CHAPTER 11

THE ILLUSION OF ANTI-CAPITALIST REFORMS.

We have seen from the previous chapter that there is an extensive number of negative effects of capitalist production on people, other life forms and the environment. We also indicated a number of the organisations which oppose all or only some of those effects. They are many, many more. From Amnesty International to Greenpeace and Eco-Warriers; from animal shelters to Poppy day, the members of these organisations seek by persuasion, legal constraint or, on occasion, physical confrontation to mitigate, alter or prevent this or that effect of capitalistic social and production relations. Thousands of hard working and dedicated people have campaigned over many years, hundreds of years in some cases, to end those effects listed in the last chapter by the method of reform. That is to say they seek to change the damaging effects and practices of capitalists and their representatives by passing Acts of legislation or repealing laws, both of which are intended to 're-form' these activities.

Each generation produces new activists to replace the older generation and each new generation hopes that its efforts to reform things will produce lasting results. But as we have seen, the many and tragic effects of the capitalist mode of production are still with us. Even the apparently successful campaigns such as the struggle for Votes, Trade Union Rights, fought for by millions with the loss of livelihood, liberty and even life - often all three in succession for many individuals - have resulted in no fundamental long-term change to the capitalist system of exploitation. Exhausting the environment and impoverishing the working people of the world - particularly the third-world - is still central to the capitalist method of obtaining surplus production and maximising surplus value. This has been demonstrated by examining the economic logic of capitalist production (M - M+ etc.) in chapter 9 and listing many of the numerous social and environmental consequences in chapter 10. In this chapter we shall demonstrate the practical impossibility of seriously trying to reform the rule of capital against capitalist interests by looking more closely at just a few of the many attempts to do this and by exploring the extent of capitalist power bases.

The campaign to reform Slavery.

On the surface of things one of the most successful attempts to reform the rapacious greed of the capitalist class for every ounce of surplus value and profit should have been the campaign to end slavery. The rule of capital cannot be blamed for ushering in this terrible disfigurement on the face of humanity, for slavery was the economic basis of the class rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Greek City States and the Roman Empire. Likewise, slavery and near slavery (serfdom, peonage, debt bondage etc.) also underwrote all the feudal kingships, theocracies and aristocracies of the middle ages in Europe and the East. Moving closer to our own time the historical evidence also indicates that the Portuguese merchants were busily supplying Europe and the East with slaves in the 15th Century as the middle-ages grew to a close. Portugal was followed closely by slave traders in Spain and France. British merchants trailed only a little way behind, but once started they soon caught up the rest of Europe.

In considering such a barbaric practice we must guard against a frequently used rationalisation. The exploiters among our European and Asiatic ancestors are often excused for promoting and operating systems of slavery, because they were ignorant or didn't know any better. We noted in chapter 8 that the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whilst fully accepting slavery himself, recognised that not everyone agreed. There were in fact strong arguments against the practice, particularly by some Sophists, Stoics and Cynics. And of course, most of the people who were made slaves undoubtedly made their feelings obvious often preferring to die fighting rather than be captured and enslaved. Despite such opposition the practice continued more or less unabated. So we read that;

"...throughout the early Middle Ages slaves constituted a highly prized section of the population of Europe, including Northern Europe....Saxons, Angles, Wends and Avars could all be bought at Verdun, Arles and Lyons at whose 'great fairs' slavs soon became a prime commodity." ('The Slave Trade'. Hugh Thomas. Pub. Picador, Page 34.)

The early merchant capitalist traders merely added slaves to their lists of highly saleable objects. But whilst capitalist rule cannot be reproached for introducing the practice of slavery, it can be held to account for extending it and for not quickly abolishing it. After all, (as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter) the rule of capital pronounced its right to overthrow the despotism of feudal autocracy by claiming to be an 'enlightened' form of socio-economic organisation. Yet in general the capitalist class were as keen to invest in the slave trade after their 'revolutions' as they were before them. The rapid growth of the capitalistic 'Atlantic Trade' in black African slaves accelerated the conquest and colonisation of the Caribbean Islands, North America and South America. The owners of the capital intensive sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations, in those hot and humid territories, needed robust, cheap labour. Since no one would volunteer for such back breaking work, people from Africa were captured and forced to do the work as slaves. Purchasing human beings at two or three pounds sterling (or the French, Spanish or Portuguese equivalent) or in exchange for Cowry shells and iron bars and putting them to hard labour brought quick wealth to unscrupulous merchant capitalists and plantation capitalists alike. The resulting high returns were a sufficiently strong enough economic incentive to shoulder aside all moral and religious sensibilities. Yet even many of the capitalists and their supporters, who had no direct interest in slavery, did little or nothing to end slavery and indeed for long periods of time many of them did their best to hinder the 'official' end of slavery. The exception to this being a few of the bourgeois radicals involved in the leadership of the French Revolution. More of that later. For now let us provide ourselves with a few details of the economic benefits of slavery to the capitalist traders and planters.

The Atlantic Slave Trade saw merchant adventurers and representatives of capitalist companies set off from England, Spain, France and Portugal in wooden sailing ships for the African coast. In their holds they carried, brass rings, iron bars, cowry shells, cloth and other assorted commodities. These they bartered for slaves, elephant tusks and other items. The purchase of these human beings cost the merchant traders the equivalent of between £2 and £3 per person. They would be packed into the ships holds and the vessels would then be sailed across the Atlantic to one or other of the Islands of the West Indies or to North or South America. There the human commodities would be sold for between £20 and £40 per slave. A vessel carrying 350 slaves whose combined costs amounted to a total of say £875 could be sold, if all survived, in Kingston for £8,750. Such amounts would then be used to purchase tobacco, sugar, rum, cotton etc., for the return trip to Europe where these non-human commodities were also sold at a considerable mark-up. Even with high mortality losses among the slaves, a truly remarkable profit could still be made. For example;

"...the owners of the Enterprise reaped a net profit on the round trip of £24,430.45p....The Louisa of Liverpool made a profit of nearly £20,000 on a voyage to Jamaica in 1800. The Fortune made over £13,000 delivering Congolese slaves to the Bahamas in 1805.....In later years when slave-running had become a somewhat more hazardous enterprise because of the agreement of several countries to suppress the trade, profits of £60,000 on a single trans-Atlantic run were possible." (Richard Hart. 'Slaves who Abolished Slavery.' Vol. 1. Pub. University of West Indies, page 69/70.)

Ten thousand pounds to sixty thousand pounds were typical amounts of surplus value gained in the days when £5 would buy the following group of items; a gun, a couple of swords, 60 pints of alcohol, 64 lb. of gunpowder, a couple of boxes of beads, 100 flints and lead balls and a couple of lengths of cloth. Clearly this would make the above sums quite staggering amounts if adjusted to today's figures.

Before we briefly note the long struggle of the reformers to try to abolish the slave trade, let us remind ourselves of how the slaves were treated in the sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations of the West Indies. This is how one eyewitness described a typical scene, on this occasion in Jamaica.

"The Overseer then asked a few questions of the drivers respecting the offences of the six slaves brought up for punishment....The first man was of about 35 years of age. He was called a penkeeper, or cattle-herd: and his offence was having suffered a mule to go astray....One of the drivers then commenced flogging him with a cart-whip....The cart-whip is about ten feet long, with a short, stout handle and is an instrument of terrible power. I trembled and turned sick...The sufferer, writhing like a wounded worm, every time the lash cut across his body cried out, 'Lord: Lord: Lord:' When he had received about 20 lashes, the driver stopped to pull up the poor man's shirt...The flogging was instantly recommenced and continued...til thirty-nine lashes had been inflicted...I perceived the blood oozing out from the lacerated and tumified parts where he had been flogged;...he was instantly ordered off to his usual occupation." (ibid. page 92/93)

This type of punishment was no exception but 'openly' the norm in the English Plantations during that period, and 39 lashes by cart-whip on bare back and buttocks was the standard punishment for male and female slaves. The power of the cart-whip, designed to inflict pain through the tough hide of oxen, ensured that from the very first stroke not just blood but skin and flesh were torn from the body of the human victim. Other punishments included chopping off one leg or beheading for runaway slaves; nailing by the ear to a post, releasing them by cutting the ear off. The latter punishment was strictly reserved for minor offences.

Again we should not imagine that some kind of universal 18th Century ignorance and backwardness was to blame for such regular acts of racist torture for this eyewitness clearly recounts his own horror at the episode and so did many others. And it must be said that the perpetrators of such abuses also knew. These punishments were not mere individual and arbitrary acts of wickedness. They were systematic, widespread and deliberately chosen for their severity in order to strike terror into all slaves and thus create a sufficiently submissive and hardworking labour force. Forcing slaves to punish each other was a clearly thought out process. Compelling one slave, under threat of further punishment, to shit in the mouth of another slave was a punishment calculated to humiliate as well as divide the oppressed themselves.

Not all the protesters were against the use of slaves - some merely being against such brutal punishments. The reformers, or Abolitionists as they were known, decided for tactical reasons to try to ban only the trade in slaves but not the ownership and use of slave labour. They thought this would be easier to achieve and would force the slave owners to be kinder to their existing slaves. If the owners were unable to obtain more slaves, the reasoning went, the slave owners would choose to look after the ones they had better, and cease to work them to death, as was the usual practice. In the minds of the reformers this doubtful tactic should have had the effect of broadening the appeal of the campaign and increasing the chance of early success. Not so. It is worth considering the abolition reform process in Britain.

In the late 1700s the campaign for the reform of the slave trade began in earnest and petitions began to pour into the House of Commons in England and eventually Parliament decided to investigate the matter. The representatives of the slave traders and plantation owners however decided to string out the procedure.

