Book Review

THE CORPORATION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational.

By Nick Robins, Pluto Press, 2006,

224 pages ISBN: 0745325238 Paperback. £15.99

I often gauge how much I have enjoyed a book by the amount of highlighting and marginal notes I make in pencil. This book, like many on my shelves, will horrify those who prize pristine, unmarked first editions.

On the 31st December 1600 a precursor of the modern translational corporation came into existence. Its pioneering techniques in the field of trade and commerce, and downright murder and corruption, preceded by centuries the noxious business practices that we associate with today’s all-powerful corporations, many of whom have a higher turn over than small countries.

This book presents as a meticulous account of perhaps the most powerful corporation that ever lived, tracing how it came into existence, how it operated, its inner structure, the role of its own armies in its rise to supremacy, its part in the Bengal Famine when 10 million died as a result of the Company’s market manipulation, its militaristic role in the Opium Wars, its part in the Indian Mutiny and the Boston Tea Party and how, for the last twenty years of its existence, it ruled India as an agent of the British Empire. When it comes to downright exploitation, corruption, slaughter and sheer negligence and indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps no company that ever existed comes near the East India Company in its ruthless pursuit of profit, whilst refashioning the world commercial order in the interests of privilege and power for hundreds of years to come.

In its time the company had many critics, most notably Edmund Burke, “the real champion of India’s identity”, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Burke fought long and hard to impeach the Company’s Governor General Warren Hastings for the devastation wrought on India in its endless search for profit.

Commencing his opening speech at Westminster Hall in February 1788, Burke said:

“I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate…I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in very age, rank, situation and conditions of life.” (p. 135)

Despite Burke’s opening four day tirade against Hastings - one of the longest opening speeches in history - during which women were carried out fainting, at which the Speaker was “rendered speechless” and at which spectators were willing to pay £50 for a seat, despite an ensuing trial that lasted from February 1778 to April 1795, Hastings was acquitted.

Considering the Company’s operations for the New York Daily Tribune in the summer of 1853, Marx noted five characteristics:

“…a permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable system, of justice and law..” (p.159)

Satirising the Company’s administrative system, he commented how there existed “no government by which so much is written and so little done.”(p.159).

Marx furthermore viewed the company as a tool of British capitalism plc in India, observing how “the aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy wanted to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it” (ibid).

Commenting on the Second Opium War, in Marx’s view attributable to the Company’s operations in the East and its insistence that it had the right to swamp China with drugs in the name of profit, regardless of the addiction-induced misery its trade created or how the Chinese authorities felt, he wrote:

“While openly preaching free trade in poison, it secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture. Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to, lie at the bottom of its’freedom’”.

In eight carefully researched chapters, Robins traces the Company’s operations from its inception as a trader in spices to its role in running the Indian sub-continent on behalf of the British crown, withholding, one imagines, very little regardless how gruesome, and there indeed are some stomach-churning passages.

In the final chapter, his analysis masterly done, Robins, contemplating the state of corporate play today, reflects how the Company’s legacy reveals the importance of taking on the mega-corporations who presently rampage across the planet unhindered, and this, for socialists, is the book’s one failing.

Robins’ remedy for curbing corporate power is simple:

“First of all, its market power and political influence must be limited…Next, stringent rules are needed to ensure that management and investors do not use the corporation as a tool for their short-term interests…And, finally, clear and forcible systems of justice have to be in place to hold the corporation to account for damage to society and the environment.” (p.181)

Thus, a brilliant attack on unchecked power in the pursuit of profit is marred by the simple request that the capitalist class behaves and shows a little more respect when carrying out its obscene business, and that the executive arm of capitalism – government – hurries to the rescue of society and the natural environment. Smiley-faced capitalism is, for Robins, the only remedy. Warren Hastings laughs in his grave.

