Davos Elites Think Globally, Act Greedily (2014)

From the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the annual World Economic Forum, global elites gather to dream about solving the problems of capitalism through cooperation.

  Every capitalist knows this about his worker, that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer, and [he therefore] wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity. But this is just how the illusion arises – true for the individual capitalist as distinct from all the others–that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money-spender, and not as worker. (Grundrisse; my emphasis)

Apologies for plunging straight into a quote from Marx to begin this article, but it seems related to the illusion that animates the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland of capitalist movers and shakers, movie-star wankers, professional do-gooders, and Bono.

One striking thing about this elite gathering is how its participants believe that capitalists (or at least other capitalists) might look beyond their own profit interests to solve some of the problems that their beloved profit system generates.

Professor Schwab has a dream

The first WEF was held in January 1971, under the impetus of Klaus Schwab, a German economist who remains the event’s executive chairman. At first the meeting only brought together European capitalists, and it was called the European Management Forum (renamed the World Economic Forum in 1987).

The official WEF website says that Professor Schwab’s ‘‘inspiration’’ for creating the Forum was the ‘stakeholder principle,’’ which states that ‘‘the management of an enterprise is not only accountable to its shareholders but must also serve the interests of all stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers and, more broadly, government, civil society and any others who may be affected or concerned by its operations.’’

You might say, then, that the Forum’s underlying concept is the idea – or the plea, really – that capitalists should broaden their vision beyond the narrow realm of their own profit chasing.

Today the WEF describes its mission as ‘‘improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.’’

‘‘We live in a fast-moving, highly interconnected world, and our existing systems, structures and formal institutions no longer suffice,’’ Schwab notes. ‘‘Pressing global problems can arise quickly and without warning. . . . Today, to address these issues, the world needs a level of global cooperation that is increasingly difficult to attain, precisely due to the growing complexities and interdependencies in the world.’’

The WEF is meant to serve as a mechanism for this global cooperation. And it would be hard to argue against the need for cooperation, or to disagree with the description of today’s world as increasingly interdependent and interconnected.

But it is also pretty clear that there are some serious limits to the degree of cooperation possible between business leaders (and their political lackeys), not only in different countries but within their own.

And the reason is again related, in some ways, to that quote from Marx. As he points out, although it might seem logical for capitalists to cooperatively raise the living standards of workers (as potential consumers), each capitalist firm must also extract from its own workers as much surplus value as it can to remain competitive – for the unprofitable capitalist will not remain a capitalist for long.

Genuine cooperation to solve fundamental problems is out of the question in a society where there are not only irreconcilable class differences, but conflicts between the capitalists themselves, who are competing against each other in domestic and global markets.

Lots of problems, few solutions

Yet the WEF remains upbeat about the potential for alleviating global problems through cooperation spearheaded by business leaders. Its website claims that the ‘‘Forum’s experience since its foundation in 1971 shows there are few issues that cannot be adequately progressed by convening the most relevant actors from all sectors – business, government and civil society – in a high-level, informal environment of trust.’’

But the experience of seeing the WEF, every year, address the same sorts of global problems – unemployment, environmental devastation, gender inequality, poverty, corruption, armed conflict, and so on – suggests that some issues have hardly been ‘progressed’ at all.

The gap between the awareness of the problems, and the inability to do much about them, is striking. In its numerous reports, the WEF list up issues that attest to the dismal reality of capitalism, but in most cases offers only the vaguest proposals or wishful thinking in response.

For instance, its Global Agenda Council on Fragile States and Conflict Prevention notes that, ‘‘Some 1.5 billion people in an estimated 40 countries live in an environment marked by persistent conflict and fragility . . . confronted by a myriad of simultaneous and often overwhelming challenges, including armed conflict or political violence, serious and persistent human rights violations, and threats from organized crime and terrorist networks.’’

And then, in the very next sentence, we are told that, ‘‘Viewed through a different lens, however, today’s fragile states are potentially tomorrow’s emerging markets. More than three-quarters of states classified as ‘fragile’ possess extensive mineral and energy resources and post impressive growth rates.’’

Similar examples can be found in the WEF report, ‘Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014,’ ‘which lists the ten ‘‘most pressing issues’’ of the coming year; these include widening income disparities, persistent unemployment, diminishing confidence in economic policies, and a lack of values in leadership.

After the report notes, for instance, how ‘‘growing income inequality is an issue of central importance’’ and lists various concrete manifestations of this inequality, it clings to the haziest of solutions:

  In order to counteract income inequality, it’s essential to tackle poverty in an integrated way that has a long-term impact. We need to give people the capacity to be resilient, to take on challenges and to learn the skills they need to work toward more prosperous futures.

Similarly, the report recognizes that the world faces ‘‘persistent structural unemployment’’ (and is careful to warn that it will escalate social unrest if not addressed), but can only offer the vague hope that governments will ‘’create regulatory structures that encourage employment and economic stability.’’

The same contrast between a fairly clear recognition of the problems and a lack of solutions is on display in the WEF’s Global Risks Report, listing the ‘‘ten global risks of highest concern.’’

The top risk for 2014 is ‘‘financial crises in key economies,’’ followed by such problems as ‘‘structurally high unemployment/underemployment,’’ ‘‘severe income disparity,’’ and ‘‘global governance failure,’’ as well as problems related to the natural environment. The report reads like an indictment of capitalism, even though it tries to claim that the problems can be solved or alleviated, provided there is adequate global leadership.

Conspiracy or dunces?

The conspiracy theorist might like to imagine gatherings such as the Forum at Davos as rather sinister events, where corporate elites hatch their evil plans. But that is almost a comforting notion; as if the capitalist system could yield to plans or control, rather than simply being the composite of all the narrow-minded economic actors chasing after their own profits by whatever means necessary.

In fact, the business savvy of global corporate elites does not lend them the power to shape, or even foresee, the future direction of capitalism. They are along for the ride like the rest of us, although travelling first-class.

‘‘Cautiously optimistic’’ is the verdict most likely to be offered by one of these elites when asked to comment on where the global economy is headed in 2014 and beyond. In other words, ‘‘Fuck if I know.’’

But that is not to suggest that the problem comes down to a lack of intelligence on the part of those elites, as Leftists are prone to argue. None of us can predict, exactly, what the coming years will bring for the capitalist economy, just as Marx, in his day, was not able to predict the exact moment when a general crisis might break out. Certainly we can be ‘‘confidently pessimistic,’’ as Marx was, about what our life will generally be like under capitalism, knowing its fundamental contradictions, but that does not make us fortune tellers.

What we can feel safe to predict, though, is that the comforting talk at Davos about working together to improve the world for all ‘‘stakeholders’ ‘won’t do much if anything to change the actual behaviour of capitalists and capitalism.

