HUMPHREY McQUEEN is one of Australia's best-known and most respected historians. A member of the Socialist Alliance, McQueen will be touring Australian campuses in March, speaking on the topic "Behind the web of war". STUART MUNCKTON spoke with him about his book, the state of capitalism and prospects for radical social change.
What do you seek to do in your most recent book, The Essence of Capitalism?
What I've tried to do is write an account of how capitalism operates, taking as a sweetener the Coca-Cola company. Coca-Cola represents many of the key elements that have come into capitalism in the 20th Century, what I'd call the age of monopolising capital — the importance of marketing, branding, franchising.
The book starts by looking at the state, which I see as the starting point of the power of capital, and I run through the rise of the corporation, which is a late 19th Century invention. I talk about the ecological aspects, with the impact of sugar.
The final chapter goes through the ways in which capital plunders nature, using the sugar industry as an example.
You are doing a campus speaking tour. Can you give a sense of what the purpose of the speaking tour is, and what will you be talking about?
The primary object of the tour is to bring people closer to a scientific understanding of why capitalism has to behave in the way that it does, rather than just be stuck with outrage about workers being treated badly in Nike factories.
You have to understand why workers are treated badly. You have to understand the cycles of capitalism and get over any repulsion towards economics and realise that we cannot know what to do about it, or how to move forward, unless we know how the system has to behave.
There are certain things capitalism can't do and things it has to do and this is what I'll focus on.
One of the things causing the greatest outrage at the moment is the planned war on Iraq. How do you see the war drive's connection to the capitalist system as a whole?
One of the obvious things is the links between oil and democracy. Washington tells us it is a war for democracy not oil, but if you look at what they are doing in Venezuela at the same time then you get a very different picture. There you have a government that has been democratically elected twice by overwhelming majorities and Washington is trying to overthrow that government only because they have oil.
Venezuela has provided the US with cheap oil, and the US capitalists had hoped they would be able to suck in oil from Venezuela while launching a war on Iraq.
The US rulers hate [Venezuelan] President Hugo Chavez so much, partly because he wants to distribute wealth to the poor, which is always a cause for the US rulers to hate people, but more importantly because it has been Chavez more than anyone who revitalised OPEC and kept oil prices up at around $25 per barrel.
This has helped to drive the US to go to war on Iraq. If the price had been half that, the urgency would not be there, but it has focused the US rulers on the fact that unless they own all the oil and can get it when and at what price they want, then they are going to run into even more economic problems than they are already in.
The system globally is in downturn — the Japanese are in long-term deflation, the US is on the edge of deflation, and whether or not you can fly the plane on one spluttering engine — which is Europe — remains to be seen.
What about the ability of ordinary people to resist, which has been seen across Latin America and Venezuela in particular where the poor have successfully defended the government, and also seen in the rise of the anti-globalisation movement?
Well, the other thing about Venezuela is that they would not have held on if the armed forces had been completely against them. It is because those armed forces are largely recruited from the poor, and joining the army is a way the poor have to get out of their poverty. Chavez himself is an example of this.
This has given the government the ability to resist the violence the pro-US elements attempted to unleash when they launched a military coup last April. But, as you say, the government would not have succeeded without the hundreds of thousands of the poor who came out into the streets. It is the combination of those two things, plus the fact that US rulers have their eyes on Iraq, that Chavez is able to survive.
Now, I am old enough to have been at the beginning of the anti-Vietnam War struggles and I was delighted to hear of the shire council in north Queensland that had voted 8-1 against the war. I think we have now a population a lot more aware of what the main issues are than 40 years ago when the Vietnam War was getting underway.
The governments are having a much tougher time trying to get the support they need to launch the war, even after September 11 and the Bali bombings. People see the hypocrisy of it. I think part of this is the network of ideas spread by the internet, but which then becomes part of people's conversations, at work or with friends and relatives.
People's capacity to resist government propaganda is much greater.
Here in Canberra, we've lost 500 homes [due to bush fires] and people can extrapolate from this. What if you wipe out 50,000 homes in Baghdad, and take out the water and electricity? People are making those kinds of calculations when they think about what war actually means.
You are also a member of the Socialist Alliance. Could you go through the role you think socialism has to play in providing an alternative to capitalism?
I think, first of all, with people who want to call ourselves socialist, we have to work out what it is we actually want. I've never really been very keen on the government owning everything and running it from Canberra. We have to start with a moral proposition about what it is we want socialism to achieve, rather than seeing it as a set of structures. If a particular proposal comes up, what I try to do is ask myself whether this is going to improve social equality across generations, not just now.
You can take all the wealth of the world and divide it up equally amongst people and it might do something, but you are really concerned with the generational effects in terms of health, welfare and general happiness.
I think if that is your starting point, then you can start working out what sort of structures you need. You can see clearly what will not achieve it — tax cuts to the rich, for instance. But you also have to return to what Marx and Engels wrote about the impact of capitalism on the environment.
What Marx and Engels wrote about this in the middle of the 19th century is more ferocious than almost any "deep green" ecologist has said in the latter part of the 20th century, although that bit of their writings certainly got forgotten.
They could see the plundering of nature that would occur as capitalism was forced to expand.
One thing we have to think about is, in re-distributing wealth, it is not a matter of making everyone as wealthy and consumption-driven as the wealthiest people in the world. We have to work out ways in which we consume and produce less and that growth does not become that kind of guide to us. I think that can only happen outside the capitalist system because capitalism cannot survive without expanding. It has to grow; it can't do anything else.
Because of this, its impact on the planet will continue to be more and more destructive. And therefore you have another urgency, as well as the exploitation of labour, to working out what structures will put greater social equality in place.
Do you see anywhere around the world that provides an example?
I find it interesting because examples pop up around the world where you least expect them, for example, Venezuela. I don't think, though, that you can export it as a model, even to the rest of Latin America, as each country has its own history and culture.
Venezuela is unique because it has the oil industry and what they can do there is different from what is possible in Brazil.
What we can draw from Venezuela is the encouragement that new things happen and it doesn't all go the way of the enemy. We need to look for those sorts of opportunities for gains in our own circumstances, not being parasitical on other revolutions and struggles. We have to learn from what we do here, as it is only here that you or I can change.
Following on from your last point about what we do here, what role do you think an organisation like the Socialist Alliance has to play?
The value of what the Socialist Alliance is what was thrust upon it in the federal elections 18 months ago. The alliance came into being for different reasons, but after the September 11, 2001, events, the alliance campaign became an anti-war campaign, not focused on parliamentary politics but on raising issues about the nature of the entire imperialist system. That put the issues on the agenda in a way that we need to continue now with Iraq, to let people know that the war on Iraq is merely a symptom of the system.
We can tie this around election campaigns, but it is not about parliament or local councils, but getting certain issues back on the agenda at a time when the Labor Party and union movement appear to have completely lost the plot.
The most effective activities of the Socialist Alliance at the moment are ideological struggles, to make certain things clear about why capitalism behaves in the way that it does. I think that is a big enough task.
From Green Left Weekly, March 5, 2003.
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