He accused Nato of not doing enough to curb the production of heroin in Afghanistan.He blamed the US administration for ending a military drive to destroy opium poppy crops in Afghan fields. According to statistics from UNODC, in 2001, Afghanistan produced 185 tons of drugs, in 2002 – 3,400 tons, in 2003 – 3,600 tons, in 2004 – 4,200, in 2005 – 4,100, in 2007 – 8,200, in 2008 – 7,700 tons.

“We are poor farmers,” said Sayed Wakhan “We grow opium to survive.”

An evaluation by the UNODC of its Alternative Development project between 1997 and 2000 in three districts of Kandahar found that though the project succeeded in raising yields of legal crops (like wheat, cumin, beans, onions and fruit) by about 90 per cent, these improvements would not have been sufficient to make legal crops more profitable than opium poppy. The poppy crop can also be harvested earlier than wheat, allowing farmers to double crop, growing maize after harvesting the poppies. Poppies being weather-resistant are also a more reliable crop than wheat. Opium is also easy to store, transport and sell, providing poor farmers a simple means to smooth income. The income per hectare from opium poppy in 2000 was an average of $16,000. As the UNDOC report on The Opium Economy concluded, “at these gross income levels, no other crop which could be planted on a large scale would be competitive vis-a-vis opium poppy in Afghanistan” For the warlords, who still continue to rule much of Afghanistan, the narco-economy continues to provide a rich source of takings. Opium purchased directly from the farmers could be used by the western development agencies to provide morphine for easing the pain associated with various terminal illnesses, including AIDS, in many parts of the Third World, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. WHO reports that 4.8 million people a year with moderate to severe cancer pain receive no appropriate treatment. Nor do another 1.4 million with late-stage AIDS. For other causes of lingering pain there are no estimates, but WHO believes millions go untreated. The vast majority are in developing countries.

“..this year we see also that there is a sharp decrease in the price of crops like wheat so it will lead the farmers to go more with illicit crops,” said Angela Me, who is with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“…Drugs and bribes have become Afghanistan’s largest source of income,” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) wrote in the report.

“The people who really control Marjah will be the people who control the drugs,” an analyst in Kabul said. “So even if the Taleban fighters go, the criminal networks will still be there and maybe they are the same.”

The Dutch military contingent from the Afghan province of Uruzgan must be completely withdrawn by late 2010 based on its Parliament’s decision. Gen. David Richards, head of the British army said British troops will likely remain in Afghanistan for five more years, and nation-building work will continue for 30 or 40 more years. A dire prospect for many.

Our own war ,the class war, needs no re-defining. The solution to the on-going insanity remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need to be united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism. This cannot be fought with guns and missiles, but using something more powerful – our minds, our imagination, our solidarity and preparedness to unite as the exploited class and to wrest control of the planet from the madmen before it is to late.

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Here’s an example of such ignorance mongering. From Phyllis Schlafly:

The younger generation probably doesn’t realize that the word socialism means and connotes a system that is profoundly un-American. Socialism has virtually disappeared from our national lexicon since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed because of Ronald Reagan’s policies and the National Socialist (Nazi) Party was destroyed by the United States in World War II.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines socialism as a system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned by a centralized government that plans and controls the economy. Both Webster and Random House identify socialism as a “Marxist theory.”

Socialism requires a totalitarian system — that gives the ruling gang the power to distribute the fruits of other people’s labor to its political pals…”

Anyone who has investigated our website knows Schlafly’s “weasel words” are easily dismissed.

But of course Schlafly would use such methods because she’s a terrorist. Yes, in fact, all Republicans are terrorists. Ever heard of the Irish Republican Army – the IRA? Using her logic, she’s a terrorist.

Also Republicans like Schlafly favor despotism, because during their Republican revolution, French Republicans murdered tens of thousands in a reign of terror.

See? once again Republicans use terror to win their agenda!