"They obtained permission to appear by counsel at the bar of the House and to have their witnesses heard. Thus began a parliamentary wrangle in which the slave trading and plantation interests, using every procedural devise available with unequalled filibustering skill, delayed the decision to prohibit the slave trade for 20 years." (ibid. page 159)

These ruthless profit-mongers gained yet a further 20 years of trading and torturing human beings even after it had finally become a public scandal. The reformers had used up much energy, time and money and after 100 years of opposition and decades of campaigning by those trying to reform this, by now fully capitalist practice, they had not prevented the use of slaves nor had they ended the slave trade. They had only achieved a Parliamentary declaration which stated it was illegal. It was a paper victory only. In actual fact the ban on slave trading was almost universally ignored. What couldn't be done openly by the capitalist traders, as in the case of today's impotent bans on arms trading, was done covertly and by smuggling. A change of flag for the ship or nationality for the owner, bribes, favours and officials looking the other way, as also happens today, also played their part in ensuring that the lucrative trade in human beings continued. Although eventually British naval ships pursued and boarded ships thought to be slavers, it actually took slave revolts in Haiti, Jamaica, Surinam and other places to finally end slavery in the West Indies and a ruinous Civil War to end it in the United States of America.

Slavery only died out in other places when industrial capitalists became more powerful than mercantile capitalists and could force upon them their wishes. In this case the reasons were economic and not moral. Industrial capitalists needed a labour force which was educated, mobile and had purchasing power - none of which was possible under an extensive system of slavery. This particular view was clearly formulated by the 18th century capitalist Economist, Adam Smith in chapter 11, Volume 1 of his book known as 'The Wealth of Nations'.

A practical example of how slavery was perceived to impede the development of capitalistic forms of productive development was provided by the resolution of the citizens of Rowan County USA., who declared that;

".. the African trade is injurious to this colony, obstructs the population of it by freemen, prevents manufacturers and other useful immigrants from Europe from settling amongst us and on occasions an annual increase in the balance of trade against the colonies". (Quoted in Hugh Thomas. 'The Slave Trade' Pub. Picador, page 461.)

This statement demonstrates the view of the industrial capitalist in contradiction to the capitalist slave trader and plantation owner. A free labourer at that time would cost the equivalent of £20 per year in wages to employ in menial tasks. Over ten years this would create a total cost to the employer of £200. A slave costing £25 - £30, could be forced to do the same tasks for ten years and only cost the original £25 - £30 and still provide surplus labour for the remainder of his or her life. This was obviously a tremendous saving for the slave owner. However, the £20 per year wages of the free labourer would circulate every year in purchases of food, clothes, tools, drink and housing. Thus the free labourer's wages would go toward enriching food producers, clothing manufacturers, landlords and publicans, whereas the £25 purchase price of a slave would disappear at one go into the bank accounts of the European slave traders. Hence an economic community with 500 free labourers would be better, for general capitalist development, than one with 500 slaves even though it might be worse for a section of capitalists. A further increment in the economic equation came with the application of steam-powered machinery to the crushing of sugar cane. Machine power, here as elsewhere, lessened the need for such large quantities of labour.

These combined factors indicate that slavery wasn't so much peacefully legislated out of existence by the philanthropists, as energetically eliminated by slaves' revolts, a civil war and changes in technology. Such factors moved the 'liberation' process forward during a period of time where slave based plantations had become less viable and more certain profits could be made elsewhere. This, together with the fact that slave labour was clearly seen to be inhibiting the further general development of capitalist forms of production and exchange, meant that the Atlantic slave trade was in rapid decline.

Dedicated and passionate as they were, the abolitionists and reformers in the end only helped to draw up and advertise a somewhat premature death certificate for a trade already economically doomed. So the reformist campaign to end slavery was not the ultimate instrument of its destruction even in the case of the Atlantic trade. Had sufficient capitalists still supported the use of slavery the abolitionist reformers would probably still be campaigning today. And in fact slavery still does exist today (particularly in the form of child debt-bondage) in many parts of the world, despite almost universal condemnation against the practice. It does so precisely because sufficient capitalists, in some parts of the world, still do support it and others turn a blind eye.

A very similar pattern of reformist failure has repeated itself in the case of the ideological companion to the economic practice of slavery - racism! Despite long campaigns and reformist legislation in numerous countries outlawing racism, it still exists, not in isolated pockets of backwardness, but at the heart of most of the bureaucratic structures and institutions of capitalist so-called democracies.

The reformist campaign against Poverty.

Another candidate for easy and popular reform should be the removal of poverty. Organised religion of the Christian (and pre-Christian) varieties have since the year zero condemned the existence of poverty and for much of the past two thousand years those religions have dominated the political, social and economic structures of Europe and America. These Abrahamic religions have in one form or another been embraced by the capitalist classes and their representatives and have become state religions in many advanced capitalist countries of the world. It would not be unreasonable then to expect that such countries would have made giant steps in the elimination of poverty.

Such is the plight of human poverty, even within the advanced countries, that it seems it could not fail to stir anyone save the most hard hearted to do something serious to end it. This is not just a modern opinion, Henry Fielding wrote in 1753.

"...if we were to make a progress through the outskirts of the metropolis and look into the habitations of the poor, we should there behold such pictures of human misery as must move the compassion of every citizen here that deserves the name of human." (Quoted in B. Inglis. 'Poverty and the Industrial Revolution.' Pub. Hodder and Stoughton, page 22.)

This, plus the apparent predominance of Abrahamic and Christian values among the dominant classes in capitalist society, together with the immense productivity of capitalist industry and agriculture, should have made poverty a prime candidate for eradication by the method of reform. Alas! this is not so. Let us consider a brief history of the problem.

In the 16th century, the poor who were not attached to the land were classed as vagrants, were punished by whipping and sent back to the place where they were born to find work or be supported. Later each town and parish was urged to provide funds for such purposes. However, despite pleas and even denunciations from the pulpit, most people who were able to pay failed to volunteer anything. During the reign of Elizabeth 1st, when capitalist enterprise was in a phase of rapid development, a new law was passed which compelled the provision of a poor rate and introduced the notion of the right to work. Later still, under Charles the 2nd, an act of Settlement and Removal was passed to enable towns and villages to forcefully return paupers to their place of birth. None of these acts tried to solve the problem of poverty, they merely shuffled the problem about. A debate ensued in which some (Sir Mathew Hale for one) put forward the case that the poor rate should be used for purchasing means of production such as looms so that the poor could produce goods to offset the poor rate. A powerful counter-argument was presented by Daniel Defoe, who noted that producing goods in one new place would merely prevent the sale of the same or similar goods in another. He wrote;

"For every skein of worsted these poor children spin, there must be a skein the less spun by some poor family of person that spun it before....it is only transposing manufacture from Colchester to London and taking the bread out of the mouths of the poor in Essex, to put it into the mouths of the poor in Middlesex." "(ibid. page 19)

The interesting thing is how far the capitalistic method of production in Britain had developed by that time. This is revealed by the success of Defoe's counter argument, which rested upon the existence of an already commonly held assumption of what is called relative over-production - at least amongst his intended audience. That is to say, that schemes such as that suggested by Mathew Hale, would not produce more 'worsted' than was needed, but more than could be sold at the price required to realise a profit. Due to the rise of capitalism, the motivation for production had changed. It had changed from local subsistence production with any surplus production exchanged, to production for the realisation of profit. In the process of the above debate it is also possible to catch a glimpse of the real cause of poverty. It was not the unwillingness to work that made working people poor, but the inability to find appropriate paid employment.

Forcibly driven off the land, by enclosures, with as yet no large-scale industries to absorb these surplus labourers, and with the law of settlement still in place, even willing agricultural workers were often forced onto the black economy of that day - poaching, begging, vagrancy, stealing, street vending and wheeling and dealing. But hardship was by no means restricted to those who were unemployed. The surplus pool of labour created by these capitalist-inspired agricultural developments also caused hardship for those 'in work' because it also helped to depress agricultural wages and increase the 'casual' nature of agricultural work. In such circumstances the situation for the poor got rapidly worse. The developing capitalist system created poverty in the rural population as a by-product of its profit-led motivation and method of production. It later extended that same profit motivation and methods to the industrialised manufacture of non-agricultural products. As a result, poverty for the working people grew alongside and in proportion to the rapidly increasing wealth of the capitalists class. The poor were not disappearing, but increasing.

In 1795 a local reform of the poor law determined that whenever the earnings of the poor working man fell below a certain level then a subsidy would be paid to bring the earnings up to a minimum subsistence level. The system became known as the Speenhamland system and was adopted widely. Clearly this reform didn't remove poverty, it just put a lower cash limit to that poverty. Nonetheless it was a useful tinkering with the previous system of charity and alms giving. A year later an attempt to have the idea broadened out was made when Samuel Whitbread introduced a proposal to Parliament calling for a minimum wage to be established. When the vote was cast, the bill was voted down by the pro-capitalist representatives, but the idea championed an alternative reformist model for attempting to deal with absolute poverty - the minimum wage. This is a model which was resurrected in the 20th century by the European Economic Community, albeit with certain categories of working people left out. A constant debate during that earlier period, which also still echoes down the years to today, was over a distinction between what was called deserving and undeserving poor. The deserving were described as those who wanted to work but couldn't get it and the undeserving were those who could work but didn't want to do any.