All said, if you’re into the study of corporate power gone mad, read this

Film Review - The Corporation

Approx 145 minutes
Directed by Mark Achban, Jennifer Abbot, Joel Bakan

The Corporation begins with a little US political history, observing how, in the 19th Century, corporations as we know them were “benevolent” associations of people with government charters to serve the public good. When, in the late 1860s, the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution recognised the slave as having human rights, the nascent corporate elite of the times had their lawyers stake their claim to the same rights with the Supreme Court. They fought and won and the state henceforth recognised the corporation as a human being, a person in law, with the same right to life, liberty and property.


This leads us to one of the big questions of the film: if corporations are legally defined as people, then what kind of people are they? One way the film addresses this question is to call in the FBI’s Consultant on Psychopaths, Dr Robert Hare. Hare, proceeds to run through a check-list of the traits of your run-of-the-mill psychopath before concluding that the modern corporation, bearing no moral responsibility for its actions, is very much the prototypical psychopath.


Much of the remainder of the film is given over to proving this claim beyond all reasonable doubt and many authoritative witnesses are wheeled in to testify. And what a selection of witnesses there are! – Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, Anita Roddick, Vandana Shiva, Michael Moore; experts from every field and all manner of labour rights organisations and grass roots activists, economists such as Milton Friedman and many CEOs. Their statements amount to a damning examination of the nature and personality of the modern corporation, charting its growth, its extending influence and downright indifference to democracy and how, as one commentator observes it has turned into a “monster, trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone’s expense.”


What we are presented with is an image of all powerful organisations running wild, rabid with greed, superpowers, for whom there is “no such thing as enough” (Moore), for whom “everything is legitimate in the pursuit of profit” (Roddick). Modern corporations are presented as the “new high priests”, more powerful than governments and accountable only to their stakeholders, their brand labels protected by more legislation than covers the rights of the children who sew them onto their overpriced merchandise.


The film pits competing ideas on the modern corporation against one another. We are at one stage shown the offices of the National Labour Committee and hear Executive Director Charles Kernaghan revealing the level of exploitation of workers in the Dominican Republic (who for instance earn 75 cents for each Nike jacket that sells for $178 and 3 cents for a tee shirt that retails at $14.) We are shown the living conditions of those same desperate workers and hear their own testimony as to the level of their destitution and then listen to Michael Walker of the corporate think tank The Fraser Institute expounding his views on the role competitive markets play in providing for the economic and social well-being and how he believes firms such as Nike are an “enormous godsend” to people in the Dominican Republic


The film contains much that is totally fascinating. One section looks at big business and its penchant for the dictatorial regime. We are shown how a punch card system devised and regularly maintained by IBM (operating out of New York) processed millions of concentration camp victims and how Coca Cola, faced with the possibility of having its operation curtailed in Nazi Germany, simply changed its name to Fanta. Much evidence is presented as to how corporate allegiance to profit transcends its loyalty to national flags and we are presented with one startling fact: that in one week 57 US companies were fined for trading with enemies of the US. Contemplating big business’s links to tyrannical regimes, one commentator asks “is it narcissism that compels them to seek their reflection in the regimented structure of fascist regimes?”


One of several cases studies the film presents is that relating to Monsanto (famous for Agent Orange and 50,000 birth defects in Vietnam) and its manufacture of Posilac. This was a drug which, when injected into cows, increased their milk yield. That the world was awash with milk did not concern Monsanto; they were far more interested in profits and eventually were supplying a quarter of US dairy herds with the product. But because cows were not meant to produce so much milk, their udders went into overdrive and became infected with mastitis, the puss from which infected the milk. Not only were humans suffering the effects of the chemicals injected into the milk, their milk was now infected with mastitis puss. Monsanto’s reaction was to deny all allegations and to lie like condemned murderers.


The modern corporation is perhaps most vilified for its total lack of respect for the environment and the point is stressed in the film that the biosphere is dying, that every living system is in decline. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Inc, who has won much acclaim promoting the idea that environmental responsibility makes good business sense, is seen addressing an audience of business leaders in North Carolina. Greeting them as “fellow plunderers” he goes on to tell them that there is “not an industrial company in the world that is sustainable.”