Michael Schauerte

Mixed Media: Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Engineers (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Engineers (BTTTE) are the live performance extension of a trio of sound artists: Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques and Nick Wilsdon who produce the BTTTE radio programme for the London radio arts station Resonance 104.4 fm. Last October BTTTE presented their Little Red Set: ‘dialectical cabaret in song, sound and exquisite hope’ at the Club Integral at the Grosvenor pub in Stockwell, South London.

BTTTE sang in Magyar Hidegen Fujnak a Szelek (Cold Winds are Blowing), a Hungarian folk song, the music collected by Zoltan Kallos in 1969 in Ördöngösfüzes in Mezoseg, today in Romania. The folk song is a prisoners’ song, a yearning to be free, to break the chains of oppression, reminding us of the Magyar working class attempts at controlling their own lives in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic or the 1956 Hungarian revolution which was crushed by the Russian Army.

The Song of Investment Capital Overseas written by Chris Cutler and Fred Frith of Avant-rock group Art Bears in 1980 is a satire on capitalist globalisation: ‘I empty villages, I burn their houses down, I set up factories, Lay out plantations, And bring prosperity to the poorer nations.’

BTTTE sang in German Epitaph 1919: Die rote Rosa written by Bertolt Brecht and set to music in 1928 by Kurt Weill as The Berlin Requiem: ‘Red Rosa now has vanished too. Where she lies is hid from view. She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.’ Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by Freikorps troops during the Spartacist working class uprising in Berlin in January 1919.

The Spanish El derecho de vivir en paz (The Right to Live in Peace) was written by Chilean folk singer Victor Jara who was murdered in the coup which overthrew the Allende government in 1973.

They finished with The Internationale written by Eugène Pottier: ‘if these vultures disappeared one of these days, the sun will shine forever, this is the final struggle, let us group together and tomorrow the Internationale will be the human race.’ It was written during the 1871 Paris Commune, of which Edouard Vaillant wrote: ‘If socialism wasn’t born of the Commune, it is from the Commune that dates that portion of international revolution that no longer wants to give battle in a city in order to be surrounded and crushed, but which instead wants, at the head of the proletarians of each and every country, to attack national and international reaction and put an end to the capitalist regime.’

Steve Clayton

Film Review: ‘Utopia’ by John Pilger (2014)

Film Review from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Utopia by John Pilger

John Pilger’s recent film Utopia about the Aboriginal ‘Nation’ (the ‘First Australians’) is an emotional and unrelenting look at ‘apartheid’ in Australia today with graphic footage of police tasering and brutalising young black Australian men in custody. The shocking racism in modern Australia is in stark contrast to the sympathetic and positive portrayal of the Aborigines in such films as Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout and Wim Wenders Until the End of the World.

Pilger identifies the huge inequality between the rich whites and poor Aborigines by contrasting the affluent suburb of Barton in Canberra with the township of Utopia 200 km from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory which is home to the ‘First Australians’ . Barton was named after Australia’s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton who declared in 1901 ‘The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to [apply to] those not British and white-skinned.’ The Aboriginal peoples live with sub-standard sanitation, shelter, public transport, water, light, and serious eye disease in children, and one third of Aboriginal people die before the age of 45. Pilger states that ‘Black Australians are the most imprisoned people on earth’. He recounts how in Western Australia in 2008 an Aborigine man ‘cooked to death’ in a police van, how a new all-Aboriginal prison is being built and how the treatment of the Aborigines is a ‘punishing of the poor, a punishing of indigenous difference.’

Pilger identifies capitalism as the major factor in the racist brutalisation of the First Australians. The Aboriginal Land Rights movement was subjected to a vicious TV campaign funded by the Mining companies and would lead eventually to Prime Minister Bob Hawke dropping Land Rights legislation. Mining capitalist Lang Hancock stated ‘Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the black fellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal Land Rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist’. Pilger shows a 1984 television interview where Hancock advocates the sterilisation of Aborigine people.

Pilger discusses the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response known as ‘The Intervention’ where on the pretext that there were widespread paedophile gangs operating in Aboriginal communities, the Australian Federal Government sent troops in, suspended the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act and introduced ‘special measures’, and there was ‘compulsory acquisition of townships currently held under the title provisions of the Native Title Act.’ The ‘Intervention’ was a Trojan Horse in order that the Federal Government could regain control over disputed land and then grant mining concessions to the capitalist class. In the same period the mining capitalists ensured the Federal Government’s Mineral Resource Rent Tax would not take too much of their profits, in fact the Mining companies saved 60 billion Australian dollars. The United Nations said that ‘the Intervention’ was racially discriminating and infringed the human rights of aboriginal peoples.

Pilger believes there is a beacon of hope by concluding with the ‘hidden history of aboriginal resistance’ with accounts of the 1966 Gurindji strike at Wave Hill and the 1973 cotton chippers strike at Wee Waa. Utopia is a grim catalogue of crimes against a people but when it comes to the insatiable lust for profit in the mining of bauxite, iron ore, and uranium nothing can stand in the way of capitalism.

The Aboriginal people believe the earth and people are one but capitalism cannot understand such a concept. Only socialism can realise the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ when ‘the earth is made a common treasury’ for all peoples.

Steve Clayton

The Top of the One Percent (2014)

Book Review from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plutocrats: the Rise of the New Global Super-Rich by Chrystia Freeland  (Penguin £9.99.)

Chrystia Freeland has no objection to the current social system and those who benefit from it: ‘we need capitalists, because we need capitalism’, she writes. And she is now a Liberal MP in Canada. But her book does have some interesting things to say about the very wealthiest people in society and the increase in inequality. 

It is quite common nowadays to refer to the 1 percent who form the top of the class pyramid. But even within this 1 percent there is a distinction between a plutocratic super-elite (which is overwhelmingly male) and those who are ‘merely wealthy’. In 2005, for instance, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had a combined wealth of $90bn, not far short of that of the 120 million people who formed the bottom 40 percent of the US population. In 2008, the top 2 percent of the 1 percent in Britain, which must be only about ten thousand people, received almost one-seventh of the income of the 1 percent. The super-elite set up ‘philanthropic’ foundations, such as the Gates Foundation, as status symbols.

Also, the higher echelons of the elite mostly operate at a truly global level, with English as their lingua franca. Its members may have been born in one country and educated in another (quite likely at a university such as Harvard or Oxford). They may own a multi-national company with its headquarters in a third country and have homes on two or three continents. So possibly the biggest capitalists are becoming less tied to particular countries and identify less with a national capitalist class. But many of them make sure to attend top British social events, such as Ascot and Wimbledon.

