A large section of the world wide web went dark earlier this year. Websites including Wikipedia (4th most visted site in the world) removed access to content for 24 hours in protest of two bills on their way though the US congress- the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). The laws would have given the old entertainment industries, represented by organisations like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) greater control over the internet. Foreign websites accused of copyright infringement could be made inaccessible to American internet users.

The online protest, which prompted a massive amount of lobbying from American citizens (and overseas), was a success, SOPA and PIPA are dead in the water- at least for the time being. Within 24 hours however it seemed as if those two laws had passed and were being enforced- New Zealand Police, colaborating with the American FBI arrested Kim Dotcom, the founder of the website MegaUpload in his mansion north of Auckland. Several other men involved with the site were also arrested.

MegaUpload was a website which allowed users to upload large files and share them with others, it was allegedly used for the sharing of copyrighted material without permission from the owners.

Of course, copyright infringement was and remains illegal regardless of the fate of SOPA and PIPA. but presumably MegaUpload would have remained online due to the “safe habour” provisions of the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). While the DMCA is not without its own problems- it is the frequent target of protest from groups like the online civil liberties organisation the Electronic Frountiers Foundation- it does protect websites from legal action regarding content their users upload, provided the comply when asked to remove it. This is why Youtube typically won’t remove copyrighted content until they are requested to by the copyright holder.

One legal opinion on the role of the DMCA in this case comes from Terry Hart who runs the website Copyhype whose motto is ‘Understanding the Copyright wars’. According to Hart the law has been interpreted as such that it provides protection in the event of civil lawsuits, but not criminal prosecutions. The crack down on MegaUpload is the latter, the state in this instance is not acting as a neutral arbiter between intellectual property holders and a content distributor, but acting on behalf of groups like the MPPA, enforcing laws which were primarily written for their benefit.

The huge support that exists for file sharing has created a situation where Kim Dotcom is being painted as some kind of a folk hero. While the numbers are small (The ‘Support Kim Dotcom’ Facebook page has less than 100 ‘likes’) they are not insignificant. Holding Dotcom (who legally changed his name from Shmitz around the time MegaUpload started) is huge error in judgment. As Brendon O’Grady wrote on Culturemap:

Dotcom, a German-born computer programmer and businessman, founded Megaupload in 2005, shortly after completing his probationary sentence for insider trading and embezzlement convictions. That’s not exactly the sort of altruistic figurehead for economic justice that so many would prefer to see rise to prominence in the “Occupy” era. And to make matters worse, recent weeks have brought to light a stream of outlandish snapshots from Dotcom’s positively Scarface-esque lifestyle. Pictures have circulated of Dotcom proudly tastelessly showing off everything from large weapons to luxury cars, personal yachts to scantily-clad female companions. Everything…simply screams of capitalist excess.

Capitalism has reached a point where technology has made existing relations of intellectual property outmoded (see ‘Copyright: A Marxist Perspective in the June 2011 issue of The Spark or online here) but that doesn’t mean capitalist relations don’t come into play in the world of online file sharing. Dotcoms wealth- which is in the millions- is no doubt ill gotten. While MegaUpload operated a more featured paid subscription service, few opted for it and most of the sites revenue came from advertising. Legitimate advertisers tend to steer clear of sites like MegaUpload which sit in the legal gray-area of cyberspace, so its probable that scams and other dubious enterprises provided the money that paid for Dotcoms lavish lifestyle.

The idea that we should defend Kim Dotcom because the property relation the old media industry seeks to maintain is past its use by date is akin to to claiming that opposing the prohibition of marijuana means defending the criminal gangs who profit from trafficking the drug. Unlike the group of people behind file sharing site The Pirate Bay, Dotcom doesn’t even present himself as a digital Robin Hood type figure, he is simply a businessman with an amoral attitude toward commerce.

The fight against the old entertainment industries should take the form of opposing laws which restrict rights in the name of defending intellectual property, not just SOPA and PIPA but New Zealand’s own copyright laws (see Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill: A Challenge to Democratic Norms also in the June 2011 Spark and online here) and international agreements such as ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). When the 8th round of ACTA negotiations was held in Wellington in 2010, the lack of transparency drew criticism from the Creative Freedom Foundation, the Open Source Society and even Oxfam, who were concerned about the effect the treaty might have on developing nations; “The ability for people living in extreme poverty to access lifesaving medicines [due to patents] must be more important than protecting profits for the world’s biggest entertainment and pharmaceutical companies,” commented Oxfam New Zealand’s Executive Director, Barry Coates.

Its also important to highlight that the current economic system means most content creators are not actually paid the value of their work, and that by maintaining the way that entertainment is brought and sold, large copyright holders continue to expropriate wealth from the labour of creative workers, who only receive a small percentage in royalties. We should also draw attention to examples of post-capitalist style production in areas where we have post-scarcity thanks to digital copying- such as the Free Software Movement and the Creative Commons.

Discussing ways in which content creators can be remunerated fairly for their work, and also about how the boundaries between creative work and other forms of labour can be broken down are beyond the scope of this article, but they are discussions worth having. There is no one simple answer for these questions.

 Third affirmative speaker Don Franks

 Unfortunately capitalism is not on its deathbed, but it is in a state of crisis.  You don’t have to take the word of a communist union organiser – just listen to the despairing of senior capitalist mouthpieces.

 “Our world is broken—and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone. The last time I saw anything like this, in the sense of disorientation and loss, was among my Russian friends when the Soviet Union broke up.” So said Bernie Sucher, Merrill Lynch operations head in Moscow, in the March 8th  Financial Times.

 In the same edition of the Financial Times Associate editor and chief economics commentator Martin Wolf despaired: “It is impossible at such a turning point to know where we are going… Yet the combination of financial collapse with a huge recession, if not something worse, will surely change the world. The legitimacy of the market will weaken. The credibility of the US will be damaged. The authority of China will rise. Globalization itself may founder. This is a time of upheaval.”

 In the midst of this time of upheaval, Wolf continued clinging to the old capitalist mantra: “no credible alternative to the market economy exists…”

 It is a well known habit of ruling classes to declare their own particular social formation immutable. Before Martin Wolf’s fellow capitalists came to hold sway, feudal lords believed their regime to be ordained for all time by God .

 In fact the market economy form of production and distribution is relatively historically recent. Since our evolution into humans, most of our production has been for direct consumption by the producers.

 Small scale commodity production has existed for several thousand years.

 But only in the last couple of centuries has commodity production become the earth’s dominant form of creating goods and services. Capitalism is not the most enduring form of human society; neither is it the most logical, natural, efficient or humane.

 Individual capitalists generally drive their workers to produce the maximum without regard to the capacity of the market to absorb their production, or to any negative social, economic or environmental effects. The result is a system with built in inescapable periodic crises. Competition between countries in the world market make it ever more difficult for them to sell the goods which are produced in ever-increasing quantities. Intense competition among capitalists makes it necessary to keep investing in plant and machinery. Relatively greater proportions of capital are invested as constant capital, which merely reproduces its own value, and relatively less as variable capital, which is spent on labour-power, the one commodity which creates new expanded value. This leads to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, described by Marx as “the single most important law of modern political economy.” The effects of falling profitability can be seen in capitalists’ inability to generate a new round of economic growth on the scale of the post-war boom.

 Modern capitalism has been in a state of chronic slump for several decades. Long periods of recession have been punctuated by shallow, short-lived booms termed ‘jobless recoveries’ because they generally don’t restore employment. The result is a crisis. Workers’ rights and living standards are attacked and the price of labour-power is driven down; capitalists less able to compete are driven to the wall and their business go bust, with their workers thrown on the scrap-heap; goods are unable to be sold even though people want and need them.

