CAPITALISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS by Vera Butler
Hunger and nakedness and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty five million hearts; this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, -was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries.
So said Thomas Carlyle, Historian of the French Revolution.
The Communist Manifesto was written by Marx and Engels in 1848, at a time of widespread political upheavals throughout Europe. It called for the overthrow of capitalism, because "the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to -win"; it ended with an appeal for the workers of the world to unite. l
The success of the Russian Revolution of 1917 consolidated Soviet power, which was developing an alternative model for political, economic, and social organisation. Capitalism was not slow grasping the challenge. Winston Churchill called for the strangling of the ‘Bolshevik babe’ in its cradle. Since then, Western powers have not let up trying. There was intervention and trade boycotts; the Nazi aggression of 1941 killed 28 million Soviet people and razed cities and villages to the ground; the Cold War after 1945 imposed a heavy defence burden, which slowed, but could not stop, social and economic development for the peoples of the Soviet Union. In 1991 Western 'psychological warfare' techniques and subversion finally achieved what force of arms had failed to do: counter-revolutionary forces, aided and abetted from within, dismembered the Soviet Union. Initially people were misled to believe that they would benefit from a bonanza - Western type consumerism. Today they have understood that they lost what they had, but gained nothing. The human right to material security, to jobs, education and health care, is not acknowledged by the ideology of profit maximisation.
Capitalism has been successful in harnessing human labour-power and technology to achieve high levels of production; but the system has proved incapable of solving problems of distribution. Therefore capitalism has outlived its usefulness and will be superseded by a different pattern of social relations that will meet the ethical norms of equality, liberty, and rationality,
The conflict of ideologies, of two mutually exclusive world views, is not limited to economic, social, and political issues. The fundamental ideological contradiction is between metaphysical beliefs and cults on the one hand, and atheism on the other.
Beliefs and convictions are personal matters, but the power of institutionalised religion is political, because it is actively directed against secular, socialist oriented societies and their governments, in a monumental struggle for people's consciousness.
THE UNSTABLE ECONOMY.
Ever since the beginnings of factory production the evolving capitalist system has been prone to crises - or a stop-go pattern of growth altering with depression. Industrialisation attracted rural labourers to the cities, only to be locked out of factories as soon as products found no buyers. As Frederick Engels pointed out in 1886,
"the decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but to land us in the slough of despondency of a permanent, and chronic depression.." 2
Since then theories of economic cycles have focussed on crises of varying intensity and duration. Essentially, however, they acknowledge a pattern of instability.
Imbalance - or disequilibrium - is not a natural state or general law of economics, but a specific feature of capitalism, the outcome of the unequal distribution of incomes and wealth. The precursors to the Great Depression 1929-1939 bore close similarities to the present situation:
Stock prices were too high, forced up by a colossal volume of loans and by an orgy of speculation to a level unrelated to prospective increases in plant, property, or earning power...
The over-expansion of fixed investment was a function of the stock market boom, and of easy credit for investment, or of too high profits, relative to wages, which raised the demand for new plant. Under-consumption is the counterpart of over-investment, arising from diversion of income into the stock market or from a lag of wages behind profits. 3
Exploitation reached such proportions that it led to the collapse of world trade, to mass unemployment, the collapse of commodity prices, and the emergence of right-wing dictatorships, to keep rebellious workers in check. 4 Is history repeating itself ?
Today capitalism uses monetary techniques - inflationary money creation - to bridge the gap between wages and prices. Keynes spoke of the "money illusion" which made workers believe their wages retained purchasing power. Secondly, easy credit facilities stimulate consumption in excess of incomes. However, as the 'upswings' and 'downturns' of the so-called 'business cycles' become more violent, one day the credit bubble is bound to burst. Cyclical movements are signs of imbalances and distortions and not, as some economists argue, ‘natural’ economic laws.
Engels attributed 'cycles' to capitalist anarchy in production. 5 This also means anarchic patterns of investment, governed by maximal profit expectations and not by consumer demand based on needs. The advertising industry whips up artificial wants, to generate "markets". Capitalism is steeped in economic Darwinism: survival of the strongest, the smartest, the most ruthless.