Robert Weismann of Multinational Monitor reminds us that the cost of getting caught for their corporate transgressions – i.e. environmental pollution – is, more often than not, less than the cost of complying with existing environmental legislation. Dr Vandara Shiva, physicist and ecologist, despairingly contemplates the suicide gene built into new strains of cash crop seeds, the new terminator technology that makes the third world farmer dependent ever on the seed supplier (instead of traditionally putting aside a portion of the harvest as seeds for the following year), and calls them inventions of a “brutal mind”


For the multinational, nothing is sacred. Even the US Patent Office has conceded defeat in its attempts to halt corporations patenting life forms and bear out Roddick’s sentiments that every means is legitimate if the end be profit. Climbing down from one seven year battle with big business, they had this to say: “You can patent anything in the world which is alive except a full birth human being.”


The film nears an end with a case study of the privatisation of the water supply of Cochabamba, Bolivia, at the bequest of the World Bank, focusing particularly on the residents of Cochabamba and their run in with the forces of the state on behalf of Bechtel, a San Francisco based company who bought the water company. So adamant were the powers that be to force the people to bow to the power of Bechtel that they demolished their homes for non payment of their exorbitant water rates and made the collecting of rain water illegal. The frustration spilled onto the streets with huge demonstrations and riots and violent clashes with the police. Eventually, though, Bechtel were forced to pull out of their Bolivian venture, but not before they had put in a claim for $25 million in compensation.


It is from this case study and other cited instances of green activism that we are meant to draw inspiration; the message being that the corporation should not underestimate the power of the people, that “the workers, united, can never be defeated.” Of course, corporations are advised to tidy up their act too. Michael Moore tells us that there should be more governmental controls and the film ends with Moore hoping the film will prompt people “to do something, anything, to get the world back in our hands”. This clearly suggests that Moore, and others who promote similar ideas in the film are missing the point. Granted, it is commendable, tragic even, that workers are prepared to often risk life and limb to defend basic rights and to confront the most harrowing injustices perpetrated by corporations. But it is a dangerous to believe that such grassroots action amounts to wresting control of the world away from its current owners.


If anyone considers this film a trumpet call for social change, a reveille for revolution, they are mistaken. The capitalist system is left unscathed. Nowhere is the logic of the market-driven profit system challenged. Nowhere are all of the case studies and criticism of corporate power and abuse rooted in a wider context. Nowhere does a commentator lambast the global “can’t pay, can’t have society” that consigns the greater portion of the planet to lives of abject misery. And no interviewee comes near to demanding the abolition of the capitalists system and its replacement with a system of society based on free access. Capitalism is taken for granted as being immutable and all that is being asked at the end is that corporations wear a smiley face and stop behaving so horridly.


Moore may well contemplate why such films are broadcast by TV corporations, in spite of the fact that they attack corporate power – for the record, he suggests it is because there is profit to be made by them and he may partly right – but he fails to grasp that this, and similar films like Fahrenheit 911, nowhere query the basis of class society - the setup that allows the ownership of property by one privileged class, and the consequent enslavement of one class by another is in no way threatened and the TV company broadcasting programmes revealing corporate crimes is aware of this.


I’d really hate to rubbish this film but, in truth, The Corporation simply echoes the sentiments of the anti-globalisation movement – the demand for greater corporate responsibility, reform of international institutions, expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions, for instance – while allowing capitalism to carry on perpetrating every social ill that plagues us.


The Corporation is undoubtedly a remarkable expose of the modern corporation at its ugliest, at the lengths multinationals will go to and the depths they will stoop to in the search for profit. The film stands as a brilliant critique of corporate power and everything we associate with it and is a much needed resource in revealing the insanity of the present system. And as far as enthusing green revolutionaries and lending weight to the anti-globalisation cause is concerned the film is a powerful tool. But that is all.