 Or, as the old union song puts it:

 “now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made”

 The latest edition of the Maritime Union of New Zealand magazine The Maritimes features an article titled “We won’t pay for their crisis” The section ‘effects on workers’ notes:

 “The USA jobless rate will reach 9.4% this year according to a survey from the business website Bloomberg News. The USA has already lost 4.4million jobs since December 2007”.

 “A national business organisation predicts UK unemployment will hit 3.2 million people as the economy shrinks – over 1 in 10 people. Official unemployment figures are rising and currently stand at 2 million.”

 “ The UN puts the average unemployment rate as 15 % in the Arab world, reaching 40% among people between the ages of 15 and 24- a total of 66 million out of the total Arab population of 317 million.”

 “The IMF expects global unemployment to hit 50 million.”

 For working people capitalism is a cruel denial of their human potential.

 In my own working lifetime I’ve seen things get not better but worse. Since I began working there has come to be for workers, a dirtier deal. More casualisation, lower union density, greater inequality, lower job safety standards, worse housing, greater state and employer surveillance, fewer social services and a far more bleak and uncertain future for our children.

 Labour and National governments have made no difference – why would they – the problem is not governments but the capitalist system.

 Capitalism is a system of privilege, injustice and crisis.

 There is no better way to spend one’s life than taking part in the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. The Workers Party is seriously committed to help accomplish this task and I invite all people of goodwill here tonight to join us. If you are interested, please see me after the conclusion of this debate,

 Thank you.

A Workers Response to the Financial Crisis

A teach-in organised by the Workers Rights Campaign

Saturday May 2^nd

1-00pm

Canterbury WEA, 59 Gloucester Street

Programme

The Big Picture

1-10pm

The Working Class Paul Piesse

The Cause of the Crisis Phil Ferguson

The Global Economic Crisis, free trade agreements & privatisation Murray Horton

2-15pm

Forms of Resistance discussion

chair: Warren Brewer

Break (Tea/coffee provided)

3-00pm

The Way Forward –

3-30pm

Panel – Organising Strategies to Advance Workers Rights

Warren Brewer

Don Archer

John Kerr

Discussion chair: David Colyer

Conclusion – Summary Paul Piesse

5-00pm

Break (food provided)

5-30pm

The Way Forward – Film

7-00pm

Every few months exchange rates feature as a point of discussion about the state of the New Zealand economy.  For many people it must seem odd that both a “high” and “low” New Zealand dollar are presented as problematic.  What is going on?  Does it really matter?

A few months ago there was a flurry of concern by economic writers and commentators about the NZ dollar being too high.  In mid-February the NZ dollar was trading for around 66 American cents.  This meant that a New Zealand product with a sale price of $100 would sell in the US for $66.  This was said to present a problem for exporters since the “higher” the NZ dollar, the more US consumers would have to pay and the less competitive New Zealand products would be in the highly lucrative – and highly competitive – huge American market.  If the currency of another country producing the same or similar products was “lower” than the NZ dollar it would be cheaper for American importers and consumers to buy those.

High bad, low bad

On the one hand a “high” NZ dollar is good for New Zealand importers and consumers.  It means we have to pay less for imported goods.  But this, too, can be a problem as a “high” NZ dollar can help stimulate a tendency to import more in dollar terms than is exported.  There may be a flood of imports into New Zealand which takes money out of the New Zealand economy and also leads to balance of payments problems.

At the start of August, a NZ dollar is around 61-62 US cents, and the talk of the NZ dollar being “too high” has abated.

This is good for exporters, since it makes New Zealand products cheaper and more competitive in the huge American market and elsewhere.  On the other hand, it’s not so good for importers since they now have to pay more for what they buy in the US (or elsewhere if they are buying in American dollars).  Also the lower the NZ dollar sinks the harder things can be for workers and the poor as so much of what most New Zealanders purchase is imported.

Isn’t it crazy that neither a “high” nor “low” NZ dollar is good for the economy as a whole and for everyone?

Currencies reflect state of overall economy

The state of a national currency normally reflects the health of a country’s economy, although in recent decades there has been a strong tendency by governments to manipulate currencies to make up for the anarchic state of the global capitalist order.  For instance, for many years the British government kept the British pound artificially high to mask the decay of the British productive economy and Britain’s overall decline on the world stage.  When the government lifted its protection of the pound in the early 1990s, the pound plummeted.

After WW2, with much of the rest of the developed capitalist world in ruins, the United States was the dominant economic power.  US industry and commerce ruled the capitalist world and the dollar was the global currency of exchange, against which other currencies were aligned under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944.  Other governments agreed to peg their currencies in relation to gold and the US dollar (with the US having most of the gold reserves as well).  The end of the postwar boom and the decline of the US economy in relation to countries like Germany and Japan meant that by 1971 this set-up could no longer be maintained and the Bretton Woods system collapsed.

National economic rivalry came more and more to the fore.  It was every capitalist economy – and every currency – for itself.  The relationship between the dollar and the yen changed dramatically, for instance.  Whereas at the end of WW2 an American dollar was worth over 300 yen, by the early 1990s it was worth just over 100 yen.  As one of the smaller and more vulnerable capitalist economies, New Zealand was hit dramatically and the fourth Labour government finally carried out a massive devaluation in 1984, wiping out hundreds of millions of funds held in NZ dollars.

Again, this seems crazy since these were actual funds which many New Zealanders had saved or created through their work, yet now were gone altogether as if neither the funds, nor the work that created them, had ever existed.

At the same time, the impact on people’s living conditions and livelihoods was entirely real.  Workers, in particular, found themselves much worse off economically.

Speculation and manipulation

The fact that the world economy operates through diverse and competing currencies also opens up all kinds of speculative and manipulative possibilities for making money, at the expense of the overall health of the economy.  Take the case of arbitrage.

Exchange rates vary between different countries and it is possible to take advantage of this.  Say in London ten British pounds are trading for twenty American dollars which in turn are trading for 2000 Japanese yen, but in Tokyo 2000 yen are trading for £12 and $20 American.  Converting the American dollars into pounds in Tokyo and then the pounds back into American dollars in London will turn you a nice little profit.  In this example of arbitrage if you started with $US100 million then, overnight, you could convert this into $US120,000,000 – a $US20,000,000 profit.

And if you have a vast fortune to play around with, you can simply divert it into buying shares, foreign currency and so on, all without contributing anything whatsoever to growing the global economy in real terms, let alone improving the economic conditions of the vast section of the world which remains without even many of the basic necessities.

These kinds of economic activities mean no new goods have been created, but a profit is turned because of the vagaries of the currency markets.  While there is no increase in actual products, let alone productivity, the $20 million profit made in the arbitrage example above is real enough.  But, somewhere along the line, that real profit has to be paid for out of the productive economy – the economy where new value in the form of actual commodities, whether goods or service, are created.

In this case, the parasitic economy, which is a fundamental part of the operations of capitalism – and more so today than in the first century of industrial capitalism – has sucked money out of the productive economy.  The overnight $20 million profit a wealthy person has just made from arbitrage, because it has to be paid for out of the real economy, is $20 million not invested in producing food for the hungry and better machines and technology to improve life for all.  And, these days, billions and billions are invested in such parasitic activity.