IMPERIALISM AS MONOPOLY CAPITALISM
The power of finance capital and its corollary, the credit economy, was already shaping up at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus Lenin's study of the historical development of imperialism led him to conclude that "in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism". He wrote :
A financial oligarchy, which throws a close network of dependence relationships over all the economic and political institutions of present-day bourgeois society without exception - such is the most striking manifestation of this monopoly. ...
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations - all these gave birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. 6
Today, in retrospect, it is evident that capitalism has not changed its methods of profit maximisation. With the demise of the Soviet alternative - flawed as it may have been -imperialism's New International Economic Order has strengthened its hold over the material wealth of the globe. In 1995 the World Bank published a "Strategy for Reducing Poverty and Hunger" which acknowledged that: some 800 million people go hungry every day. In its World Development Report "Workers in an Integrated World" (1995), the World Bank anticipated that on current trends, 1.3 billion people are expected to survive on less than a dollar a day by the year 2000 - or 200 million more than in 1990. 7
Between 1981 and 1987, 44.7% of the Australian mining sector was foreign-owned, and 46.3% of mineral processing, as well as 31.9% of manufacturing. As Abe David and Wheelwright have pointed out, in the five years 1984 - 1988 financial enterprises in Australia increased the country's external debt nearly fivefold, whilst the banks' share of such debt increased tenfold, following deregulation of the financial sector and removal of restrictions on capital flows. 8
Increasingly, Australia is being swept along into a new historical era as capital reshapes and reorganises the world Corporate takeovers on a global basis are leading to increasing monopolisation and internationalisation of industry, enhancing corporate power in relation to the workers of the world.
Australia's predicament is neither new, nor is it an isolated case, What has changed is the global institutionalisation of corporate power via such agencies as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and their affiliates, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which protects the rights of transnational traders and investors. The purpose is to give pseudo-legitimacy to the global reach of finance capital and its activities, to the disadvantage of host countries. 9
The disequilibrium in the global distribution of incomes and wealth is accelerating. Frederic Clairmont has pointed out that "the gap between rich and poor is horrendously widening": In 1870 the average per capita income was eleven times that of the poorest; in I960, it soared to thirty-eight, and by 1994 it reached fifty-eight times. 10 The author also quotes from the New York Times of 10th June 2005, that "since 1973 the average income of the top 1% of Americans has doubled, and that of the top 0.1% has tripled"
CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM.
Marx foresaw that capitalism's fanatical striving for profit maximisation bears the seeds of the system's collapse.11Today his forecast seems prophetic.
Technological change aggravates the contradictions between labour and capital. Microelectronics mark the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution, the transition from Newtonian mechanics, which formed the scientific basis of industrialisation, to automation. Computers now replace human labour in production as well as the services, to an extent where the link between jobs and incomes is irretrievably broken for millions of people. Already Karl Marx had noted humans being replaced by machines, but he could not foresee the extent of the replacement process which, today, relegates millions of people to the scrap-heap of irrelevance for the 'efficiency-minded capitalist.
New technologies create new conditions which cannot he accommodated under capitalism. The people whose skills and labour- power are no longer 'marketable' must be provided with a minimum income, unless society is to become a battlefield for the survival of the fittest. This is possible only if the profits achieved through automation are channelled into a social welfare system, with the state acting as the redistributive authority. The social wage is a human right, not a reward to be granted or taken away at whim, or charity.
Unemployment and pauperism are the corollary of capitalism. As Marx pointed out in the 1860s, a "disposable industrial reserve army" makes the extraction of a greater work effort at lower wages possible. l3 The microelectronic revolution makes millions of skilled working-age people redundant and condemns them to becoming the outcasts of the 'global village'. However, reckless greed without social responsibility bears the seeds of systemic collapse.
