page 10 • Britain's Road to Socialism
civilised society. This contradiction has been highlighted by the fact that, while imperialism has used the crisis as an opportunity for super-exploitation of the Third World, China has become a major engine of world growth, not least in the developing countries. The disparities in economic and social development between nations and whole regions of the world have increased over the past 20 years. This is the product of capitalist economic anarchy – where no effective economic planning takes place above the level of the individual enterprise or conglomerate – combined with the unequal distribution of monopoly and state power between the imperialist countries and the rest. Capitalism’s structural economic crisis has also produced a structural crisis of distribution on a world scale. More than a billion of the Earth’s seven billion people are severely undernourished or starving. Food production and distribution is organised by TNCs in order to maximise profits in the most lucrative markets, while Third World governments enslaved by debt collaborate in ‘cash crop’ farming, which leaves their own populations poor and hungry. Meanwhile, the EU routinely destroys mountains of food produced by subsidised agriculture in order to maintain prices and profits. Hundreds of millions of adults and children have no access to medical services and a similar number – the majority of them women – are illiterate. More than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, causing millions more deaths every year from preventable disease. Water and other energy resources that could be harnessed for those in direst need are instead exploited, diverted or neglected by capitalist monopolies seeking maximum profit. Another dimension of capitalism’s general crisis has come to the fore in recent decades, one which threatens the very future of the human race. Capitalism’s rapacious, short-term drive to maximise monopoly profit now endangers our global environment and eco-system. The continuing growth in carbon emissions plays the main part in heating up the Earth, melting the polar ice-caps, raising sea levels, spreading desertification, disrupting weather patterns and destabilising some of the most vulnerable societies on our planet. Yet big business and the major capitalist powers refuse to take the drastic steps necessary to curb emissions, for fear of curtailing monopoly profits. Instead, they use sanctions, military intervention and compliant local dictatorships to maintain access to oil supplies. Until and unless global warming is halted, many more people will join what are already some of the biggest forced migrations in human history, as millions flee the famines and resource wars inflicted on their homelands by imperialist super-exploitation and military intervention. The depletion of finite resources such as coal, oil and natural gas, without the planned development of renewable alternatives, confronts humanity with the prospect of catastrophic energy shortages within a generation or two.
Yet instead of investing massively in alternative, safe and renewable energy generation and distribution, the EU promotes carbon emission trading schemes. These enable the industrial and financial monopolies to trade licences to pollute for profit, while shifting dirtier production to the developing countries when not limiting their industrialisation altogether. Capitalism’s social crisis afflicts countries at every level of development. Almost everywhere, social inequality has widened over recent decades. The alienation of people from their local community and society – especially young people denied prospects and opportunities – has grown, together with associated problems of drug abuse, crime and anti-social behaviour. In the sphere of politics, big business influence has nurtured naked careerism, hypocrisy and corruption. Large numbers of people in the advanced capitalist ‘democracies’ – especially among the working class – have turned away from bourgeois politics. This is reflected in declining levels of participation in political parties, together with higher levels of scepticism and hostility towards professional politicians. At the same time, people will still mobilise in large numbers around issues relating to local services, unemployment, the environment, peace and racism. Ideologically, while people’s confidence in any viable alternative to capitalism was shaken across the world by the downfall of the Soviet Union, critical and antagonistic attitudes to capitalism continue to be widespread and have even increased in the wake of the post-2007 crisis. The liberating potential of artistic and cultural activities for working class people, both as producers and as consumers, is continually undermined by capitalist ownership and power. Capitalism increasingly produces ‘culture’ as it does other commodities – for sale and at a profit or not at all – regardless of social need or the social good. ‘Popular culture’ is thereby turned into a commercial, conservative force that promotes ideas of selfishness, greed and individualism. Monopoly capitalist society is one in which the price of everything is proclaimed, while the real value of things to society as a whole is denied or distorted. There is little in capitalist mass-produced ‘culture’ that reflects the real experience, collectiveness and creativity of working class life, past or present. New technology such as the internet can be used extensively by progressives and revolutionaries in the interests of human liberation. But capitalist ownership and state control also strive to promote it for the purposes of mass trivialisation and diversion, as well as for military and security projects that endanger everyone. Economically, socially, politically and culturally, capitalism has long ceased to play a progressive role in human development. It does not lack dynamism in its quest for maximum profit, but this imperative of capitalist development threatens every aspect of humanity. Capitalism’s general crisis is society’s general crisis, as much in Britain as anywhere else. ●