Under capitalism, of course, it is the profit motive which drives economic activity, so it makes sense for the rich to make money from the parasitic economy and to speculate in exchange rates, future commodity prices and just about anything else they can.

Profit versus human need

At the end of the day, currencies and money are just pieces of paper.  But the turbulent, unplanned nature of the world capitalist economy leads to dramatic shifts in the relationships between these pieces of paper from different countries and these mere pieces of paper actually have significant impacts on people’s lives, especially for people in the Third World – on what they can afford to buy to eat, to clothe themselves, to pay for shelter, indeed just to live.  Thus a blip on the currency market in New York, London or Tokyo can kill people in Africa.

Increasingly, blips in exchange rates affect workers in the First World too.  We may not die – yet – but our standards of living are certainly affected by the turbulence of currencies brought about by the unplanned nature of economic life in a capitalist world.  It is one of the craziest aspects of capitalism today that currencies – pieces of paper – rule over actual human beings and worsen our conditions of life.

How much more sane it would be to have human beings rationally plan the global economy, producing and distributing goods and services on the basis of human need.

In Capital, Marx notes that at a certain point of development the capitalist system itself, in particular the property form, becomes an obstacle to the further development of the production forces and even to the further development of capitalism itself. The chief barrier to capital turns out to be capital itself. At this point capital attempts to escape the limitations of its own natural laws of motion and find new ways of operating. This indicates that capitalism has reached the end of the road, and socialism is required.

In its own perverse way, capital begins to establish what Lenin called ‘transitional forms’ – forms which indicate that the means of production are trying to go beyond capitalism to a new form of society. Of course, they cannot, as long as capitalist property forms constrain them and the capitalist class holds political power. However they can last for a long time in the absence of a revolutionary challenge. As Lenin noted, there are no hopeless situations for capitalism in economic terms. In fact, in Imperialism, Lenin suggested that the imperialist epoch, the highest and final stage of capitalism, could last “for a fairly long period” if what he called the “opportunist abscess” in world politics, namely social democracy, was not decisively defeated.

In Imperialism, Lenin identified key transitional forms, such as monopolies, and the other means used by capital to escape the limitations of its own laws of motion.

What I want to look at is how imperialism has evolved since, the importance of distinguishing form and content in understanding what has changed and was not changed, and lastly at some new survival mechanisms and transitional forms thrown up by imperialism.

This is only a brief overview. I won’t be going into great detail and there are a number of important issues to do with globalisation that I haven’t got time to deal with.

Marx noted that the constraints of capitalist social relations on production bring about an historic tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As this tendency was expressed more and more potently in the late 1800s, for instance during the ‘long depression’ from the later 1870s until the early 1890s, movements of capital and commodities become increasingly propelled by evasive actions – in particular to escape from geographical places and industrial sectors afflicted by falling profit rates and to escape forms of organisation and competition in which the crisis is expressed.

Lenin’s concept took forward these insights of Marx. For instance, he saw that the internationalisation of capital was increasingly the result not of capitalist dynamism but of the inability of capital to sustain itself and expand much further within the old national terrain alone.

Lenin also noted, however, “It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the possibility of the rapid growth of capitalism.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, capitalism was most notable by the decay side of the decay-expansion dialectic. Capital reached its low-point with the Great Depression, beginning in 1929, although most of the capitalist world have experienced severe economic problems throughout the 1920s. Britain, the oldest imperialist power, had 10 percent unemployment for most of the 1920s before the Depression, for instance. In the US the fall of the rate of profit in the industrial sphere resulted in a speculative spree in the artificial economy, a spree which put prices in the artificial sphere so out of kilter with real values that everything came tumbling down in the Wall Street crash of 1919.

In the developed capitalist countries with the weakest economies, eg Germany and Italy, the combination of economic problems and heightened class conflict meant that ruling classes had to abandon bourgeois democracy and rule by naked force. Eventually the economic problems heightened conflict between the major capitalist powers and brought them to war, as had happened in 1914.

Economic meltdown, imperialist war and ongoing direct rule and oppression in the colonies all served to discredit imperialism and vindicate Lenin’s analysis. All over the world, imperialist capitalism appeared discredited and millions flocked to Marxism. Even in the West, the intellectual defenders of the idea that society worked best by letting the hidden hand of the market have full rein were few and far between.

Indeed, the terms imperialism and imperialist, which had been badges of honour in the early 1900s, became thoroughly discredited. The revelation of the Nazi horrors, which had taken the racial aspects of imperialist thinking to their logical, horrendous conclusions, served to discredit the politics of imperialism.

After WW2, however, there were several significant changes.

1. The old European imperialisms, usually with a lot of pressure from the oppressed in the colonies, abandoned direct rule in Africa and Asia. The United States, partly through being forced to compete with a Soviet Union which had embraced the right of nations to self-determination after 1917 and partly to gain access to raw materials, markets and investment opportunities which the old European powers had shut them out of, supported such decolonisation.

2. The postwar economic boom turned out to be the biggest and most dramatic expansion of capitalist production ever. Massive economic expansion and dynamism and rising living standards for workers in the First World, a product of sustained growth and increases in productivity which enabled workers to buy more use-values in the form of commodities with their wages, seemed to suggest a bright new dawn of capitalism.

Decolonisation and the postwar boom seemed to go against the analysis of imperialism by Lenin. Western powers did not need colonies and capitalism was no longer in decay. There was a retreat from Marxism and from Lenin’s analysis of imperialism among much of the left.

However, this indicated the impressionism of much of the left more than it did the incorrectness of Lenin’s analysis. Lenin had noted the dialectic between decay and expansion, and he had also differentiated between particular political and organisational forms and means through which imperialism operated at a particular point in time and the more fundamental content of imperialism.

Those bourgeois ideologists and leftists who said that Lenin on imperialism was old hat failed to understand Lenin’s underlying approach, for instance they failed to distinguish between form and content. The form of something can change significantly, without its content, without its essence changing. Capitalism, for instance, can operate in a variety of political forms, from liberal bourgeois democracy through to military or fascist dictatorship. The political form is certainly important, but it does not define the essence of a society, which is its mode of production.

Thus the physical removal of imperialist soldiers and civil servants from the old colonies, and their replacement by members of emerging local elites did not at all change the underlying economic relationship of those countries with the imperialist powers. In fact, formal political independence could make it cheaper for imperialism to control them. Imperialism did not have to bear the costs of direct rule.

The other indication of widespread impressionism on the left was connected to the postwar boom. Instead of using Marx’s theory to elaborate the factors which had made the boom possible many on the left in the West simply declared Marx and Lenin to have been wrong. Much of the left retreated from a materialist critique of the political economy and practical workings of capital into a moral critique of bad stuff capitalism did, a stance which reached its height with the emergence of the New Left’ in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In fact, there were very good reasons for the postwar boom – the Depression and world war had destroyed vast chunks of inefficient capital, concentrated and centralised capital, driven down the price of labour-power, destroyed a number of imperialist powers leaving the world open to the victors, most especially the United States. War industries had also stimulated technological development, Although starting out after these events on a narrower basis for , or at a lower level than several decades earlier, there was massive scope after 1945 for economic expansion.

However, as Marx had noted, capitalism has a tendency to develop unevenly, because expansion is based not on logical human considerations but on the basis of profitability. So what happened after WW2 was that the vast opportunities for profitable investment within the First World ensured only limited investment in the Third World. The economies of the Western powers themselves boomed, while Latin America, Africa and most of Asia stagnated, through lack of serious capital investment. Instead, these areas were plundered for cheap raw materials and what investment did take place was geared mainly to facilitating the grabbing and export of these raw materials.