More controversially, Freeland claims that many plutocrats are the ‘working rich’. They are chief executive officers or top bankers or lawyers, rather than just people who own masses of shares. Though few come from truly impoverished backgrounds, their enormous wealth is not inherited, so they are supposedly ‘self-made men’. They mostly work in newish industries such as computing or other kinds of technology, or else in finance. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that these ‘alpha geeks’ often had some idea for a website or a piece of software, but they were just lucky in getting into a position where they could exploit others, and that is what really made them so fantastically wealthy.

So Freeland’s book does have some interesting things to say on ways in which capitalism is changing, and on how it is not.

Paul Bennett

Mixed Media: Children of the Sun (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Maxim Gorky play Children of the Sun directed by Howard Davies was performed last year at the National Theatre in London.

The play captures the unease and violence of what the historian Lionel Kochan called the ‘dress rehearsal for revolution’ in Russia in 1905. Gorky wrote the play while imprisoned for accusing the Tsar of the massacre of 1,000 workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1905 outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. For Kochan ‘this was the spark that set alight the flames of revolution. In all social groups revolt flared up. By the end of January nearly half a million workmen were on strike. The professional intelligentsia joined in.’ A ‘soviet’ in St Petersburg ‘formed of some 500 delegates elected by about 200,000 workers, represented the peak of working-class achievement. It was a spontaneous creation. But it was a lesson in revolution, not the revolution itself’.

The Children of the Sun are a group of privileged, self-absorbed, middle class intelligentsia who are floundering and philosophising about the world, who sense revolution is in the air but lack vision, energy and dynamism. Geoffrey Streatfield is amiable as Protassov, the ‘student of natural science’ who is prescient about the role of science in the future but blind to romantic advances, and the philandering around him. Protassov’s sister Lisa played by Emma Lotfield is anguished by the harsh reality of the suffering peasantry while his wife Elyena played by Justine Mitchell knows something is wrong, of the need for action, and embodies the revolutionary spirit.

When the play had its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre in October 1905, the atmosphere was tense, and ‘the audience panicked when they mistook the arrival of the protesting workers at the end of the play, for a real demonstration entering the theatre from the streets’ (Cynthia Marsh). Stanislavsky wrote that the role of the Moscow Art Theatre was ‘not a simple private affair but a social task. Never forget that we are striving to brighten the dark existence of the poor classes.’

Gorky’s father was a joiner, and Tolstoy called Gorky ‘a real man of the people.’ Gorky had worked as a skivvy in a shoe shop, in a bakery, as an errand boy, a stevedore, a dishwasher on a River Volga steamer, and a railway night-watchman before educating himself and becoming a jobbing journalist and a Marxist.

The 1905 Revolution was suppressed with 14,000 people executed and 75,000 imprisoned. Gorky wrote ‘our sick society will not become healthy until the sources of light, beauty and wisdom have become accessible to everyone.’

Steve Clayton

Proper Gander: Channel Hopping The Shopping Channels (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you find an advert particularly irksome, at least it’s over in a few seconds before you can return to your cosy ITV drama. There’s no such relief if you venture on to one of the many shopping channels cluttering up your digibox, where life is one long advert after another. Here, each stretched-out infomercial is presented by a chirpy wannabe Channel 5 continuity announcer. The presenters will babble on for half an hour about the virtues of a mystic peacock quartz sterling silver ring with 3D conical facets, or how a baked brow tones set with a double-ended brow brush will transform your eyebrows.

They will go into more detail than you ever wanted about the cleverly-designed drainage holes at the bottom of a plastic plant pot, or how 82c is the optimum temperature for cleaning a carpet. It takes either some skill  or some medication to keep up the bland bonhomie, even if the enthusiastic descriptions end up  meaningless. Most of the products are ‘amazing’; others are ‘collectors’ quality’ or ‘professional grade’,  apparently.

On Bid TV, every sentence the presenters say ends with an exclamation mark, while over on QVC they talk in block capitals. Weirdly, the infomercials are broken up with ‘commercial breaks’ which only have adverts for the channel itself.

At least the shopping channels are upfront about being nothing more than intermediaries between your bank account and another dose of retail therapy. Within a few minutes of tuning in you’ll be wondering how you  ever coped without a faux fur colour changing cushion with a seven LED colour cycle. Channels like Gems  TV and Rocks & Co try to muster up the ‘ooh, I’ve got a bargain’ feeling by starting out with an over-inflated price for their latest bit of bling.

Then, helped with a countdown and heartbeat sound effect, the price drops – often by thousands of pounds – to whatever they were going to charge everyone anyway. Plus P&P. Plus the cost of the phone call to order it. What you can get from the shopping channels, without spending anything, is an example of how vacuous the market system can be. Hurry while stocks last!

Mike Foster

The Maoist Insurgency in India (2014)

From the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Adivasis, the original people of India, are among the poorest people in the country. Infant mortality amongst Adivasis (from adi meaning from the earliest times or Scheduled Tribes – of which there are 635 distinct groups) is 57 percent, and child malnutrition 73 percent (the national average is the highest in the world at 48 percent), and 42 percent of under fives are undernourished.

The objective of the ‘Communist Party of India (Maoist)’, also called the ‘Naxalites’, is the armed overthrow of the Indian state and the creation of a ‘socialist-communist’ government. The Maoists insurgents do not consider the Indian electoral system to be democratic, but rather a tool that benefits the landlord and capitalist classes. The Naxalite insurgency (numbering around 20,000 armed fighters with 50,000 supporters) has spread over 40 percent of India’s land area, encompassing 20 of the country’s 28 states. The seven most affected Indian states in terms of fatalities are Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh, in that order. The Indian state’s response to the Maoist challenge has been to send 81,000 paramilitary troops. In addition to paramilitary troops, the state has also used death squads known as Salwa Judum (SJ), meaning Purification Hunt. (The Indian Supreme Court declared the SJ illegal in 2011 and ordered the Chattisgarh government to disband it).

The state of Jharkhand in eastern India is a main focus of the insurgency. Deep within the Saranda forest in the state (where Adivasis make up 26 percent of the population) lies the world’s largest deposit of iron-ore. The Jharkhand government has signed 42 Memorandums of Understanding with various large iron and steel companies. The mining giants are firmly in residence in the north eastern state, which is now a fully militarised zone, and there are over a hundred bases with a total of 50,000 official paramilitary troops involved in military action, plus the mining corporations’ security forces.

Says Indigenous activist Gladson Dungdung, convener of the Jharkhand Indigenous Peoples’ Forum:

  The government has been helping in securing land, water, and minerals for the corporate giants through military operations. In Saranda in June, July, and August 2011, there were three massive operations: Operation Monsoon, Operation Bravo Boy, and Operation Anaconda. The security forces killed two Adivasis, raped several women, and tortured more than 500 Adivasis. They also disrupted the Adivasis food grain supply, destroyed the harvest, ate livestock, and destroyed all official identification papers of the Adivasis (ration cards, voter ID, land titles). The Adivasis were forced to leave their villages and they only returned after our intervention. The end result is that the government gave mining leases to 19 mining companies in the region including Tata, Mittal and others.’ Dungdung goes on, ‘Today, we live in the corporate Indian state, not in a welfare state. The government makes all the laws and policies in favour of the corporate houses… The state is simply not bothered about its people. See the example of the state of Chattisgarh, where 644 villages were forcibly vacated by Salwa Judum and handed over to corporations.

