Glasgow branch members have agreed to meet at George Square
on Saturday, June 20 from 11am onwards, where the STUC demonstrators will be
gathering for an anti-austerity protest. The socialist alternative to this
anti-austerity protest will be the distribution of 2000 flyers advertising the
branch's meeting on Wednesday, June 24. Austerity - How to End It? 7 pm at Maryhill Community Centre, Maryhill Rd
Capitalism is the accumulation of resources by means of
exploitation in the production and sale of commodities for profit. Capitalist
exploitation is an unequal exchange wherein capitalists extract income from
economic exchanges solely because they hold legal title to productive assets.
At all points of exchange in production, capitalists have institutionalized
coercive power as employers, bosses, lenders, and landlords. Capital that has
extended its influence over these new territories knows its own interests,
works together in its common interests even while individual capitals compete
and coordinates its goals and its strategies in its common interest. There will
always be social inequality, because that increases profits; winners win more
because losers lose more. Today, the richest two percent of adults own more
than half the world’s wealth, while the richest tenth own 85 percent of the
world’s assets. Within this small elite, a fraction embedded in financial
capital owns and controls the bulk of the world’s assets and organizes and facilitates
further concentration of conglomerates. Historically, warfare has been an
instrument of economic conquest. This form of structural violence has led to
the death of countless hundreds of millions of people, and the deprivation of
thousands of millions of others.
There has been many recent calls for the British left either
to “reclaim Labour” or to build a new party (Left Unity or TUSC.) What we see
today is a wholesale embrace of anti-working-class reformism, with attempts to
create whole new reformist parties to replace the discredited ones. In some
cases, the left are already taking the logic of their shift further by
endeavouring to openly collaborate with openly capitalist parties such as the
SNP. They use the term “socialist” to describe the new coalitions they are
forming, in order to camouflage their lists of palliatives, often phrased so
broadly as not to offend. Reformism is not a moderate or slow road to socialism
but a hindrance and diversion to achieving it.
Socialists need to avoid both nostalgia and amnesia
At present, more than 50% of the British public (working or
not) depend on welfare benefits of some kind. That is because Britain is a
relatively high unemployment, low waged and low skilled economy. An economy
dominated by the principles of the ‘free-market’ but one in which the taxpayer
effectively subsidises the employer to order to keep their wage bill low. British
politics is influenced by various levels of liberal ideology, notions of the
free market, self-interest, self-reliance and self-responsibility. Notions that
also seep into the public consciousness to become the ‘norm’ that people
regulate their behaviour by, and monitor the behaviour of others. We hear daily
from our politicians and our media about the need to end Britain’s ‘something
for nothing culture’, about ‘some’ people not being self-responsible enough,
and about the need of government to support ‘hard working families’ – policies
that encourage the philosophy of ‘hard work’, not erode it. While at the same time
subtlety insinuating that both the unemployed and the disabled are social
groups who contain certain ‘rogue’ elements that need weeding out - scroungers,
spongers and layabouts. As far back as 2007, a national British Social
Attitudes survey indicated that the general public believed that at least 35%
of all benefit claimants were fraudsters. It is an approach while aimed solely
at gathering support amongst the general public for cuts to welfare spending.
The capitalist argument is that a person should work for
whatever a prospective employer wants to offer them, no matter how low those
wages happen to be. That is the basic philosophy of the ‘free market’, a market
place where goods and skills are not only exchanged for money, but where people
compete with each other for employment. The actual numbers of unemployed
benefit claimants removed from the welfare system by sanctions are reported to
be as high as 500,000. Between 2008 and 2013, 76,300 sick or disabled claimants
of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) had their welfare benefits cut or
stopped completely. Of course, many of these decisions were overturned as
unfair after many months of appeals, and after many months of stress.
Are benefit sanctions here to stay? The simple answer is
yes. Labour have publically stated that they are committed to keeping welfare
sanctions applied to the unemployed and the disabled in place. However, what
the Labour Party is also committed to, is the removal of sanction ‘targets’,
something that the present government deny are in operation. But how can a
future Labour administration remove something that at present is said not to
even exist?
Despite years of global economic crisis and austerity there
has been little effective political mobilization in favour of a socialist
alternative. It is true that struggles have erupted with large scale protests
and movements against austerity but none have posed the comprehensive challenge
to capitalism as underlying cause of the effects (inequality and poverty) to
which these movements responded. Hierarchical organization, and not capitalism
per se, is often identified as the enemy. Suspicion runs high against the very
idea of political power as necessary to advancing egalitarian and democratic
values. Autonomous withdrawal into local alternative economies, and lifestyle
changes are far more attractive to activists than the need for a genuine
socialist party and political action. Many radicals have often not identified
their goals explicitly with socialism. What some people often do not realise,
when they are motivated by immediate threats to access to fundamental
life-requirements like health care, is the actual opposition they are offering
to the dominant institutions and value system of capitalism. There may be some
self-conscious revolutionaries or anti-capitalists in the ranks of protestors,
but many may have no explicit interest in politics beyond the immediate
struggle. One key to building the case for socialism is to find arguments
convincing to those who are concerned to preserve unpaid access to life-goods
that what they are essentially defending is the free access socialist
alternative to capitalism. Everything that creates well-being is being eroded
by capitalism – water and sewage systems for all, roads and open public spaces
without cost to use, public libraries with unpriced books and films, free healthcare
and disease-prevention, security from unemployment, old age and disability, health
and safety laws and environmental regulations, free primary to higher education
and accessible family housing. These are the things that workers seek and
socialism provides. The good life for human beings does not conform to what
capitalism offers.
We know that people threatened by austerity are willing to
resist its assaults on their life-conditions and resistance has sometimes
delivered victories. Simply exchanging one ruling class for another without
transforming collective life and individual life will lead to the same problems
being repeated. A different vision must take us beyond the exploitative,
alienating, oppressive, and life-destructive practices of capitalism.
Revolution cannot be reduced to simple calls for redistribution and defence of
public services. It has to be a different road for society.
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
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