A Murderous Society

Poverty, war and starvation are ever present social problems inside capitalism, but there is another one - murder. 'Almost 1.2 million people have been murdered in Brazil in the last three decades, making the country more deadly than some war zones, new figures show.' (Times, 20 July) Yet despite this murder rate of 27.4 per 100,000 inhabitants Brazil is only the seventh most dangerous country in the world. The Centre for Latin American Studies  claim that the most murderous was El Salvador, followed by the Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Colombia and Guatemala. RD

Food for thought

 

The world's capitalist class and politicians, who attempt to administer capitalism's day-to-day functioning, do anything to solve the problem when global warming promises rich profits. An article in The Toronto Star, May 4^th focused on interest in agriculture in Greenland. Potatoes, thyme, tomatoes, green peppers and strawberries are being grown there. In Southern Greenland hay is now being grown. Sheep farms have increased in size, and  supermarkets sell locally grown vegetables. Greenland's government set up a commission to study how climate change can help farmers increase production and replace expensive imported foods. Throughout the Arctic, the thawing of the ice sheets has seen a boost in oil and mining exploration. This is a much more sought after development by the profit makers, natural disasters be damned. If the owners and controllers of production will do nothing about global warming, then, of course, it is up to the world's working class to act politically to put an end to the capitalist system. John Ayers

Sleeping with the enemy

The Loony Left-Nationalists' flag

The Socialist Party argues that the important division is one of class, not of nation. We argue that the working class in Glasgow has much more in common with the workers of London than they do with the Highland lairds or the fund-managers in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Sq. Our goal is a socialist world without states or countries. We organise to overcome the capitalist system and  transform our economy – ridding ourselves of exploitation, environmental destruction, and oppression that comes with it.

The capitalist class is international – state borders do not divide them. The working class, on the other hand, are separated  by these borders. They prevent us from travelling freely, they restrict us to where we live and work. Borders hinder workers unity in resisting employers.  The capitalist class organises internationally. And it wants to obstruct our class from doing the same. The Scottish working class is exploited in the same way as the English working class, the same way as the German or French worker: by the Scottish, English, British , European and international capitalists and in many cases, by the very same multi-national corporation. The social evils experienced by the Scottish  people are the very same miseries shared by workers of all nations. Austerity doesn’t stop at the border. An independent government in Scotland  would make all the same cuts to working class living standards if the capitalist ruling class demanded it, and it would put corporations and profits before the needs of the people. And to counter the ensuing class conflict and to prevent the rapid disillusionment of many men and women workers, an independent Scottish government would exploit nationalistic feelings to the hilt. It would strongly encourage narrow-nationalism, pushing for “national unity”, extolling sacrifice for the “pride of the nation.”

All countries are quite ready to condemn “in the abstract” international suspicion and mistrust, while each one individually insists upon an absolute national sovereignty which makes international order impossible. Yet, the fact is, a  small insignificant independent nation-state can no longer remain isolated from the world-economy. This shapes our view on nationalism. There is no difference between a group of workers oppressed by a foreign power or corporation and those oppressed by domestic rulers. You are either the voice of the capitalist class or of the working class, you can’t be both. The Socialist Party of Great Britain want Scots and every other worker around the globe united for socialism not divided by nationalism. We want a world without borders. Supporting Scottish independence takes time and resources away from this far more worthy and pressing matter.

A good socialist will not say “you are independent” or “you should fight for independence”. A good socialist will say “you are not independent and you should not be. You are dependent on the working class of the world and they are dependent on you. We all depend on each other.”

Hungry for justice

The Scottish comedian,  Frankie Boyle, has joined campaigners who are attempting a symbolic  hunger strike for a combined total of 1,000 hours  to highlight the case of Shaker Aamer - the last UK resident being held at Guantanamo Bay.

Aamer, from London, has been detained in the military prison for 11 years without being charged or tried. Since February, 100 of the 166 prisoners still held have been refusing food in protest at their detention. Human rights campaigners Reprieve are supporting the hunger-strikers by encouraging supporters to give up food temporarily.

 Now in his second term as president, Barack Obama has still failed to make good on his election promise to close Guantanamo prison.

