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! 

The National Ill-Health Service

From time to time British politicians like to boast about the NHS and claim it is the envy of the world. This is a hollow boast as these figures show. Five children die unnecessarily every day of conditions such as asthma, meningitis and pneumonia because NHS care for young people is badly organised and dangerously inadequate, the leader of Britain's 11,000 specialists in children's health warns. 'Around 2,000 children a year lose their lives because of an array of problems, which means the UK has some of the worst death rates among children up to the age of 14 in Europe, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health told the Observer.' (Observer, 14 July) RD

A Grim Choice

In the city of Asbest in Russia workers face a grim choice - work to produce asbestos, which will probably kill you or else move somewhere else. Valentin K. Zemskov, who worked in the asbestos factory and developed asbestosis, a respiratory illness caused by breathing in  asbestos fibres summed up the position of workers in Asbest. ' Still he said the city had no other choice. "If we didn't have the factory, how could we live?" he said gasping for air as he talked in the yard of a retirement home. "We need to keep it open so we have jobs." (New York Times, 13 July) Obviously inside a socialist society no one would have to endure such a hellish dilemma. RD

The Commonweal

According to the Herald, “the so-called Common Weal plan, which has been injected into the referendum debate by the left-wing Jimmy Reid Foundation.” The Common Weal model envisages a fundamental break with the UK's market-led economic and social model, with Scotland importing policies from Germany and Scandinavia designed to make the country wealthier, fairer and more equal. A key part would be an expanded welfare state providing "from-the-cradle-to-the-grave" services which are paid for through an overall higher tax take. But the Common Weal model would also entail a diverse, high-skill, high-pay economy in which Scots firms are supported by lending from state banks and favoured in state procurement.

Commonweal means the common welfare, a commonwealth. The commonweal  shall satisfy peoples’ material needs from the common storehouse, according to their desires. Everyone will be able to have what he or she desires in food, in clothing, books, music, education and travel facilities. The abundant production now possible, and which invention will constantly facilitate, will remove any need for rationing or limiting of consumption. Every individual, relying on the great common production, will be secure from material want and anxiety. There will be neither rich nor poor. Money will no longer exist. There will be no selling, because there will be no buyers, since everyone will be able to obtain everything desired without payment. The possession of private property, beyond that which is in actual personal use, will disappear. There will be neither masters nor servants.

This is the commonweal. Socialists are determined to work co-operatively for this commonweal.

No amount of sophistry can change commonweal to mean capitalism, no matter what variety claimed.

Taxation and its burden

Continuing our tedious but necessary economic education posts. This one on the subject of taxes.

When capitalist political parties are in disagreement, the issue of taxation usually looms large. Should income tax be reduced or increased?  The serious-minded worker who does his own thinking will probably at first be amazed at the dexterity exhibited by both the Labour and Tory sections of the capitalist class. We watch them handling figures and statistics in a way that must cause a circus juggler to turn green with envy, each proving that the poverty and misery is bound to increase if the proposals of the other side are adopted!

A Society Of Debtors

Politicians love to paint a picture of steadily improving living standards, but it is a complete illusion as a recent newspaper article by Christian Guy, Director of the Centre for Social Justice has revealed. 'Yesterday's grim figures revealed that more than 800,000 households will soon spend more than half their income on debt repayments. We already know that 274 people are declared insolvent or bankrupt every day, 88 properties are repossessed and average household debt, including mortgages, is almost £55,000.' (Times, 12 July) Hardly 'steadily improving living standards' is it? RD

Anarchism

Socialist Courier has had a couple of recent posts about the history of anarchism inn Aberdeen and Glasgow so before the blog is accused of being an anarchist one we should highlight the political differences between ourselves and anarchists.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain possess a clear definition of what we would describe socialism to be. The definition of "socialist" generally meant in the 1840s was anyone who wanted to reform society, in whatever way, so as to benefit Labour. That was indeed how it was used them and was of course one of the reasons why Marx and Engels called the manifesto they wrote for the Communist League of Germany in 1848 the "Communist Manifesto" and not the "Socialist Manifesto". Basically, it was much too broad a definition that included too many contradictory views that we suppose the more appropriate word (then as much as today) would be "social reformers". It is only on that basis that supporters of private property and the market such as Proudhon, could be called "socialist".

Banking 7/7

Socialists have no love for banks. A world without banks would be a wholly better place. However to blame the banks for creating our debt-ridden society is just too biblical, like a re-run of Christ expelling the money-changers from the temple. Even if the banks were state-owned, they would still have to lend. If they didn't there would be no point in them existing. Banks and interest are not the villain of the piece but capitalism and production for profit. We need to abolish money before we can get rid of banks. But to get rid of money we need an end to property. And you can't abolish property relations until you abolish capitalism.

The Housing Shortage

Housing is probably the one basic need which, were it properly satisfied, would be the most conductive to good emotional and mental health. It is, surely, very pleasant and soothing to relax among pleasant and agreeable surroundings. The fact remains that such a happy situation only applies to the small to the small minority of the population who have the means to buy beautiful homes. Housing is one problem of capitalism which has been a constant source of difficulty and is part and parcel of working class life. Few members of our class escape some aspect of housing trouble. Whether it is the crisis of homelessness or overcrowding, or the stress involved in keeping a roof over our heads through paying rent or the mortgage.

