Overpopulation is not the problem

 

It is guaranteed that the persistent and pervasive overpopulation bogeyman will resurface in Glasgow at the COP26 summit with some attendees conjuring up imagery of hordes of migrants storming the gates of the West.The overpopulation argument serves as a scapegoat for the shortcomings of capitalism at a global level to provide security for the poor  and vulnerable displaced by the economic consequences of the market system. It exposes the impossibility of capitalism to satisfy the world population’s need. For the apologists of the profit system the ‘overpopulation problem’ helps to explain its failures.

 

At  many environmentalist events, population numbers will feature as a major culprit  for ecological degradation. The arguments of Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich,Garrett Hardin and the Club of Rome will in one way or another be cited to blame the climate crises on too many people. Credibility will be offered by scientific sounding equations such as IPAT - Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology to emphasise the role of population to environmental destruction. IPAT neglects the structure of population, its ethnicity, gender and class composition, crucial differences in resource use and technology application. As a result IPAT places the responsibility of  the ecological destruction upon the people with the lowest carbon footprint  and the least access to resources and services.

 

Neo-Malthusian NGOs will be blaming the poor for exacerbating their own poverty and increasing damage to nature with their high fertility rates. Conservation groups will accuse the billions in the undeveloped and developing world of collectively accelerating and intensifying unsustainable pollution and consumption. The view that overpopulation is the real problem is reinforced in education, in the media and political circles. It diverts from the role that the rich and powerful play in depleting the planet of its natural resources.

 

The more humanitarian of them will call for increased spending on family planning. The less scrupulous will demonise and impose eugenic solutions.

 

In his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” Engels called the concept of overpopulation “the crudest, most barbarous theory ever existed, a system of despair.”

 

Population patterns cannot be blamed for the deteriorating condition of the environment. Such arguments ignore the role played by far more powerful actors, the influence of corporations with their control over the political-economic system. The poor are forced into unsustainable resource use because of the lack of alternatives and restricted availability of such necessities as land.

 

The focus upon overpopulation blames individuals themselves for their predicament. It exonerates the structural inequalities of capitalism with its abundance of wealth yet widespread scarcity. 

#Uproot the System

 Greta Thunberg has announced she will be taking part in climate protests in Glasgow next week, also inviting Glasgow workers who plan on striking to join her in the march.

She confirmed she would be in Glasgow during Cop26 to take part in the protests on Friday, 5 November. The protest, arranged by Fridays for Future Scotland a group inspired by Thunberg’s activism, will march at 11am from Kelvingrove Park in the west end of Glasgow to George Square in the city centre.

Thunberg invited thousands of striking street cleaners, railway and refuse staff to join the climate protests. The Swedish activist appeared to support the workers’ strike in her invitation. Around 1,500 Glasgow City Council staff in refuse, cleaning and catering roles are set to strike in the opening week of Cop26 over a pay dispute.

She wrote: “Climate justice also means social justice and that we leave no one behind. So we invite everyone, especially the workers striking in Glasgow, to join us. See you there! #UprootTheSystem.”

Society must change

 

Each new day demonstrates that capitalism is damaging humanity and the planet. We need a different society, which produces to satisfy the living needs of the majority and not to satisfy the economic profits of a small minority.

Capitalism thrives on exploitation. Its logic is that of profit. Its morality is that of self-interest. Socialism, on the other hand, stresses the cooperative rather than the selfish behaviour of human beings by eliminating the conditions that promote the self-centred lust for property. The primary contradiction of any capitalist order is between the social character of production and the private appropriation of surplus. Socialism resolves this contradiction through the socialisation of the ownership of the means of production.

Since private ownership of property produces inequality and feeds on the exploitation of the majority, a socialist society must be based on the common ownership of the means of productive property, the operation of which required collective labour-power. Hence, under the regime of private ownership, it serves as a means for exploiting others. This concept may also be extended to land and natural resources, the private appropriation of which deprive others of their means to live. Common ownership of the means of social production does not mean absolutely no form of personal possessions or having to borrow each other’s toothbrushes. Objects of consumption properly belong to the personal and private sphere. Also, tools of production which are not used to exploit or deprive others, are retained as individual possessions. Personal property is respected, but not ownership of property that is used to exploit others and to create wealth only for personal consumption. There will therefore be no confiscation of personal property in a socialist society. In the process of building a socialist society, a large amount of redistribution will have to be undertaken. This includes, for example, the redistribution of private property that has been used, not for personal enjoyment, but for the oppression and exploitation of the majority. The goal of socialism is to enable everyone to have access to more personal property such as food, housing, clothing, books and leisure. But to accomplish this, the ownership and control by a few over the means of production must be eliminated. Poverty has been the lot of the majority in capitalism. They cannot be any poorer.

