The Bin Man (Garbage Collector)

'Who will do the dirty work?'

(Socialist Standard March 2002)

What would you do if you grew tired of a successful career as a salesman, earning lots of money as you persuade people to part with their readies for things they probably didn't want? Would you fake a smile and carry on, hating every minute of it but realising your suffering puts bread on your kids' table? Probably. One man in my home town did something else. He quit that job and became a dustbin man.

He is quite an energetic guy. He doesn't walk at all, he runs with the bins. Danish labour legislation has thankfully forbidden the old-style bins, without wheels, and law requires easy access to them for the binmen. No more busted backs or falling over gnomes. He and his fellow refuse workers get their job done in next to no time, which means our hero gets lots of hours for canoeing, his favourite hobby. He likes the outdoor life, the pace of the job, feels much happier, and is not concerned that his wage packet is smaller. Whilst it is a physically demanding job, he claimed the sales job was pretty demanding due to the mental tedium of waiting about for the next hard sell.

This little news story was one of those light relief space fillers we have grown accustomed to. However, it was by far the most interesting thing on the news that evening. It raises some intriguing points.

The reporter couldn't understand why someone would turn their back on a big wage placket and become, "of all things" a binman. Why should refuse work be deemed less worthy than salesmanship? Why should anyone have to be asked, and justify, why they want to be a binman? A bin in summer can have a nasty, ripe smell, and it is obvious that public health requires, amongst other things, a clean environment – nothing could be worse than your Nan being plagued by rats, after all. What useful social function does a salesman have? None really, if you think about it. Salesmen are out to sell a product. Once the product is sold, the outlays are paid for and a tidy, little sum is netted in profit for the product's pre-sale owner, who is probably wise enough to use another brand and who isn't the salesman. Salesmen are only necessary in capitalism.

A salesman is, or so it goes, more educated than a binman. There is a social stigma attached. Only Dumbo empties bins. (Our hero is not a Dumbo of course.) It is a rotten snobbishness that overlooks a variety of things. The unemployed watching the news that night would jump at the chance to get a job. Perhaps some of them might be inspired to try a refuse job, even though the thought of rotting chicken and cat crap turns their stomachs. But then they could always change their job to salesmanship if they grow tired of bins, right? You see, what we want to do is pretty much irrelevant. You are employed only if you are exploitable. Jobs are plentiful in booms but come a slump you are put on the dole. You might get tons of papers from school, but does that mean you will get the job you want (and if you do, will the work conditions rapidly change your expectations); or even get educated? In any case schooling does not equate with education.

Hopefully our hero will continue to enjoy his job. Of course the Aarhus refuse workers' strike some five years ago reveals the true nature of work in capitalism. There is a ceaseless struggle between capitalists seeking to up the tempo of work and reduce wages (in these days of permanent inflation, all they need do is freeze wages and workers will feel the pinch) and workers seeking to get their own back (by smoking on the WC and stealing the toilet roll) or organising to improve conditions and pay.

Work should not really be equated with employment. Work will be an essential part of life in socialism; it will be a part of the individual's development and a necessary, healthy expenditure of energy. Employment is wage labour (the ability to work is a commodity the workers are forced to sell – we are all "salesmen" in reality), commodity production instead of production solely for use. As such it has alienating factors associated with it; e.g. Monday to Friday is "their" time, whilst the weekend is your time, where you can enjoy working in the garden or painting. Employment is based on the division of labour. The upshot being workers are tied to one job for years on end, instead of being people able to do all kinds of things, which socialist society – run by conscious decisions instead of blind forces – will allow. (Of course it is a moot point as to how far the division of labour can be removed from socialism; not every one can have the steady hand and requisite knowledge of a surgeon.)

One of the strangest objections to socialism is "who will do the dirty work?" The man of this piece was not entirely motivated by cash. His sales job made him miserable; he loves his new job. We can speculate that there will be people willing to do dirty work in socialism. The hours required will be considerably reduced as the waste of unemployment and salesmanship, amongst many other occupations, will not exist in the moneyless, free access society of socialism; there will simply be more hands to do the unpleasant but necessary stuff. The objector is always a bit strange: "I don't want to live in a world without war and starvation, and where my needs are satisfied, if it means I have to do dirty work once a week." ?! Socialism can do lots of things, but not make crap smell of roses; that is one little fact of life we'll have to put up with.

The Socialist Gene

(View Original)

Is there a gene for socialism? Are we hard-wired to organise a communal society, share everything and live a peaceful and democratic life in harmonious coexistence with nature and other species? Is anybody asking this question? If not, why not?

Let's face it, people have asked much sillier questions. Recent examples have included: is there a gene for aggression, or 'obedience', or 'homosexuality', or whatever human behavioural tic is currently inspiring tabloid copy-editors. Usually they are on the lookout for ways of explaining away character traits which their readers regard as undesirable, and which through cod-genetics can be made to look like evolutionary flaws or dead-ends, or else alibis by which the readers can avoid taking any personal responsibility. Serious researchers do ask questions about cooperation, altruism, sacrifice and other socially more admirable traits, but of course, 'serious' research is all a matter of what funding bodies are willing to pay for, so while the military will certainly be interested in studies which show aggression to be innate, and which thereby affirm the importance of the military, it is hard to see who, in a capitalist world, would be very keen to bankroll research pointing to the desirability of abolishing banks.