Have you noticed the official name of North Korea is the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea? They’re Republicans too! Which also explains why US Republicans have been so keen on exporting manufacturing to the Republican businesses in the People’s Republic of China!

See how bizzare such logic can get?

If you don’t like socialism, fair enough. But at least investigate what marxism actually stands for. If the various dictionaries define “socialism” as a marxist “theory” read what Marx and the circle of people directly around him wrote. A good place to start is Value, Price and Profit.

Our article on Russia, Lenin and State Capitalism shows that Lenin and his followers were not marxists nor socialists. Something we have consistently pointed out since the news of the bolshevik revolution reached here.

Hitler was obviously hostile to Marxism because it was “jewish”. And in fairness, the Nazi party was financed by major capitalists around the world, including Prescott Bush, the father and grand-father of a couple of recent US Republican presidents.

The various governmental “Socialist”, Social-Democratic and/or Labour parties don’t claim to be marxist. Nationalization isn’t socialism. It’s sometimes a cost-effective capitalist way of dealing with problems like lack of capital.

We socialists believe in education not posturing. What do you stand for?

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The key difference in the case of capitalism, though, is that this indispensable wealth takes the form of commodities, which simply means that the things produced are exchanged on the market.

People today are so accustomed to this capitalist world, where everything has a price, that the word “commodity” itself has become more or less synonymous with “product,” but Marx draws an important distinction between the two terms and the reader of Capital needs to be aware of that specific usage.

A commodity, as a product produced for exchange, thus has two aspects. On the one hand, it is a thing that satisfies some human want or another, while on the other hand, it is a thing with a certain value or worth on the market. In other words, the commodity is a unity of “use-value” and “exchange-value,” as Marx puts it (borrowing the same basic terminology used earlier by Adam Smith and David Ricardo).

Use-value presents little mystery, as it is simply a matter of how the qualities or properties of a thing satisfy “human needs of whatever kind”—such as the usefulness of clothing in keeping us warm or food in satisfying our hunger.

Since the usefulness of things is hardly unique to capitalism, an examination of use-value does not shed much light on this specific mode of production. A tomato for instance would have the useful property of satisfying hunger whether it was a commodity sold in a supermarket or a non-commodity grown in someone’s backyard for personal consumption.

So Marx quickly turns from use-value, to consider the phenomenon of exchange-value, which is the aspect that characterizes the commodity as such. As exchange-value, any two commodities (of a given quantity) can be equivalent to each other. As an example, Marx ponders the significance of the following equation:

1 quarter corn = x cwt of iron

This sort of equation, Marx says, “signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things” so that both are “equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other.” The task, therefore, is to uncover the “third thing” that both commodities are reducible to. In other words: What is the common factor that determines or regulates the exchange of commodities?

The stock response to that question, which will earn a student good marks in Economics 101, is that this value depends on the fact of “supply and demand.” It is true that this explanation accounts for the rise and fall of prices, but Marx pointed out in a pamphlet entitled “Wages, Profit and Price” the limitations of this explanation:

“Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they will never account for that value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or the other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate. In inquiring into the nature of that value, we have, therefore, nothing at all to do with the temporary effects on market prices of supply and demand.”

Supply and demand, however much it might account for price fluctuations, does not explain why prices fluctuate around a certain level. This means that we need to look elsewhere to find the common factor that fundamentally determines exchange-value.

One thing that commodities in common, as already mentioned, is that they each have some use-value or another. But it is precisely because their use-values are qualitatively different that the commodities are exchanged for each other in the first place. So it is fruitless, Marx argues, to look to some “geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities” as the common factor that regulates exchange.

After setting aside use-value as a possible explanation, Marx briefly presents his own conclusion:  “If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor.”

Here Marx seems to be on rather shaky ground, for we know that there are things sold on the market that are the product of little or nearly no labor that still fetch high prices, like the autograph of a celebrity, for example. How can Marx reach this conclusion that labor is the only possible “common property” that can determine exchange-value?