Food for thought

A report by the Norwegian Refugee Councils Displacement Monitoring Centre claims that in 2012 32 million people were forced to flee their homes because of floods, storms, and earthquakes, almost twice as many as in 2011. Gordon McBean, the director of research at Western University's Centre for Environment and Sustainability in London, Ontario commented on the report, " 32 Million people, that is the human cost of climate change. The impact of climate change
isn't small, that's what these numbers say." No part of this world is immune from floods -- India, Nigeria, The Philippines, Russia, Spain, China, Pakistan, and the US that led to 775,000 people fleeing their homes. Nor will things improve any time soon. According to the report, "Climate change is expected to influence
the frequency and intensity of weather extremes over the coming decades." John Ayers

Anti-Imperialism = Anti-Socialism

The concept of 'anti-imperialism' is rooted in nationalism, since it assumes that there is something unnatural about one 'country' exploiting the resources of another 'country'. All nations were created through an imperialist process that involved the homogenisation of an area under a particular local elite, and that involved the explotation of wage differences creaming off of surplus. Look at how industrial Italy dominated south, agrarian Italy.

Was the struggle by the US southern states anti-imperialist? Would the southern USA workers and slaves have been better off exploited by their local ruling class?

An anti-imperial analysis seems to get in the way of a class analysis too much -- especially since a useful class analysis should be rooted in immediate experience and struggle, not worked out using an economist's slide-rule.

 'Anti-Imperialism' is anti-socialist because it leads us to support smaller controlling elites, or ignore the damage they do, in favour of just concentrating on the USA or European powers, etc.

The concept of 'anti-imperialism' comes from Lenin's immediate political needs during the USSR's war against France and Britain in 1918-24, during which any defeat for the imperial powers was good for the USSR -- and thus the working class, of course -- and so the Bolsheviks championed nationalists in  Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Similarly, later during the Cold War the USSR supported local nationalisms in order to oppose US hegemony.

The Crisis

A crisis is caused by capitalists choosing not to buy, that is, not to invest profits because they judge they won't make any profits or not enough. Workers cannot be indifferent to a crisis, no matter how much we are disgusted by the predictable pendulum swing between “boom” and “bust”, because our lives can be directly influenced by today’s financial turbulence. But at the same time, we have no interest whatsoever in thinking up ways to put capitalism “back on track” or make it “healthy” again. Even when the system is in tip-top shape it works directly counter to the interests of workers. The crisis will not miraculously or mechanically turn every worker into a socialist, as some hope, but it does at least create a situation where socialists may find workers more willing to consider an alternative to capitalism. It is up to us, as socialists, to present that alternative in a convincing way based on our understanding of the essential nature and limitations of the capitalist system.

 Could the present slump really last for a decade or more? The truth is we don’t know and can’t know. The future course of capitalism is largely unpredictable. Economic forecasting is no more reliable than an astrological horoscope. All we can say with certainty is that it is an irrational system.

A number of quite distinct and separate things need to happen before a slump can run its course. Firstly, capital has to be wiped out if excess productive capacity is to be tackled with devalued capital being bought cheaply by those enterprises in the best position to survive the slump. Secondly, de-stocking needs to take place, with overproduced commodities bought up cheaply or written off entirely. Investment will not resume if overproduction still exists. Thirdly, after this has occurred there needs to be an increase in the rate of industrial profit helped both by real wage cuts and falling interest rates (which tail off naturally as the demand for more money capital eases off in the slump). This will help renew investment and increase accumulation. Also, if recovery is to be sustained, a large proportion of the debt built up during the boom years will need to be liquidated, if it is not to act as a drag on future accumulation. Through these mechanisms a slump helps build the conditions for future growth, ridding capitalism of inefficient units of production. When these processes have run their course, accumulation and growth can begin once more with capitalism again creating a boom situation, which will be inevitably followed by a crisis and slump. This has been the history of capitalism ever since it first developed. Far from being an aberration, this cycle of misery is the natural cycle of capitalism.