According to Xavier Dias, spokesperson for the Jharkhand Mines Area Coordination Committee, the insurgents also attack Adivasi villages, extort money from mining companies, and protect the ones that are grabbing land from Adivasis. He says:

  No corporate boss has so far been killed by the Maoists. When the Maoists call a general strike, those companies that pay levies to them are allowed to function and the rest are attacked. I do not believe that a mining company can function here without paying levies to the Maoists. Jharkhand is the place from where Maoists finance their operations in other states, too.

Xavier Dias, however, admits that ‘there are places where the Maoists are providing some good services to the Adivasis, such as Bastar [a town] in the state of Chattisgarh’. According to Al Jazeera in many of these places the insurgents have organised the Adivasis and taken up community projects to provide services the government doesn’t. One village leader told Al Jazeera that the Maoists frequently visited their villages, and ‘treated everyone equally.’ Dias does not think that the Maoists are corrupt, but considers them ‘misguided’ and disagrees that armed struggle is the way to solve India’s class and Adivasi problems.

Dungdung is also critical of the Maoists:

  As far my knowledge and experience is concerned, they are not fighting for the Adivasis. Instead, they have created more problems for the democratic people’s movement. It’s very easy for the government to call these democratic struggles Maoist and suppress them. I think the Maoists are part of the problem, not the solution.’ As Dungdung points out ‘The government claims that its troops are there to counter the Maoists, but in actuality it is the democratic movements such as people resisting land grabs or fighting police repression that are intimidated into silence. By creating this drastic panic among the people, the corporations are free to suck out the minerals and forest resources.

Some Adivasi groups have now formed their own resistance movements – in Orissa for example, several tribes came together to form the Chasi Mulia Sangh, a 5,000 strong tribal land movement unconnected to the Maoists (they assert). Armed with traditional weapons they are fighting for human rights and collective tribal ownership of their ancestral lands. They ‘claim they are caught between the two fires of an escalating Maoists/Naxalite insurgency and the government’s paramilitary backlash’.

Marx described ‘primitive accumulation’ as ‘The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.’ It is still going on. Capitalism is an insatiable monster as far as profits are concerned. Human misery is of no concern where the profit motive reigns supreme.

Sources: Maoist Insurgency Spreads by Asad Ismi; Land Conflict And Injustice: Development In ‘New India’ By Graham Peebles

ALJO

Flooding, Gay Marriage, St Medard and Mormons (2014)

The Halo Halo! Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Help for people in various parts of the country who were flooded out during January and February may have been slow to arrive, if it came at all. But at least they do have ex-UKIP councillor David Silvester to thank for bringing the cause of it all to the nation’s attention. And, as it turns out, it was nothing to do with climate change or the lack of dredging. It was all the fault of the gays. Or, more specifically, according to Mr Silvester, because David Cameron acted ‘arrogantly against the gospel’ in bringing about the Equal Marriage (same sex) Act.

‘I don’t have a problem with gay people’ he explained. ‘My prayer for them is they will be healed’. ‘I am a man who prays every day for every member of the cabinet and for every member of the royal family and when, two years ago, I wrote to the Prime Minister to warn him there are repercussions for serious breaches of the coronation oath, such as this one has been, when I saw what followed I naturally assumed this was the result of them going against God’s laws’. ‘This is not new, this happened in the Old Testament – they were warned if they turned against God there would be pestilence, there would be war, there would be disasters’.

Well, you can’t argue with that can you? Bloody gays. Perhaps UKIP will send them all home before it gets any worse.

One Lincolnshire vicar, though, who obviously believes there is not enough scientific evidence to blame gays for the flooding, has a different solution. According to the Guardian (1 February), the vicar got her flock to pray to St Medard to sort the problem out. St Medard, apparently, was a French bishop who died in 545 AD, and who has some clout in controlling the weather because he was once sheltered from the rain by an eagle.

Obviously if you want your prayers to be heard at the very top you’ve got to go through the proper channels. It’s not what you know, it seems, it’s who you know.

Our reliance on God to help us out, though, may soon be in jeopardy. Or, at least, any help from the Mormon God. A summons has been issued for him to appear before Westminster Magistrates Court on14 March (or, rather for Mr Thomas Monson, the Mormon God’s prophet on earth, to make the trip over from Salt Lake City to attend the court).

The summons, described in the Telegraph as ‘one of the most unusual documents ever issued by a British court’ came about because a disgruntled ex-member of the flock now believes that some of the Mormon’s more bizarre teachings may amount to fraud.

The teachings in question include the ‘fact’ that Adam and Eve lived just six thousand years ago, that Native Americans are descended from a family of ancient Israelites and that the Book of Mormon was translated from ancient gold plates and revealed to their founder, Joseph Smith, by an angel.

The Church said that Mr Monson had no intention of attending the court hearing and dismissed the summons as containing ‘bizarre allegations’.

Well, the Mormons should recognise bizarre allegations when they see them shouldn’t they?

NW

Obituary: Florrie Barwick (2014)

Obituary from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Florrie was a socialist who enjoyed being with other socialists at meetings and conferences and always brought cakes as a contribution to refreshments. During one Conference lunch break Florrie related how on return from evacuation at age 13 she had been given a copy of the Socialist Standard by her father, and became a lifelong supporter of the socialist aim. She was proud to have a letter published in the Standard (‘World Without Money’ June 2012) where she wrote of a better way to live ‘on this great planet of ours. A global moneyless society for the whole human race. Co-operation not competition.’

Over the years she took every opportunity to pass on copies of the Standard and various leaflets. Her neighbours as well as family were all aware of her views, with Florrie even speaking of socialism to the paramedic on the way to hospital after her accident sustained when at Head Office for a meeting in September. Florrie recovered well from the injury and subsequent operation, but sadly died from pneumonia on 10 January aged 85 years.  We extend condolences to her family and friends.

Pat Deutz

Municipal reformism (2014)

Book Review from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militant Liverpool: A City on the Edge by Diane Frost and Peter North, Liverpool University Press, 2013, 218 pages, £13.22

Frost and North look in detail at the Militant Labour Liverpool City Council of the 1980s but also set it in the context of the 1970-80s world capitalist crises. The authors rightly point out that Liverpool’s ‘urban problems derive from broader structural factors’ such as the shift in world trade, and were all part of the ‘long term decline of its industrial and commercial bases.’