Acute underdevelopment in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which also invariably meant repressive regimes as the material basis for bourgeois democracy was lacking, tended to facilitate rebellion. A chunk of countries – most notably China, but also part of Korea and Vietnam, broke free of imperialist domination and sought to develop along non-capitalist lines.

The very success of the postwar boom in the West, meanwhile, was creating a new crisis, beneath the surface of economic dynamism and prosperity. The boom meant that a greater and greater proportion of capital was invested in means of production, technology and other parts of constant capital in relation to the share of capital invested in labour-power. Yet, whereas the forms of constant capital, such as machinery, can only reproduce their own value, labour-power – and labour-power alone – produces new, expanded value. This change in the composition of invested capital therefore has a tendency to lower the rate of profit.

The same process sets off countervailing tendencies, which I don’t have time to go into here, but eventually the countervailing tendencies fail to work any longer and more direct measures are required to stave off crisis. There are a raft of measures which capital uses at this point – driving down wages, laying off workers and making those remaining work longer and harder, cutting costs of raw materials, exporting capital to areas where the rate of profit is higher, stimulating demand by expanding credit, price-fixing, developing cartels and monopolies, investing in the artificial economy (shares, forex, land speculation, arbitrage and so on).

A good example of how things have changed since the 1800s and yet how the essence has stayed the same is the case of Britain. In the 1800s, after the Industrial Revolution, Britain became the workshop of the world. Its industrial output was greater than that of any other capitalist power for most of the century and its productivity was such that it churn out industrial products cheaper than places like India. Cheap British industrial goods could flood the Indian market and wipe out Indian handcraft manufacture and burgeoning industry. Back then, Britain’s industrial exports reflected the immense productivity of British industry and the dynamism of British capitalism.

Today, Britain is probably the most internationalised capitalist player. Britain exports about a quarter of its annual output, more than most other G7 countries. A section of its biggest companies earn most of their profits abroad. For instance, pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome generates about 90 percent of its profits outside Britain. Yet Britain’s dependence on exported capital, whether in the form of investments or commodity capital, does not reflect British capitalism’s dynamism, let alone any significant edge in productivity and competitiveness. In fact, Britain trails the West in productivity. Thus the export of money capital and commodities reflects the weakness of domestic profitability.

The difference between Britain at the height of its industrial power and today is also reflected in the role of financial services. A hundred and fifty years ago, financial services were an outgrowth of a dynamic industrial sector. Industrial expansion required the development and expansion of financial services and London was the world’s leading financial centre because Britain was the number one industrial power.

Today the relatively low productivity of the industrial sector in Britain and the country’s decline as an industrial producer means that the economy is increasingly dependent on financial services to stay afloat. Financial services is actually Britain’s largest export earner, responsible for about 20 per cent of national output.

Thus the very kind of things which globalisation theorists point to as expressions of the dynamism of capitalism today are reflections of stagnation and decay at the very heart of the system – the production process in industry.

The fall in the rate of profit in the West, and the onset of stagnation at home, drove the export of capital when the postwar boom collapsed in the early-mid-1970s. While there was a susbsequent marked expansion of investment in the Third World in the 1970s and, especially, the 1980s. most foreign direct investment flows were, and remain, within the imperialist world itself. (See graph 2 and graph 3). It was not until the very end of the 1980s that the rate of FDI increase in the Third World equalled the rate of increase of FDI within the imperialist world and in the early 1990s, the rate of increase in the Third World began to markedly rise, although the actual amount of FDI going between imperialist countries remained greater than that going into the Third World.

The reality is that, despite all the hoopla of the globalisation theorists and the historic universalising tendencies of capital (noted by Marx and Engels as far back as the Communist Manifesto) capital remains constrained by the profit motive. Investment and development in one part of the world is offset by lack of investment and underdevelopment in another part of the world.

The massive scope for highly profitable investment within the imperialist world after WW2 meant much more limited investment in the Third World. The crisis of profitability in one imperialist country after another in the 1970s and 1980s drove capital abroad, albeit mainly within the imperialist world and from the late 80s into the Third World. However, imperialist investment within the Third World is highly uneven.

Most FDI in the countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia (excluding Japan, as an imperialist country itself) goes to a tiny handful of countries. Take the period in the early-mid 90s, when there was a dramatic expansion of FDI outside the imperialist heartlands: in 1994 a third of such FDI went into China alone, another third was shared between Malaysia, Thailand, Argentina and Mexico. You will note that none of these countries are in Africa. Indeed, 90 percent of FDI in the non-imperialist countries went into just 20 countries in Asia and Latin America. Much of Latin America and Asia, and pretty much all of Africa, missed out. Africa, in particular, remains starved of investment and development, even within the confines of capitalist investment and development.

We are still far from living in a globalised world, let alone one which is united by common living standards and opportunities.

Lastly, I want to look briefly at the idea that capital is now supranational or transnational and at the development of transitional forms since Lenin.

The idea that capital has evolved beyond the nation-state and we are now living in the era of transnational companies is widely held on both the right and left. The most emphatic left statement of this view is probably Hardt-Negri’s recent book Empire. On the right, neo-liberals celebrate the domination of the world by the free market and free trade, by the free movement of goods, services and money.

As I have already noted, there are very real limits to the globalisation even of investment. Moreover, the world is still characterised more by limited access than free access to markets. Take something like dairy products, NZ’s chief export earner. Fonterra, as a highly efficient producer, may favour free trade in dairy commodities, but only six percent of the international market for dairy products is without restriction. Sectors of the US economy, including core parts of US agriculture, are especially highly protected. The capitalist state regulates trade in favour of the interests of national capital.

The vast bulk of so-called transnational firms are still rooted within individual imperialist countries and still make the largest part of their profits in the domestic market. The firms that don’t tend to be based in the more stagnant imperialist countries, not Japan, the United States and Germany.

Inter-imperialist rivalry also indicates the crucial role played by the nation-state in modern society in general and in advancing the interests of national capital in particular. The US government, for instance, was very specific about who would be given contracts for the so-called rebuilding of Iraq. Modern inter-imperialist rivalry would simply not exist if capital really had moved beyond being primarily national capital and become global capital.

In fact the politico-economic trend today is towards heightened inter-imperialist rivalry and heightened military intervention in the Third World by imperialist states carefully guarding the economic interests of their own capitalists.

An interesting example of the national basis of global companies, by the way, is Fonterra in NZ. With $12 billion in assets, this is NZ’s largest company and a huge player in the international dairy market. Most of its earnings do actually come from exports and it now has a couple of dozen processing plants overseas. However, the largest single sector of its profits come from within NZ and its production remains concentrated within NZ. This is even more the case with huge companies based in much bigger capitalist countries like the United States.

Now to conclude with the transitional forms. I want to look at the development of one of these forms, monopoly, and then at some new forms post-Lenin.

A good indication of the trend toward monopoly can be seen in the formation of Fonterra in NZ in 2001. In the food retail industry internationally in the later 1990s and early 2000s, there was something like one major merger or acquisition every two days. These mergers in turn made it essential for food production companies to merge, in order to be able to supply enough commodities to bigger and bigger retail companies.

More significantly, throughout the imperialist world, mergers and acquisitions have been a central feature of capitalism in the past several decades. In the 1980s, the value of such deals quadrupled. In fact funds, often largely obtained on credit, tended to be used for buy-outs, takeovers and mergers, rather than investment in new machinery and technology to increase productivity and expand output.

