Letters
Got wood
Tony Clark says no previous long-wave boom has been undermined by the depletion of an essential resource (Letters, June 14). He has yet to prove that this one will be either. But a look at history shows what is wrong with his argument.
In fact, for a long time industrial production in Britain was based not on oil, or even on coal, but on wood. Right up until the middle of the 18th century - ie, into the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the first long-wave boom, iron was smelted using charcoal. This essential resource had been dwindling since Elizabethan times, when, due to rising industrial production, the country’s forests were being depleted, causing concern that there would be insufficient wood to build the ships required for the navy.
The iron producers were all located in or near forest areas because of the need to utilise the nearby timber due to the difficulty in transporting it. Coal production increased, but it could only be increased marginally, because the technical problems of excavating deep-mined coal had not been overcome. Only surface coal could essentially be hewn, and then its use was restricted due to the limitations of road transport using pack horses. Moreover, the technique for using coke from coal to produce iron had not been developed. Abraham Darby developed the technique in 1707, but it was kept secret until around 1760. In fact, what we see here is an application of the principle Marx has described, and to which I have referred previously.
The depletion of the once essential resource (wood) led not to the kind of Malthusian calamity Tony Clark envisages, but to the development of new techniques to deal with it, and this was dialectical in nature. Not only did coal replace wood, but more efficient means of using the coal were developed - for example, the use of blast furnaces. Far from a calamity, it spurred on whole new industries - coal mining for one! And, in order to get the coal from one place to another, it spurred on the development of transport industries - first canals, then railways, which in turn required coal. Steam engines were another industry that was developed, and created a need for skilled engineers. The steam engines too were developed so as to use coal more efficiently, and used to resolve the problems of extracting deep-mined coal. There is a saying in economic history - necessity is the mother of invention.
I do not at all believe that the long wave can necessarily overcome such problems, still less in worshipping demand-supply economics. The long-wave cycle is not some mystical process, but the result of real economic forces. Marx recognised the existence of the long wave, and thought it might be due to the time needed to develop and the duration of large elements of fixed capital, such as the building of factories. He was not far off, but we now know it is more than just factories, but related to the time needed to locate and develop new resources, the role of the innovation cycle, etc. Indeed it’s because of that, and the way these play out, that each cycle is unique, such that its duration is not exactly the same from one to another. So the factors that lead to the ending of a boom include the relative rise in the prices of raw materials (including fuel) and the increasing inability to offset that by rises in productivity. But we are a long way from that point in this cycle. Moreover, the role of oil within that process is clearly not what it once was.
In the 1970s, a four-fold rise in the price of oil triggered a deep global recession. In the late 1990s, oil stood at $10 a barrel. Its price rose four-fold, whilst economic growth increased rapidly from 2000 on - it’s almost doubled global warming potential in the intervening period. And, in fact, the price of oil is now 10 times what it was then, and yet global growth still continues at around 4%-5% per annum. Moreover, if - and I agree it’s a big ‘if’ - scientists succeed in developing nuclear fusion, then Tony’s argument disappears completely.
Faced with the fact that his claims about gas production were factually and dramatically wrong, Tony falls back on a hope that gas might run out sooner than all the experts say. But the next part of his argument is even worse. From speaking about global capitalism at one moment, he slips into an argument based purely on the position of Britain. He says: “While there may be some uncertainty about the world gas peak and how much of it remains, one thing we can be certain about is that Britain’s gas production in the North Sea has already peaked and is in decline. Gas fields in America, mentioned by Bough, are not going to help Britain. We are being kept afloat by Russian gas.”
This is both factually incorrect and irrelevant. There is likely to be large quantities of shale gas in Britain too, but why does it matter if there isn’t? There is a global market in oil and gas, and Britain can simply buy in cheap gas from the US, Algeria, Russia or whoever wants to sell it! Japan has never had any sizeable energy resources, yet during the last long-wave boom that did not prevent it being the most dynamic and fastest growing economy in the world. On the other hand, Iceland has plenty of energy resources, being self-sufficient in geo-thermal, and essentially free energy. Yet its economy has been dependent upon fishing and fish processing, alongside a very dodgy financial services industry.
The reason I believe that peak oil will not be a problem is the same reason that Marx set out against the Malthusians. It is based not on a belief in demand-supply economics, but in the law of value. As Marx set out in his letter to Kugelmann, the law of value has operated throughout man’s history, and the basic requirement of it to reduce the amount of labour time necessary for the production of man’s needs is what has spurred innovation and the development of new productive forces and new productive relations. That is why we moved from burning wood to burning coal.
Finally, to give another example in reply to Tony, he speaks about the world’s seven billion people. In the 1950s, the economist, Colin Clarke, showed that, just with the world’s existing agricultural land, it would be possible, using the same level of capital investment, and techniques such as those used in the Netherlands at the time, to provide a global population of 12 billion people with the same level of nutrition as that enjoyed by that country. Advances in technology mean that figure would today be much higher. That is before we take into consideration the massive increase in agricultural production that will ensue from the development of Africa, where agriculture is being developed on an industrial scale to take advantage of current high food prices.