In the absence of any real progress in overcoming poverty, a fanciful solution was put forward by a Jeremy Bentham. He proposed that a National Charity Company, with himself as the main shareholder, be set up which would build over a twenty year period 500 industry-houses for the whole of the nations poor. Each of these 'institutions' would contain living and working quarters for 2000 poor people. They would be set to work in various ways and made to yield a profit for the company over the cost of their upkeep. Two-hundred per cent profit was the projected target from able-bodied men and one-hundred percent from able-bodied women. In this way, Bentham suggested, 'dross' (i.e. the unemployed = the dregs of society) would be turned into 'sterling' (i.e. profit for the shareholders). Children of the inmates would be set to work at four years old and everyone would be worked hard enough to prevent them from being tempted by drink and other work-avoiding distractions. Yet interestingly they would have been allowed, from an early age, the distraction of frequent sexual relations. This apparent moral laxity was in order to increase the number of working inmates on the assumption that each new offspring would eventually yield an extra 100 or 200 per cent. For various reasons this fantasy or rather 'nightmare' extension to the much-hated workhouse scheme was not taken up

Following a series of agricultural riots in 1830 a New Poor Law was passed in 1834 which aimed at a further reform based upon the distinction between providing support for the aged and sick and the able-bodied unemployed person. It was the able-bodied poor who constantly bothered the ruling class of that period, for if they provided them with too much financial support when not working, they would not want to work at all. By the same measure too high a level of support would be a disincentive for those already in work who would see the unemployed getting almost as much as they were. For this reason it was considered that the two situations (non-working poor and working poor) needed careful separation. This is also a debate which is still alive today in the setting of income support levels and unemployment pay and again shows how little capitalist and reformist thinking has travelled in the intervening years. The New Poor Law of 1834 thus reformed the old poor law and introduced a payment to the poor unemployed person which was deliberately calculated to be less than that gained by the lowest paid working person. The reasoning was thus;

"It is only by keeping these things separated and separated by a broad and as distinct a demarcation as possible and by making relief in all cases less agreeable than wages, that any thing deserving the name of improvement can be hoped for." (From the Poor Law Report 1834 Quoted in 'The Idea of Poverty.' G Himmelfarb. Pub. Faber and Faber, page 164.)

As we have seen from Chapter 9, for each generation, working class earnings fluctuate around an average, based upon the cost of feeding, clothing, housing etc. When these 'earnings' are below average then even the employed are in grave difficulties. The unemployed relief provided by the above type of model would then have to be reduced even further and would push them even further down into poverty. So again we see that this reform did not by any means eliminate poverty. At best it was merely a method of managing or controlling poverty and in some cases it could actually increase it. This New Poor Law also incorporated the idea of the workhouse. The reputation of the workhouse preceded it. It was hated by the working classes. Confinement in a workhouse was considered so obnoxious, even by the middle-classes, that it was judged to be a self-test of how destitute a person was. It was reasoned, at the time, that someone asking for entry into a workhouse would not need to be means-tested for they would have to be extremely desperate to agree to enter.

All through that long period it was a small section of the capitalist class who were calling for reform of the poor laws and aid to the poor. Their reasons differed. Some were anxious to stave off rebellion from below, others thought visible poverty was a blight upon an otherwise glorious capitalist system. However, with the development of a National Union of the Working Classes and its journal, the Poor Man's Guardian, a more working-class voice began to be heard. Rather than tinker with wage subsidies, poor relief and workhouses, the editor and contributors of 'Poor Man's Guardian' saw the root of the problem of poverty in the lack of the poor being able to vote. This was another dangerous reformist illusion, as we shall see, but at the time they argued that;

"The real issue was not the 'advocacy of poor laws' but the advocacy of universal suffrage; indeed the franchise was required in order to 'supersede poor laws and pauperism'." (ibid. page 244)

The Chartists, whom we mentioned briefly in Chapter 1 with regard to the problem of sectarianism, were committed to essentially the same programme. Both groups thought that if the working class was given the vote then this would fill Parliament with working men or supporters of the working classes and the poor. These representatives would then pass laws to ensure that capitalist property rights and profits were restricted in such a way that the abundant wealth which was clearly available would be shared out more fairly. In other words they thought the working class representatives, once in Parliament, could ensure that the working class would get a more equitable share of the surplus value they produced. Neither of these two powerful movements for electoral reform were successful. Yet eventually the vote was won for men and later for women. As we know, obtaining the vote did not remove poverty from within the geographical boundaries of Britain nor anywhere else where it was gained for that matter. It failed despite the fact that Britain was then the most wealthy and developed capitalist state in the world. But then if we understand the economic and political dynamics of the capitalist system we know it could never have succeeded.

For the dynamics of competition drives capitalists to introduce technology to replace human labour and in this way they routinely create a surplus pool of working people whose wages then cease and whose income, therefore, falls below the cost of maintaining them and their families. What legislative reform could reverse that trend? Would a government of pro-capitalists, or pro-chartists for that matter, be likely to outlaw competition, ban the introduction of machinery, or alternatively make it illegal to dismiss working people? The only way to have solved this problem would have been by a revolutionary challenge to the whole basis of the system of capitalist production - wage labour - and loyal members of Parliament were certainly not going to do that.

The debate on Poverty continued down the years and various other reforms were introduced to amend the Poor Laws in the late 19th century and the early 20th. Needless to say none of them extinguished poverty. The unemployment Insurance Act of 1920 introduced a contributory scheme for working people which provided a paltry amount of aid for those workers made destitute by unemployment, but it did so only for short periods and only to those who could prove they were genuinely seeking work. Contributory payment schemes of reform such as this obviously do not end poverty. For a start, thousands were not covered by the scheme, nor did the schemes end poverty for all those who were covered by them. The reason being, the level of relief was set too low and it was paid for only a very short time. After a short period of relative poverty on relief came a period of absolute poverty when it was terminated.

In 1931 the British government cut the already meagre amount of unemployment pay by 10%. Public Assistance Committees, Unemployment Assistance Board and charities were left to deal as best they could with the problem. This period witnessed the large-scale unemployment demonstrations and hunger-marches of which the Jarrow march became the most well known. It was only after the Second World War, (both the First and Second World Wars having created further poverty and mass destruction) that the greatest reforms aimed at the welfare of the working class and the poor were made. The Beveridge scheme of social welfare put to Parliament in 1944 was the capitalist welfare reform par excellence and, in the hopes of the paternalists and reformists, was to finally end the five biggest problems said to be facing working people under capitalism - Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The scheme was intended to guarantee families an income at a minimum level if their income was effected by unemployment, sickness, or old age. Despite the optimism and the energies crammed into the scheme it was never equal to the task. Today, over half a century after its flawed implementation, this most radical reform is in tatters. Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness are all still on the rampage not only on the 'forgotten estates' but on the streets of every large town and city, for as we have seen, they are the indirect product of the capitalist system. We can see from this evidence that every grudging reform devised by the British capitalist class has only tinkered with the symptoms of poverty and kept well clear of the cause, even when that cause has been openly recognised.

The situation fared no better in that other wealthy capitalist country, the United States of America, as was outlined in the last chapter. There too poverty followed very closely on the heels of the development of capitalist ownership of the means of production. However, in that chapter's survey of the effects of capital, we omitted to note the cynicism of the modern pro-capitalist politicians on the issue of reforming poverty. For example; after repeated instances of extreme poverty, as late as the 1960s, reported by a Board of Inquiry, the New York Times noted;

"At least ten million Americans are victims of hunger....Whatever happened to President Johnson's commitments to wage all-out war on poverty and hunger?" (New York Times. April 28 1968. Quoted in 'The Unholy Hymnal'. by Albert Kahn. Pub. Wolfe, page 113.)

Perhaps President Johnson's promised reform of poverty suffered the same cynical fate as it did under the following pro-capitalist President, Richard Nixon. Nixon, in the wake of public outcry, instructed his aides to say;

"...that this Administration will have the first complete, far-reaching attack on the problem of hunger in history. Use all the rhetoric, so long as it doesn't cost money." (ibid. page 116.)

Of course hunger is only one aspect of poverty even if it is the most distressing one. Such out-of-sight responses are typical of many capitalists and their supporters - hot air or some shoddy reform, and share as little of the annual surplus value produced by the working classes as possible. Reforms never did end poverty in any capitalist country and could never do so because poverty is an essential by-product of the capitalist system of production. It cannot be reformed away by legislative tinkering and adjustment, nor can it be dealt with by focusing the symptoms such as homelessness and hunger. After 200 years of campaigning for reform, after many a hard-won legislation, much hand-wringing and pleading, poverty is still endemic, and in many places greater. This is so even in all the advanced wealth-saturated countries of the capitalist world, Europe, America and Japan. The long history of the globalisation of capital has also ensured that by armed invasion, colonial export and later financial infiltration, poverty, not only relative but absolute, has flourished in all countries of the third-world as well.

It would not be too difficult to take other examples of issues which have attracted long-suffering campaigns for reform and which most people would think would be easy to achieve. It would be possible, for example, to trace the reforms aimed at ensuring we are able to eat unadulterated food, campaigns which have gone on for many, many decades. Yet consumers still have to protest long and loud against various contaminants and unhealthy practices. The most recent being the 'Brave New World' of genetically modified adulteration which now rears its potentially ugly head. The campaigns and legislation aimed at outlawing unsafe working practices also have a long and chequered history. They have resulted in numerous Factories Acts and this patchy development could be similarly traced. But we have seen in chapter 10 that in the 21st century unsafe working practices still go on daily in Industry and Commerce - even in such potentially dangerous industries as nuclear power stations.

Similarly, a description of the campaign for basic Human Rights, a reform now embodied in a United Nations' Declaration, could be undertaken, but we would still in the end be forced to draw a negative balance sheet. In many countries of the world, human rights abuses are large-scale daily occurrences. These are happening whilst capitalist salesmen and politicians clasp the hands of the perpetrators of such horrors having clinched the latest lucrative business deal. Human Rights' abuses, unsafe working practices and adulterated food are still with us today every bit as much as poverty. And of course, just because slavery was officially outlawed in the West in favour of wage-slavery, debt bondage and cheap casual labour, doesn't mean that this obscene practice has even ended yet.