A Strange Sense Of Values

A study was carried out on behalf of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) by experts at Loughborough University. This being capitalism it concentrated on what the problem was costing local authorities. The figures taken city by city were hardly surprising. Birmingham £914 m per year, Manchester £446m and Glasgow £395m. 'An estimated 36,367 children in Glasgow live below the poverty line, according to the research. ....... Statistics from the Scottish government last month revealed 710,000 people north of the border - including 150,000 children - were living in relative poverty in 2011-12.' (BBC News) The figures may not be surprising but the "experts" emphasis on what it costs local authorities rather than what it costs in human misery tells us a lot about their sense of values. RD

Safety first?

There has been a large decline in the number of workplace inspections carried out by the Health and Safety Executive in Scotland over the past three years, according to new figures.

Despite significant numbers of fatal injuries in the agriculture, construction and service industries, checks have fallen in all three sectors.

Better futility than false roads

Our flag is the red flag

The capitalist class has managed society and its management has failed yet workers have not rallied to the red flag.

Will socialism benefit people, the Socialist Party is asked.  Will rest benefit the weary? Will food benefit the starving?  Will fresh air benefit the suffocating?

Some have convinced themselves that socialism is dead as a door nail.  We do not agree. Nor do we wholly accept that leaders have led the movement astray. The movement – that is to say the socialist movement – has not been led astray. But the general movement of the working class refused to support the socialist movement; and its leaders watched for what way to jump, and led their forces, not in the way the workers should have gone, but in the way they wished to go.

It seems rather inconsistent now however, to chide the workers for having preferred “Labourism” to socialism when, for they were advised to do so by all its present critics on the Left. They lost sight that if the wrong road be taken, every mile travelled takes us only farther from the right one and  after years of marching along the wrong road they now find themselves wallowing in the New Labour swamp. Socialists have never wearied in pointing out the right road; but the mass of the workers have preferred to take the wrong way, encouraged to do so by the Left-wingers.

 If they want socialism, they must join the Socialist Party, and agitate, educate, and organise for socialism.  Workers must rightly use their political power. But they have not done so.

 Capitalism leads to the bloodiest anarchy, to the destruction of the few cultural achievements which have been created, to the deepest misery of the masses and their literal enslavement, seared into the minds of the of the working class.

The “Communist” Parties have failed to offer the masses a substantial alternative. With a blindness which only shows how superficial their socialist knowledge has been and  miscalculating the distance which separated their countries from the situation in which the Russian Bolsheviks had found themselves they rejected the weapon of parliamentary agitation and education, and thereby, ruled themselves off the political stage, and condemned themselves to an existence in obscurity. Their repeated attempts at insurrection found no echo among the still unenlightened masses, and far from succeeding in becoming a political and social force, have now hopelessly split into several factions. Thus everything the Leninists advocated combined in preventing the development of the revolution from a political into a social one.

 The revolution cannot be vague uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people—a blind and instinctive knee-jerk reflex to hurt and suffering . On the contrary, it has to be intellectual; a movement based upon economic necessity and  in line with social evolution. Socialists are no starved slaves but working people who see the shambles waiting for them and  their children and recoil from the descent into barbarism.

AJJ

Principles And Profits

 

The British government likes to portray itself as an organisation of the highest moral standards on such issues as human rights. When it comes to making profits however such high principles are soon forgotten.'The UK government has approved more than 3,000 export licences for military sales to countries which it believes have questionable records on human rights, MPs say. The House of Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls says the value of the existing export licences to the 27 countries in question exceed £12bn. This includes significant sales to China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.' (BBC News, 17 July) Although the current policy states that they cannot issue licences where there is a clear risk that the proposed export might provoke or prolong internal conflicts or repression, this has not stopped them dealing with Egypt. When there is a £12bn business at risk principles count for little. RD

The N.H.S. Farce

The present government are blaming previous Labour governments for the current failure of care in the NHS. Needless to say the Labour Party are blaming them. None of them are blaming capitalism of course. 'The shocking conditions in Britain's hospitals have been laid bare by an official report which disclosed that failings uncovered in NHS wards were so bad that inspectors felt compelled to abandon their impartial roles and step in to alleviate patient suffering. ..... Eleven NHS trusts were put into "special measures" after an investigation found thousands of patients died needlessly because of poor care.' (Daily  Telegraph, 17 July) Medical care is like everything else inside capitalism. If you have the money you can get the best of care, if not you have to make do with the cheap and shoddy. RD

Facts of the Day

An estimated 36,367 children in the Glasgow City Council area are living below the poverty line, according to the research.

