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Friday, December 02, 2016

The Capitalist Tricksters

The Socialist Party does not see itself as a part of the Left and view Left and Right as being outmoded bourgeois terms reflecting different aspects of managing the capitalist system which it opposes. Corbyn is as much a part of the problem even though he, probably genuinely, wishes to reform it. But his reforms are just not socialism or even 'socialistic'. As Tony Benn once pointed out, “The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England.

We do not have problem with any individual who has enough capital to start up a business and employ others, it is in their economic or class interests to do so and maximise accumulation, but their motivation is to profit from it and certainly not a philanthropic desire to create work for others. We have yet to meet a business-person who worried about how many jobs they were creating, though we have met many anxious ones worried as consequence of how many they would have to shed but increase or accelerate the rate of exploitation to maintain profit accumulation. Capital (stolen from surplus value created by workers) is not invested to create jobs, but to create profit accumulation. This could just as likely take the form of reducing worker numbers and increasing the rate of exploitation of the remaining workers. The purpose of investment, the driving motivation, is to create profit for the parasite class. All wealth springs from labour. It is inevitable that workers are employed, where else would the wealth come from, but this is a consequence of the workers capacity to create a surplus over and above their subsistence and maintenance (waged ration) and not the motivating factor of deploying capital (stolen surplus value), which is profit from exploitation.

As Robert Tressell put it, the workers are the real philanthropists.
Video version of The Great Money Trick explained here.  

The global economy is in a periodic slump so the fat cats can sit it out until it picks up again. Credit Suisse have produced their Global Wealth Report for 2016. It notes, for instance, that 'the 33 million parasite millionaires comprise less than 1% of the adult population, but own 46% of household wealth.' There's lots more data there.
The report can be downloaded from here
https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/research-institute/publications.html
The capitalist baby is a monstrous irreformable creature which requires to be drowned forever before it conducts more war science upon hapless civilians such as at Nagasaki or Hiroshima. I do not share your happy-clappy view of capitalism. It is presently the only show in town to be sure, but this is no reason to abandon the only solution to it, regardless of how our class enemies or erstwhile shamefaced supporters of Leftist variants, bring disrepute to its name or traduce the idea of real communism.

A socialist world will, of course, be what we all make it. Everyone's ideas and efforts will contribute. Everyone will if they choose to, have an equal voice in the democratic decisions that are taken. Perhaps this is one thing about socialist society that most of us today would find strikingly different – the amount of discussion that will take place about what things are to be made and built. There will be no market forces offering a quick profit in plastic handbags or causing a shutdown in shipping. There will be no governments imposing taxes, preparing for germ warfare, tapping telephones or closing hospitals. Road-building, shipping, agriculture, manufacturing, distribution, services, entertainment – these things will be everybody's concern. And these things – not crimes or wars – will be news. The whole pattern of production and distribution will become a conscious social process.
We don’t need to become Super Man.  We are ordinary men and women who aspire to do extraordinary things, a class in itself yet to become a class for itself and then to end classes. I think the 'withering away', Engels referred to was that of government as in the state becoming obsolete, as we captured it initially to avoid its coercive apparatus being used to prevent the revolution, being shorn of this repressive possibility and useful parts retained directed over things, rather than over people. The politicians are powerless to do anything other than attempt to manage us in the interests of the global parasite class. All government is over us.

There are not too many people on the planet just too many poor people, but that can be sorted out with a social revolution to make it a commonly owned world.


Wee Matt


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