While the transitional forms noted by Lenin have continued, more important at some times than others in the past 90 years, some new ones have emerged as well. These include the emergence of diversified financial instruments like junk bonds and derivatives, the massive expansion of credit, new institutions of international economic regulation (IMF, WTO, World Bank, OECD) and a massive expansion of state intervention. All of these are reflections of the inability of capital to spontaneously reproduce and expand itself according to its own laws of motion.

While the state has attempted to roll back spending on the ‘social wage’, it has tended to expand its assistance to capital throughout the imperialist world. There is a gamut of state subsidies to capital throughout the imperialist world, of which lucrative contracts to the arms industry in the US is only the most visible and notorious. The role of the state has expanded because capital can no longer operate smoothly on the basis of its own laws of motion.

Of course, the problems that beset capitalism in its senile, imperialist stage are not only problems for capital. Most significantly, they are problems for humanity. Until the great mass of humanity shifts from being the passive object of these problems to being the active agent for their solution, through the abolition of this outmoded way of organising society, the current state of the world really will be as good as it gets. And, in fact, it promises to get worse.

The Green Party has caused some controversy recently by releasing its Population Policy for New Zealand just prior to the election. The Greens estimate the maximum population that Aotearoa can sustain at 5.7 million. In order that we do not exceed this figure, they propose policies including: “initiatives to raise awareness amongst parents and potential parents regarding the issue of sustainable global population levels.”

They also propose to “regularly review NZ’s immigration policy to ensure that we are retaining capacity to absorb climate change refugees and returning NZ citizens.”

It seems strange that the Greens should have made this an issue in a country that is sparsely populated with an ageing population. But in today’s political discourse, “sustainability” is becoming an essential green veneer to reactionary measures such as immigration controls and restricting working class people’s consumption.

The proposition that population growth is the cause of all manner of social ills is not new. It is worth examining the origin of this idea.

In 1798 the English clergyman Thomas Malthus published an essay entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Effects the Future Improvement of Society; with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers. A polemical work, it aimed to counter claims to the possibility of unending human progress made by influential Enlightenment thinkers like William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet in the wake of the French Revolution.

Malthus maintained that the human population, if unchecked, tended to increase at a geometrical rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on), while food supply tended to increase only at an arithmetical rate (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on). This principle represented an insurmountable barrier to the very realisation of a more egalitarian society.

The idea of the arithmetic ratio was quickly disproved by empirical data, but it fitted with the pre-Darwinian view of nature of the time that there was only limited room for “improvement” in plant or animal species.

Malthus wrote that “a man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact, has no business to be where he is.” He attacked the English Poor Laws for providing relief to the destitute, arguing instead for workhouses, which the New Poor Law of 1834 duly provided.

It was in response to Malthus that Friedrich Engels developed the concept of the reserve army of labour. Malthus was “right in his way that there are always too many people in the world; he is wrong only when he asserts that there are more people on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence.” An “unemployed reserve army of workers” existed at all times within industry, fluctuating according to the extent that the market encouraged employment. But the workers, far from actually thinking of themselves as superfluous, “have taken into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing,” constitute “the surplus population.”

Despite being repeatedly discredited, Malthus’s ideas have persisted in one guise or another to defend reactionary projects, including eugenics. Its latest Green incarnation must be exposed as equally fraudulent. The ecological and economic crises of our planet are fundamentally caused not by the level of population, but by the way capitalism controls resources.

Our planet is capable of sustaining the billions, but not the billionaires.

It seems as though these days the only time you are likely to hear the name of Karl Marx mentioned is when he is being dismissed as the proponent of some outlandish utopian ideology which had marginal relevance in nineteenth century Europe but none at all now (the view of most standard history texts) or as a the prophet of capitalist globalisation who also had some rather funny ideas about workers and exploitation with which we need not concern ourselves too much (the view of more sophisticated bourgeois pundits such as the writers for The Economist).

It is indeed true that the idea that the working class of which Marx wrote so volubly is rapidly vanishing from the stage of history has some material basis (at least in first world countries like New Zealand).  However while the number of workers directly engaged in the creation of surplus value in areas such as manufacturing and raw material extraction has certainly decreased in New Zealand over the past few decades, the amount of exploitation i.e. the mass of surplus value created by workers in these sectors and expropriated by the capitalists has not.

In addition, although the largest occupational group as measured in the 2006 New Zealand census were labelled as “professionals” (18.85%) followed by “managers” (17.14%), the relationship of these individuals to the means of production is clearly shown in the “status in employment” category where we learn that over 75% of the population are still dependent on selling their labour power in order to earn a living.

The real problem here then is not the absence of class but rather the collapse of working class consciousness (such that a supermarket checkout supervisor may now well consider themselves a “manager”, and various politicians can proclaim that we are “all middle class now”).

And contrary to what the school textbooks might say, this development would not have surprised Marx.  While his political opponents have often charged him with predicting the inevitable demise of capitalism and the victory of the working class, in fact he did nothing of the sort.  What Marx outlined in his writings (most notably in his magnum opus, Capital) were the basic laws, tendencies and internal contradictions of the capitalist system.

Dialectical View

In order to identify these processes Marx employed the method of dialectics, pioneered by the German philosophers Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.  However unlike those philosophers Marx was also a materialist, and realised that the primary contradictions driving human history were located in the modes and forces of production – not the ideas in peoples’ heads.  Marx’s materialism allowed him to avoid the making the same mistakes as the utopian socialists and anarchists, who imagined that sheer revolutionary willpower was all that was required to bring about political change.  While the subjective factor of peoples’ consciousness was extremely important, other vital prerequisites were the existence of material abundance and a certain level of technological progress. As Marx put it in The German Ideology (anticipating by over a century the central problem which would bedevil the attempts to construct socialism in countries such as Russia, China and Cuba), wherever there is generalised want and scarcity “…the struggle for necessities begins again and all the old crap revives”.

Returning to the subject of the laws of motion of capitalism, the major dialectical contradiction that Marx perceived was the creation of a large landless, propertyless class with nothing to sell but their labour who are then forcibly collectivised by the need for capital to valorise itself in production.  This development, coupled with the increasing division of labour and specialisation, gives rise to the possibility of a society in which production is organised and run collectively rather than on an anarchic individual basis.

The hidden nature of exploitation under capitalism

However, as Marx pointed out under capitalism (unlike say feudalism) the real relations of exploitation are obscured.  The worker sells his or her labour and is duly remunerated at a mutually agreed price. The capitalist provides his or her tools, factory premises and raw materials and in return claims his or her rightful share. What could be simpler or fairer?

The secret of course as Marx discovered was that unlike raw materials, machinery or tools which only transmit a portion of their replacement value into the process of production and wear out over time, labour transmits not only the value equivalent to the cost of its own reproduction but also an additional surplus value.

Thus the worker may in a 9 hour day create in 4 hours labour sufficient value to pay for the cost of their daily upkeep, and then work another 5 hours creating surplus value for the capitalist employer.

This is very different from the state of affairs under feudalism, where it was obvious when the peasant worked on their own land to meet their own subsistence requirements and when they worked on their lord’s demesne to grow crops for the lord of the manor and his retainers.

Effect on workers consciousness

In this way while under feudalism the peasantry was held in check only through the threat of armed force (or eternal damnation in Hell), under capitalism workers will usually willingly acquiesce in their own exploitation since on surface appearances all that takes place is a free and equal exchange.

As Marx put it in Chapter 28 of Capital (Volume 1):

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working-class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves.