Socialism means the creation of a society where the people, not a few property owners, own and manage the affairs of the community. In such a society, production would be basically oriented to need, not to market demand. This can only be accomplished through rational social planning. A planned economy requires the identification of basic needs that must be met and an efficient distribution system. These can only be achieved through the effective participation of people in the determination of national goals. It is crucial, therefore, that a planned economy be the result of decisions popularly participated in by all sectors of society. This is the only way through which real needs can be arrived at, people motivated to act collectively and sacrifices made based on rational choices. A planned economy must also ensure a wide and even dispersal of industries in the countryside in order to create work opportunities for a vast number of people and avoid centralization of development only in selected areas. Democratic social planning is thus in complete contrast to the anarchy of capitalism where surplus is expropriated from those who produce by the social classes who own the means of production.

Our aim is a world cooperative commonwealth without the State and without classes, in which the workers shall administer the means of production and distribution for the shared benefit of all. Yet everywhere the capitalists cry: “More production! More production!'’ In other words, the workers must do more work for fewer wages, so that their blood and sweat may fix the debts of the ruined capitalist world. In order to accomplish this, the workers must no longer have the right to strike; they must be forbidden to organise so that they may be able to negotiate concessions from the bosses. At all costs, the labour movement must be halted and broken. To save the old system of exploitation the capitalists unite and chain the workers to the new technologies of industry. The capitalists will do this unless the workers declare war on the whole capitalist system, overthrow the capitalists and make all wealth the property of all the workers in common. It is the ONLY way for the workers to free themselves from industrial slavery, and to make over the world so that the workers shall get all they produce and nobody shall be able to make money out of the labour of working men and women. Reforms wouldn’t solve the problem, even if they could be achieved. So long as the capitalist system exists a few will be making money out of the labour of the many. All reforms of the current system merely fool workers into believing that they are not being robbed as much as previously.

The State is used to defend and strengthen the power of the capitalists and to oppress the workers. Constitutions and laws are framed with the deliberate purpose of protecting the owning class interests against the majority of the people. So-called socialists believe that they can gradually gain this political power by using the political machinery of the capitalist State to win reforms, and when they have elected a majority of the members of the legislatures, they can proceed to use the State power to legislate capitalism peacefully out and the industrial commonwealth in. Supposed socialists preach all sorts of reforms of the capitalist system, drawing to their ranks small capitalists and political adventurers of all kinds, that finally causes them to make deals and compromises with the capitalist class. 

The Socialist Party candidates elected to Parliament have as their function to campaign ceaselessly to expose the real nature of the capitalist State, to obstruct the operations of capitalist government and show their class character, to explain the futility of all capitalist reform measures, etc. At the various national assemblies, socialists can show up capitalist hypocrisy and outright brutality.

 

The Sutherland Clearances

 

Volume three of Alwyn Edgar’s work on the Scottish Highland Clearances is out now as an ebook. This volume is about the clearances in Sutherland.

Before the Rebellion of Prince Charles in 1745, each Highland clan owned its own land. No one else, including the Government in Edinburgh, had the power to deprive them of it. (Travellers saw that in the mountains every crag was a new fortress for men defending their own country.) But the Highland Jacobite rebels having been defeated at Culloden and scattered, and the Lowland Government in Edinburgh now being much stronger since the Union with England in 1707, the British authorities decided to incorporate the Highlands into Great Britain in fact, as well as in theory. The anglophone legal system was successfully imposed, and the clan chiefs were made into landlords, owning all the land which had once belonged to their clans. Scots law now gave each chief-landlord the right (for any reason or no reason) to turn his entire clan out of their homes and farms, and keep the whole clan land as his private back garden, if he wanted. So when the new landlords realized that big grazing farms, for cattle or sheep, would make a lot of money, the clearances started. Well-to-do Highlanders, Lowlanders, even a few Englishmen, rented the clan lands; the chiefs evicted their folk; and the chief/landlord found his income shooting up over the years to five times or fifteen times what it had been (and there was no income tax!). Many of the evicted Highlanders were given an acre or two of worthless, barren land, and told to make it fertile: and when by donkey-work the crofters were able to grow a few potatoes, they had to pay rent for the value they themselves had created. Others – either immediately or after years of rack-rented drudgery on the croft – went to the Lowland factories, or abandoned Scotland entirely for arduous pioneering lives in North America (those who survived the journey).

