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Friday, August 10, 2012

world capitalism

The Olympics has been a frenzy of patriotism for Team GB. No doubt when the Commonwealth Games arrive in Glasgow a similar outpouring of nationalism for the Scottish athletes can be expected. In the independence referendum we will also meet those illusory phrases “national economic interest,” “national security,” and “national unity.”  In the patriotic fog we will be urged to ignore class divisions and join with the bankers and bosses, sacrificing our own worker interests for the “good of the nation.”  The capitalist economy can never work for all of us, because it’s designed for the wealthy. To be patriotic, workers are told they must nobly sacrifice to save the economy and the nation. A load of Bull.
 Nationalists pit Scottish workers against their class allies in other countries. It’s a way of diverting workers’ anger toward other countries’ labourers and away from the real cause of the economic crisis — the profit system. We have much more in common with sweat-shop workers in India, strikers in Spain  and protesters in Greece, than with capitalists from Scotland. Working people can improve their conditions by uniting with their mates across borders, instead of swallowing patriotic slogans against their own class interests. Paid propagandists whose job is to mystify and distract us while the ultra rich steal what little we have left. We have all heard reams of economic analysis. Many countries have announced that they are running out of money, and the solution they offer, everywhere on the planet, is pretty much the same.  People worldwide are told to expect less employment, lower salaries, reduced pensions and benefits, higher retirement ages, health care that is less available, more expensive, and lower quality, fewer government welfare services, etc.  You have heard the endless mantra, that we all must tighten our belts.

“Shared sacrifice” means accepting speed-ups, redundancies, and pay cuts. It means agreeing to austerity without rocking the boat with protests and strikes — all for the good of “our” national economy! The notion that a company or corporate executive or wealthy entrepreneur is bound by an allegiance to their country of origin is passé. The elite capitalists of today are bound to one another, not to countries. They meet at the same conferences, like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the The Bilderberg Group annual geopolitic forum. They stay at the same 5-star hotels, lease the same private jets, dine at the same 5-star restaurants, meet up with Bono and Geldof, and ceaselessly travel the globe together, with homes on every continent, taking up residence according to the season. Their allegiances extend beyond the borders of their nation-states of origin, and they could care less about the toiling class in any particular country where they do business. The common denominator of global corporations is cheap labour; they hover like bees around honey, wherever cheap labour is to be found,  combing the world for the loosest regulations. They are a transglobal community who have more in common with one another than with their supposed country-men back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in Edinburgh or London, Moscow or Mumbai, the super-rich are a nation unto themselves. Several thousand people control the world of finance and politics. They control food, energy, employment, real estate, health care, the police, the army, and the air force, and we control nothing. This global ruling class controls the levers of decision-making of the IMF, World Bank, the EU, and the WTO. World capitalism is a multi-headed hydra. International capitalism has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to maintain class power worldwide sharply in its favour and to undermine the strength of working class movements around the world. The gap between the richest 1% and the rest of us is the greatest it's ever been and growing. Yes, there is class warfare and the rich are winning.

The labour movement can be seen as in crisis, with trade union membership falling and increasingly discredited by their complicity with capitalist austerity programs. New fronts of anti-capitalist activity have been opened, away from the traditional structures.  The recent Occupy Movement is a reminder that the class struggle is still alive. The fatally compromised nature of trade unions under capital points the way toward different means of building struggles. Again an  example is the Occupy movement's clarion call of the 99% against capital. Yet for all the class struggle that’s been staged in the streets and squares, and despite what has been accomplished, those who govern and manage capital are still effectively making it harder for working people to survive. The changing shape of the labour market has called into question the labour movement as the chief conduit of struggle against capitalism. For example, an increasing amount of workers are employed in precarious conditions, and in part-time, temporary and fleeting forms of employment not immediately associated with the traditional base of trade union membership. These workers, the precariat as they have been called, do not fit so easily into the template of "workers". Their sense of individual identity and collective position as workers in the capitalist system is less pronounced. 

Did the workers cause the recession?  We lived exactly as we lived when we were being told that times were good. Whatever happened to the global economy was not caused by us. That is a fact. Yet it is also a fact that we are being forced to pay for it, for decades to come. Meanwhile, the rich really are getting richer.  Not even they deny it. How exactly is that happening, when all the rest of us are hard pressed to feed the family? The rich cut wages and pay everybody less, while demanding greater productivity.  Then they charge us more for everything. So their profits are soaring. The war of the rich against the rest of us has been going on since time immemorial.  This is blatant theft by the ruling class and amounts to class war on a global scale, and they have, quite literally, all the big guns. So don’t expect anything to get better with or without a sovereign government in Edinburgh.

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