For the Trotskyist Militant Tendency ‘capitalism had failed the population of Liverpool’ but what had failed was Keynesian capitalism in Britain which was unable to prevent mass unemployment and ‘stagflation’ (stagnation and inflation of over 25 percent). Labour Cabinet Minister Tony Crosland said in 1974 that ‘the party is over’ while Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan said in 1976: ‘we used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.’

The stage was set for the return of economic liberalism and free market capitalism with the election of a Conservative government in 1979.

The authors see the 1983 Liverpool Labour/Militant council as a ‘socialist labour council with a radical socialist programme’ which is absurd as the Council were operating municipal capitalism. The Liverpool Trots believed large amounts of money would be needed from government to fix the city’s problems, they fixated on the Tories having ‘stolen Liverpool’s money’ and ‘the council resolved on confrontation to provide the resources it argued the city needed.’ A lot of the book deals with local government finance and there is even a need for a definition of ‘capitalisation’ as ‘moving spending from day to day spending – revenue – which needs to be raised from the rates to long term spending on infrastructure that did not count against day to day spending – capital.’ There is the grim irony of reading about the Trots in Liverpool securing £30 million from a consortium led by nationalised French bank Banc Paribas, negotiating a £30 million facility from London stockbrokers and getting a £60 million loan from Swiss banks described by the Guardian as ‘the gnomes of Zurich have rallied to the Trotskyists on Merseyside.’

The Militant Trots in Liverpool wanted to turn the Labour Party into an explicitly Leninist party. It used it as a recruitment vehicle, while their ‘democratic centralist tendencies left little room for dissent or reflection, even when mistakes were made’ and they described in exaggerated fashion how Liverpool 1984 was ‘Petrograd-on-Mersey’ or the Paris Commune. Eventually the trade unions realised they were being used by the Trots as a stage army, foot soldiers and cannon fodder, and were especially shocked by ‘the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle around the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’ (Kinnock).

Former Liverpool City Councillor Paul Lafferty’s inquest on Militant in Liverpool said ‘all the lighting on pavements point out onto the road and we thought why don’t we turn them around and point them on the people? And I think that says everything about us really.’ It does.

Steve Clayton

Letter: Benefits Street (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Well done for attacking awful programmes like ‘Benefits Street’ (Socialist Standard, February).

Apart from profit, the aim of such programmes is clear: it’s to turn working-class people against each other, and try to discredit the welfare state. If you can get ordinary people to resent other workers, then the propaganda has worked.

The system we live under gets let off the hook, thanks to sections of the media. And some tabloid newspapers are even worse in misrepresenting the working-class. Compare this to the totally uncritical coverage of the Royal Family in the media.

During the 1970s and 1980s Birmingham lost thousands of jobs. And like most working-class cities, people have been hit hard by the latest recession.

Blame the system not ordinary people!

Graeme Kemp, 

Wellington, Shropshire

Party News: Socialists to Stand in Euro-elections (2014)

Party News from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is planning to contest Wales and the South East Region of England in May’s elections to the European Parliament.

The South East Region is the biggest in the country. It covers the counties of Oxford, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, the Isle of White, Surrey, Sussex and Kent and so big urban centres such as Southampton, Reading, Brighton and Oxford.  There are some 6 million electors (more than in many EU Member States) and 10 MEPs (among the current ones the notorious Nigel Farage).

If we contest Wales that will entitle us to a Party Election Broadcast in Wales, the first time in our history that we will have had one.

The election is by proportional representation of party lists. We will be presenting a full list of 10 in the South East and 4 in Wales.

Election day is Thursday 22 May, so most of the campaigning will be from the end of April on. Any offers of help to distribute leaflets, write to the press, phone in to radio stations and the like, please contact election committee, by email at spgb@worldsocialism.org or by post to: The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN

Action Replay: Power Play (2014)

The Action Replay Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’ve written before about the power struggles in rugby union, among clubs and national and international associations, especially over who gets the money from TV coverage (Action Replay, November last year). Now we turn our attention to cricket, where a comparable clash of interests is being played out.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) is the international governing body. It has 106 members, including countries such as Bulgaria, which has only eight clubs. So naturally it is dominated by the ten full members, those that play Tests, from Australia to Zimbabwe. But within these there is an inner elite, Australia, England and India. And now these three have proposed a new system that concentrates the money and power even more in their hands. South Africa is currently the top-ranked Test team, but the country is not such a big player financially.

Under the new system, which was agreed by the ICC on 8 February, there will be an executive committee to run the Council, and this will be dominated by the elite three. There will be two Test divisions, incorporating some of the current associate members such as Ireland, and the elite cannot be relegated from the first division, wherever they finish. The income from broadcasting rights is to be redistributed, with the top three becoming relatively wealthier than the other ICC members, and with India doing particularly well in financial terms.

In fact India has been generally seen as the villain of the piece. Cricket is the national sport there, with enormous crowds and TV audiences and the massively popular and lucrative Indian Premier League. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have been described as acting like ‘lawless thugs’ (Scyld Berry, Telegraph online, 1 February). The whole idea may well be an attempt to stop the BCCI from picking up their bat, stumps and ball and walking away from world tournaments and tours to other countries.

Berry went on to say that, if the BCCI were to leave and refuse to defend their World Cup title, ‘India’s government and people will not allow them to get away with it’. Which is a rather optimistic approach to how the power-brokers and money-men operate.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Big Stamp Wrangle (2014)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The biggest battle for a long time is now being fought in the retail trade in this country—and all, on the surface, over a little piece of green, or pink, or gold, sticky paper called a Trading Stamp. Yes, on the surface. The real cause of the battle is to be found much deeper than any newspaper cares to dig.

Trading Stamps have been going in this country for a long time with Green Shield, a British company, having the big hold. But the stamps were mainly confined to small shops; they had no really big retail organisation to issue them. What started the present fuss was the decision of millionaire Garfield Weston (ABC, Fine Fare Supermarkets) to issue the American Sperry and Hutchinson pink stamps in his supermarkets.

This started a flood of stamps, among them another American concern—King Korn—and another British—Super Yellow, owned by the same John Bloom who has made a lot of money out of direct selling washing machines. One gimmick followed another—Mr. Weston, for example, had glamorous pink-coated hostesses outside his supermarkets dishing out the S.H. gift catalogue. (…)

As long as the working class are deluded by the gimmicks of capitalism in all their many shapes and sorts—there will be no end to them. Perhaps some enterprising firm will try white balloons next. For saving so many white balloons you can get so many black stamps which you can exchange for so many pink discs which you can swap for … and so on, and so on, until they get wise to it, and it dawns on them that a better, saner way of making and distributing humanity’s wealth is so that it is strictly for use instead of for sale and letting all human beings have free access to it.