To be sure, from their practical experience an individual worker will often perceive a common interest in joining with other workers together to sell their labour at a higher price (through a trade union) or support efforts to legislate for better working conditions.  However they will not spontaneously draw from this experience the revolutionary conclusion that they are being exploited – not just by the lack of fairness or compassion of a particularly reactionary employer – but by the economic system itself.

Need for a revolutionary political organisation

This realisation, as Marx made clear in the Communist Manifesto, can only come about through the organised intervention of a revolutionary political organisation.  As he put it:

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx also made clear that it was the actual process of struggle against the capitalist class which would create the preconditions for the future socialist society.  In this sense, what mattered were not so much the demands or slogans under which workers were organised but rather the dialectical process that led them to see themselves as a collective revolutionary subject, as opposed to merely an agglomeration of marginalised individuals.

As for the often quoted section of the manifesto which says that

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties…

it should be born in mind that this was written in 1848 – before the historic betrayals of the Second International in World War I and successive social democratic governments throughout Europe in the decades since then. However, in places such as Venezuela where new untried and untested working class movements, oscillating between reform and revolution, have emerged in recent years Marx’s advice still holds good.

The most important thing that we as 21^st century socialists can learn from Marx is not to fetishise programs or lists of demands (which change depending on the time in history and geographical place) but rather to stress the need for self-activity of workers and to overcome all barriers (racial, sexual, national) to class unity.

This is the reason why the Workers Party includes “open borders” as well as  “opposition to all New Zealand and Western imperialist intervention in the Third World and all Western imperialist alliances” in our 5 point platform, but does not lay out a prescriptive plan or blueprint telling workers how to implement socialism, such as calls to nationalise industries a b and c or more spending on social programs x y and z (such points may be raised as secondary agitational demands during an election campaign, but do not challenge or advance the existing level of consciousness in the same way that slogans such as “open borders” or “workers should be running the country” do).

Tactics for revolutionaries in a period of downturn

Today in “First World” countries such as New Zealand it can seem as though communists are also alone in advocating any kind of  class-based politics at all, due to the collapse of social democracy and the sharp decline in the levels of unionisation among workers.  Some ostensible marxists infer from this that we need to drop for the moment all talk about the need for revolutionary change and instead adapt our agitation and slogans to the current low level of political consciousness.

Such a viewpoint however runs counter to Marx’s materialist approach to politics which led him to realise that small groups of revolutionaries must not try to substitute themselves for the lack of a mass movement.  When the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 ended in defeat for the working class  and the onset of a sustained period of reaction Marx did not decide to abandon his revolutionary politics – although the conditions did necessitate for the time being a retreat from mass agitation to carrying on political activity in small revolutionary study circles and propaganda groups.  The revival of struggle across Europe in the 1860s and 70s allowed Marx to once again direct his political activities on a larger public stage through the International Working Men’s Association (the so-called “First International”).

At all times Marx sought to lend to the mass struggles that were taking place a revolutionary dynamic and stress the need for workers’ self-activity and workers control (often despite opposition from his own nominal allies such as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated building a clandestine conspiratorial organisation to organise the revolution rather than the formation of a public, mass democratic revolutionary party).

The important point here though is that at no stage did Marx attempt to substitute himself or his followers for the lack of a genuinely mass movement, or disavow his belief in the need to overthrow capitalism simply to pander to the reformist mentality of some of his more opportunist colleagues in the First International (such as the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, who argued for the exclusion of women from the workforce on the grounds that there was only a fixed amount of money available in the capitalist “wage fund”).

Instead, Marx maintained throughout his lifetime a standpoint of uncompromising, ruthless criticism towards all apologists for capitalism (including the progenitor of the modern day Green movement, Thomas Malthus) while adjusting his perspectives and methods of organising according to the ebb and flow of the class struggle.

Capitalism still incapable of resolving its internal contradictions

The current crisis on the world financial markets came as a shock to many of the so-called “business commentators” who opined that capitalism had in the world of hedge funds, derivatives and futures trading a means of transcending its roots in commodity production and exchange. However, it would have come as no shock to Marx, who in Capital explained that all profit is ultimately derived from surplus value, and that surplus value can only be created in the exploitation of wage labour engaged in actual production.

Marx even anticipated that as capitalists looked to produce commodities more cheaply and increase the level of workers exploitation by investing more in machinery (so that the worker would spend a greater proportion of their work day creating surplus value for the capitalist) that there would be a decline in the amount of surplus value relative to the total capital outlay. He referred to this as the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.  Marx also identified that there were two main ways in which the capitalists could try to get around this difficulty:

1)      through implementing speedup and lengthening the working day

2)      redirecting investment away from production into credit and loan markets

However, as we are discovering in New Zealand at the moment there are definite limits beyond which both of these strategies cease to work!

Utilising the scientific and dialectical approach to politics and to analysing capitalism pioneered by Marx we can see that capitalism is a flawed and historically aberrant economic system that contains within it the seed of its own negation. It is for this reason that now in the 21^st century when the ideas of empiricist philosophers or utopian writers from 50 or 150 years ago have surpassed their useful shelf-life, Marx’s political and philosophical method continues to be as relevant as ever.

Every week a new gene is supposedly found for something. This week New Scientist has a headline: They’ve discovered the gene for religion. Dig a little and it’s clear that the claims are grossly inflated. Well, it turns out they haven’t quite found a gene for religion after all, but postulated it exists. The theory is based on a computer programme that predicts that if a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, that religion will flourish. And this passes for science somehow!

The popular notions of what genes do are interesting.

I caught part of a programme on TV a few weeks ago. It was about people’s behaviours and their sex lives. The participants were asked to record how many times a day they had a sexual thought. The results were a little mixed, but one male had a huge number of sexual thoughts, another male had a moderate number which was about the same as one of the women and one woman had very few. It was a small sample of only about 4 people, so not the most rigorous scientific study. The conclusion drawn by the programme narrator was that “men think about sex more than women, and this is because in evolutionary terms this is an advantage. A woman once pregnant gains nothing from further copulation, whereas a man can keep spreading his genes around to great evolutionary advantage.”

This sort of theorizing is rather typical these days. Yet in the sample there was as much difference between the two men as there was between one man and one woman. But hey, we all know that humans are driven by the need to spread their genes, don’t we? So how do we explain that bizarre anti-evolutionary practice of contraception?

The trouble with many of the crude genetic explanations is that they come about through a series of assumptions and are deeply coloured by social and historical context.

Much of this talk today draws on the work of dialectical biologist Richard Lewontin. He points out that science is a social activity carried out by organisms with a limited central nervous system and severely limited sense organs. It is, moreover, carried out by organisms who have already gone through a considerable period of individual socialization and psychic maturation before they become employed as scientists, in a social setting that has a history that constrains thought and action. The state of science should not be confused with the state of the universe.”

The debate over what influences the development of an organism most – genes or environment – has largely been treated in a mechanical way. The pendulum has swung back and forth as to which plays the bigger role. Right now the pendulum is in the gene camp with all sorts of characteristics being thought to be linked to genes. The problem is most of the genes they talk about have yet to be discovered! (There’s also the “middle ground” types, who are just as mechanical, who say it’s a bit of a combination between genes and the environment.)

A dialectical approach provides a more insightful way to investigate the material world. What is needed is a more careful understanding of the context of the whole organism as well as the environment. Dialectics is a tool to discover and understand the interactions and interconnections.