It must seem to many people that Marx is trying to get by with a circular argument, where he limits the discussion to commodities created by human labor and then, lo and behold, discovers that “labor” is the common factor that regulates exchange.

That is how it appeared to the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914), who created the template for subsequent criticism of this labor theory of value. In Karl Marx and the Close of His System, Böhm-Bawerk described Marx as “one who urgently desiring to bring a white ball out of an urn takes care to secure this result by putting in white balls only.”

Marx of course, like anyone else, was well aware that there are all sorts of “commodities” that are the product of little or no labor. In Chapter 3 of Capital, for instance, he notes that, “things which in and for themselves are not commodities, such as conscience, honor, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price” (my italics). And later in Capital, particularly in Volume 3, Marx goes on to examine a number of these sorts of formal commodities, such as the price of land or stocks. But Marx draws an important distinction between those commodities in form only (i.e. anything with a price) and the commodity in the fundamental sense that is analyzed in the first chapter of Capital.

We need to return to the opening paragraph, examined earlier, to better grasp this conceptual distinction. There Marx reminds us that material wealth is necessary to sustain any form of society. And it goes without saying that this wealth is created through human labor of some kind or another. Marx pointed out this undisputable fact as follows in a letter to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann: “Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish.” Here we have the great, precondition for any society: human beings must create useful things via labor.

The difference in the case of capitalism, of course, is that the material wealth created via labor takes the form of commodities. The commodity in the most fundamental sense is thus premised on the commodity as product of labor (or as the capitalistic form of material wealth).

At first glance it might seem that Marx is making an arbitrary premise to suit his argument, but in fact he is simply starting from reality as it exists under capitalism, as noted in the opening paragraph—namely, the fact that under capitalism the wealth necessary to sustain any society overwhelmingly takes the form of commodities. It is the commodity as the “elementary form” of wealth that Marx analyzes at the beginning of Capital.

So there is an absolutely crucial distinction between Marx’s key concept of the commodity as the capitalistic form of social wealth and the “commodity” in the superficial sense of anything with a price (whether a product of labor or not). Those who ridicule Marx for limiting his initial analysis of the commodity to products of labor are ignoring, or choosing to overlook, the great social fact that “every child knows” with regard to the need for labor to sustain a society. From this perspective, the conclusion that “labor” is the common factor underlying exchange-value should not seem as arbitrary as it might at first glance.

Marx defines this “labor” more exactly as the “socially necessary labor-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent to that society.” This is the labor that “forms the substance of value,” according to Marx.

Marx set out to uncover the common factor underlying the phenomenon of exchange-value and he does so by arriving at the underlying concept of “value,” determined by the quantity of labor expended to produce the given commodity. This concept, specific to commodity production and capitalism, would have no basis to exist in a socialist society, where the whole aim is simply to produce useful things to satisfy human needs, rather than commodities to be exchanged on the market.

But for the analysis of capitalism, the concept of “value” is central, for it is at the very core of an understanding of how things are produced and distributed in that society.