Review of Fahrenheit 911

Michael Moore’s latest documentary film - Fahrenheit 911 - grossed $80 million in its first week. Despite initial attempts to secure an outlet for the film’s distribution and screening and right-wing claims that the film is inaccurate and initial plans to ban its screening, it has been seen by sell-out cinema audiences and won all manner of applause from US ‘liberals’ and the left everywhere.


Moore has clearly made a first rate documentary here in showing George Bush up as the first class moron we always knew him to be and heading a corrupt administration drooling oil and dripping from every pore with workers’ blood, unashamedly prepared to go to any lengths in the name of profit, but that’s about all we can extract from the film.


Whilst Moore can rip into the Republican administration over its obsession with Iraq and its intense love affair with the Saudi elite, he neglects to mention that President Clinton had Iraq bombed almost on a daily basis for 8 years—the 1998 cruise missile attack aside—and helped enforce an embargo that left 500,000 dead. Neither does Moore point out that high level dealings with Saudi Arabia have been going on since the 1940s. Furthermore, whereas the film gives full exposure to the visit by the Taliban to Texas in 1997 to sign an oil deal, that fact that Clinton was in power at the time is also overlooked.


More importantly, nowhere does Moore locate his film in a wider social and political context—in the capitalist system itself, in a system racked with contradiction, an exploitative social system that consigns hundreds of millions to abject poverty. While he clearly makes the link between oil profits and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he nowhere suggests that war, all war, is the continuation of business by other means; that in capitalism wars are fought over trade routes, overseas markets, mineral wealth or areas of influence; that if you build empires you have to be prepared to kill people.


But Moore is no revolutionary, no class warrior! In the film he talks to a woman whose family have a long military tradition and who proudly unfurls the stars and stripes outside of her house each morning. Moore, ever the patriot, suggests she must be a proud woman and himself qualifies her pride in her soldiering offspring with the line “it’s a great country” – and well worth dying for, no doubt, Mike? Later on, and referring to the many US soldiers from impoverished towns—such as Flint, with 50% unemployment—who have been killed since the invasion of Iraq, Moore says: “They offer to give up their lives so we can be free”. In this, Moore shows he holds the same ideas of freedom that Bush and his ilk are every ready to ask workers to defend. In a land where there exists a ‘Patriot Act’ that restricts many hitherto taken-for-granted ‘freedoms’, where trade unionists have recently been forbidden to engage in strike activity, where speaking out against the status quo is seen as dangerously subversive, where the prison population borders on 2 million, boosted by a “three strikes and you’re out” ruling, the only real freedom exists in which capitalist the workers choose to exploit them.


And I feel I must point to a racist undertone I detect in the film – though we are knocked off guard and almost miss it with the film commencing by focusing on the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida and the joint session of Congress where Congressional Black Caucus members are all but humiliated in their attempts to get a single senator to sign a letter that could initiate debate on an election that was decided on under 600 votes.


I refer to the manner in which the film ridicules Bush’s “coalition of the willing” – those small countries who lent support in the hope they would be well rewarded. Britain aside, which gave its full support the invasion of Iraq, small nations such as the Republic of Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, Romania, Netherlands and Morocco also offered to help out. The imagery that accompanies the mentioning of the latter smaller nations, the voice-over being intentionally slow and moronic sounding, is stereotypical and demeaning if anything: footage from the film Nosferatu accompanies the mentioning of Romania, Palau has native dancers festooned in flowers and a bare chested man driving a cow-drawn cart, there are Vikings for Iceland, cannabis-smoking for the Netherlands and Morocco is mentioned with footage of rampaging monkeys. The message is clear – there are countries with large armies which are a welcome addition to a coalition (ie Britain, which never actually gets a mention), but did the US have to settle for the pathetic?


Likewise, considering the US Invasion of Afghanistan just after 911, real analysis is sacrificed for a snear at the size of the invasion force itself—smaller than the manpower needed to police Manhattan, we are told—implying it should have been many times bigger.


And again, at a time when thousands of Moslems were being arbitrarily arrested and detained without charge—some being sent to Guantanamo Bay and denied legal representation—what obscene instance of Republican repression is dangled in front of us? Answer: the case of one white-skinnned Mr Reingold who slanged off Bush at his local Gymn and was visited by the FBI who never, incidentally, detained or charged him.