Dialectics is a method of how to observe and analyse the movement of opposites that are present in all things and processes from beginning to end. From that analysis one can then establish ways to resolve contradictions. It’s not a formula to prove a proposition, it is a tool for investigation.

So I’m going to look at how the pendulum has swung so hard towards genes but also I’d argue that there’s more to development than simply genes and environment.

In the 19^th century there was a debate between the epigenetic school and the preformationist school. The preformationists believed that there fully formed miniature versions inside each sperm which got bigger and bigger, and the egg supplied nutrients to it. The epigenetic school said that was nonsense, that each embryo or organism is gradually produced from an undifferentiated mass by a series of steps and stages during which new parts are added. So which won out?

Surprisingly, the little man idea has prevailed. The idea that genes predetermine everything is a preformationist view. It’s the same as the notion that all the information necessary is in the sperm and egg.

All the information is not already contained in the fertilized egg. There is other important factors in producing an organism. There is a temporal sequence of environment.

As Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who was a dialectician said “You can’t step into the same river twice”. There is nothing static about the environment.

Timing is a big factor.

Then there is another factor which is indeterminacy from a quantum level to a higher level. It adds a random component and has a profound effect. So much of development is not predetermined, but is uncertain. I’ll go into this more later on.

One key problem is the limitations associated with specialization in science. Today it’s impossible to be a generalist because the body of science so vast, but how do we deal with the isolation of scientists from each other who work in different fields? This has encouraged people to take a narrow view.

GENETIC DETERMINISM

It’s now 55 years since the structure of DNA was revealed and it is time to ask why gene therapy not progressed beyond the trial stage. (There are currently around 100 gene therapy clinical trials aimed toward cancer and diseases such as cystic fibrosis and hemophilia A, infectious diseases – including AIDS – and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis).

The problem is that individual cells in every organism differ enough from each other that no two will process DNA information in exactly the same way, making many genetic therapies impractical and very difficult.

For cancer, for instance, the treatments by and large remain cut it out, burn it off or poison it.

What we find is that DNA doesn’t play quite the determining role that is commonly believed and that genes are irrelevant for some characteristics (eg asymmetry).

The gene-centred view of evolution was popularised by Richard Dawkins who came up with the term the selfish gene. He says evolution acts on genes, and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes. He reckons that it’s about genes replicating, not necessarily those of the organism, much less any larger level. Genes are the main thing in the process of natural selection. (Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.)

So an almost magical power is ascribed to genes. What’s more there is ‘genomania’ – a frenzied excitement about genes and gene therapy (the ’90s were the decade where it probably reached its height). This has a social context which is holding back progress in science. DNA does reveal a lot, but it is only a part of a bigger picture and must not be taken in isolation.

Heredity involves far more than just genes. Scientists have established that genes are pleiotropic – that is, they convey many messages. The timing and nature of those messages is determined not by them, but by enzymes and other cellular structures that are not genetic.

Conversely, I’m not going to argue though that we are simply, or even largely, a product of our environment. For a start, even our concepts of the environment are shaped by current ideology. “Preserve the environment” is a catchy slogan but nonsense in biology. Lewontin, I think, put the question do organisms “adapt” to their environment or is adaptation a misused metaphor? It bit more on that soon.

We need to take a good look at the social construction of scientific knowledge.

There are various factors which encourage scientists to make overblown claims, (it’s one way of getting funding) and all too often the people who publicise findings are commercially driven to sell papers by over simplifying and sensationalizing.

GENES

There are around 25,000 genes in a human being. Researchers more or less completed the final analysis of the Human Genome Project in April 2003

In 1991 scientists “found the gene for homosexuality” – or so the headlines screamed. They quietly lost those genes some years later when their study could not be replicated. Today there are no known genes for homosexuality.

The mythical gay gene was embraced by various political directions. Gay rights advocates were generally pleased that it was a natural cause, not social, while anti-gays could treat it as a genetic mutation.

What about the risk taking gene?

That was declared discovered, only to missing again. To date there are no genes or set of genes that have been found that relate to any aspect of human behaviour. It’s all purely speculative. But they are still looking!

No one has found the genes for skin colour, height or weight.

Nor has the thrifty gene ever been found. That’s the one Polynesians are supposed to have which is said to make people predisposed to become obese and diabetic once they’ve been in a western society for a few decades. No such gene has ever been found and the geneticist, James Neel who postulated the theory back in 1962 ditched it in 1982. He conducted proper research and found that indigenous people weren’t predisposed – they had normal glucose tolerance tests. He ended up thinking that exposure to a modern diet was the cause, not any gene. Anyway poverty is a much greater marker for obesity than any other factor. It increases the chances by about 50%.

While they are at it maybe they should look for a poverty gene!

If they put as much effort into eliminating poverty as was put into sequencing the human genome the effect on morbidity would probably have been greater.

There’s the thrifty phenotype (phenotype being the appearance rather than the genotype). This is the theory that in poor nutritional conditions, the fetus is prepared for an environment where resources are scarce. If that child is then born into an affluent western environment there is a mismatch. It’s thought that this could last several generations this effect.

Breast cancer genes fair a little better, but not much. To date, most inherited cases of breast cancer have been associated with abnormalities in two genes. But these abnormalities account for only 10% at the most of breast cancers. If one identical twin gets breast cancer, the other’s likelihood of contracting it is only around 10% to 20%. This suggests that genes are not the whole story

There are really only a handful of diseases that have a clear genetic component. Muscular dystrophy, sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, haemaphilia. There are some other genetic diseases but they are extremely rare.

Around one thousand genetic tests now available to diagnose and assess risk of diseases, and there’s big money in it.

As well as the misguided emphasis on genes, every gene is seen in isolation, certainly in its popular presentation.

This misguided emphasis on genes could be taking away attention from infections as the big killer. Most diseases are caused by infections: cholera, dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis and measles. But they are third world diseases – poverty related. For instance we don’t die from measles in the west because we have adequate protein in our diet. Measles is a protein-consuming disease and can be deadly for people who are protein deficient.

A disease-causing gene that reduces survival and reproduction would normally eliminate itself over a number of generations. One example of this is schizophrenia; patients with the mental illness rarely have children, argues evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald. He thinks schizophrenia may be caused by the Borna virus and argues that this disease would have already been eliminated if it were from a strictly genetic cause.

We know that CJD causes extreme mental illness, and so does syphilis. So it is not such a wild idea that other mental illnesses may be caused by a pathogen not a genetic defect.

So genes are not the be all and end all. Of course, they do play an important role but they are only part of how any organism develops.

ADAPTATION AS A MISUSED METAPHOR

Most people accept that environment does play a role. This is evident when an organism is cloned. It cannot be a simple replica of the parent. For a start it is in a different environment and there is a high degree of uncertainty and random events that result in differences. Evolution is a result of random as well as selective forces. Michael Raglan gives an example of this “Humans, do not have the same fingerprints on their left and right hands and the differences in pattern can be so great that no similarity at all can be detected. Yet the genes of the left and right sides are the same and no usual meaning of environment will allow that the left and right hands of a foetus in its mothers’ womb have different developmental environments”. This is explained at the quantum mechanical – the submolecular level. Quantum mechanics are the physical principles that govern the microworld. It’s this quantum mechanics that accounts for why DNA is a double helix. The H bonds between purines and pyrimidines that are responsible for the double helical structure of DNA. Once again, randomness of the motion of particles is a factor.

History as well as randomness plays a role. Something might have been selected for long ago can influence how organisms take shape later on. An obvious example is our limbs – we have four limbs, not because this is the best possible configuration, but because we are descended from land vertebrates that had fins.