Clairmont has pointed out that "contradictions within imperialism will always remain one of its glaring and permanent traits, " because, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "there can he no equality between unequals. 14
HUMAN RIGHTS: RHETORIC, NOT REALITY
The concept of Human Rights goes back to the French Revolution of 1789 and has remained an inspiration to generations after. Today Human Rights have been debased to a political slogan, which is meaningless to millions of impoverished working people, struggling to survive in the Transnational Corporate Gulag (TCG). Child labour, starvation, and the ravages of uncontrolled epidemics decimate millions. This wasteland of human desolation amounts to a blatant violation of human rights, but is ignored by the advocates of market fetishism. 15
World Bank President James Wolfensohn, former chairman of a leading Wall Street investment bank, commented on the tragic situation in Africa, saying: "In the only region of the world where poverty is projected to increase by the end of the decade, I saw its very sad, very human face. One agrees with Clairmont that "we can dispense with this nauseating sentimentality16
In Russia, capitalist victory has brought huge profits to some at the expense of the many. The Yeltsin regime exercised strict control over the media (so much for Gorbachev's 'glasnost)', but social statistics paint a picture of desolation and death. The UNICEF Report on "Central and Eastern Europe in Transition" (1995) registers the effects on people's lives of the collapse of state-financed social welfare , specifically in public health. Between 1989 and 1995 Russia's birth rate fell by 35.6 percent, whilst the mortality rate of 29-39 year olds increased by 72.8 percent..
There is massive corruption and appropriation of state property. Violent crime not only makes business there a risky proposition but also spills over to the rest of Europe and, indeed, the world. Uncertainty, fear, and despair ensnare the lives of millions of duped people throughout the new capitalist satrapies, from the Baltic to the Caucasus,, from Central Asia to the Pacific. The spreading use of narcotics, and suicides, are some of the indicators.
In his study of post-communism, Professor Leslie Holmes of the University of Melbourne cites N. Eberstadt, who compares the present situation with conditions at the time of the Nazi invasion, in his "Operation Barbarossa and the siege of Leningrad." According to the London "Economist" of 24 April 1999. the average rate of GDP growth in formerly communist Eastern Europe was said to slow to 1.9% in 1999.
THE 'NEW WORLD ORDER' - THE END OF THE ROAD ?
There is a growing chorus of those who question the viability of capitalism. Neal Acherson, writing in the "Independent International", argues that
This New Order, still in its exultant youth, cannot stand for long. Less than a decade after the fall of communism, its fatal weaknesses are already plain. As a form of capitalism, it is too unfair and callous to last, too unequal to be tolerated, too recklessly greedy to he sustainable. Within a generation it will be challenged, and a season of rebellion and upheaval will return, in the rich zones of Europe as much as in the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. 18
Others, notably John Cassidy writing in the "New Yorker", argue that Karl Marx was right in stressing the inexorable movement of capitalism towards monopolisation and centralisation, and the exploitation of human labour as the source of profit. Cassidy analyses the social effects of the right-wing backlash in America against: social welfare from the 1980s onwards. Salaries of chief executives which, in 1978, averaged about 60 times a worker's wage, were 170 times that wage in 1995. This is not to count the share of profits - dividends - going to shareholders. Cassidy poses the question whether capitalism will be able to hang on to its gains, and whether Marx will be proven right.
Cassidy refers to a U.S.welfare study which found that in 1997 demand for foodbank assistance throughout America rose by an average of 14 per cent, and by up to 50 percent in some places. 19
In Australia for the period 1983 to 1996 median household incomes fell from $36,692 to $33,033; and although the official unemployment rate was static, at 9% and 8.9% respectively, the youth unemployment rate rose from 23.6% to 27.6%, and that of long-term unemployed from 20.2% to 34.4 %. According to media reports, "a growing pool of virtually unemployable jobseekers ts entrenched and moving through the welfare system, unaffected by the gyrations of the business cycle." In September 1996 the number of people on Newstart allowances stood at 342,000 long-term unemployed:, by September 1997, the figure had increased by almost 70,000. 20 It defies reason that a nation of 18 million people, occupying the territory of an entire and richly endowed continent, is unable to employ productively a comparatively small, but skilled and willing workforce.