(Socialist Standard, March 1964)

The Miners’ Strike Remembered (2014)

From the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

One socialist recalls what made him class conscious

The 1984-85 Miners' Strike was a pivotal moment in my political education, a formative event in the development of my socialist class consciousness. After the death of Thatcher in April 2013 I was at a celebratory gathering in Trafalgar Square which was also attended by a few Geordie Miners who carried their North East Area NUM banner. In the old mining village of Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire an effigy of Thatcher was publicly burned. Seumas Milne wrote in The Enemy Within that 'films such as Billy Elliot and Brassed Off rammed home the devastation of the mining communities wrought by the politically driven closures.' Recently there have been released cabinet papers that reveal the Tory government had a secret plan to close 75 pits at the cost of 65,000 jobs, and that the government used police tactics to escalate the dispute. The IPCC is currently undertaking a preliminary assessment to decide whether it should launch a full inquiry into the 'Battle of Orgreave.'

On two occasions having my birthday in February meant the candles on my birthday cake were the only light in our house. In February 1972 a miners' strike led to power cuts, and the defeat for the Tory governmentpay policy. Again in February 1974 a miners' strike caused power cuts but this time Heath called a snap election asking 'who governs? The Tories or the Miners?' The British electorate told Heath it was not him.

On 18 March 1979 an explosion at the Golborne Colliery near Wigan in the St Helens coalfield killed 10 miners with one survivor, a 20-year old apprentice electrician called Brian Rawsthorne. Following the explosion Golborne was visited by the Labour government Secretary of State for Energy Tony Benn who said: 'It is the most terrible tragedy. I have come to express sympathy with the families. The human cost of coal is still a very high cost and we must never take it for granted.' On Boxing Day that year in Garswood, near Ashton-in-Makerfield my family were visiting my uncle who was a mining surveyor for the National Coal Board. The young Brian Rawsthorne was also a guest that day. As recent as September 2011, a miner was killed at the Kellingley colliery in North Yorkshire, and 4 miners were killed at Gleison colliery in South Wales.

Workshop of the world

In the nineteenth century Britain's industrial position as the 'workshop of the world' (Disraeli 1838) – reflected in the bourgeois triumph of the Great Exhibition of 1851 –was based on coal. In 1865 in The Coal Question the leading economist of the day, William Stanley Jevons wrote 'Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country, the universal aid, the factor in everything we do, a material of such myriad qualities, of such miraculous powers.' Britain had huge coalfields in South Wales, Lancashire, South Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland, employment in coal mining hit a peak of 1.3 million workers in 1920 with a production peak of 287 million tons in 1913. In 1983 production was still over 100 million tons and close to 200,000 miners still worked in the industry.

In 1956 in Coal is our Life, Dennis et al wrote 'The prestige of the miner in the working class is higher than it has ever been' but in some quarters there was a growing realisation of the 'state capitalist' nature of the nationalised coal industry. VL Allen in The Militancy of British Miners (1981) wrote that 'there existed a group of politically articulate miners who argued for the emancipation of their fellow miners from the conditions which made them compliant, vulnerable and dispensable wage labour.' Milne observed a 'visceral capitalist class fear of miners emerging from the bowels of the earth to demand their rights which touched a raw nerve'.

On 2 March 1984 the Miners' Strike began at the Cortonwood Colliery near Wath-upon-Dearne in South Yorkshire. On 6 March the government scrapped the 1974 NCB Plan for Coal and announced a closure plan. On 12 March the strike went national with 196,000 miners on strike. Chas Critcher in Working Class Culture (1979) wrote 'The miner may not think of wage labour or class consciousness as abstract categories, but he knows who pays his wages and what they get out of it, and hence sees that they are not on his side.'

At the end of March 1984 I heard the Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock speak about the Miners' Strike at Preston Polytechnic. Within days I had joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, was reading the Militant newspaper and essentially I had joined the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist organisation. There followed public meetings on the Miners' Strike at the Preston Trade Union Centre, a Militant Rally in Blackburn, attending branch meetings, and selling Militant in Preston town centre. I read the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels but the most important book to my then comrades in Militant was Lenin's What is to be Done? which describes a disciplined, centralised 'vanguard' party of dedicated revolutionaries (i.e. Militant) bringing socialist consciousness to the working class. I was always hearing the word 'cadre' and was told the situation in Liverpool where Militant controlled the City Council was akin to 'Petrograd in 1917.' I also helped out in the Labour Party rooms at the May local elections.

In June I knocked on doors in Preston collecting food for striking miners' families in the Lancashire coalfields. There were 6,500 Lancashire miners at 20 collieries in the Manchester coalfield, 26 collieries in Wigan, 22 in St Helens and 18 in Burnley. The working class are capable of organising their own affairs in common and this was clearly demonstrated by the mining communities pooling their energies and resources and taking what they needed from a common store. As Engels wrote 'the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting itself pleasantly. They have experienced hard times themselves, and can therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable, friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more than the property-holding class.'

18 June was a decisive day during the strike when 10,000 miners picketing at Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire were confronted by about 8,500 police from ten counties. The NUM planned to repeat the success of the picket at Saltley Coke Depot, Birmingham in 1972. At Orgreave coal was turned into coke for use in steel production and British Steel plants had been receiving 'dispensations': picket-permitted movements of coal to prevent damage to their furnaces. However it was discovered that British Steel was moving far more coal than the dispensations agreed. In the ensuing 'Battle of Orgreave' 93 miners were arrested, and 51 miners injured by the police. The BBC edited footage to alter the time-line of events to show police defending themselves from miners attacks when it was miners defending themselves against police attacks. Later 95 miners were charged with riot and unlawful assembly. In 1991 South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 to settle civil actions brought by 39 miners for what happened at and after Orgreave including for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution, but no police officer was ever disciplined for any misconduct.

In The Enemy Within Seamus Milne details the Tory government, police, MI5 and Special Branch tactics in the class war against the miners; tapping phones, checking bank deposits, forging documents, using agents provocateurs, providing disinformation to the media, surveillance of miners and the NUM, the DHSS withholding benefits to striking families, restrictive bail conditions and courts sequestering NUM funds. There was the creation of what ostensibly was a national police force, the police used as a paramilitary force, the police using road-block strategy stopping cars and buses and turning them back hundreds of miles from their destinations, and arresting miners if they strayed outside their home county. The criminal law was used against the miners even though picketing including secondary picketing was not an offence in criminal law.  