The great danger with Fahrenheit 911y, lies in its frontal attack on the present Republican administration, which leaves viewers assuming that a USA headed by a more liberal—perhaps Democrat—government would not be so militaristic and friendly with its corporate elite. In truth, any newly elected government, a one headed by Nader included, would serve primarily as the executive arm of corporate America, charged with pursuing the interests of the profit-hungry US ruling elite at home and aboard, ready always to call in the troops and bombers if US profits are threatened. The history of US foreign policy since 1945 is testament to this fact. Any US president who entertained any idea other than that he/she should be maximising profits would most definitely receive a sniper’s bullet.


Moore in fact leaves the capitalist system very much unscathed and free to go on killing. Bush may well lose the coming election, perhaps partly thanks to the production of this film, but capitalism will continue in the US as it does everywhere else on the planet, and the myriad injustices Moore himself catalogues in his book Stupid White Men will continue.


Moore is building up a lot of false hopes in targeting Bush and his administration as the villains of the peace. Whereas People know Bush is a war-mongering stooge of big business, something he goes to no great lengths to conceal, Kerry gives the illusion that he can work wonders if elected and Moore helps with the fantasy by saying, in a nutshell, the sooner we get rid of the village idiot the better. Whilst one can clearly understand why audiences, who have watched Fahrenheit 911, have chanted “Bush out, Bush out?” as the film ended, they are clearly mistaken in thinking the unseating of the Texan idiot will better their lot one iota. They will exist as wage slaves, every aspect of their lives subordinated to the dictates of capital, just as much under Kerry as under Bush.

BOOK REVIEW - MARX IN SOHO

By Howard Zinn
Published by South End Press

Distributed by Pluto Press

Granted his request to return to earth for just one hour, to clear his name and refute the rumour that his ideas are dead, a bureaucratic mix up finds Karl Marx in Soho, New York, instead of Soho, London where he once lived.

This short, one-man play sees Marx alone on stage, with only a table, a chair, books, newspapers and a glass of beer as props, reminiscing about his family life, enthusing about the Paris Commune and reliving an imaginary confrontation with the ‘shaggy anarchist’ Bakunin.

Zinn’s Marx can be humorous one page, and deadly serious the next in vitriolic condemnation of a system he spent his life trying to overthrow.

One moment Marx is recounting his countless journeys home from the British Museum, past open sewers telling how it was “only fitting that the author of Das Kapital should slog through shit while writing the condemnation of the capitalist system.” The next he is grappling on the floor with a drunken Bakunin. Then, just as suddenly, we can hear the bearded man launch a vehement attack upon the notion that the Soviet Union was socialist: “Do they think that a system run by a thug who murdered his fellow revolutionaries is communism? Scheisskopfen…can that be the communism I gave my life for?…[Angry]…Socialism is not supposed to reproduce the stupidities of capitalism!”

For anyone coming into contact with Marx’s ideas for the first time, dreading the thought of long, studious hours in front of volumes of insipid texts on political economy, having only ever heard second-hand and distorted accounts of Marx’s theories, fear not; this is a welcome first point of reference in which Zinn makes his ideas accessible and the man himself , less the spectre that haunted Europe, than some 19th century alternative comedian who just happens to know what capitalism is really all about.

Book Review - QUESTION EVERYTHING

Nowhere in this book, or in his previous Third Millennium Press publications, does Melvin Chapman claim to be a socialist - he is indeed dubious of word ‘socialist’ - but throughout Question Everything, as in his previous publications, we find the author clearly propagating the case for a world without money and articulating many of the arguments Socialist Party members have been using against their political opponents for decades

Chapman, for instance, tears into the concept of leadership on a number of occasions, arguing that we have been conditioned to accept that we are ‘intellectually deficient’ and in need of betters who are “capable of organising and directing us”. And they of course can not control events because it the system that controls them; they too are “conditioned by the economic and political structures in which they were born.”