In 1969 Australian women workers won the right to equal pay. In 1999, thirty years later, the average female wage stands at 66c to the male's S1:00.21
Australia is no exception among the so-called ‘developed’ capitalist nations. Already in 1986 American economist Lloyd Dumas drew attention to his country's long-term economic decay:
It seems highly unlikely that high-tech, management, or the service economy will save America. Under present conditions, they do not provide a solid foundation on which to build a brighter economic future. They are neither turning points nor starting points - only false hopes. 22
Ten years later Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Washington DC, drew attention to the inexorable shrinkage of the labour market in advanced capitalist economies, and the worsening imbalance in the distribution of incomes and wealth. Between 1989 and 1993 more than 1.8 million American workers lost their jobs in manufacturing. Only a third were able to find new jobs in the service sector, and then at a 20 percent drop in pay. In the 1980s more than 1.5 million mid-level-management jobs were eliminated, and in the 1990s their ranks now include upper -middle- management executives as well. 23 In 1992 the net worth of America's 834,000 richest families totalled over $5,62 trillion, whereas that of the bottom 90 percent of American families was only $4.3 trillion. 24 Another example of failing capitalist economies is Germany, once a star performer. By mid-1999 total unemployment had risen from 3.9 miln. the year before, to 4.1 miln. In the former East Germany, official unemployment figures, at 16.8%, were double those for the West at 8.4 %. However, by 2005 unemployment in the East stands at between 15% and 20 % plus, and at (officially)12% in the West. 29 The widening income gap aggravates social contradictions and conflicts in capitalist societies.
'BUSINESS CULTURE' - 'IDIOT CULTURE’.
However, the system works hard at a new kind of control - control of consciousness. Nowadays unsuspecting people are subjected to a variety of brainwashing programmes, not to inform and educate, but to confuse and misguide. 'Human relations' experts draw on techniques of public opinion formation, using global communications facilities which monopolise information- and entertainment flows. Here is a control network of unprecedented global coverage which enables faceless operators to access every country, every home, to promote 'New Ager' values, create commercial wants, and conjure a world of make-believe that turns spectators into consumers of trivia and politics into a game of showmanship. As far back as the 1970s Vance Packard, journalist and writer, warned that:
Human engineers are at work in a variety of fields. They are increasing the capacity of a relatively small number of people to control, modify, manipulate, reshape the lives of a great number of other people. And they are functioning in many countries, especially in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Israel, Russia, Australia, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. These new technologists draw primarily upon discoveries in the behavioural, biological and computer sciences. Control is being achieved over human actions, moods, wishes, thoughts. 26
No absolutist ruler or totalitarian dictator ever wielded comparable power or exercised the extent of intrusiveness and control that has become possible with the advances of science and technology. In the 'brave new world' of the globalised business culture brute force is replaced by consciousness shaping, setting new standards of 'good 'and 'bad' whilst dismissing questions about 'true' or false', as pointed out by Alex Carey. 27
In the name of freedom individuals become stereotyped, to conform to the image of the business culture. Humanitarian values and social consciousness are replaced with new status symbols:- mobile phones, lap-top computers, fast foods, depersonalised sex, 'designer' drugs ... Methods to ensure compliance have changed but are no less effective :-the threat is no longer beheading as under Genghis Khan, or forced despatch to Australia or Guyana, to Siberia or Auschwitz, but loss of income and status - the threat of the globalised business culture, the totalitarianism of the late 20th century.
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE,
What will come after capitalism ? There is broad agreement that change will be radical and probably violent; yet there are different perceptions of outcomes, Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the system does not react to crises as logic would suggest, by seeking to ameliorate conditions for millions of people, but by promoting proto-fascist groups, religious fanaticism, and cultural standards of self-enrichment Fear and hatred is stirred up against emigrants and the poor, because this justifies the application of totalitarian state power, dedicated to the preservation and augmentation of wealth for the few at the expense of the many, 28 Right-wing politics has never been a threat to capitalism - on the contrary:- it could be relied upon to enforce a no-strike, low-wage worker 'discipline', a dictatorship of capital.
Rifkin fears that the worsening polarisation between rich and poor is turning America into an outlaw culture. With the spread of automation in manufacturing -and service industries, forcing millions out of work, violent crime is on the increase.
Trapped in a downward spiral, and with fewer safety nets to break their fall, a growing number of unemployed and unemployable Americans will of necessity turn to crime to survive. Locked out of the new high-tech global village, they will find ways of stealing their way back in to take by force what is being denied them by the forces of the marketplace. 29
The victorious superpower America is drifting towards the same abyss of crime and anarchy which has already entrapped the former Soviet Union.