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This lack of ability to act in concert, to vacillate on any meaningful action, to feign extraordinary progress when there is little, in short, to fiddle while Rome (or the earth, in this case) burns, on such a vital issue, is no surprise to socialists. Capitalism is a world wide social and economic system of competition. Workers are forced to compete with one another for jobs. Businesses must compete for markets, and countries compete for financial advantages for their respective capitalist classes, such as better access to resources, strategic positions that will help achieve that goal, and for control of more territory and people for larger markets and more, and therefore, cheaper, labour. In fact, our modern nation states, largely marked by arbitrary lines drawn on a map and containing strong central governments and armies, arose for that purpose, and are vital to the protection and maintenance of the capitalist mode of production. Given this fact, it is not surprising at all that two hundred competing countries, all jealously guarding their own interests, cannot come to an international agreement. Governments and their representatives are obliged to pursue the interests of their capitalist class above all else. As Canadian prime minister, Harper, said,” This may be a shock but the negotiators Canada assigns to international negotiations are there to represent the interests of Canada, not the interests of Mali.” -an honest assessment that socialists can agree with. (Toronto Star, December 6, 2009) After all, Canada is a resource-based economy and we must pursue the extraction and sale of those resources to keep investments and profits flowing, global warming and the rest of the world be damned. This is why Canada has done virtually nothing in the two decades since Kyoto. The Liberal governments said what the environmentalists wanted to hear, enthusiastically signed onto the Kyoto treaty, and then allowed Canadian emissions to rise 30%. The Conservative government has done everything to stymie any talks on reductions, frequently winning the ‘Fossil of the Day’ award for inactivity, and, furthermore, leaked government documents predict that that emissions from the tar sands project will rise one hundred and sixty-five per cent over the next few years. Thus international conferences are forever doomed to miss the mark, to promise much and deliver little, to argue, wrangle, and obfuscate, and look after their petty interests, and, in the end, fail to do the right thing.

Socialism can only be established by a class-conscious majority of the world’s people working together. It will mean an end to nation states, their central governments, and to competition and replace it with a cooperative, democratic system where producers meet as equals to produce goods for use, not profit, and to look for real solutions that benefit all mankind, based on science and common sense. Only in such a system can the revolutionary changes in our life style be enacted that will put an end to the dirty production, indiscriminate resource extraction, and unchecked development that characterize capitalist production. It’s common sense to end our dependency on fossil fuels and to develop green technology, to move to local production and self-sufficiency, and produce only what we need in an economy planned to meet the needs of all humans. This kind of common sense is impossible to contemplate, never mind implement, under our capitalist system because its only reason for being, and its driving force, is the production of profit. Capitalism that has brought the productive powers necessary to create abundance for everyone is incapable of making the revolutionary social and economic changes needed to nurture the earth and all its inhabitants. Only socialism can usher in the next greatest step in human progress – the era of mutual cooperation, the real beginning of our history on this planet.

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The percentage of the total national income that went to the top 400 families in the USA tripled, from .52 percent in 1992 to 1.59 in 2007.The top income earners received a total income of $138 billion in 2007. This figure is larger than the yearly output of most of the world’s countries, and is nearly as large as the GDP of Chile.

US super-rich get five times more income than in 1995.The incomes of the very rich in the US grew phenomenally between 1992 and 2007.The figures were published on the IRS web site in December of 2009, but received little notice because they were not announced. The report only became widely known when Tax Analysts, a news outlet for tax information, discovered the document.The report shows that the average income for the top-earning 400 families, denominated in 1990 dollars, grew from $17 million to $87million, representing a five-fold increase in real terms.The data shows that these families saw their incomes increase by 31 percent between 2006 and 2007 alone, while the average income of each family reached $345 million.

The amount of money earned by the group more than doubled from 2001, when its members earned on average $131.1 million. In 1993, the top 400 tax return filings amounted on average to $46 million. This means that there was an eight-fold nominal increase in the average earnings for this group between 1993 and 2007.

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And at the same time he makes us laugh. So far so good. It’s fairly clear what Michael Moore is against. But what he is for? He doesn’t seem to know himself, as he admits in a recent newspaper interview:

“What I’m asking for is a new economic order. I don’t know how to construct that. I’m not an economist. All I ask is that it have two organising principles. Number one, that the economy is run democratically. In other words, the people have a say in how its run, not just the [wealthiest] 1 percent. And number two, that it has an ethical and moral core to it. That nothing is done without considering the ethical nature, no business decision is made without
first asking the question, is this for the common good?” (Guardian, 30 January).

We too want democracy to extend to all spheres of social life. For us that’s what socialism is – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by the whole community. But genuine democracy will not be achieved by relying on economists or other supposed experts to design it.