What's odd about these questions is that they run counter to the trend of all the evidence, which suggests that genes do not operate in isolation but in matrices, and that one single gene can never be identified as being attributable to one single and discrete characteristic, either mental or physical.

This is strange when you consider how the brain works, and how it is popularly supposed to work. Nobody expects to be able to extract a single brain cell and find, encoded within it, a phrase from Romeo and Juliet or a picture of a Ford Mondeo. We realise the brain doesn't work like that. With a hundred trillion neural connections to play with, the brain distributes its memory and cognitive processes in various different places at once, operating as an integrated network which, like the internet, is even capable to some extent of rerouting round damage and adapting spare parts to new uses.

The nature and adaptability of the brain ought to be a clue. Humans are so adaptable that it is doubtful if anything beyond basic bodily functions can be ascribed to nature. But this doesn't stop the speculation, because there is a small window of opportunity, via the study of identical twins, to explore the 'nature' side of the nature-nurture debate. For, argue people like Steven Pinker, we are not born a 'blank slate', so something must be genetically already in there. Something, but what? That's the trouble. Until some intelligent life form is discovered in the cosmos, which can be studied and compared, there is no way to guess what is natural and what isn't.

A recent article in New Scientist illustrates the problem, when it asks whether political leanings are encoded in the genes (Feb 2). Some disparity between voting habits of identical twins is cited in support of this outlandish claim, which is being seized on by political scientists as a potential magic key to unlock the voter's brain. Identical twins, it seems, are more likely to give the same answers to political questions than non-identical ones. While interesting, this is hardly 'startling', as the article puts it. If identical twins are truly identical, and if they are brought up together, it is not very surprising that they would develop the same views. The article does not mention identical twins who were brought up separately, however. If one twin is brought up in an impoverished mining town and the other in a mansion, would they still hold the same political views? If they did, this really would be startling. And where non-identical twins hold different views, no mention is made of a comparison with non-identical non-twins and whether the two correlate. This is significant because different siblings within a family experience that family differently, and differential experiences of attention, affection, expectation and responsibilities may well affect their subsequent political development. Lastly, we are told that identical twins tend to give the same answers, but we are not told what these answers are. Logically, of the 30,000 twins studied over two decades in Virginia, one would expect by random chance a greater number either of Democrats or Republicans. This information is not provided, possibly because the obvious conclusion to be drawn from either case is that humans are genetically disposed to be one or the other, which is plainly nonsense.

Genetics has made huge strides in understanding the biological basis of many diseases which afflict humanity. Less successful have been attempts to investigate the supposed biological basis of human behaviour. As has often been stated in this magazine, our ability to think may be innate. What we think about, and what we then do about it, are not. Were it otherwise, there would be no point anyone discussing anything.

Socialist Standard March 2008

“Socialism is Illogical and Irrational”

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free-market capitalism, left to its own chaotic and predatory devices would self-destruct in very short order.

I've been told this on a number of occasions when attempting to discuss the pros and cons of socialism and capitalism . . . not that the proponents of that view can offer any evidence that the present system of free-market capitalism is either rational or logical. Theirs is the response of the semi-secure, semi-comfortable, and semi-informed; they sit within the bubble that the system allows them, observing the world through the reversed telescope of capital's media machine. What they see, hear and read "informs" them and shapes their world-view. When compared with much of the rest of the world their semi-existence looks infinitely better than that of the vast majority of humankind. Better not to rock the boat, better not to question, better to be satisfied with one's lot, better to follow the advice of our leadership, after all, didn't we elect them to take the difficult decisions in our name? Following the crisis of "9/11" didn't Bush suggest that the best contribution the citizenry could make was to kick-start the economy back into top gear? Don't think, don't question – consume!

The capitalist system is rather like an onion. At the centre sits the elite controlling the system and drawing to themselves the fruits of the labours of the rest of us. From this centre each skin or layer gets progressively bigger with those nearest the centre being granted the largest share of the remunerations and benefits that form a part of the "overhead costs" that capital incurs, and those at the outside who are deemed to be totally non-productive by the elites, receiving nothing – not even the right to exist.
Whilst those who are near to the centre refuse to see the faults and failures of the system, there are two groupings who recognise the failings only too well – those on the outside who are robbed of everything, often even their lives, and those at the centre – the thieves and murderers themselves, aka the elites.

We are conditioned to believe that the free-market capitalist system has always been around and because it's the only system that actually works, will always be around. First, it actually doesn't work. Free-market capitalism, left to its own chaotic and predatory devices would self-destruct in very short order. Second, there really is no free-market capitalist system in the developed world – the "free-market" is reserved for the rest of the world, the people and resources that are there to be exploited and plundered.