The two examples of the negative results of capitalist profit seeking considered in this chapter, are so startlingly universal, so appalling and so close to home to us as human beings, that there should have been no opposition to ending them. Yet there was and still is. If the campaigns to reform these particular practices have failed then reforms aimed at less inhuman, less prominent issues (including all those listed in the previous chapter) have no chance. No amount of campaigning, persuasion, eloquence, petitions and numbers of people demonstrating has ever made as much as a dent in the effects of the rule of capital. Yet the illusion that we can reform capital into better ways still persists. We shall now consider why.

The capitalist form of production requires change.

When the capitalist class institutes a system of government or seizes control of one, it immediately sets about developing or modifying that system to insure the continued rule of capital and to ensure it has the means to effect only the changes it needs. Those who sincerely wish to bring about lasting change to the issue they feel most strongly about need to recognise that even small reforms won't be accepted unless they are in the profitable interests of the capitalist class. Therefore, the idea of reforming the rule of capital in the interests of animals, the environment or the working and oppressed classes, has proved and will continue to prove, nothing more than an illusion. Yet there is a reason and material basis to that illusion which we need to consider. It springs from the fact that all ruling elites have the desire to both conserve their power and privileges and at the same time to welcome and promote changes which increase their opportunities to gain or extend their control of wealth. There are therefore periods when ruling classes are conservative or reactionary, and periods when sections of them are advocates of reform or even on occasion, revolution.

Recognising this, and appreciating also that where a ruling class is made up of different sections (e.g. between landed capitalists, industrial, commercial and financial capitalists) one section can become reformist whilst other sections remain conservative or reactionary. As we shall see in the next chapter once the emerging capitalist class had successfully challenged the aristocracy, in the 17th and 18th centuries, it had no further need for revolutionary methods and so entered a period of consolidation and control. To do this it required a form of government responsive to the dynamic and expansive development of capital. When Edmund Burke writing in the late 18th century reminded his fellow conservatives that "Change is the means of our preservation" he was only stating the political and social needs of capital as perceived by this clear-sighted representative of the capitalist class. He also noted;

"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation...By a constitutional policy working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives." (Edmund Burke. 'Reflections' in 'The Portable Conservative Reader' Ed. Russell Kirk. Pub. Penguin pages 9 and 11.)

Leaving aside the crude anthropomorphic reference to the pattern of nature, we can see that in Burke's view change is fundamental to hanging on to property and privileges. Edmund Burke was a considerable influence in conservative political (and thus capitalist) thinking in Britain and America. Of course Conservatives are not supporters of constitutional forms of change just because Burke advocated this, but because they too recognise that change is a necessary political compliment to the industrial dynamic of capitalist production which is itself constantly being modified. Competition and technological advancement are always presenting new developments requiring greater or lesser amounts of change in procedures, geographical location and commodity forms. In every capitalist country in the world the capitalist class has developed a system of government which allows it both to conserve and to change through legislative reform. The systems vary from; Parliaments, (England, Canada, Australia, Italy, Sweden, Denmark etc.); Congresses or Chambers of Deputies (Spain, Belgium); Federal or National Assemblies (Austria, Germany, France); to Houses of Representatives and Senates (America, Japan); but they are all 'home grown' varieties of the same basic political structure which capitalists throughout the world have perfected for their continued rule. In all cases, behind their political organisations, stand their state institutions and military organisations.

The parliaments, congresses and assemblies are staffed by the capitalist class and its supporters in each country. Proposals to change or reform any aspect of the social or economic structure of the capitalist country concerned must in this way face the combined and continuous scrutiny not only of powerful individual capitalists but also the representatives of the whole capitalist class. The 'swearing in' ceremonies, 'loyalty declarations' and 'oaths of office' are there to remind any new members of these capitalist governments that they are there to represent the status quo, which of course is capitalist, and to bind them securely to this. This means that if a proposal for change is not in the interests of the whole of the capitalist class or at least a majority of the capitalist class - as their representatives see it - then the change or reform will not take place. In this way capitalist political structures are purposely developed to filter out, water down, or sideline any reforms not in the interests of capitalist accumulation.

In capitalist countries with a second tier of legislation, such as a separate Senate, Upper House or House of Lords, there is a double filter to ensure that reforms harmful to the capitalists' interests are blocked. And as noted, behind and surrounding these important but subordinate legislative 'talking shops', lies the real power of the state and the organised capitalist class. These are its political, economic and social organisations, private clubs or coteries and its armed bodies of men. The predominant economic interests of the capitalist class, as we have seen, is to accumulate capital by maximising the surplus product and realising the surplus value. Any proposed political or social legislation which detrimentally affects this capital accumulation, if not defeated, will be and has been, modified beyond all recognition, made a voluntary condition, subverted, or reversed as soon as possible. This is precisely why most of the negative effects and horrors of the capitalist mode of production and exchange are still with us today as they were with our grandparents generation - only perhaps more so in new areas such as nuclear and chemical emissions.

Yet because some changes and reforms do take place with regularity and because a constitutional process of change exists, the illusion is created that it would be possible to transform the many negative effects of capital by a process of reform. But as we have seen, even in cases of extreme inhumanity, it is not. The changes and reforms which do occur are only those which are in the main favourable to capital, but these do serve to sustain the illusion that other forms of change are possible. And the illusion can last for long periods. It is an illusion which serves in non-crisis periods to keep most anti-capitalist oppositional energies and thoughts away from anything but 'legal' means of opposition. Among those most prone to the illusion that reform is possible are many who engage in new campaigns on single issues. This is understandable, for on the surface it seems easier to promote change on one issue and since for new issues there is no long history of failure, it seems a possibility. But 'on the surface' is precisely how we are supposed to view it, for below the surface the matter looks somewhat different as we have seen in the case of Slavery and Poverty.

In a Capitalist crisis reforms are preferred to revolution.

Pressure for substantial capitalist reform in America and Europe came from the effects of the economic downturn and political crisis between 1918 and 1939. A profound capitalist economic crisis usually calls forth a general questioning of the capitalist system and the period between the two world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 was no exception. Experience of this inter-war period of revolutionary attempts and challenges to the rule of the capitalist system, convinced enough of the capitalist class, their representatives and their supporters among the middle-classes in the west to modify some of the effects of the capitalist system. The realisation dawned upon the thinking members of this class, that in a crisis situation, if the capitalist class did not give the workers some reforms, the workers might just give the capitalists - revolution.

The results in the western capitalist democracies of Europe and America were reforms aimed at providing some form of state assistance. A 'new deal' in America, an embryonic 'welfare state' in Britain, rearmament-led full employment in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, paltry social and sickness insurance in France, unemployment insurance and an eight hour day in Italy, were the types of reforms implemented. These concessions - in most cases motivated by fear of workers' rebellion rather than compassion for their plight - meant that an additional part of the surplus value created by the working class would be taken from the capitalist concerns by the state in the form of extra taxation. This levy, together with insurance contributions taken from the wages of the workers themselves, would provide a fund to be used in the various ways already mentioned. As noted elsewhere, these reforms were developed further after the Second World War, and became among some of the most far reaching ever achieved by and for working people under the rule of the capitalist class. For a considerable period of time a majority of the capitalist class continued to consider these reforms useful to their system. Yet after only several decades every one has been reduced or is under attack. In Britain, for example, health, education, unemployment benefit and pensions have all suffered reductions and will continue to do so. What has happened to them reveals the partial and limited nature of all types of reforms obtained under the capitalist social and economic system. The process was broadly as follows.

The physical destruction of machinery, plant, buildings and infrastructure, caused by the Second World War, created the conditions for a short-lived boom period for British and European Capital. Making good the losses of bombed out towns and industry, and taking a ride on the back of huge American loans to Europe (the Marshall Plan), the capitalist class in Britain and Europe had a period of rapid capital accumulation and good profits. So these reforms, funded by relatively high company taxes, were met with grudging acceptance. Yet by 1960 the boom was almost over for Britain. International capitalist competition was again in full swing and the rate of profit falling. High taxes and high wages were an obvious target of resentment by the capitalist class. In support of them the British Government in the 1960's created various schemes (productivity deals, pay pauses, wage freezes, ceilings etc.) to prop up rates of profit and control wage increases. Most of these policies, however, dealt only with symptoms and not with underlying causes and therefore could only yield marginal and temporary results.

The trend of reductions in the rate of profit continued. Although production had been rising, so too had wages and taxes. British capitalists, (particularly the finance capitalists. had been loathe to invest in new technology and so British industrial production began to lose out in competition with foreign industry. One result was a steady outflow of capital from Britain from about 1967. Capital began to be moved out of the less profitable sectors and into more profitable ones. More often than not these sectors were outside Britain, and finance often remained 'offshore' in low tax or tax-free havens. In this way the capitalist class had begun to switch its investment decisions away from traditional areas in order to reduce taxation and retain more of the surplus created by the workers they employed. However, before long the reforms granted in the late 1940's and 1950's were being attacked directly

A further set of interesting, but short-lived reforms in the post-2nd World War period was in relationship to government economic policies. Under the influence of Keynes western governments increasingly borrowed from private capitalists, not merely to fund its own activities prior to raising taxes, which was usual, but also to initiate and promote large-scale economic activity, which was relatively new. The result was a substantial 'public services' and 'public ownership' (or nationalisation) aspect of post-war capitalist rule. With these major reforms most capitalists faced fewer risks. The government guaranteed repayment of their capital plus sufficient interest, and government funded economic activity created employment for surplus workers. In turn the purchasing power of these state employed workers created 'guaranteed' opportunities for other capitalists to provide them with goods and services.