From past experience there are grounds to fear that the final solution' to economic crisis will, once again, be recourse to war, the mass destruction of human lives and social wealth. After all:- it would be a way of getting rid of millions of unwanted people across the globe, millions of mouths to feed, millions of embittered and desperate hearts craving justice. Who will oppose the ultimate inhumanity of capitalism-gone-mad ? In Clairmont's words,
The profound analytic insight of Marx with his great message of hope is of supreme contemporary? relevance as humanity faces up to the exigencies of breaking the inherited mould of what always was, and has now become even more so, of an oppressive and anachronistic social system. 30
The Achilles heel of moribund capitalism is internal collapse. Globalisation draws closer the disempowered and dispossessed , regardless of colour, gender, or creed. United they stand a world to win, because they will soon have nothing left to lose.
REERENCES:1 Marx, K. & F Engels, 1977 (first published in 1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow.: Progress Publishers, p.96. Note that the Revolution of 1848 was not primarily carried by the industrial workforce, but included peasants, liberal intellectuals., nationalists, and some aristocrats in support of constitutional monarchic rule.
2 Engels, F. 1886. Preface to the English Edition of Das Kapital Moscow: Progress Publishers, 19745p. 11
3 Kindleberger, C.I 973. The World in Depression 1929-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.112 & 117
4 Weiss, J. 1967. The Fascist Tradition New York: Harper Row.
5 Engels, E1975 (first publ. in 1880 Socialism, utopian scientific? Peking: Foreign Languages Press, pp.82, 92-93
6 Lenin, V. 1965 (first publ in 1917).Imperialism , the highest stage of capitalism Peking: Foreign Languages Press, pp. 149& 150
7 Clairrnont, F.1995. The Rise and Fall of Economic liberalism, Penang: Third World Network, p339
8 David, A. & E.L.Wheelwright, 1989. The Third Wave. Sydney: Left Book Club Cooperative Ltd.,p. 102 52 ibid.,p.214.
9 Butler, V. 1998. Tweedledum, tweedledee... in Australian International Studies Association Newsletter Vol 12No.l
10 ibid
11 Marx, K. 1974{first publ.1867) Capital Vol I .Moscow: Progress Publishers, p.555
12Marx, K. Capital Vol. I, op.cit.,ch. 15: Machinery and Modern Industry1.
13 Marx, K CapitalVol 1, op.cit., pp.592-594.
14 Clairmont (1995), op.cit, p,20
15 Clairmont, F.I 995. The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism. Penang: Third World Network.p.339
16 Clairmont, F.(1995), p.339. The Statement to the UN is dated Geneva, 6 July 1995
17 Eberstad, N. 1994, 'Demographic Disaster: The Soviet Legacy, National Interest No 36, pp.53-57, cited in L, Holmes 1997.Post-Communism: an Introduction Oxford: Blackwell, p.244
18. "Independent International" 28 January-3 February 1998: 'We live under the most arrogant of world orders, but it will not last.’
19 The Weekend Austalian 20-21 December 3997: 'Why Karl Marx was righ1, reprinted from "The New Yorker",See also: "Independent International" 7-13 January 1998; 'Rise in poverty in the USA'.
20 "Time" magazme(Austral edit.) 4 March 1996 ; see also "The Australian", 17 October 1997.
21 The Age, 30 September 1999, p. 10, referring to research by Associate Professor Rosemary Hunter .
22 Dumas, L.,1986. The Overburdened Economy. Berkeley; University of California Press,p.23.
23 Rifkin, I 1996. The End of Work. New York: Putnam & Sons, pp. 167 and 171
24 Rifkin, op.cit.,pp173-174
25 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 July 1999. See also "Weekend Australian". 7-8 February 1998.
26 Packard, V. 1978. The People Shapers. Melbourne: Nelson, p.3
27 Carey, A. 1995. Taking the Risk out of Democracy, ed A Lohrey. Sydney: University of NSW Press, Ch. 4:' The McCarthy Crusade.'
28 Chomsky, N. 199 6. Class Warfare. London: Pluto Press, pp. 152-153.
29 Rifkin, 1996, op..cit., pp.212-213; 30 Clairmont, op.cit,p356 .
Note: Dr Vera Butler studied at the University of Melbourne and German Universities of Freiburg and Tuebingen.