The Left

A few days after Orgreave I was in Leyland for a miners rally where I heard speeches by Dennis Skinner, ex-miner and Labour MP for Bolsover in the Derbyshire coalfield, and Peter Heathfield, NUM General Secretary. A 'Second Front' of strikes in the face of Tory anti-trade union legislation on secondary picketing was opened up in July with a 2 weeks national dock strike prompted by the use of contractors to unload iron ore at Immingham Docks. There were also prolonged 'wildcat' strikes at power stations in the Aire, Calder, Wharfe, and Ouse valleys in Yorkshire. Railway workers did not move coal trucks, and the railway workers at Shirebrook marshalling yards in Nottinghamshire right in the heart of scab country refused to move one ounce of coal throughout the year-long strike.

In September I came to London to read politics and philosophy at Thames Polytechnic in Woolwich, South East London. Leftwing politics were popular at the Poly; the SWP, the Labour Club which comprised the LPYS, i.e. Militant Tendency, the Socialist Labour Group, and the IMG. My first gig at the Poly in the Student Union Cellar Bar was a Miners' Benefit with The Three Johns and Hagar the Womb, a feminist anarcho-punk band. The Miners' Support Group was linked to the Kent NUM and the 3,000 miners at Betteshanger, Snowdown, and Tilmanstone collieries. In Plumstead I knocked on doors collecting food for striking miners families in the Kent coalfield.

NACODS, the Pit Deputies and safety officials union, wanted the NCB to withdraw the pit closure plan and a ballot on strike action was 82 percent in favour. Strike action was called off when the NCB and Government promised a modified colliery review procedure which was reneged on. If NACODS had gone on strike could the miners have won the strike?

In November I travelled on a hired bus with the Miners' Support Group and Labour Club to the NUM picket line at West Thurrock Power Station in Essex. Near to Christmas young miners from the Betteshanger Colliery in the Kent coalfield visited the Polytechnic and we spent hours drinking with them in the student union bars and later smoking hashish at our house in Charlton.

During the strike state capitalist Poland exported cheap, non-unionised coal to Britain demonstrating that the defeat of the Polish miners in their earlier efforts to form an independent trade union (Solidarnosc) contributed to the defeat of the British miners. The class war is not local but international and the interests of workers in one part of the world are the common interest of all workers. There were no power cuts in Britain in the winter of 1984-85. Later it was revealed that a $1 million donation by Soviet miners never reached Britain through the influence of Thatcher over Gorbachev when he visited Britain in December 1984.

Like many others in the world of art of performance, the 'alternative music scene' I followed was behind the Miners' Strike. Test Department, from New Cross in South East London collaborated with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir on the album Shoulder to Shoulder. The Redskins sang Keep on Keepin' On! about the Miners' Strike, and proceeds from Billy Bragg's Which Side are You On? and Paul Weller and the Council Collective's Soul Deep were donated to the striking miners fund.

Eventually, the Miners' Strike ended in defeat on 3 March 1985. Two miners had been killed during the strike, and three teenagers died picking coal from colliery waste heaps. During the strike police arrested 11,312 miners in England, Scotland and Wales. In December 2011 only 3,000 miners were left at 9 pits.

At the end of the strike I left 'leftist' politics and began over 25 years of counter-culturalism, beatnik-hipsterism, and armchair-anarchism. Then I discovered Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and realised the miners needed to go beyond fighting over wages and conditions in the industrial struggle and instead 'ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, abolition of the wages system.'

Steve Clayton

Greasy Pole: A Tale Of Two Constituencies (2014)

The Greasy Pole Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

At what may have been a bad time for him David Cameron made the most of it, perhaps in the hope that the term A Falkirk Experience would go down in history as epitomising the corruption of an election in order to gain power over a victorious puppet. Falkirk is a Scottish town which grew up in the Industrial Revolution, at the junction of two canals, into a major centre of the iron and steel industry. But it has not survived unchanged; where once they made carronades for the Royal Navy and pillar boxes for the post there are now what are called business parks and temples of retail such as Tesco, Asda and the Co-Op. Typical of such places in Scotland, Falkirk has been dominated by the Labour party, leaving any Tories like a threatened species. The MP between 2000 and 2012 was Eric Joyce but he was suspended from the Party after displaying a tendency to treat others with violence during a session in the Strangers' Bar at the Houses of Parliament. He has since then sat as an Independent while the local Labour Party has sorted out another, hopefully less impulsive, candidate.

Unite

But this was complicated by ruthless in-fighting driven by some over-active ambitions. The applicant favoured by the trade union Unite was Karie Murphy who, apart from a any other factor, is a friend of the union's General secretary Len McCluskey. It was quickly obvious that this was not to be a dispute among friends, settled by a hand shake. Ed Miliband described it as '...politics of the machine, politics of hatred'. The substance was that, as it was put by a Labour Party report, 'members were pressured into completing direct debit forms' for party membership; it was also alleged that some had been signed up into the party, through being in Unite, but without their knowledge. The matter was settled by the selection of Karen Whitfield to stand at the next election. In all it was a promising gift to Cameron, who made much of the influence of McCluskey on the Labour Party and what this said about the party's subservience nationally to the unions.

Deselection

Leaving the warring Labour factions in Falkirk and travelling south will bring you to North Yorkshire, where another constituency is looking for a candidate to contest the next general election. Thirsk and Malton is firmly Conservative, with Anne McIntosh winning the seat in 2010 on a majority of 11,281. It was not an uneventful victory for her. She had been previously elected in 1997 for the Vale of York and held the seat until it was abolished in 2006. She then applied to the Conservatives in Thirsk and Malton but her approach was not unanimously welcomed; she was selected as the candidate only after there had been an attempt to deselect her in August 2009. And when she won the seat in 2010 it was quickly apparent that the opposition to her was still strong. At present the reasons for this are confused; she has a reputation as a notably industrious MP but also as one liable to be aggressively divisive. During a surgery when she was MP for the Vale of York she angered a constituent by her refusal to discuss local opposition to a proposed incinerator plant so that he tipped a pint of beer over her (the surgery was being held in a pub). More recently, an opponent in Thirsk has said that she is 'a silly little girl' and Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage would be preferable as a candidate. Another describes her as 'a few peas short of a casserole'…another as 'a menace'. In response she has referred to them as 'a small cabal... or 'a narrow clique'. The contest in which she won the candidature at Thirsk and Malton has been described as 'unpleasant, leading to 'deep divisions'.

Right Wing

All of this is rather surprising in view of McIntosh' steadfast right wing opinions. She is against same sex marriages and fertility rights. In a recent debate in the Commons she questioned the sense of appointing female doctors because they would place 'a huge burden on the health service' by marrying and having children. Among other angry responses to this came from the wife of Andrew Mitchell – he of 'Plebgate' fame – who scorned her comments as 'not just insulting but a display of sexism that is simply not acceptable in this day and age'. (Of course McIntosh may have found some comfort in the applause from Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail). On wider issues she supported the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, is in favour of the Trident nuclear submarine, the hated 'bedroom tax', a fully privatised Royal Mail. .