We’d better hope that Marx is right, and Tony Clark is wrong, because otherwise not only is capitalism dead, but the possibility of transcending it and moving forward to socialism is impossible.
Got wood
Got wood
Penetrating
In response to Heather Downs’ earlier proposition that 75% of women found sexual intercourse unsatisfactory (Letters, June 7), I responded that by remarkable coincidence myself and every bloke I had ever met had only ever had sex with the other 25%. Heather now comes back in all seriousness to this remark and is clearly unable to see it was a joke (June 21). It was meant to be a self-critical reflection on male sexual ego, for god’s sake. Do you seriously think I actually meant that as statement of fact on my sexual relationships? Chance would be a fine thing.
Perhaps Heather’s lack of a sense of humour is matched only by her amazing ability to miss the point being made and extract only those items from the debate which suit her purpose, totally ignoring the rest of the argument. So it is that she ignores the bit of my letter that says: “If the claim is that most women reach an orgasm other than through penis penetration, I could fully accept that is the case” (June 14). She goes on to cite all the sources which prove this fact anyway.
What I went on to say is, because a heterosexual sexual encounter mostly involves other sexual activity to achieve a female orgasm, that doesn’t mean the female partner doesn’t enjoy the penis penetration as well. In my humble experience, they certainly do. Heather draws the conclusion that, because sexual intercourse isn’t enough on its own to give most women sexual satisfaction, therefore most women don’t enjoy sexual intercourse. That’s the bit I’m challenging and it’s quite clear in my original letter.
It’s simply a matter of fact that heterosexual couples engage in most sexual engagements open to other sexual orientations as well as penis penetration. It has never been a question of either/or. And, believe it or not, most of us blokes had learned this by the time we were 17. We’d scarcely have had girlfriends or wives and partners if we hadn’t.
Penetrating
Penetrating
Detached
This paper and the CPGB can never be accused of getting carried away when political or social change is underway. Instead we get an appeal to be accurate in our estimates of what is possible, and the usual conclusion is that we shouldn’t expect too much.
One fact that caught my attention during the last six weeks of elections in Greece and Egypt was the abstention rate. In the four elections, the abstention rates were 35%, then 38%, in Greece; and 54%, then 49%, in Egypt. These figures are higher than any achieved by either a political party or a candidate (those figures were 30% for New Democracy, and the 52:48 split in the final Egyptian vote). I don’t know the causes of the abstentions nor the reliability of the state-provided figures. I just want to remind readers that in these two countries many people are not involved in electoral politics and probably not in organised politics at all.
Marxists, correctly, often focus on activists and ‘the class’, but it is necessary to appreciate what is happening to all citizens to avoid being adventurist and detached from reality.
Detached
Detached
Housing poverty
David Cameron has recently said that he is going to cut benefits for under-25s, claiming that it gave the message that people were “better off not working, or working less”, and that “it encourages people not to work and have children, but we should help people to work and have children”.
This, of course, coming from the prime minister, had to be backed up with reliable statistics to prove his case surely? Oh, wait - since 2010 there have been 300,000 extra claimants of these benefits, 279,000 of which were employed. Moreover, the Building and Social Housing Foundation showed that 93% of new housing benefit claims made between 2010 and 2011 were from households containing at least one employed adult. George Eaton of the New Statesman writes that only “one in eight” of under-25s who claim housing benefit are unemployed. So why is this the situation?
The problem is not the hugely inflated idea that benefits are an incentive for people not to work, but that many employed people simply get paid too little in relation to the price of their rent. By taking housing benefit from these people (who are actually the majority of people claiming it), you may well be forcing them to uproot and, due to the economic climate, leaving them potentially unable to find a job elsewhere, further adding to the crippling unemployment figures that the government still has to face.
The fact that many working people are unable to support themselves or the family without taking out housing benefits should be a far bigger concern to Cameron than a minority who are unemployed and claiming benefits (many of whom have genuine reasons for being unemployed). People are trapped inside an economic system which forces wages as low as they can go, whilst increasing the profit margins and wealth at the top, meaning that working does not give people a good wage to live on. Cameron is blaming the poor for being in the situation they are in, while his associates make money out of public sector contracts. It is also categorically untrue to assume that people’s financial state is directly correlated to how hard they work.
David Cameron will, regardless of the situation, claim that the housing benefit budget is too high, and in addition that cutting it will somehow reward those who work. This, however, is purely perfunctory if he does not consider why the housing benefit budget is so augmented. He doesn’t stop to think that this may be the case due to the choice by successive governments to subsidise private landlords and businesses, creating a quasi-Conservative nanny state for the rich, rather than invest in affordable housing. He is deliberately ignoring the fact that housing prices are so exorbitant that it leaves those at the bottom unable to buy, and forced to pay rents that are higher than many mortgages. Meanwhile, his government is continually privatising public services, which succeed as businesses by lowering wages.
Instead, Cameron would rather punish poverty, force individuals back into dysfunctional or potentially abusive situations, create homelessness by leaving people who have left home with nowhere else to go, due to either not having a family to go back to, or not having parents who want them back. In the long run, cutting housing benefits will not have any positive impact either economically or socially, and even if the former were true, it would be no excuse for a policy so detrimental to innocent people.
Housing poverty