On the surface, and in the short term, this reform of capitalism seemed to offer solutions to the needs of workers and capitalists in the advanced industrial countries. The state took on the responsibility for creating full employment and for cushioning the effect of unemployment, industrial accidents, bad housing, lack of pensions, poor education and ill health. The capitalist class was guaranteed profits from industrial and commercial investment, or through loans to government and the workers were guaranteed jobs or unemployment benefit. But as noted the situation did not last for long due to the increased competition and the reducing rate of profit.

As we have seen in chapter 9 there are only two basic ways for the capitalists to increase the rate of surplus value and thus the potential rate of profit. One is to increase machinery together with productive efficiency and intensity of labour and thus reduce the time workers spend on the labour necessary to cover their wages etc. This of course creates redundancies and unemployment. The other is to lengthen the working day. Since overtly lengthening the official working day would appear as a serious retrograde measure, and provoke widespread opposition, it was a campaign to increase the efficiency and intensity of labour which was eventually undertaken.

In Britain in 1973 the capitalist campaign for regaining more of the surplus value took on a new dimension. A Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, used its parliamentary majority and the machinery of the capitalist state to destroy the organised trade union movement in order to remove resistance to increases in efficiency, intensity and to the lowering of wages. With weak unions there was also less resistance to factory closures, and redundancies. The many campaigns of employers and government against the unions culminated in the miners' strikes of 1974 and 1984, the latter for all practical purposes finishing off any substantial resistance of the British working class to the new capitalist reality. The Conservative representatives of capital also used its Parliamentary majority to begin to dismantle the earlier expensive welfare reforms in order to be able to reduce the level of taxation to industrial and finance capital. Both parts of this attack enabled the capitalist class in Britain to claw back, and hold onto, a greater share of the surplus value created by the working classes.

Lower wages, greater efficiency as well as cheaper food, meant a greater part of the working day was given over to producing surplus production. Fewer taxes also meant the capitalists could hold on to more of the value of increased surplus production after it had been sold. As we have seen in the previous chapter, under the heading of poverty and wealth, this period saw a massive increase in the wealth of the capitalist class in Britain. The results of this economic and political process, from the standpoint of the post-war welfare reforms, was a rapid rise in the numbers unemployed and an increase in the duration of unemployment, together with relatively lower wage rates for those remaining in work. With lower taxes from profits and fewer workers paying taxes and National Insurance contributions, the burden of universal welfare provision, fell upon fewer shoulders and on a relatively smaller government budget.

This was the economic reality underlying the Tory attacks upon the Welfare State in Britain (and incidentally) the Republican reductions in state expenditure in America. Because the political representatives of capital had relieved the capitalists of some tax burdens, they needed to reduce state expenditure, in order to balance expenditure with the reduced income. A spin-off to this policy was the decision to privatise as many state functions as possible. This simultaneously reduced state expenditure and enriched private capitalists. They were allowed to buy utilities such as water, gas, telephones and electricity cheaply and put prices up by virtue of their monopoly position. Since this occurred in Britain such privatisations have become a global pursuit promoted by the representatives of global capital in the I.M.F., the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

We should recall that under the offensive of capital in the 1970's trade unionised workers were frequently told to be 'realistic' in terms of what they could expect from the capitalist production process. By the year 2000, practically everyone was being told the same message - pensioners, single-parents, school-leavers, low-paid workers and the word was spread world-wide. Let us make it clear what such statements meant and continue to mean. They mean working people should realistically expect the capitalist class to share as little of the surplus value created by the working people as they possibly can. We have seen in chapter 9 just how large the surplus value can be in each country. Twenty-first century economic and political realism, in this capitalistic sense, means that capitalists and their supporters, will be allowed to get what they think is an adequate share of the surplus value so that they will continue to invest. Workers, according to this new global realism should work long, hard and for as little as possible. Nor should we realistically expect any serious reform useful to working people, to environmental protection, to animal rights or pollution, to health-care or consumer rights, for these have cost implications.

Being realistic under capitalist rule means passively accepting extreme inequalities and environmental destruction. Not only will there be no new reforms benefiting the working class as a whole, but on the contrary the pattern established now is to continue reducing the existing ones. A prime example of this is again in relationship to pensions. Because life expectancy has risen to 80 years and because fewer people are working, the pension fund income is insufficient to meet the outgoing costs. Instead of discussing reforms to increase employment, so that more can contribute, or setting aside more of the massive amount of surplus value obtained by the government and already created by the working people; instead of asking citizens if they would prefer reductions in armaments spending or extra taxes on capitalist production, pro-capitalists talk only of reducing pensions or forcing people to contribute even more from their already low wages toward their future pensions.

So it should be clear, at least to those who want to see, that only in periods of serious crisis and mass working-class activity, when working people forcibly press their demands for a better life, can the capitalist class be pressured to grant some reforms in an attempt to stave off revolution. Such temporary successes also serve to support the illusion that reforms can work, that reformist activity can bring lasting results. During such periods of working class activity organisations are created or where they have already been created, they can be given a new lease of life. Groups of employees and 'officials' within these workers' organisations become accustomed to, and come to rely upon, the 'reformist' method of working. They too then develop a vested interest to believe in the reformist method, for these reformist organisations pay their often bloated salaries. In this way they act as leading advocates, within the working class and anti-capitalist movement, of this method of struggle, long after it has served its purpose. They point to the partial and temporary gains made against the interests of capital and to those made in the long-term interests of capital and try to persuade us that reformism can work and is the more sensible and realistic path. But it is not.

It should also be clear that apart from periods of potential revolutionary crisis, most, if not all, of the achieved reforms, were in the interests of the Capitalists themselves. Let us note just a few more in passing. For example; public health reforms were important to the capitalists because airborne disease easily crossed class barriers and threatened them also. A 'healthy' work force could also work for longer and more intensely and thus produce more goods and services, with potentially more profits, than an undernourished one. A diseased or deficient working class was a handicap in a capitalist war, for they were, and are, the bulk of those thrown into any front line battle. Later, the establishment of unemployment benefit reforms kept workers alive during times when factories closed, so they were fit enough to return to work when any capitalists decided profits could be made from them again. Educational reforms were necessary as capitalist production techniques developed and manufacture and distribution required a more literate and numerate labour force. Nothing could make this last point clearer, for example, than the speech to Parliament made by the Quaker Radical, W.E. Forster in 1870. In it he informed the Members of Parliament that;

"Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity. It is of no use trying to give technical teaching to artisans without elementary education; uneducated labourers - and many of our labourers are utterly uneducated - are for the most part, unskilled labourers and if we leave our work-folk any longer unskilled notwithstanding their strong sinews and determined energy, they will become over-matched in the competition of the world." (Speech by W.E. Forster in the House of Commons February 1870. In 'Educational Documents. J.S Maclure. Pub. Methuen, page 104.)

Under the new conditions of the technical advancement of the means of production in the 19th century capitalists needed technically literate workers to compete in the capitalist world market and this is why free state education for all was introduced. Reforms, such as state pension and sickness insurance schemes, served to remove some of the burden of the old and the sick from the capitalist state by compelling them to contribute during their working life toward their own pensions and sickness benefits. If the history of the many struggles for anti-capitalist reforms is studied it will become clear that, as already stated, major reforms were never granted by the representatives of the Capitalists, until they were clearly seen to be in the immediate or long-term interests of the Capitalist class. The problem is that most people rarely have the time for such study.

Another problem of reformist tinkering with the capitalist system, from the standpoint of the working class, is that many of these partial or temporary reforms can make the over-all situation worse for workers. Reforms such as family income supplements, mean that employers can keep most wages lower than the average needed to keep workers and their families fed and housed. Working people can become trapped in the benefits system and subject to its bureaucratic surveillance. Such supplementary benefits (paid partly out of contributions by those actually working) represent a subsidy toward the employers profits and undermine existing wage levels. Housing benefits act in the same way and more often than not also end up making private landlords richer.

All this does not mean to say that working people should give up the day to day struggle against the capitalist class. Resisting the intensity of exploitation by demanding changes in wages and conditions is important, but it should always be borne in mind that, based upon experience, reforms are more often than not limited, divisive and as we shall see often reactionary.

The Left Parties of reform.

So powerful was the illusion that capitalism could be substantially reformed that many anti-capitalists, calling themselves socialist thought, like the Chartists before them, that the capitalist system could be modified sufficiently by getting enough of them into the legislative forum of any capitalist state. Once there these 'socialists' would be able to pass laws not only to tone down the level of exploitation of the capitalist class but to progressively do away with that exploitation altogether. Their failure, as with the single issue reformers, was to see only the legislative trappings of power and not the real sources of power. This led to the mistaken belief that something they called socialism or social democracy could be attained through legislation created in Parliaments, Assemblies or Congresses. There was a double illusion involved in this perspective. The first was as already stated; the illusion that reforms seriously curbing the interests of the capitalists class could be realistically achieved and maintained. We have seen that this was not possible even in the richest and most democratic capitalist countries of the world. The second was that the legislative forums of the capitalist state (Parliaments, Assemblies, Houses of Representatives etc.), including the laws they pass, were the absolute power in any capitalist state. This is simply not the case.

Anti-capitalists need to understand that the absolute power under the rule of capital is the combined capitalist class and their armed bodies of loyal men. Such armed forces can and will be used to suspend or dissolve political and legal forums and arrest, imprison or exile any recalcitrant members if the capitalist class feel their economic rule is sufficiently threatened. Emergency powers can be quickly taken during which laws will be ignored, suspended, altered or rescinded if they are felt to inhibit the perceived needs of the capitalist class or its political and military representatives. This is true also with regard to international law and international forms of organisation. Those who think that national, international law or multilateral agreements, however solemnly entered into by sovereign capitalist states, are meant to bind those states or restrain actions in pursuit of their respective economic interests, is certainly displaying a high degree of naiveté.