He is also critical of the reformist mentality, informing us how “No reform, nor attempt to improve the system…can do more than ameliorate its inconsistencies.”

He is derisive of what passes for democracy in capitalist society, observing that there “can be no democracy in a complex system designed to justify inequality, a system in which the power of money carries the right to govern, in which the governed accept their own inferiority, lack of self-respect and sense of worth, a system in which crime, conflict, nationalism, racism, ethnic cleansing…is inevitable.”

“Only in self government can there be freedom with order.” And ‘freedom’? Chapman insists that “Freedom lies in a society in which we can work together free of the social structures that inhibit consensus and in a social, political and economic environment that does not actively promote differences and confrontations.” The rub is that “Freedom depends upon knowledge…knowledge upon information…[but ] information is not knowledge… {because it is}limited and controlled….The individual has to have the facilities to understand and interpret, to know what there is to know and what questions to ask”

Chapman is at his best in attacking the logic of the profit system, for instance noting how “the money system has enabled the human species to develop the technology with which it dominates the earth, but it has become an excuse for ignoring the factors that impede its own social advance.” Highlighting the alienation the money system gives rise to, he comments: ”This creature Man…has allowed itself to be treated – and to treat itself – as of less consequence than a few copper coins, a few electronic pulses, no more than a dollar a day.”

He challenges the assumption that without money no one would work, pointing out how “the money system has given work a bad name, with connotations of long hours, stress, tiredness, monotony…even in this acquisitive society of ours, most of us do some sort of voluntary work…working for others is enjoyable provided that we do not feel that it is augmenting other people’s interests at our expense.” In a moneyless world, he maintains, “the man/woman power available would be virtually limitless. There would be plenty for them to do…our fellow man, our environment, our towns and cities, our talents and potentialities… there would be enough to keep us occupied for generations.”

He continues: “We assume that without money there would be anarchy, but it is the chaotic complexity of the money system and the governments required to maintain it that is anarchic.” There then follows a lengthy section in which Chapman envisages the benefits of a money less world before concluding that “the greatest benefit of all would be in the reduction or elimination of the anti-social emotions of greed, hatred, selfishness and aggression, which the money system makes inevitable and we would be able to treat ourselves and each other as the sort of human beings that we claim to be.”

A lot of this book is given over to how capitalist society conditions our consciousness; how it determines the way we think and act. Chapman is adamant we can overcome this conditioning and achieve the maturity needed to help forge a better world. And this ‘maturity’ he contests, lies “in the ability to question our inherited assumptions and to replace our primitive responses, our need to compete with an eliminate each other, by recognition of our responsibility to ourselves and to the wider universe. To free ourselves we have to “run the gauntlet of inherited impediments.”

The books great weakness lies, perhaps, in the suggestion of how we can get from capitalism to the moneyless world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. For Chapman, “the actual process of getting rid of money would require no more than the creation of a single International currency, followed by the gradual reduction in interest rates and an expansion of the quantity of money in circulation until it ceased to have any value.” Here, a closer scrutiny of the workings of capitalism and the implications of such a process, might have prompted the author to rethink this statement.

Moreover, emphasis on the democratic road to a money less world, how it must be the free and class conscious decision of the majority, would have enhanced this short book.

Accepting that Chapman does not claim to be a socialist and criticism aside, this work does have its merits in revealing, quite succinctly in places, the insanity of capitalism and in advancing the benefits of establishing moneyless system of society.

This self-published, short print-run book is available from the author at: Third Millennium Press, 51 Newton Road, Bath, BA2 1RW. No price is given.

Book Review - The People of the Abyss

Centenary Edition
Jack London
Pluto Press
£10.99 paperback
192 pages

Those vaguely familiar with Jack London (pictured above) know him as a skilled writer, basing many of his stories on experiences from his rich, colourful and often dangerous life. Few remember him as the skilled political commentator and social critic who exposed many of the injustices of his day. The People of the Abyss is Jack London the investigative reporter relating an impassioned account of the degradation and squalor endured by the people of the East End of London in 1902, and this year marks the centenary of his visit to this part of London.


