem remote from 21st century global capitalism. But when you read what Marx and Engels had to say in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, you are struck by how fresh their summary of capitalist crisis is:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?

Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

Brilliant! The productive forces are too powerful for the system of private ownership of the means of production. So they must be and are destroyed, jobs included. This what bringing “stability” back to the banking system actually means in practice. The case for reorganising society on co-operative, not-for-profit lines has never been stronger. That would give us the control over resources to keep people in work and meet basic needs like housing. Creating the means to turn the old order upside down is the immediate challenge.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Drive the merchants from the temple

When the Archbishops of Canterbury and York weigh in against what they see as the excesses of market capitalism and financial speculators, something is definitely up. The most senior figures in the Church of England haven’t suddenly become revolutionaries, however, but reflect a growing sense in society that the economy is going to hell and that ordinary people are the principal victims.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, condemned the financial traders who made millions by driving down the share price of leading banks as "bank robbers and asset strippers". Speaking to City bankers on the effects of the credit crisis, he damned the "Alice in Wonderland" world of global finance where speculators profited by laying bets that shares in HBOS would fall in price.

Meanwhile the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, warned that modern devotion to the free market is a form of idolatry and that Karl Marx was right in his analysis of the power of "unbridled capitalism". In an article for The Spectator magazine, Dr Williams said the current crisis had exposed the "basic unreality" of the long-standing global trade in debts, in which "almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders".

Sentamu and Williams make some good points but like many others, fail to relate the financial crisis to the essential nature of the capitalist system. The inner drive for the continuing expansion of capital is the source of the fantasy finance world the archbishops describe. Their demands for regulation and reining in of the speculators will not only fall on deaf ears but are as far removed from reality as the financial system they denounce.

In the United States, for example, the Bush administration is taking desperate measures to try and keep the financial system going by spending $700 billion to buy up useless assets that the market is unwilling to put a price to. Bush is bludgeoning Congress into approving the deal, warning that failure would lead to “financial panic” and a “long and painful recession”. The Financial Times has doubts whether the package will make a difference, saying today: “The plan has some serious flaws. In particular, there is no reason why public sector buyers should be better at pricing these assets than private bidders. This could, potentially, lead to significant losses.”


The archbishops would like to return to a more benign form of capitalism of the 1960s, before the globalisation genie was let out of the bottle. Those of a mature age like myself would love to go back 40 years, which shows how the imagination can run riot. It is far easier to conceive of a future based on co-operation expressed through common ownership and democratic control of the resources of the global economy.

Of course, the Church of England cannot help in this respect. Since the Reformation, it has provided the theological justification for capitalism. Money-lending and the accumulation of individual wealth through land grabbing, slavery and colonial possessions were generally blessed and approved of by the church, which is an integral part of the British state. Rather than limiting ourselves to Sentamu’s and Williams’ criticisms, the action of Jesus in driving the merchants and money-lenders out of the temple would be a far better starting point!

Paul Feldman
Communications editor