It is the combined resources of this class and its representatives which exert the real power and these resources are many. For as a class it collectively owns and controls the means of production of essential commodities (factories, agricultural land and machinery); the production of the means of production (the firms that design and construct factories and the machines based in them); the means of distribution (warehouses, aircraft, ships, trains, lorries etc.) and the means of circulation (money, finance, credit etc.). Any or all of these resources can be restricted, closed down or cut off at any time with very little effort. In most instances this class also has absolute influence and control of the means of repression (police, judiciary, army, navy and airforce, prison services etc.); and the officials and offices of state who can co-ordinate this power and efforts of that class. These are the component parts of that extensive network of real power which the capitalist class normally wields. Compared with these real sources of power, Parliaments, Congresses, Chambers of Deputies, Assemblies etc., are just elaborate talking shops - useful, to the capitalist class, but not essential.

The failure to understand the real sources of power of the capitalist class led to the above noted ideology of gradually transforming capitalist relations by means of mass 'left' reformist or 'socialist' parties. Perhaps the largest and most notable of such left political groupings was in Germany in the 1900's. Rosa Luxemburg was a member of the Social Democratic Party and she made a comprehensive rebuttal of this reformist line of thinking. She noted that;

"The theory of the gradual introduction of socialism proposes a progressive reform of capitalist property and the capitalist state in the direction of socialism. But in consequence of the objective laws of existing society, one and the other develop in precisely the opposite direction. The process of production is increasingly socialised and state intervention, the control of the state over the process of production, is extended. But at the same time, private property becomes more and more the form of open capitalist exploitation of the labour of others and state control is penetrated with the exclusive interests of the ruling class. The state, that is to say, the political organisation of capitalism and the property relations, that is to say, the juridical organisation of capitalism, become more capitalist and not more socialist,..." (Rosa Luxemburg. 'Reform or Revolution.' in 'Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.' Pub. Pathfinder, page 83.)

The socialisation of production has increased even further since Rosa Luxemburg wrote those words. It would be a difficult to find anything in modern society which was not the product of hundreds, if not thousands, of people each making a small contribution to either the raw material of a commodity or its manufacture, packaging, transport and sale. All production, save perhaps the rare isolated craftsperson who produces or collects their own raw materials, makes their own tools, creates and produces their own designs and sells them in their own shop, is socialised production. But, as we have seen, the benefits of that socialised production in the form of surplus value fall into the hands of the capitalist class who (as Rosa Luxemburg says) penetrate the state with their exclusive interests. Her point was clearly made but the next was even stronger and more crucial to the issue of trying to reform capitalist relations. She went on to say;

"No law obliges the proletariat to submit itself to the yoke of capitalism. Poverty, the lack of means of production, obliges the proletariat to submit itself to the yoke of capitalism. And no law in the world can give to the proletariat the means of production while it remains in the framework of bourgeois society, for not laws but economic development have torn the means of production from the producers' possession. The phenomenon of capitalist exploitation does not rest on a legal disposition, but on the purely economic fact that labour power plays in this exploitation the role of merchandise possessing among other characteristics, the agreeable quality of producing value - more than the value it consumes in the form of the labourer's means of subsistence. In short, the fundamental relations of the domination of the capitalist class cannot be transformed by means of legislative reforms, on the basis of capitalist society, because these relations have not been introduced by bourgeois laws, nor have they received the form of such laws." (ibid. page 113/114)

It must be said, however, that despite the accuracy and power of Rosa Luxemburg's analysis, it did not sway the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party. They ensured that the party continued on its reformist path. Rosa was finally silenced in the midst of a revolutionary uprising of workers in Berlin in 1919. She and her anti-capitalist colleague, Karl Liebknecht, were murdered on the orders of a representative of the German capitalist state. Arrest and trial was the correct procedure according to German law at the time but, as already indicated, capitalist respect for their own laws is regularly suspended when the interests of capital are at stake. With the defeat of that uprising many socialists turned once again to the 'legal' and ultimately sterile reformist path The success of 'left' reformism in diverting a large section of the working class from revolutionary struggle was also due to the fact that it served to unite two quite distinct tendencies. First, those who genuinely wished to see an end to capitalist exploitation in all its forms but at the same time were under the illusion that real power lay with capitals' legislative bodies. Second, those who merely wished also to improve their own lot under the capitalist system but could not countenance doing so directly by becoming capitalists or joining an openly capitalist party.

Left reformist political parties could, and did, appeal to both these aspirations within the anti-capitalist movement but in actual fact they could only fulfil the latter. Hence the failure of many causes and the phenomena of well-paid, smooth operating, ex-worker representatives who stride the corridors of power and largely ignore the problems they were elected to solve. A consequence of this protracted 'left' reformist process is that large numbers of the working classes, in all the advanced capitalist countries, no longer share the illusions (and delusions) of the reformist politicians, and no longer bother to turn out to vote in local or national elections. A further result is that the so-called left socialist parties are all in various stages of decline or redefinition. They now have to rely upon the efforts and wavering vote of the large middle-class which has developed in the advanced countries, rather than the alienated and disillusioned working class.

In Britain, for example, the Labour Party was 'the' left political party of reform. From its inception it promised to substantially reform capital to make it far more responsive to the interests of the working class. It took the money of generations of working people through their direct subscriptions to the Party and their indirect subscriptions via the Trade Unions. In America the Democratic Party flirted with a similar role but never as blatantly and is now practically indistinguishable from the Republican Party. In Britain, it must be said, the original promise of the Labour politicians was never realistically fulfilled, but the Labour Party no longer promises anything of the sort. The new economic situation for the British capitalist class means no new reforms are possible for the benefit the whole working class and this is exactly what New Labour has understood. Support for the existence of an unfettered profit-making capitalist class and support for mechanisms which protect capital accumulation is now the economic background of Labour attacks upon UK state provision, welfare reductions in the USA and the restructuring of the European Capitalist states within the European Economic Community. The watering down of the Beveredge provisions by Tories in Britain was not simply the result of the politics of inhuman Toryism, which is how it was often depicted within much of the traditional anti-capitalist 'left'. This belief led only to the mistaken hope that more humane politicians might reverse this destruction.

In reality, as has already been stated, the entire political campaign of 'left' and 'right' reformists, was merely the pursuit of the economic interests of the capitalist class in a period of reducing profits. The acceptance of a 'partnership' with Capital is why previous Labour Governments, under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, continued with many Tory policies and introduced their own policy of cuts and wage restraints. This should have come as no surprise, for the Labour Party in Britain has been, since its inception, the vehicle which gave political expression to the struggle for (and granting of) limited reforms under capitalism. The currents which led to the original formation of the Labour Party came from disaffected Tories, Liberals, 'respectable' trade union leaders and only a sprinkling of anti-capitalists. The Labour Party has always been 'her Majesty's loyal opposition' and has always wished to remain so. In this context loyalty to the House of Windsor is synonymous with loyalty to capital. Any past anti-capitalist window dressing, such as Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution, was only a flimsy tinsel wrapping meant to attract working people's vote and to disguise the fact that the Labour Party was merely a new form of liberal capitalist political grouping.

For the demise of the once powerful Liberal Party in Britain occurred because many liberal representatives of capital simply left it and either joined the Tories or the Labour party. Once sufficient 'liberal' politicians and professionals had joined Labour, Clause 4 became something of an embarrassment so they conducted a long fight to remove it. The fight to remove this clause only took so long because a number of die-hard anti-capitalist reformists in the Labour Party, such as many in the 1980's Campaign Group, mistakenly believed it could be implemented and that its implementation could lead to something called socialism. Both sides of this internal (left/right) Labour Party struggle kept alive the illusion that socialistic reforms could and would be implemented via parliament.

However, as indicated above, even the really massive reform programme of the 1945 Labour Government, was not a divorce of Labour from Capital, but a continued partnership with capital under new conditions. The eighty three parliamentary bills presented by the Attlee government of 1945, as with the others that followed, were not aimed at a radical alteration of capitalist relations but a reform of some of its outdated features in the interests of the capitalist class. Two decades later the pipe-wielding oratory of Harold Wilson, who spoke of 'taxing the rich until the pips squeaked', was no more than a theatrical flourish, to maintain the illusion of his political independence from capitalists' interests. When finance capitalists, based in Zurich, made their intentions known, it was Wilson who squeakingly bowed down in submissive acceptance.

Undoubtedly the Labour Party, in political power, was less directly vindictive and brutal than the subsequent Tory government of Thatcher and Major, but the essential direction remained the same, as it continued to be under Blair. Blairite 'New Labour' made it quite clear that its entire leadership remained committed to a solid partnership with Capital. Although Tony Blair and his tarnished cronies wrongly assert that partnership with capital is a new realism for the Labour Party he and his supporters in the Labour Party nonetheless reaffirm the depth of that commitment. So much so that the leadership feel they cannot promise any welfare expenditure without making it dependent upon an expansion of trade and business. But an expansion of industry and business under the capitalist system cannot take place without further investment and the promise of good profits. So the British Labour government, as with all other so-called 'left' reformist governments in the advanced countries, committed as they are to a partnership with capital, must therefore first help the capitalists to achieve profits. This means they must create and maintain a low-waged, low-taxed economic environment, in other words one of poverty and deprivation for working people. And they must do this before they can do anything else.

One of the major ways political parties can help capitalists is to ease their tax burden and give them grants to set up or expand their businesses. This they continue to do in very large amounts, as they have done since before the war. But by doing this they further reduce the amount of government money available for other purposes such as education and health. However, unlike the post-war situation of 1945, no matter how many tax breaks they give or substantial grants they make available, the conditions for a general and continued expansion of real capital, as against fictitious, no longer exists. There simply has not been the wholesale destruction of plant and infrastructure as there was after the Second World War nor anything like severe under-production which equates with it. Indeed, as we read in chapter 9, there is at the beginning of the 21st century a situation of considerable capitalist over-production and surplus industrial capacity for many basic and luxury commodities. Under the current profit-based capitalist system there is clearly not too little production but too much. So a further boom is out of the question and without a boom together with the accompanying high profits, there cannot even be temporary or partial reforms.