Candidate

It says something about the turmoil in the Thirsk and Malton Tories that it took them three attempts to deselect her – and even then only after it was discussed at a four-hour meeting. In defiance McIntosh declares that she will stand again at the 2015 election, presumably in the hope that this will expose some of the party's malaise. In all these events a central figure has been Party chairman Peter Halkett Kinsman Steveney, known as 'the galloping major' because, apart from holding that exalted military rank, he is also a retired Jockey Club stewards' secretary. Steveney was heavily criticised in a report by Tory HQ over the 'fundamentally flawed' process of overthrowing McIntosh. While the battle was raging Steveney made no secret that his preference for the seat is one Edward Legard, Old-Etonian, St. Andrews University, Sandhurst ex-Light Cavalry officer, now a barrister and a judge and – in case these are not sufficient qualification, heir to an hereditary baronetcy. After making the usual noises about his immaculate intentions for the constituency and how innocent he is in the current infighting, Legard has avoided committing himself.

In Kilmarnock and Thirsk and Malton we have two constituencies whose political parties assert that they represent vitally different methods of managing the capitalist system. The current disputes reveal that it is only the personalities which vary. Common to them all is the basic function of repressing and exploiting the people who vote for them.

Ivan

‘Immigrants’: A Voice From the Past (2014)

From the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Think-tanks galore are releasing studies about income inequality. The Tories preach free markets as the answer to it while conveniently ignoring the failure of ‘trickle down’ economics. The Labour Party suggests the need for more social programmes while its left-wing argues for a greater redistribution of income in order to level the playing field. Of course, they will ignore the fact that decades of state-sponsored interventions have failed . What happens when inequality rises? Usually, a demagogue turns up to stir up the discontent and he or she will point the finger at ‘them’ for making things worse for ‘us’. It is all too easy to blame outsiders for causing problems such as unemployment, the housing crisis or even crime.

The employers pay as much as they have to pay, in order to carry out their profit-making enterprises. The employers pay scant attention to the cost of living, much less its quality. They pay for their workers what they have to on the open market. They do not care whether you are of 100 percent Anglo-Saxon stock, related to the best families in the land or just another ‘damned foreigner.’ The workers found this out long ago and began to organise unions, pledging one another not to work below a certain price. If they worked to get all available workers into the union and if they vigorously practised solidarity, they were better able to shift more of the burden of economic necessity from their own shoulders to the employer’s, and make him pay them a ‘living’ wage.

‘A Voice From The Aliens’  may possibly be one of the earliest appeals against blaming ‘immigrants’. It was produced in 1895 and was published in the name of several Jewish trade unions. Jewish refugees started to come to this country in the 1880s, fleeing from persecution and pogroms in Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia. At this time there were no immigration controls. However, there was very quickly racist agitation for such controls and unfortunately some in the trade union movement took up the demand for restrictions. Those who today argue for a ‘just’ immigration policy ought to realise that over a century ago some trade unionists were fighting controls in principle. They rejected the notion of ‘fair’ controls and instead appealed for workers’ solidarity against a system that exploits all workers.

‘It is, and always has been, the policy of the ruling classes to attribute the sufferings and miseries of the masses (which are natural consequences of class rule and class exploitation) to all sorts of causes except the real ones. The cry against the foreigner is not merely peculiar to England ; it is international. Everywhere he is the scapegoat for other's sins. Every class finds in him an enemy. So long as the Anti-Alien sentiment in this country was confined to politicians, wire-pullers, and to individual working men, we, the organised aliens, took no heed; but when this ill-founded sentiment has been officially expressed by the organised working men of England, then we believe that it is time to lift our voices and argue the matter out...’

The pamphlet counters with the conclusion:

 '...is [it]not rather the capitalist class (which is constantly engaged in taking trade abroad, in opening factories in China, Japan, and other countries) who is the enemy, and whether it is not rather their duty to combine against the common enemy than fight against us whose interests are identical with theirs...’

Precisely.

ALJO

Voice from the Back: Too Poor To Live (2014)

The Voice from the Back column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too Poor To Live

You would think that the purpose of medical research is to save lives. Think again, this is capitalism. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers said that his company's new cancer drug, Nexavar, isn't for Indians, but ‘for western patients who can afford it’. 'The drug, which is particularly effective on late-stage kidney and liver cancer, costs approximately $69,000 per year in India, so in March 2012 an Indian court granted a license to an Indian company to produce the drug at a 97 percent discount. Bayer sued Natco Pharma Ltd, but in March of last year, the High Court in Mumbai denied its appeal. Bayer CEO called the compulsory license issued by the Indian court ‘essentially theft,’ then said ‘we did not develop this medicine for Indians we developed it for western patients who can afford it’ (Raw Story, 26 January). The purpose of medical research, like everything else inside capitalism, is to make a profit.

Dying To Work

The owning class hate to see workers not working. After all they rely on them to produce the surplus value the owners live on. In addition the owning class have got to pay out sickness benefits. Last year they reckon it cost them about £13 billion. The present government have appointed the company ATOS to overhaul the benefits system. Its findings have not been without its critics though. 'One 39-year old woman from Livingston, near Edinburgh, was judged fit to work just weeks before she died. A heart and lung transplant patient from Essex died nine days after being declared well enough for employment' (Sunday Times, 9 February). C'mon workers so you are a bit knackered ... oops dead! Sorry about that.

Business As Usual

Every year the president of the USA gives a State of the Union speech. It is usually the same old guff about how marvellous everything is inside capitalism, but this year there was a slight difference. ‘Those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by –let alone get ahead. And too many still aren't working at all’ (Independent, 29 January). It is indicative of how awful capitalism has become that even the president of the USA has to acknowledge it. Needless to say however he will carry on running capitalism the only way it can be run –in the interests of the owning class based on the exploitation of the working class. 

American Nightmare

The USA is often depicted as the embodiment of the virtues of modern capitalism but we are indebted to the American economist Paul Krugman for this expose of its less than perfect characteristics: 'What do we know about long-term unemployment in America? First, it's still at near-record levels. Historically, the long-term unemployed –those out of work for 27 weeks or more - have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. Yet extended unemployment benefits, which went into effect in 2008, have now been allowed to lapse. As a result, few of the long-term unemployed are receiving any kind of support' (New York Times, 9 February). Hardly the American dream is it?

Knightsbridge Bargain

While many workers scrimp and save in an effort to get together a deposit for a mortgage it is worthwhile looking at how the owning class live. 'An allotted space in an underground car park has gone on sale for £400,000. The space, near the Royal Albert Hall, Knightsbridge, is large enough for a Rolls-Royce Phantom and comes with metal lockable doors' (Times, 13 February). You homeless workers will be glad to know that the agent Hobart Slater said ‘We've already had plenty of interest in the space.’