Living in the East End doss houses, London posed as a stranded American sailor, down on his luck. He mingled with the poorest of the poor, worked alongside them, ate with them, drank with them and slept amongst them in the workhouses. His observations are documented in full in People of the Abyss, and this is no work of fiction. This is the London in the days when the SPGB was about to be formed, and reading London’s account of the privation endured by millions of his fellow workers, one can’t help but ask why the clamour for an end to capitalism was not being screamed from every rooftop. He attempts an answer himself:


“Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be fed and housed as a pig is fed and housed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.” (p.162).


And who could blame them? For many in the East End of London in 1902, the daily struggle to live absorbed all their energies. Their life expectancy was 30 years; 55% of children died before the age of 5. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished men and women yearned only the public houses and alcohol in a pathetic attempt to “express their gregariousness” and because intoxication finally “brings the oblivion that nothing else can bring” (160). This is the England “where a constant army of 8 million lives on the border of starvation.” (155); where hundreds of thousands of families inhabit one room, and where “children take turn about in sitting up and drive the rats away from the sleepers (148); where the lucky go insane and the courageous commit suicide. And all of this when Britain had the largest empire ever know and milked the world.


The SPGB were not alone in the formative years of the 20th Century in pointing out the world of potential abundance we live in. Lamenting the widespread starvation of the day, the ‘hunger wail’ that echoed across the British Isles, London comments:
“And this in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300 and boots and shoes for 1000….and who dares to say that it is not mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?” (160)


The people of the Abyss is a masterly recording of the lives of the masses in 1902, and a poignant indictment on the capitalist system, and London is to be commended. However he affords us no panacea to the ills of the system he lambastes, but rather finishes with a lengthy note about how the system is being mismanaged, before ending:


“There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man’s producing powers an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of Civilisation live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear and protect them from the elements than the savage Inuit in a frigid climate who lives today as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago.” (p.170)


The people of the Abyss deserves to be read, for a Century after this book was written it is still possible to record the same, in spite of all the scientific and technological breakthroughs that have occurred since 1902 and which should be benefiting humanity.

Unholy War (book Review)

Unholy Wars – Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism
299 pages, John K. Cooley, Pluto Press

This new edition of a book first published in 1999 provides a first rate insight into the US relationship with militant Islam during and since the Cold War and provides much ammunition for those holding to the line that in supporting the likes of Osama bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US was indeed sowing the seeds of a bitter harvest reaped on September 11th 2001.


The USA did not only support those opposing the Soviet forces in the Afghan War, forming a deadly and unholy alliance with militant Islam in the process, it very much instigated the war. When President Carter signed a directive for covert support for the enemies of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in July, 1979, he was informed that do so would lead to Soviet intervention. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, would comment: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we consciously increased the probability that they would do so…This secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.” He later wrote to Carter: “Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam War.” (p. 19)


The US support for the mujahedin and other groups would turn out to be phenomenal. Billions of dollars were pumped into the Afghan cause and thousands of Islamic zealots were given specialist training in the US and Britain. As Cooley observes: “In the United States they experienced tough courses in endurance, weapons use, sabotage, and killing techniques, communications and other skills. They were required to impart these skills to the scores of thousands of fighters who formed the centre and the base of the pyramid of holy war.” (p. 81)


The training of the warriors of jihad not enough, the CIA also promoted drug trafficking in Afghanistan, one result being that the trade found easy access into the Soviet Union and helped destabilise civil society there. Moreover, “Nowhere did the growing addiction to locally-produced drugs, encouraged by those in the CIA…wreak greater havoc than in the Red Army…on an even larger scale than the addiction of American GIs during the Southeast Asian wars.” (p.5)


And of course there was the oil. One reason why the US nurtured the Taliban was that American oil companies wanted to build an oil pipe-line from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, to the Indian Ocean. It was hoped, states Cooley, “…that the Taliban, once in control, would be a security blanket. It would be able they conjectured, to secure the truck highways and eventually routes for oil and natural gas pipe-lines.” (p. 147)


In this updated edition of the 1999 publication, Cooley brings his topic up to date with an insight into the Bin-Laden-linked international terrorist network, as well as providing information on the post 1999 Pakistani coup.