The experience of this 'left' reformist trend in Britain, after the Second World War, is significant for the workers in all capitalist countries. This is not only because Britain was one of the first countries to develop the capitalist system fully, but primarily because the advantages this brought about enabled it to create a world empire. By exploiting the native peoples and resources in many areas of the world, British capital made extraordinary high profits and under the previously noted pressure was able, for a period, to grant some temporary reforms. The experience of the British working class over the past 100 years represents, therefore, a social and political experiment in reformist methods of struggle under very favourable conditions. The defeats and reversals in fortune of the British working class in the 1920's to 1930's and between the 1970's and 1980's, organised as they are in rich and powerful trade unions with statutory political rights, demonstrates conclusively that anti-capitalist reformist methods of struggle cannot gain, and maintain, decent living conditions for a majority of its workers for any substantial length of time.

This entire experience clearly demonstrates that under the most privileged and wealthy Capitalist class there cannot be anything other than short-term reformist gains. If this is the case for British workers what chance do other workers have in the other capitalist countries of Europe or in the rest of the world? Can the workers in South Africa or South America, under capitalist rule, look forward to reforms which bring back dignity and well being for the majority so long denied them by Imperial oppression? Can the workers in the newly emerging capitalist dominated countries of Asia expect decent wages and living standards for their lifetime? We don't need to wait and see what happens, the answer is clear. The same question and the same answer applies to every other capitalist dominated nation whether of the so-called first, second or third world.

The global effect of reforms won in the advanced countries.

We have noted that the foundation of the earlier noted welfare reforms in the advanced countries was based upon the temporary political fear of revolution and the continued economic exploitation of the non-industrialised countries of what then became known as the third world. So an additional prop holding up this 'new deal' in post-war Europe and America was the continued existence of low raw material prices, cheap third world labour and thus sufficient profitability to persuade capitalists to continue to invest in commerce and production. However, with the re-emergence of rival capitalists, particularly Germany and Japan, and the pressure to use a larger proportion of capital in machinery the expected rate of profit soon began to fall in a number of industrialised countries during the 1960's and onwards. In addition to this, developing countries throwing off the forced controls of colonialism were beginning to demand increased payments for raw materials. Newly arising elites and workers, in the ex-colonies, began to claim a greater share in the annual surplus value created in their countries. It was a share they could not get without organising and leading a struggle for a level of political independence. This 'third-world' demand for increased payment for raw materials put a further squeeze on profit margins for the advanced countries and resulted in pressure for the above noted erosion of previously granted reforms in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's.

From all we have considered in previous chapters it is clearly the case that in a system based upon global capital, reforms benefiting workers in one country can only be at the expense of workers in another. Reforms such as above-average pay, sufficient unemployment benefits, decent housing, reasonable pensions, quality health care, under capitalist rule, could only be established and continued on the basis of high profits for the capitalists - otherwise they simply won't invest or re-invest in production. Such reforms which are temporarily gained in the advanced capitalist countries, therefore, require proportionally low costs for raw materials and labour. Low wages and poor welfare conditions for foreign workers are thus the inevitable result. This has to be so under the advanced capitalist system, otherwise there would not be sufficient surplus value to support the now numerous unproductive classes. Also, as we have seen, this annual surplus has to support the immense social weight of a large middle class as well as the capitalist class. For this reason working people, of one country or another, must be paid less if workers in other countries are to get more. Due to 20th century increases in production techniques, (automation, computers, intensive production and assembly methods) the amount of annual surplus value is already close to its achievable limit in the advanced capitalist countries. The same type of technical process has also cheapened the cost of necessary commodities for working people and thus shortened (close to the limit), the period for necessary labour. Very little more can be done in this direction.

This process has gone so far that capitalist firms in many industries are already unable to utilise their full productive capability and must routinely function well below total capacity. They cannot fully utilise their present level of technology, so in general, any further advances in technique would also be under-used. This means that less pay, longer hours and increased intensity of working for the global work-force together with less taxes are the only means available to increase the amount of surplus value and thus profits going to the capitalist class and its supporters. This is precisely why industrial capital is constantly looking for locations for production in countries with working people whose circumstances make them willing to work long hours for low pay and whose governments demand very little tax. It is also the explanation of why capitalist production is increasingly being moved to India, Asia, Eastern bloc countries and China.

So, on closer examination, we find that frequently the other side of the coin to the reformist maintaining of even low-level welfare benefits for workers in the advanced countries was, and is, the implicit or explicit support of the capitalist classes and their representatives, for non-democratic regimes in third-world countries. These non-democratic, often military, regimes, trained, armed and funded by western democracies are the basis for keeping 'foreign' labour and raw materials cheap. And;

"Today, authoritarian and repressive regimes in many successfully industrialising Third World countries perform a function in relation to the world capitalist centres comparable with that of the feudal overlords and slave owners of a century ago: they make available to the overseas investor both a docile, stable and unorganised work-force and the monopolistic rights to the use of land and natural resources; it is their political presence and their political domination which permit the capitalist production of commodities in the overseas countries,...."(Ankie M.M. Hoogvelt. 'The Third World in Global Development.' Pub. Macmillan. Page 178)

Under the domination of the capitalist form of production, the freedom of some white workers in advanced capitalist countries to fly away on holiday each year is at the expense of keeping black and Asian workers in the poverty and ghettos of the third world. If these impoverished workers were well paid, under the present capitalist system, the cost of living in the advanced countries, would become so high that few western workers would be able to afford even such mediocre standards of living. In the same way the current ability of numerous workers in the industrialised countries to purchase automobiles and expensive consumer goods is at the cost of denying this ability to millions of workers throughout the rest of the world. Yet, as we have seen, even these implicitly 'racist' freedoms and reforms in the advanced countries, are short-lived, as capital moves away from high wage countries and leaves poverty in its wake. To simply argue for a reformist struggle to defend the welfare state, or improve it, in the industrial countries, whilst retaining the system of capital, is to be not only indifferent to the plight of the poor and oppressed in other countries, but to implicitly demand they remain poor and oppressed.

Placing reformist demands on capitalists and their governments in the west for improvements in social welfare is to invite them to seek to fund these improvements by using their financial power to further increase the exploitation of third-world peoples. In the advanced countries, the reformist agenda and defence of the various welfare states, divorced from a commitment to overthrow capital, is consequently extremely reactionary. The only revolutionary aspect of a reformist struggle in the advanced countries is in promoting the development of the self-activity and organisation of the anti-capitalist movement and the working class within that movement. Where such struggles do take place it should not be overlooked that the programme of many of these struggles is essentially ultraconservative, because the content of such struggles is (more often than not) the pursuit of sectional interests irrespective of the interests of other workers.

The reformist programme of the 'official' trade union and labour movements of the advanced countries advocated by the leadership of these organisations has rarely ever been seriously anti-capitalist or anything more than an expression of reactionary and opportunist trends within the working class anti-capitalist movement. This explains why the trade union method of struggle in the advanced countries has proved in practice to be so moribund. It has led in the end to the trade union movement being unable to defend its own sectional interests, let alone defend or extend broad working class social reforms. Once attacked by a resolute government, as the British trade union movement was by the Thatcher government, in the 1980's, the previous period of sectional selfish struggles had all but ensured the political and social context for defeat of workers section by section. The original experience of the working class, summed up in the slogan of 'united we stand divided we fall', has been repeatedly overlooked and marginalised particularly by the short experience of the immediate post-war period. The relative successes in the immediate post-war struggle, office by office, factory by factory, building site by building site, shipyard by shipyard, to advance wages and conditions was quickly put into reverse as defeats occurred office by office, factory by factory, building site by building site.

Although the dock-workers, engineers, car-workers, building workers, shipbuilding workers and steel workers etc., tried in the 1970s and 80s, to extend support for their struggles once it was their turn to fight, in essence each group inherited a legacy of standing alone. Other industries and their workers, apart from some individuals within them, simply watched and did little more than cheer or jeer. When it came to the 1984 Miners Strike, apart from the valiant efforts of the striking miners and their support groups, the mine workers essentially fought alone. The miners were in receipt of some of the most brutal treatment ever dealt out to British workers since before the war, yet no other industry or widespread industry-based group of workers felt able to down tools to protest and seriously support them. If ever proof was needed that working people if divided will be defeated, then it is in the history of the British working class from 1950-1990. From having practically every partial reform that could be gained from a Capitalist class in retreat in 1949, it had lost practically all of them by 1990 to a capitalist class once more on the offensive.

Reforms in the 'developing' countries.

The terms 'developing countries', along with 'third-world' and 'less developed countries', are words which denote a western capitalist prejudice. What is really meant by these terms is the existence of places and people who have not yet been fully exploited by capitalist industry and commerce. In modern usage these phrases do not mean there is a lack of culture or economic activity in these countries. What is usually signified is that they are underdeveloped capitalistically. The terms serve to denote that vast tracts of land remain under-utilised by advanced capital, large mineral resources or natural features are under-exploited for profit; roads and other infrastructures are insufficiently developed for the requirements of capital. Nevertheless, capital remains poised and on the look out to make good that 'under-development' once sufficient profitable incentive exists.

We have dealt briefly with the effects of 'aid' to such countries in chapter 10. We shall consider it here again, from a different angle in order to explain a further illusion of reforms. Reforms originating in the 'advanced' countries under such titles as 'development aid' have been hailed as providing much needed help for the third world. On closer examination they have been shown to benefit the originators rather than the recipients. With regard to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) it has been calculated that countries donating to the funds of this organisation get back more than they put in.