Statistics from the Scottish Government last month revealed 710,000 people north of the border - including 150,000 children - were living in relative poverty in 2011-12.

The number of people sleeping rough on the streets of Scotland exceeds 1,700. The highest numbers of rough sleepers are in the Edinburgh and Dundee council areas, Edinburgh had 363 rough sleeper cases and Dundee had 97.

Paranoid Politics

 Conspiracy theories are not new – far from it. But with the arrival of the internet offering easy dissemination and access to them conspiracy theories have proliferated and taken hold even amongst those who claim to be sophisticated and well-educated. Conspiracy theorists gain plausibility by taking established fact and embellishing it, so that one can’t tell where truth ends and fiction begins.

Major events cannot, in the popular mind, have trivial causes, because our world-view cannot allow it. Believing ourselves to be rational creatures in a supposedly ordered and rational universe, we shy away from the hideous tyranny of randomness, that force of Nature which defies our control and thus denies us our sense of meaning and “place” in the world. Thus, JFK, who ninety percent of Americans believe could not possibly have been killed by one lone fantasist with a rifle and some personal issues but with rather good eyesight and some luck. Princess Diana didn’t die because a driver got drunk, it was all a vast conspiracy involving the top echelons of power. Ditto John Lennon that the blame is again placed upon the "lone nutter" who had been receiving treatment for paranoid schizophrenia for his entire life since childhood but rather Chapman was being used as a "Manchuran Candidate" by Richard Nixon. Ditto 9/11, which clearly couldn’t have been simply the work of a few terrorists who got very, very lucky.

Conspiracy theorists take the view that the modern world must be controlled from the top – someone, somewhere must be pulling the strings, somehow. The conspiracy theorists interpret every event (even contradictory ones) as being evidence that everything is under some group’s secret control. The stock-in-trade of the conspiracy writers is rumour, innuendo, guilt-by-association and half-knowledge passed off as fact and a re-iteration of the inter-connection of some sections of the capitalists class (the Rothschilds, being an example).

The conspiratorial world-view is certainly not promoting an understanding of society. Those unfamiliar with the analysis of Marxian economics are yet to realise that at the heart of the capitalist economy is a genuine “anarchy of production”. Conspiracy theorists' assertions that a complex, technologically advanced society like capitalism cannot be at root “anarchic” in many of its operations, are misplaced. There are conspiracies all the time. Big ones tend to spring leaks however, and rarely last without being "outed". The capitalist class is not a conspiracy, not because it is democratic and transparent in its dealings which it very clearly isn’t but because it is not united, as the Illuminati presumably are. Because of the anarchic, competitive and contradictory nature of capitalism a conflict-free “New World Order” is practically impossible.

Scientific issues can be vulnerable to misinformation campaigns. Many people still believe that vaccines cause autism and that human-caused climate change is a hoax. Science has thoroughly debunked these myths, but the misinformation persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. Efforts to combat conspiracies can often backfire.

"You have to be careful when you correct misinformation that you don't inadvertently strengthen it. If the issues go to the heart of people's deeply held world views, they become more entrenched in their opinions if you try to update their thinking." says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia.

Psychologists call this reaction “belief perseverance” - maintaining your original opinions in the face of overwhelming data that contradicts your beliefs. Everyone does it to a certain extent , but we are especially vulnerable when invalidated beliefs form a key part of how we understand and live our lives. Researchers have found that religious faiths  are especially vulnerable to belief perseverance but also how we view ourselves. A  study  found that people are more likely to continue believing incorrect information if it makes them look good by enhancing ones self-image.

For example, if an individual has become known in her community for purporting that vaccines cause autism, she might build her self-identity as someone who helps prevent autism by campaigning for parents to avoid vaccination. Admitting that the studies  linking autism to the MMR vaccine were mistaken would diminish her self-respect. In this circumstance, it is easier to continue believing that autism and vaccines are linked, according to Dartmouth College political science researcher Brendan Nyhan. "It's threatening to admit that you're wrong," he says. "It's threatening to your self-concept and your world-view."