For the socialist there is much in Unholy Wars we can use in the battle of ideas, revealing the lengths the US will go to, and the stinking depths it will plummet to secure its own ends, regardless of the cost of life. Where there is profit to be made, where US interests are challenged, nothing is sacred. People, no, whole nations are there to be manipulated.

ROGUE STATES: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (book review

This from the previous year:

ROGUE STATES: The Rule of Force in World Affairs

By Noam Chomsky
2000, Pluto Press

Over the years, Noam Chomsky has been described in various ways: as ‘the medic trying to cure a national endemic of selective amnesia’; as ‘the most dangerous man in the US’; as ‘the little boy who told the emperor he was naked’ and, more recently by the New York Times, as ‘an exploder of received truths.’ In his latest book, Rogue States, we find Chomsky very much living up to this time-honoured reputation.


It is often aid that if you’ve read one Chomsky book, you’ve read them all, which is perhaps true in so far as Chomsky is a relentless critic of US foreign and domestic policy, sinking his teeth deeper into the same old foe like a vengeful rottweiler with each new publication. Rogue States is no departure from the norm – it’s Chomsky doing what he does best.


Through skilful analysis of internal documents combined with historical context, a meticulous scrutiny of the activities of the US State Dept and a thorough gleaning of the quality broadsheets both sides of the pond, Chomsky again sets himself the task of gauging the US and its allies by the Standards they use as justification for the interference in the lives of others.


The Balkans, East Timor and Colombia come in for close scrutiny in separate Chapters which reveal the extent of US collusion in the ongoing misery there. In Kosovo, observes Chomsky, the US “has chosen a course of action that, as it explicitly recognises, escalates atrocities and violence…a course of action that undermines – perhaps destroys – promising democratic development”(p.47). The Clinton regime’s praise for Colombia as ‘a leading democracy’ is stringently challenged by Chomsky. Citing Colombia’s human right’s record as one of the worst in the world, Chomsky provides ample proof that the Clinton/Blair doctrine of ‘new humanism – “the historic mission of bringing justice and freedom to the suffering people of the world” (p.84) – is a total sham. Colombia, notorious for its state terror, produces 300,000 refugees and 3,000 deaths per year at the hands of its security forces, yet is presently the biggest recipient of US military aid in Latin America. The same favoured nation status is reserved for Turkey, whose security forces, in their persecution of the Kurdish people, have destroyed 3,500 villages and created 3 million refugees. Meanwhile, the US is keen to promote the redeeming qualities of mineral rich Indonesia ahead of the political fate of East Timor at the hands of the former.


Chomsky further reveals the US to be wholly contemptuous and dismissal of UN resolutions and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights it helped to bring into existence and to be severely lacking in any credible justification for its policies beyond its own borders. In this regard, Chomsky further highlights the US passion for free trade, pointing to the developing countries compelled not only to accept US cigarettes and other drugs and commodities, but also to advertise them under threat of trade sanctions.


Sanctions and indeed debt “is a very powerful weapon of control” says Chomsky, with half the world subject to US unilateral sanctions – a cruel form of economic coercion condemned repeatedly by the UN. In a chapter on the paranoiac US relationship with Cuba, Chomsky reminds us that Cuba has suffered 40 years of embargoes – the longest in history, and in spite of two thirds of the US population opposing the sanctions and in breach of WTO rules, all of which is dismissed with the defence that Cuba is a threat to US national security.


Though this can at times be a hard going book for the uninitiated, the mountains of information make it an indispensable reference work and guide to the methods the powerful use to further their own interests to the detriment of so many. It is moreover an invaluable tool for deciphering the rhetoric the powerful use to rationalise their excesses.