The Earls of Sutherland were chiefs of the Sutherland clan, Murrays, MacKays, Sutherlands and others. Adam Gordon married a daughter of the Earl of Sutherland about 1500, and managed to cheat the rest of the family out of their land-charters. After that the Earls of Sutherland were Gordons. The 18th earl died in 1766 leaving a year-old daughter, Elizabeth Gordon, to succeed him. She inherited nearly two-thirds of the county of Sutherland, over 1250 square miles, an estate about the size of Gloucestershire. The long wars with France between 1793 and 1815 meant there was a desperate need of soldiers, such as the Sutherland small tenants could provide: but (despite being married to one of the richest men in England, the Marquis of Stafford) she wanted the much higher rents which big sheep farms would supply. (You can never have too much money.) She was indifferent to the fate of the small tenants – “a good many of them”, would “inevitably be tossed out”, she wrote; they would be “driven from their present dwellings by the sheep farms”. She cleared her estate between 1807 and 1821, greatly increasing her rents. She and her husband became the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

The second greatest Sutherland landowner was Lord Reay, the chief of the Reay MacKay clan. Reay cleared his estate even before Elizabeth Gordon, beginning about 1800. (Thirteen smaller landlords owned the rest of the county, and rivalled the countess and Lord Reay with their own clearances.) Reay belonged to a London firm which provided finance to slave-traders, and spent most of his time in gambling dens and brothels. Having wasted vast amounts of money, he sold his estate to the Sutherlands in 1830, and bought a slave plantation in the West Indies. When the slaves were freed in 1833, like the other slave-owners he was compensated. (The slaves weren’t.)

The Sutherland Clearances. The Highland Clearances Volume Three – Theory and Practice

Glasgow University's Cancel Culture

 More than 500 academics from around the world, including a Nobel prize winner, Royal Society fellows, and former and current presidents of major academic bodies, signed a petition delivered to Glasgow University this week to protest it of “capitulating” in two separate cases that have undermined academic research because of the lobbying activities of pro-Israel and Zionist supporters.

 A peer-reviewed paper by Jane Jackman in the university’s scholarly journal eSharp in 2017, which examined methods used by Israel to form public opinion and support from the UK Government and following complaints over the content of the article, the journal issued an apology and said it recognised the article had caused considerable offence and promoted an “unfounded antisemitic theory. ” The scholars who support the petition say that criticism of Israel and its supporters cannot be conflated with antisemitism.

The article was an examination of the mechanics of how Israel and its allies influence and inform public opinion with the aim of maintaining British Government support. Similar articles are published about other nations lobbying such as China and Russia, but they are not accused of anti-China or anti-Russia racism. But on Israel, it is considered antisemitic. 

Jane Jackman, who was then a scholar at Exeter University, published the paper, titled Advocating Occupation, examining the evolution and role of Israel lobby groups in the UK, in the immediate wake of a 2017 documentary aired by Al-Jazeera on the lobby’s interference in British politics.  Footage filmed by an undercover reporter showed an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, covertly colluding with Zionist groups to undermine senior UK politicians – especially the then head of the opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn – who were seen as too critical of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Jackman concluded in her paper that “critics of Israeli policy expose themselves to the possibility, indeed the probability, of being smeared as anti-Semites”. 

 Initial complaints against Jackman’s paper shortly after it was published were dismissed by Glasgow University's administration but later pro-Israel blogger, David Collier,  accused Glasgow staff of  “heavy antisemitism” in clearing it for publication. He and fellow activists to wrote to Sir Anton Muscatelli, Glasgow’s principal, complaining that Jackman’s paper was “laden with conspiracy, antisemitism and errors”.  , He claimed it was a “poison spreading through our universities. With malignant cells in place such as Exeter, [London’s] SOAS and Warwick – it acts as a cancer – with new academics, freshly dosed with antisemitic ideology, leaving the nests to spread the sickness elsewhere.” 

In her article, Jane Jackman had identified Collier as particularly adept at characterising critics of Israel as “haters” and antisemites. Collier, she had noted, was a favourite of the Israeli embassy that had invited him the previous year to help train more than 100 representatives from British pro-Israel groups on advocacy tactics to counter those who sought to tarnish Israel’s image. 