By its very nature, democracy must be created by a conscious majority. Michael Moore seems to be saying that in his “new economic order” the wealthiest 1 percent will still exist, even though they will no longer have all the say. He also assumes that there are still going to be “business decisions”. But business decisions are about making money, not serving the common good. Any firm run by managers who care too much about ethics and morality will soon go bust – unless the managers get sacked first!

On one key point, he is right. If the situation he exposes so well is to change, it really does require a “new economic order”. An end to production for profit. The alternative is a society in which the means for producing what we need are owned in common and run democratically. A society in which productive activity is no longer “business” but simply cooperation to satisfy human needs.

This is much more than he offers on his website. He says nothing there about any kind of “new order”. It’s all about campaigning for various reforms. These may well be of benefit to working people in the short term, but as they still leave capitalism in place there would always be pressure to reverse any gains made. Worst of all, and despite Michael Moore’s evident disillusionment with Obama, heurges readers to work for change through the Democratic Party – a recipe for endless failure and frustration.

One last point. Michael Moore talks only about changing things in the United States. This national focus makes it impossible even to conceive of a fundamentally new society. That’s because nowadays capitalism is a highly integrated world system and can only be replaced at the global level.

It is clear to us that society urgently needs a worldwide system upgrade…from capitalism to socialism!

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“Even before the onset of the current global financial and economic crisis, the world had not been on track to meet MDG 1 by 2015…Now the crisis is making attainment of that goal even more elusive,” said a UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs report entitled “Rethinking Poverty.”

The number of people living in extreme poverty — on less than 1.25 dollars daily according to the World Bank — had declined to 1.4 billion in 2005 from 1.9 billion in 1981. But excluding China, the number actually rose over the same period from 1.1 billion to 1.2 billion.

In Vietnam , a country of 86 million people, we read , about 7.6 million children lack adequate housing, 5 million lack basic hygiene facilities, 2.4 million have no clean drinking water and 2 million suffer from malnutrition.

20 years after the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa remains burdened with glaring social inequalities. Wealth is tilted towards the white minority and a small black economic elite, while poverty and unemployment are major problems.According to a report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, levels of inequality have risen between the years 1993 and 2008.

A new Hunger in America 2010 report shows that 37 million people — one in eight — receive emergency food each year through the nation’s network of food banks and the agencies they serve.The hungry include 14 million children and nearly 3 million senior citizens.

The Millenium Development Goals project had plenty of talk about key issues we must address, challenges we must face, changes in our current approaches we must make. But not a word about the need to fundamentally change the system from capitalism to something else. Capitalism is in the end an ideology; everything it does, all of its workings, all of it is a human product, constructed in the minds of humans, and obeyed because it presents itself as the natural law, as the real world, and the realm of the possible.To fail to reveal the ideology, to de-mystify and explain it, means to remain within it. The idea that capitalism can be humanised and changed by a series of reforms is almost as old as the capitalist system itself.

Eliminating poverty is not impossible. Over the past hundred or so years the world has developed the capacity to adequately feed, clothe and shelter every single man, woman and child on the planet.It is the profit system that stands in the way of satisfying human needs. It only allows production to take place in response to needs that can be paid for and then only if a big enough profit can be made from doing so. It diverts resources into maintaining a whole superstructure of finance and commerce – banks, insurance, accounting, advertising, etc – that is only needed because there is production for the market. And it diverts yet more resources into armed forces and their weapons which every state is compelled to have in view of the competitive struggle for profits that is built-in to the system.

When the Earth’s resources have ceased to be the private property of states, national and multinational corporations and rich individuals, then these resources could be directed to turning out wealth to meet human needs. (It may take some time to completely clear up the mess left by the capitalist profit system, but people dying of hunger could be stopped immediately). Unless this basic change from class ownership to common ownership is made, then unnecessary human suffering for everybody except a privileged few will continue

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