THE NOTION OF EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGE

There is a tendency to treat the evolutionary process as one where all aspects of the organism are perfectly adapted to the environment. It’s what we can call optimal adaptation.

This way of thinking assumes every feature must have a benefit for survival. Let’s take skin colour. Actually no one really knows why Europeans are pale, Asians have dark hair etc. Ah, of course, being dark skinned in Africa means you won’t be likely to get skin cancer, one thinks. Indeed that is true. But it doesn’t make any difference to evolutionary survival as skin cancer is something that tends to occur later in life, not during the reproductive years. A more sound explanation, is what Darwin called sexual selection.

For instance, peacocks have large bright feathers, which provide no advantage to flying, and might actually impede flight, thus attracting predators. These spectacular feathers have evolved because they attract potential mates.

People in Europe were attracted to pale faced people and selected them for their mates. That is the current explanation, strange as it may seem. Same thing in Asia – a particular look was favoured and selected for. It sounds weird to us because we aren’t really used to thinking about sexual selection in that way.

The view that we are purpose built for the environment is a notion of an external environment posing “challenges” that successful organisms “solve” those challenges. That is problematic because environments of organisms do not exist before the organism. The physical world exists, but it is not the environment of any organism.

Just as the air we breathe is the result of living organisms, there’s no environment without an organism, and no organism without an environment. Organisms and environment co-evolve. Every organism is in the process of constructing its environment by using it.

Lewontin gives a great example of our boundary layer. Around our bodies is a layer of warm moist air is created by our metabolic activities. We each have our own boundary layer. The wind chill factor is because wind blows away the warm boundary layer. Every organism uses up what it needs and deposits waste products. Plants break up the soil which aids them and other organisms. Fungus grows on a plant and in turn nourishes the plant. Every organism does it at all times. Organisms create and destroy. It’s a symbiotic situation.

It’s not that organisms are well suited to their environment, it’s more that they have interacted and developed a world around them which is suited and which evolves with them at all times. It’s a world in motion, not a fixed world that they enter.

That’s why the notion of “preserve the environment” makes no sense in biology. Every organism has a different environment, its changing with the organism,

And the organism is a unique result of both genes and environment, of both internal and external features, and these are not separate entities. They are a unity and struggle of opposites. It’s not the case that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to the environment. It’s far more dynamic and interconnected: Organisms are influenced in their development by their circumstances and for there part they create, modify, and choose the environment in which they live.

KNOWLEDGE SHOULD ADVANTAGE HUMANITY

No longer should we think of the environment as something unconnected to the organisms that shape and create it out of the raw materials of the physical world.

This perspective enables us to think more constructively so that we can use our knowledge to promote environmental change in a direction that is an advantage to humanity. That sort of ecology is far more appealing than the sort that wants to limit human activity and sees humanity as a blot upon the earth.

Genes are not all powerful. There is a close interaction between genes, environment, and random developmental events. They cannot be separated from the living organism and its realm it inhabits.

Defenders of capitalism often claim that it is the most efficient, productive and effective system on offer. That for all its flaws (such as the misery that most of humanity is forced to endure), capitalism is at least capable of ensuring that everything operates the way it should, and all the jobs get done. However, this doesn’t stack up to reality.

I spend every Sunday pushing trolleys in the Countdown carpark. It’s a boring, monotonous job with very little to stimulate my mind – I walk outside, get trolleys, take them back inside, and repeat the process. Every now and again I shake things up a bit by taking a trolley into the store, collecting baskets and taking them out to the foyer.

Last Sunday, though, something was different. I don’t enjoy my job that much, and I don’t exactly pour every drop of energy I have into it, but over time I have become reasonably good at it. I can usually ensure that at all but the busiest times there are trolleys and baskets in the foyer and no major problems to do with supply of shopping bags, till rolls, etc. I can pretty much just zone out and let the day take its course as I get into my usual routine.

Not any more. Management has just bought a whole lot of new trolleys. This in itself is good – we’re beginning to run low (those pesky students keep making off with them), and the more trolleys we have the easier my job becomes… or so I thought.

The bosses, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to buy a completely different type of trolley. They’re lighter, shallower and feel generally flimsy, and the satisfying crash that used to come when you deposited a load of trolleys with their fellows has disappeared, taking with it most of my job satisfaction. All I get now is either a pathetic tinkling noise or a horrible metallic screech.

Most significantly, though, these new trolleys don’t stack with the old ones – they’re the wrong height and the wrong shape. This means that when customers put them in the trolley bays in the carpark, they don’t just fold into each other any more – they clump up in little bunches of two or three trolleys. Whereas before I could just grab ten trolleys out of the bay and haul them in, now I have to take them out in little groups, sometimes one at a time, and painstakingly separate the new ones from the old ones before I’m able to take any of them inside. It now takes me about three times as long as it used to, just to get a load of trolleys in the doors. That means that there tend to be fewer trolleys inside, more cluttering up the carpark, fewer baskets in the foyer and fewer menial chores getting done because I’m too busy desperately trying to sort out the mess that’s been made of the carpark. Basically, thanks to management’s stupid decision, I’m now a much less efficient and productive worker.

This is a good example of how, in practice, capitalism is not efficient at all – it’s the complete opposite. The bosses don’t have a clue about how my job is actually done, and their bad decisions are a result of that.

If Countdown was under workers’ control, with all decisions about how it operates, what’s going to be bought, what changes are going to be made and so on being made democratically by the workers who actually operate the store, decisions like buying the new type of trolleys wouldn’t get made. Instead, I would be able to get up at the assembly we’d hold to vote on decisions and put forward my perspective on what type of trolleys we should get – after all, who knows better than me, the trolley guy? The decisions would be made based on the first-hand experience of us workers, and it’s safe to bet that they’d be better than those made by the pricks who are currently running the show.

Another good example of how capitalism is actually an ineffective and crazy system is the story of a Workers Party member who lived in Wellington for a while. He was waiting for the bus near his house of an evening to get into town, and two days running no less than six buses drove past without picking him up! The drivers just waved sorry and kept going.

This wasn’t the choice of the drivers – they were forced to do it by the company management, who structured the shifts to deny drivers any overtime. This meant they weren’t able to pick people up on their way back into town even though the buses weren’t full, they were heading in the right direction, and people needed to go there. The bosses’ desire for profit resulted in an inefficient, ineffective system that messed up a lot of people’s plans for the evening.

This talk about workers’ control isn’t just idle dreaming – it’s a reality all over the world, where working people have dispensed with the parasites at the top of the stairs and started running things themselves. Without fail, when left to their own devices they’ve done a much better job of it.

In Argentina, there is a powerful and well-established workplace occupation movement. At Zanon Ceramics a factory making tiles, the workers were able to produce more tiles than before and sell them at a cheaper price, with all the workers enjoying better wages and more enjoyable jobs.

In Nepal in the past few days, workers at a tea factory and plantation have responded to their bosses’ refusal to negotiate better wages and conditions by seizing control of the plant and putting it under workers control! The workers’ union is affiliated to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), and with the Maoist revolutionaries being the largest party and the leaders of the new government, the workers are feeling more confident.

If it can be done in Argentina and Nepal, why not in New Zealand? Why not around the world, and in every single workplace that exists? Why can we not ditch this crappy system of exploitation, poverty and needless suffering that we currently have, and replace it with a system based on workers’ power, and a world of freedom, equality and material abundance? The working class has the ability to achieve this. Let’s get started!