Glasgow University authorities then reversed course and concluded  Jackman had promoted “an unfounded antisemitic theory regarding the State of Israel and its activity in the United Kingdom”. Glasgow University suggested that action had been taken against Jackman’s paper in accordance with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It also implied that her research was an example of “hate speech”.

The signatories of the petition say it “extraordinary” that Glasgow University had had to apologise and then labelled the article's content as “hate speech”.

Noam Chomsky said: "The capitulation by the University of Glasgow is a serious blow to academic freedom that should not be allowed to stand.”

Separately, Glasgow University's politics department took the unprecedented step of demanding the right to vet a talk on Israeli and Palestinian politics. Somdeep Sen, a professor at Roskilde University in Denmark had invited Sen to speak on his new book, Decolonising Palestine, published by Cornell University Press. The university then insisted on new conditions – apparently after submitting to pressure from a Jewish student body to seek the Jewish students’ approval before agreeing to the talk going ahead. 

Sen was contacted by the department to say it had received “a message of concern from the University’s Jewish Society” about his forthcoming talk and that he would need to “provide information” on the main points and any slides he intended to use.According to the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes),  the information would be shared with the Jewish Society to assess whether it would have “negative repercussions” for Jewish students.  Brismes warned such acts would lead to “self-censorship on the part of individual scholars and students”.  

Taken from Jonathan Cook blog

Over 500 scholars launch fightback against Israel lobby (jonathan-cook.net)

Glasgow University accused of undermining academic freedom in 'antisemitic' ruling | The Scotsman

Be a Socialist

 

What is the nature of our civilisation? What is the controlling force which is guiding our destinies, and regulating our actions? What is the nature of the system? Is it operating for good or evil? could it be replaced by a better or a worse one?  Is our social system a success, or is it a failure? These are questions some of us ask ourselves. We pride ourselves in being called “civilised.”  We point at our great culture and grand works of art, our wonders of scientific achievement, our massive cities and communications, our complex technology as our glories of civilisation. It is our labour alone which supplies all human wants. The workers never cease toiling to satisfy the insatiable demands of the owning and employing class. It is the worker alone who carries on civilisation and keeps humanity going, too. 

What about the capitalist? What is his place in our social system? It is to extort another huge slice out of the worker, by buying his or her services as much beneath their true value as he can possibly procure them, and selling them as much above their worth as the circumstances will permit him to extort. The more extensive his trade, the greater will be his power over his employees.

Civilisation is successful so far as it is associated with harmony. Civil conflict, political intrigue, and internal strife of all kinds are its destruction. Mutual peace and prosperity mark its success. Which course are we now pursuing? Whether it be a theocracy, autocracy, constitutional monarchy, or bourgeois republic we find in all alike the one common political basis – the division of the people into the rulers and the ruled. The government may differ in form, but they are alike in fact; whatever they may be called, presidents are virtually kings, plutocracies are intensified aristocracies, elections are conquests by oligarchs. Whatever the form of government, they are all marked by this general characteristic – they all rest upon APPROPRIATION and EXPLOITATION. Slavery, in some form or other, is found to underlie the social structure. Those who have appropriated the world to which all are justly entitled, hold in slavery the millions whom they have expropriated and live upon the results of their toil. And the State holds guard with all the machinery of law, police to protect the idle proprietors’ extortion.

That the present social system has failed must be apparent to all. It has made the many subservient to the few; it has thwarted the best human endeavours, and facilitated every method of exploitation; it disinherits the great mass, and fore-ordains their lifelong misery before they are even born. It is an incentive to pillage and plunder.  It creates jealousy, hatred, and injustice. All political institutions are destructive and reactionary, self-seeking, dishonest, and tyrannical, and ever ready to dominate and oppress those over whom they exert authority; and not only does it corrupt those who rule it, but its evil effects extend to those whom they govern, for every extension of governmental function assists in decreasing and dwarfing the energies self-reliance of the people themselves and making them more helpless, cowardly, and servile than before.

 

No reform can end the evils which the capitalist machine has brought into being.  The existing evils of society are too gigantic to toy, tinker or tamper with. “Remedies” are no remedies at all.  The slavery and the robbery of the workers by rent, interest, profit must be abolished – abolished peacefully, expeditiously, and permanently. And to do so, we must start from where we now stand, and despite all the disadvantages which surround us, and with all the ignorance, all the bigotry, all the intolerance, and all the debasement and cowardice which characterise the down-trodden, we must side by side make our way along the path which so many have found slippery until we reach the long-cherished goal of labour’s emancipation.

