Socialist Standard February 2021 1 Introducing the Socialist Party The Socialist Party advocates a society developing Russian capitalism under a where production is freed from the one-party dictatorship. Both failures have artificial constraints of profit and given socialism a quite different -- and organised for the benefit of all on the unattractive -- meaning: state ownership basis of material abundance. It does not and control. As the Socialist Standard have policies to ameliorate aspects of pointed out before both courses were the existing social system. It is opposed followed, the results would more properly to all war. be called state capitalism. The Socialist Standard is the combative The Socialist Party and the World monthly journal of the Socialist Party, Socialist Movement affirm that capitalism published without interruption since is incapable of meaningful change in 1904. In the 1930s the Socialist Standard the interests of the majority; that the explained why capitalism would not basis of exploitation is the wages/money collapse of its own accord, in response to system. The Socialist Standard is proud widespread claims to the contrary, and to have kept alive the original idea of continues to hold this view in face of the what socialism is -- a classless, stateless, notion’s recent popularity. Beveridge’s of the natural world can have limited wageless, moneyless society or, defined welfare measures of the 1940s were effect and run counter to the nature of positively, a democracy in which free and viewed as a reorganisation of poverty and capitalism itself. equal men and women co-operate to a necessary ‘expense’ of production, and Gradualist reformers like the Labour produce the things they need to live and Keynesian policies designed to overcome Party believed that capitalism could be enjoy life, to which they have free access slumps an illusion. Today, the journal transformed through a series of social in accordance with the principle ‘from exposes as false the view that banks measures, but have merely become each according to their abilities, to each create money out of thin air, and explains routine managers of the system. The according to their needs’ why actions to prevent the depredation Bolsheviks had to be content with All original material is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales (CC BY-ND 2.0 UK) licence. 2 Socialist Standard February 2021 Editorial Chaos on the Capitol Last month we looked at the chaos that conspiracy group. What had drawn them to and belonging. Donald Trump was able to has been engulfing the capitalist world in embrace Donald Trump’s leadership? harness this discontent for his opportunist the twenty-first century. The chaos shows Over the years many American workers ends by posing as the workers’ champion. no sign of abating. have seen their incomes stagnate and He promised he would take on the On 6 January, at a ‘Save America’ rally their places of work and jobs being ‘Swamp’ and bring back jobs to the US. organised in Washington D.C., Donald relocated to countries where the labour Over the course of his presidency, he Trump fired up a crowd of supporters, costs are lower. The influence of the built his base by pursuing nationalist and repeating the fantasy that the presidential labour unions has been dwindling and xenophobic policies like beginning the election had been stolen from him and Democrat administrations, which purport construction of a wall on the Mexican calling on them to march on to the to represent working-class people, have border, implementing tougher anti- Capitol. This they did and then went on to presided over this growing power of immigration measures and aligning himself storm the Capitol building in a desperate capital over the workers. with far-right groups. attempt to prevent the certification of Many small business owners have The assault on the Capitol has been Joe Biden as the next President. They been losing ground to the big beasts of described variously as an attempted met with little resistance from the capital. This has especially been the case coup, an insurrection, an assault on police, indeed in some instances they since the 2008 financial crash, and now American democracy, and an act of appeared to have been assisted by them, with the Coronavirus pandemic many domestic terrorism. But it was no in stark contrast to a Black Lives Matter small businesses have gone to the wall, workers’ revolution, and socialists do demonstration outside the Capitol in the whereas the large capitalists have gone not endorse reckless adventurism to try summer where the building was heavily from strength to strength. to advance working class interests. We fortified by the National Guard. Amid the In these circumstances, experiencing say that, on the contrary, workers must chaos, five people lost their lives. growing social powerlessness and, in organise globally and democratically The rioters comprised a motley bunch the absence of an influential socialist to take political power to establish of disgruntled workers, small business movement, many have become attracted socialism, a worldwide society without owners, armed vigilantes, highly paid to right-wing nationalist populism and classes, money and national frontiers. professional workers, far-right groups like some are drawn to conspiracy theories This revolution will be based on socialist the Proud Boys, off-duty police officers, propounded on the internet and social consciousness and not on the leadership serving and retired members of the media. White supremacist and vigilante of a narcissistic egomaniac. military. Many were followers of the QAnon groups provide a sense of community Subscription Orders should be sent to the address above. Rates: One year subscription (normal rate) £15. One year subscription (low/unwaged) £10. Europe rate £40 (Air mail). Rest of the world £40 (surface). Voluntary supporters subscription £20 or more. Cheques payable to ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain’. Socialist Standard February 2021 3 Gene genies REVOLUTIONARIES TEND to like science, the astronaut’s face in the film Alien, all and science loves revolutions. There’s one set to inject its loathsome babies into his going on right now in something called innards to eat him from the inside out. But proteomics. This studies the structures of the quick-thinking astronaut pulls out a proteins, collectively the proteome, which pair of scissors, aims it at the exact spot, causes an unexpected change, and the unlike the genome differs from cell to cell. and snips the squid-blob’s brain stem. change ‘gets out’ and can’t be stopped? The gist is that DNA makes RNA, and RNA The squid-blob drops off his face, stone Home CRISPR kits are already starting to makes proteins, but what do proteins make? dead. Bacteria do this to phages using appear on the market, raising the spectre That depends on the cell they’re in and the these repeating identifier sequences. To of some enthusiastic schoolkid accidentally 3-dimensional shape they fold into. The describe these sequences, someone came creating a terminator gene that escapes hows and whys of this have up to now never up with the wonderfully recondite name into the wild. been fathomed. But late last year Google’s of ‘clustered regularly interspaced short Socialist society would also have to DeepMind AI lab was able to predict the palindromic repeats’, or CRISPR for short. weigh up such risks. But capitalism raises 3-dimensional folding of a protein (BBC So far so obscure, but then it was realised the threat level far higher than it needs Online, 30 November - bbc.in/2XKu5rR). that if you could tweak these sequences, to be. Its entrenched class-divided nature If this doesn’t sound very awe-inspiring, you could use the process to quickly cut, could lead to this technology being imagine you’re a kid with a basic Lego set, or cut out, any bit of DNA, at any point you hijacked by the rich in order to create and one day your mum gives you a tool to like. If a single faulty base-pair is known to designer babies and widen the class design and create any individual piece you cause serious conditions, such as sickle-cell divide at the genetic level, a Brave New like, for any purpose, in any quantity. The anaemia, it should be a simple matter to World scenario. Moratoriums on human potential limits go well beyond the sky. edit it out. Because genes are passed on to genome editing do exist, and a Chinese But that’s building new things. What descendants, the edit would be permanent. scientist was jailed for three years in 2019 about debugging what already exists? Other life-crippling conditions and diseases for carrying out illegal work on twins (bit. Another revolution generating huge could follow, such as cystic fibrosis or ly/3bH6Oz7). Yet the money and the excitement involves the ability to cut Huntingdon’s Disease. Edit the genome temptation are there, and covert work is and edit individual strips of DNA. Work is of the carrier mosquito and you could in probably continuing in other dark corners. progressing so fast that textbooks, even if theory wipe out malaria and dengue fever. The gene genie is out of the bottle. they existed, would be out of date as soon CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing has been Then there is capitalism’s compulsion as they were printed. And as is so often described as one of the biggest discoveries to weaponise new technology. A genetic the case, this breakthrough happened in the history of biology, potentially ‘bullet’ wouldn’t just disable a soldier, it largely by accident. allowing us to control and rewrite would disable all that soldier’s descendants.