In the developed world the elites have established a system of protectionism and state intervention through subsidies that pass as government contracts; the defence industry with its associated satellite firms is perhaps the definitive example. Through these and similar routes the elites can regulate their economies in an attempt to balance the short-termism that is inherent in the "maximum-profit-now-regardless-of-consequences" free-market. Whilst scorning "big government" in public the capitalists are creaming off vast amounts of money from the so-called public purse through government contracts and through bail-outs for "vital" industries where greed, fraud and ineptitude has resulted in the likely collapse of part of the capitalist's empire. Witness the revolving door that allows the so-called Captains of Industry or key managers within the bureaucracy to be "fired", handed huge severance payments and then immediately rehired somewhere else on even higher remunerations. Could there be a better indicator that the elites recognise that there really is no skill in "working" the system, only chance. As long as you are a paid-up member of the free-market masonic club there will be warm hand shakes and even warmer hand-outs as you head off for your next boardroom appointment.

The logic and rationale of socialism is that at its heart lies the principle, not of maximising profits for the few, but of meeting the needs of everybody on the planet. From that it follows that exploiting people or the environment upon which they depend for the short-term benefit of a few chosen individuals is purely illogical and irrational. Witness that illogicality, that irrationality of capitalism in the following comment by Noam Chomsky in conversation with David Barsamian, "Keeping the Rabble in Line" on a news item in the business section of the New York Times (7 February 1992) about a report prepared by Lawrence Summers, chief liberal economist at Harvard, for the World Bank setting out its position for the Rio conference in June that year:

"The idea is that the rich countries should take the position, led by the World Bank, that the problem of pollution is that the poor countries, the Third World, don't follow rational policies. 'Rational' means market policies. Many of them are resource and raw material producers, energy producers, and they sometimes try to use their own resources for their own development. That's irrational. That means that they are using resources for themselves, often at below market rates, when there are more efficient producers in the West who would use those resources more efficiently. That's interference with the market. Also, these Third World countries often introduce some measures to protect their own population from total devastation and starvation, and that's an interference with the market. It's an interference with rational market policies. The effect of this Third World irrationality is to increase production in places where it shouldn't be taking place, to increase development where it shouldn't be going on, and that causes pollution. So if we could only convince those Third World countries to behave rationally, that is, to give up all their resources to us and stop protecting their own populations, that would reduce the pollution problem. This document was produced with a straight face" (author's emphasis).

The same day on the same page of the New York Times there was another unrelated article, reproduced from Economist magazine, about a World Bank internal memo, written by the same Lawrence Summers, which had leaked. The NYT included an interview with Summers in which he claimed that the article was meant to be sarcastic. Chomsky commented:

"The World Bank memo added to what had been said in the article about Third World irrationality. It said that any kind of production was going to involve pollution. So what you have to do is do it as rationally as possible, meaning with minimal cost. So suppose you have a chemical factory producing carcinogenic gases that are going into the environment. If we put the factory in Los Angeles, we can calculate the number of people who will die of cancer in the next forty years. We can even calculate the value of their lives in terms of income or whatever. Suppose we put the factory in Sao Paulo or some even poorer area. Many fewer people will die of cancer because they'll die anyway of something else, and besides, their lives aren't worth as much by any rational measure. So it makes sense to move all the polluting industries to places where poor people die, not where rich people die. That's on simple economic grounds."

Summers did point out in his memo that there might be some counterarguments based on human rights and the right to a certain quality of life. But he further points out that if we allow these arguments to enter into our calculations, then just about everything the World Bank does would be undermined.

In the fifteen years since that report there is plenty of evidence of its principle thrust, the export of hazardous production processes to poorer areas of the world, in action. The same principle works in all areas of production. Capital is international, it goes where the profit is and in the process it undermines the position of the workers in the areas it leaves behind opening them up to greater exploitation as wage and benefit costs are driven down ready for whatever menial service jobs may be introduced for some in the next stage of the capitalist merry-go-round. Capital has no conscience and neither do those who function at the higher levels of the system who benefit from it.

So, there you have it, on the one hand the rationality and logic of free-market capitalism, a world devoid of humanity in every sense. Corrupt, polluting and choking to death on the consequences of its own greed and immorality. On the other hand you have the rationality and logic of socialism, a world where humanity can thrive, where the challenges of meeting the needs of every human being on the planet are balanced against the needs of the planet. Where everyone, including Mother Nature, has a voice and a place at the table, where there are no weak and poor, where there are no needy, where there are no outsiders . . . and no money. The choice is ours; we have to want change enough to bring it about. We have to build socialist thinking one brick at a time, spread the message one person at a time. Last November pundits were predicting the "Perfect Storm" economic collapse scenario due to the convergence of high oil prices and the credit crisis. Both of these events were triggered by the logic and rationality of capitalist greed and corruption; the first through an illegal attempted grab of resources and the second through greed for the easy money to be made out of sub-prime mortgages and the subsequent selling on of re-packaged and concealed risk to other greedy "suckers". In both instances the capitalists are making vast fortunes or are being bailed out from the "public purse", screened from the consequences of their greed and crimes. Some might feel that this "event" will provide a window of opportunity where the masses will suddenly get the socialist message by osmosis. Don't hold your breath! Socialism is about spreading the truth, about making socialists and only socialists can do that. Socialism is logical, rational, pro-people, pro-environment, and above all + pro-active.

Alan Fenn