We are more likely to believe a statement if it confirms our preexisting beliefs, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Accepting a statement also requires less cognitive effort than rejecting it. Even simple traits such as language can affect acceptance: Studies have found that the way a statement is printed or voiced (or even the accent) can make those statements more believable. Also hence the debate on how the question in the up-coming Scottish independence referendum should be exactly phrased.

Correcting misinformation, however, isn't as simple as presenting people with true facts. When someone reads views from the other side, they will create counter-arguments that support their initial viewpoint, bolstering their belief of the misinformation. Retracting information does not appear to be very effective either. Some researchers have published retractions, and at best, halved the number of individuals who believed misinformation.

But it is not all bad news. There is now near-universal agreement that smoking is addictive and can cause cancer. In the 1950s smoking was considered a largely safe lifestyle choice—so safe that it was allowed almost everywhere and physicians appeared in ads to promote it. The tobacco industry carried out a misinformation campaign for decades, reassuring smokers that it was okay to light up, offering biased scientific reports and suppressing research while discrediting whistle-blowers. Over time opinions began to shift as overwhelming evidence of ill effects was made public by more and more scientists and health administrators. Smokers could now personally understand and have the association of their individual hacking cough confirmed with its cause.

 The Food and Agriculture Organisation is convinced there is sufficient global capacity to produce enough food to adequately feed the world’s seven billion people and many more besides. But globally a billion people go to sleep every night without eating dinner, and extreme poverty, 1.2 billion people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day. A child dies every 10 seconds from malnutrition – not because their parents are reckless, stupid or lazy – but because they were unlucky enough to be born at a time and place where tragically,  people cannot afford to buy the food that is available. This is a known but socialists must break through the conspiracy that declares it an unavoidable condition and an inevitable situation.

Capitalism And Crime

Any TV viewer is aware that one of the most popular themes in dramas is crime and its solution. Super smart policemen solve baffling crimes inside the stipulated hour programme. It is all very reassuring but unfortunately it is complete nonsense. Britain's biggest police  force is "screening out" almost half of its crimes after deciding that they are too hard to solve. 'The Metropolitan Police stopped investigating 76 per cent of motor vehicle theft, 40 per cent of burglaries and 23 per cent of robberies at an early stage in the past year. Forty-five per cent of a total of 770,448 crimes in the Met's area were "screened out".' (Times, 16 July) Why don't they send for Miss Marples or Hercules Poirot? RD

Doom and Gloom Again

The pharmaceutical industry, like oil companies and arms manufacturers, isn’t viewed highly in the public imagination. And for good reason. There is growing awareness of an inherent conflict of interest in the testing of drugs by the companies that manufacture them — like Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly — and a steady stream of tales from journalists, researchers and doctors of deliberately dodgy trials, buried unfavorable results, and purchased academic journals.

Yet the greatest crime of the world’s major private pharmaceutical companies is not what they do, but what they don’t do.

Antibiotics revolutionized healthcare. In the ongoing war against bugs and infection, these companies have abandoned their posts at the most critical time: when the enemy is mounting its most ferocious attack in generations. As these firms continue to shirk their duties — effectively abandoning antibiotic research for some 30 years now — senior public health officials are warning that the world could soon return to the pre-antibiotic era, a miserable, fearful time that few people alive now remember. We have forgotten how common and deadly infectious disease once was. We’ve taken antibiotics for granted, but we can hardly blame ourselves for such complacency.

The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, warned authorities of their “limited window of opportunity” to deal with the “nightmare” presented by the rise of a family of bacteria highly resistant to what are often our last line of antibiotic defense: the suite of drugs known as carbapenems. A few months earlier, the UK’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, used similar language to describe a future “apocalyptic scenario” in 20 years’ time, when people will be dying from infections that are currently understood to be trivial, “because we have run out of antibiotics.” Davies described how the phenomenon “poses a catastrophic threat” to humanity akin to that of climate change and imagined a scenario in the coming decades in which “we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar to the early 19th Century,” where any one of us could go to the hospital for minor surgery and die from an ordinary infection that can no longer be treated. Major interventions like organ transplants, chemotherapy, hip replacements and care for premature babies will become impossible.