"For every million lire the Italians allocate to FAO projects, they get 16 million back in the form of salaries and contracts. The ratio for Holland is 1:5; for Belgium 1:7; the French , on the other hand, have to be satisfied with more modest returns - for each franc they contribute they only get two back. The British do much better....For every pound the UK. allocates to FAO, British business interests get seven pounds back" (Marcus Linear. Zapping the Third World. Pub. Pluto Press, page 34/35.)

The advanced countries, in setting up these international reformist organisations were, on the surface, supposed to be ending the extreme exploitation of third-world countries by the advanced capitalist countries. Yet we can see that in fact their slick operations benefit the advanced countries who at a minimum get double their money back. So this reform allegedly intended to help the developing world became a nice little earner for the capitalists of the developed world. Put 5 million francs in and get 10 million back; put ten million pounds sterling in and get 70 millions sterling back; put 1 million lire in and get sixteen million back. Not bad this and all with the pretence of helping the poor backward people. And where does this magical return come from? It comes, of course, from the surplus product and surplus value of the workers of the developing countries! How does it get back to the advanced countries? By inflated payments for medicines, swollen consultancy fees, the magnified costs of road construction, industrial plants, airfields, military and civilian aircraft, armaments and hydro-electic dams etc. Even in cases where some benefit does filter down to the poor of the third world it is also estimated, by the same source, that they only get 3% of the original sum advanced. Three cents for every dollar; three pence for every pound; three centimes for every franc etc. Under capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - even when the rich are supposed to be directly helping the poor!

The struggle for reforming the rule of capital takes place wherever capital dominates human life and inevitably, where capitalist relations dominate, this struggle goes wrong. Let us consider another example. The thin strip of land joining North and South America contains the republic of Panama, the site of the famous sea going canal which bears its name. The region of Veraguas, in Panama, in which the village of Los Boquerones was situated had been occupied by Spain in the period of Spanish Colonialism, but after 'liberation' ownership had been claimed by the descendants of the Governor of Veraguas. However, in 1963 after tensions lasting ten years between a new owner and local villagers, fences were repeatedly torn down and villagers were subsequently jailed. Eventually a land reform agency stepped into the dispute intending to sort things out in such a way as to benefit the poor villagers. The land reform agency bought the land from the new owner and proposed to divide it into a strip for house building and the rest into agricultural plots. House plots would be sold to the villagers for $100 per hectare and the farm land was parcelled into ten hectare plots to be sold for $30. They even made a rule that no villager could buy more than one plot until everyone had one plot.

On the surface and from a distance this may seem a sensible and fair solution but not when the real economic situation is examined. The villagers were poor subsistence farmers and so did not earn wages or have money stashed away. The plots were therefore offered at 20 percent down and the rest to be paid over 20 years. Readers will recognise the 'mortgage' system in operation here and also recognise the pressing need for a regular wage and one high enough to keep up the mortgage payments. The house plots were too small for the normal subsistence use of rice, maize and livestock which the villagers were used to growing. So to obtain the use of land and pay the mortgage, the villagers would need to earn cash from anything grown on the plots. The most successful cash crop in that region was sugar cane, however, it was noted that;

"If sugar cane is planted, which it already has been, then the size is without question insufficient....Since in the traditional subsistence economy, the volume and velocity of money are small, the peasants themselves have quickly pointed out that few of them have the resources to make even a down payment. Land purchases will force the campesinos to enter the capitalist economy, but plot sizes will not enable them to do so advantageously. The people will be liable for a debt for which they have no resources to pay....The land (reform) agency has turned out to be not a force for land reform but only a marketplace intermediary." (Stephen Gudeman. 'The Demise of a Rural Economy'. Pub. R.K.P, page 25/26)

This particular government agency used its authority to buy and sell land the purpose of which was to reform the land tenure system in this region of Panama. However by using capitalist economic logic it only succeeded in making the main means of production (the land) into capitalistic means of production. In doing so the Camposino village workers of Los Boquerones were priced out of land and/or placed deeply in debt. Most who bought land were eventually faced with too much debt and before long forced to sell their ten hectare plots. What the previous owner had failed to do with hostility, (i.e. move the villagers away), the government reform agency succeeded in doing by kindness. A misguided reform measure supposed to benefit them actually ended up dispossessing the majority.

This is not the only way which attempts to reform the market mechanism of capital have reacted against those the reforms were intended to help. We have noted earlier the fact that for a whole period the World Bank considered that the construction of huge Dams were an important way of bringing cheap electricity and modernisation to developing countries. In the 1980's the World Bank, after much effort, was eventually made to realise that its loans to governments were causing hardship and disruption to poor people who worked the land in regions which governments wished to develop. Accordingly the World Bank reformed its policy and insisted that governments receiving loans should ensure that people who were displaced by projects such as dams would regain at least their previous standard of living. In 1990 the World Bank made a loan to India. It was made in order to construct a dam across the river Narmada and had precisely these 'resettlement conditions' applied to it. The Indian government accepted the need to reform its procedures to ensure this and did so. The villagers of Gadher, which would be flooded once the dam was built, were the intended recipients for this supposedly enlightened policy reform. And;

"The land purchase Committee had already found some land it thought the people of Gadher would like. With some trepidation, a group of men from the village went with the committee to look it over....What they saw was a pleasant surprise. The soil was rich, there was water nearby and the previous owners had planted lots of Banana trees. The officials who had brought them were anxious make a deal. They explained that the government would build a school and a health clinic here and put in roads, electricity and a water pump...Moving day came. The people loaded their belongings onto the government trucks and climbed aboard. After the convoy had travelled for an hour or so the trucks stopped.......The first thing they noticed were the corrugated tin huts, all close together in rows..and as they looked around, it was the land that stunned them. There were no banana trees , there was no water; it was a wasteland! They walked around, confused, trying to orient themselves. They turned to the officials: this isn't the land you showed us. Oh, yes, came the reply. This is your land. Here are the deeds you signed." (Catherine Caufield. 'Masters of Illusion' Pub. Pan, page 5/6.)

The Gadher villagers had been tricked. They were shown one piece of land and trusted the government officials that they were signing a piece of paper for that land. They were not. One set of deeds had been substituted for another. Of course the villagers had recourse to the law to put this injustice right but like injustices in all capitalist countries it could take years and years and considerable expense for legal fees. The villagers could not afford this, and such an action would not of course guarantee that the courts would take their side against that of the government. Such examples are merely the tip of an iceberg of such cases. Even reformist aid projects which are not themselves thoroughly corrupt, as in the above case, are more often than not inept and counterproductive. In the 1970's one author on this question noted;

"Abuse of the environment is taking place to an increasing extent in all tropical continents, in order to make way for agriculture or cattle breeding on land which cannot stand the strain of such activities. The ongoing deterioration of the environment which is the very foundation of these populations' existence is an ecological disaster, which undermines the future effort of these people to support themselves in these areas. (Quoted in 'Zapping the Third World' Marcus Linear. Pub. Pluto Press, page 119.)

Yet the struggle against western imposed reforms, in those territories which are controlled by imperialist countries have a serious role to play. As in the case of the advanced countries, the struggle for some reforms and against others, can serve to promote the self-activity of the oppressed classes and groups, and in the third world this struggle can also serve to expose the indigenous elite's inter-relationship with the capitalist methods of exploiting the people or the raw materials. Such reformist struggle's can demonstrate the need to struggle against their own capitalist class and bring about the realisation of making links with the international anti-capitalist struggle.

Reforms in a period of revolution.

As we shall see in the next chapter, not all crises for the capitalist system of production result in revolutionary upsurges - but some do! And it is in a period of revolutionary upheaval that the exception to the general rule of the limited and reactionary nature of the struggle for reforms in the advanced capitalist countries can occur. In such cases of internal crisis and social ferment, very limited reformist objectives and measures - provided they are supported by large numbers of the oppressed population - can have revolutionary implications. This is because during revolutionary periods of crisis, the ruling class is often weak and divided. Its machinery of state and government is often crippled by internal dissent to such an extent that it cannot suppress large-scale pressure for the obvious and needed reforms. It is often the case that the reforms either cannot be met in the then existing economic and social situation, or more likely, as we shall also see in the next chapter, will not be allowed by those desperately clinging to their positions of power and privilege.

Thus, in such situations, the pursuit of a reform or reforms can propel the masses of ordinary citizens into the political arena in circumstances which lead their collective efforts beyond the actual reforms in question. In such conditions pursuit of seemingly elementary reforms can lead to the challenging of the whole political and social structure. Examples of this are; the pursuit of simple reforms to abolish Royal Monopolies, forced loans to the King, and to allow religious toleration, all of which led ultimately to the English Civil War. In the American Revolution the colonists started from a position of only wishing to reform English Custom Duties, Stamp Duties and direct government from England. It was British obstinacy which finally caused them to take up revolutionary arms for full independence. In the French Revolution the mere suggestion of a reform in the voting methods of the Estates General was enough, in the particular circumstances of 1789, to lead through many twists and turns, toward a successful revolution. In Germany in 1848 and again in 1914, the issues leading up to those revolutionary upsurges were such basic reformist issues as minimum wages, eight hour shifts, pensions and being spoken to with respect. Similarly, in Russia during 1917. The main issues leading up to and during that particular revolutionary ferment were modernisation, an ending of the war, and sufficient bread and land. In all these cases the reforms could have been granted at an early stage, but they were not. However, these revolutionary situations are the only exception to the general rule that anti-capitalist reformist struggles are moribund and reactionary in the modern era.

Conclusion.

The history of reformist struggles against the effects of the capitalist system of production has been one of