It could be more than 20 years before enough new homes are built in Scotland to meet the country's projected needs. Scotland requires 21,230 new homes each year between 2011 and 2035 to meet a projected 21% increase in the population to 2.9 million by 2035.

Councils and registered social landlords  have built 14,000 fewer homes since 2005 than the Scottish Government said were needed. Funding for housing fell by around one-quarter between 2008/09 and 2011/12 with further reductions to come, while the number of new private homes built has more than halved since 2007/08 when the economic crisis took hold. The Scottish Government’s Audit Scotland  blames the recession, along with constraints on lending, competing and increasing demands on capital resources, and reduced government subsidies. Changes to the benefit system, an ageing population and the rising number of single person households are creating further pressures.

There are more than 400,000 people currently on housing waiting lists. Audit Scotland said the housing supply was not keeping up with levels of need.

The first fallacy to dismiss is the belief that “housing shortage” is the beginning and end of the problem and is the source of the problem, because if it were, it could be logically assumed that there was some intrinsic inability of society to meet the housing needs of its population. It has had plenty of time and resources to do so, so this is clearly not the full story.

Another fallacy which tends to cloud our conception of the issue is that which suggests that the housing problem has its basis in the inefficiency and lack of organisation of the building industry. It is true that this industry is not generally well organised in relation to output and the workers employed there; it is also true that at times it can operate in an inefficient manner. The fallacy is however that this is a cause of the housing problem rather than, like the housing problem itself, an effect of an inefficient and unrealisable social system. How can the construction industry possible be efficient when it is subjected to the demands of profitability in a system which produces an uneven flow of work, conflict between employers and employees, and most importantly, the fact that buildings which create the greatest profit in construction are usually the least socially useful and therefore take preference over housing?

The facts tell us the industry suffers many problems which have been related to one thing: the contradictions and conflicts of the system of capitalism. Governments do initiate various housing reforms to try to solve these problems, but these always fail. Why is failure so total, especially when the materials, know -how and labour power exist to adequately deal with the problem of providing decent housing for all?

Is it because of stupid or corrupt politicians? Many people believe so and view a particular governments shortcoming’s in light of the various abilities and characters of its leading members. But in actual fact these factors play a very subsidiary part and make no fundamental difference. Some politicians and civil servants , assigned various tasks, may be very well-meaning and in some respects efficient, but in the final analysis fail because they cannot succeed.

Under capitalism all production, government-initiated or not, is with a view to profit, not the satisfaction of human needs, material and recreational. Since the profit motive is the very life-blood of the capitalist system, it logically follows that government housing programs will also be introduced with a view to providing a profit for some capitalist group or other. Whether or not the politicians involve be good guys or con-artists is immaterial, because the financial institutions putting up the money for these reforms want a return for their investment.

Banking 6/7

Surely, the current banking crisis has exploded the myth about banks being able to create credit, i.e. money to lend out at interest, by a mere stroke of the pen but apparently not. Financial crises always spark interest in critics of the system. They see the problems of capitalism—like its vulnerability to crises—as primarily financial in origin. The whole point of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of needs, but the accumulation of money. In other words, it’s impossible to separate the economic world into a good productive side and a bad financial side; the two are inseparable. The monetary surpluses generated in production—the profits of capitalist businesses—accumulate over time and demand some sort of outlet: bank deposits, bonds, stocks, whatever. It’s going to be that way until we replace capitalism with something radically different. What we need to ask is why people today tend to blame banks rather than capitalism as a whole.

Anarchism in Glasgow

Some may find this article on the history of anarchist and socialist activity in Glasgow of interest.

The earliest known Glasgow anarchist history centres around the figure of Duncan Dundonald, a Clydeside-based engineering worker who is said to have met Mikhail Bakunin in Geneva in 1869, translated the Revolutionary Catechism in 1870, and then returned to Scotland to carry out anarchist propaganda and revolutionary sabotage. His obscurity to later generations of Glasgow anarchists could be related to the fact that he emigrated to Australia, possibly in the 1890s, where he settled in Melbourne and continued his activities under the assumed name of Donald Duncan.

In 1884 was the founding of the Social Democratic Federation branch in Glasgow. Many of those involved in the SDF had been members of the Democratic Club and/or the Republican Club in the city, and were in the main ardently anti-parliamentarian. This caused divisions as happened elsewhere, and when William Morris broke away to form the more vibrant Socialist League, most Glasgow SDF members simply de-camped to the new body. Branches then quickly appeared in other parts of Scotland.

In 1886 there was the visit to Glasgow of Peter Kropotkin. In 1888,  Lucy Parsons, partner of Albert Parsons, one of the executed Haymarket martyrs. Emma Goldman made her firstvisit in 1894. Voltairine de Cleyre in 1897 and 1903

By 1937, there were 3 groups of libertarians in Glasgow, Aldred's United Socialist Movement, Wm McDougall's Anti-Parlimentarian Communist Federation and Anarchist Federation of Frank Leech.

breathing is bad for you

More than two million deaths occur globally each year as a direct result of air pollution from human activity, scientists have said.  

2.1 million people die after inhaling fine sooty particles called PM 2.5s generated by diesel engines, power plants and coal fires. Another 470,000 are thought to be killed by high levels of ozone, created when vehicle exhaust gases react with oxygen.