What did the pre-antibiotic era look like? There was 30% mortality from pneumonia. Mortality from appendicitis or a ruptured bowel was at 100%. Before Alexander Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of the first antibiotic penicillin, hospitals were filled with people who had contracted blood poisoning through cuts and scratches. These scratches often developed into life-threatening infections. Using amputation or surgery as common medical responses for scraping out infected areas is not pleasant or preferred, but these were the only options for the doctors.

Reports in medical journals, charity organization analyses, government studies, and the pharmaceutical sector’s own assessments attribute the dangerous threat to insufficient market incentive - lack of profit. Unlike drugs that millions of people have to take for the rest of their lives to target chronic illnesses such as heart disease — drugs that suppress symptoms but do not cure — antibiotics are usually taken for a few weeks or months at most. This makes antibiotics unfavorable for capitalism.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2008 put it: “[Antibiotics] are less desirable to drug companies and venture capitalists because they are more successful than other drugs.” It is long-term therapy — not cures — that drives interest in drug development, the paper concluded.

Only four of the global Big Pharma 12 are engaged in antibiotic research. Capitalism encourages these firms to cherry-pick the products that make the most money for their shareholders, such as Viagra.  A common criticism from the Left of these companies has been that their profit-seeking hurts the poor of the developed and developing world, who can’t afford their drugs. This is true as far as it goes, but doesn’t tackle the scale of this problem. It is the capitalist command to accumulate profit that  pharmaceutical companies must obey that is the major threat to public health and needs to be done away with entirely.

See full article here

Socialism, the steady-state system

Capitalism  have given the top 1% of the population what they want, which is the opportunity to be the wealthiest and most powerful of the richest people ever seen. The present competitive exploitative system is  driven by increasing consumption of energy and resources. Competition works is the contest is to maximise wealth and power and to produce the most goods and services for the least cost. Capitalist economies are motivated and controlled with competition, which has replaced social needs as the motivator. Furthermore, as the competition and rivalry intensifies,  cooperation and caring decreases. Capitalism shifts the blame of a dysfunctional and unfair social system to people. The capitalists’ interest is their self-interest, which is why they are plutocrats; it is to be successful in capitalism. This means they are what they are. This also means ordinary people are not in charge of the economy or of the political system.

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain are seeking a "steady-state economy" which corresponds to what Marx called "simple reproduction" - a situation where human needs were in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them.

The Lazy Worker Myth

From time to time newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express like to put all Britain's economic woes down to welfare grabbing lazy workers, but recent statistics give the lie to that notion. 'Workers feel less secure about their jobs and are taking fewer days off sick, according to two new surveys. The CBI said the number of days lost to absence in British workplaces had fallen to  a new low, while Law & General's monthly Job Security Index dipped to its lowest reading since its inception in January last year.' (Times, 15 July) How few days are taken off for sickness is shown by the figures. Down from 6.5 days per year in 2010 to 5.3 days at present. RD

Utopian Socialism

Is it possible to mobilise people to fight oppression without fashioning models for a socialist economy for people to fasten on to? The capitalist slogan ‘There is No Alternative’ was answered by ‘Another World is Possible’. We need to know and say much more about this other world.

Socialist thought has to deal in prediction, but only in broad terms. We live in dark days.  One often has to aim at objectives which one can only very dimly see. Socialism is a vision of the future, while its advocates are actively at work in the present. Socialists have typically avoided the tactic of the utopian blueprint. One reason for this was that no matter what your utopian vision is, you won’t be able to achieve it under capitalism. The other reason was that after capitalism is overthrown, it will be up to the people to determine how to run their society. Some people may prefer a return to Nature. Others may want robots tending to their every need.Why should one person’s utopian preference determine how society should be run for everybody else?

Charly's Profits

Prince Charles' tax exempt, capitalist property empire, the Duchy of Cornwall, is worth £847m and according to his top adviser it is a "force for social good".

It is definitely a force for his personal individual good, the scrounger gets around 19 million pounds a year from it!