But how can we do it? How can we get from the present unjust, destructive system, into one in which justice and happiness shall be the distinguishing characteristics? How shall we fight out of the present blood-thirsty system without the shedding of blood and without the disastrous reaction which has marked the bloody rebellions of the past? How shall we walk from bondage into liberty?  Slaves as we are, have to emancipate ourselves. It can be done. It must be done. 

 

Is it "our nation"?

 Land equals power. If you own land it gives you economic, social and often political muscle. And the more of it you own, the more potential power you have.

 According to Shona Glenn from the Scottish Land Commission, "At the moment the balance of power really sits with landowners and we need to shift that so that communities and society at large have much more of that power."

The BBC in a 2-part programme sets out to find out  'Who owns Scotland?'

One thing is sure, it is not its working people. 

There are 47,000 long term empty homes in Scotland - the number's doubled since 2005.  If you were to place all the vacant and derelict land in Scotland together in one space, the area would be twice the size of the city of Dundee. The most concentrated areas of dereliction are spread through west-central Scotland and down the Clyde coast.

 In Glasgow, the derelict properties seem to be spread out, spanning much of the city with no obvious pattern - until you add another layer. When you superimpose the areas of greatest deprivation onto the map, they sit almost precisely on top of the places where you find the most derelict land.

Tom Smith explained: "When you add that layer (to our map) there does seem to be a direct correlation between the vacant and derelict land in Glasgow and its deprived areas."

Private Ownership or Common Ownership

 

Private ownership divides society into two distinct classes. One is the class of employers, and the other is the class of wageworkers. The employers are the capitalist class, and the wageworkers are the working class. The capitalist class, through the ownership of most of the land and the tools of production — which are necessary for the production of food, clothing, shelter and fuel — hold the working class in almost total economic and industrial subjection, and thus live on the labour of the working class. While the working class, by their labour, produce today — as in the past — the wealth that sustains society, they lack economic and industrial security, suffer from overwork, enforced idleness, and their attendant miseries, all of which are due to the present capitalist form of society. The working class, in order to secure food, clothing, shelter and fuel, must sell their labour-power to the owning capitalist class — that is to say, they must work for the capitalist class. The working class do all the useful work of Society, they are the producers of all the wealth of the world, while the capitalist class are the exploiters who live on the wealth produced by the working class.

As the capitalists live off the product of the workers, the interest of the working people is diametrically opposed to the interest of the capitalists. The capitalist class — owning as they do, most of the land and the tools of production — employ the working class, buy their labour-power, and return to them in the form of wages, only part of the wealth they have produced. The rest of the wealth produced by the working class the capitalists keep; it constitutes their profit — i.e., rent, interest, and dividends.

Thus the working class produce their own wages as well as the profits of the capitalist class. In other words, the working class work a part only of each day to produce their wages, and the rest of the day to produce surplus (profits) for the owning capitalist class. The interest of the capitalist class is to get all the surplus (profits) possible out of the labour of the working class. The interest of the working class is to get the full product of their labour. Hence there is a struggle between these two classes. This struggle is called the “Class Struggle.” 

The crises of the world capitalist system are becoming more acute than ever before and are intensifying the suffering of the people. It is absurd that the social character and higher efficiency of the new technology in the means of production should bring about more unemployment and worsened working conditions. This is because the capitalist relations of production require that firms maximise their profits and win in the competition with rivals by increasing high-tech equipment and by cutting wages. We must understand the inherent laws of capitalism which lead to the chauvinist and racist notion that migrant workers are to blame for taking jobs away from the host people.

 

The aim of the Socialist Party is to overcome the capitalist class. The Socialist Party shows how the working class is exploited by the capitalist class; why capitalism must be overthrown and replaced by socialism, and how the working people must realise these goals. This theory provides the essential tools workers need to orient the struggle for their emancipation. The primary task of the Socialist Party is the political education of our fellow workers through our agitation and propaganda to explain the true nature of the system that oppresses workers, and the need for socialist revolution. Our task is to bring class consciousness to the working class. The Socialist Party will also use the forum presented through elections and parliaments to expose the true nature of these institutions. We will use them as a tribune to denounce the injustice of the existing social order and urge the workers on in their fight.

We are living under a system that is more and more revealed as the enemy of humanity. It has vast productive potential, but it means poverty and oppression for most people. It brings hunger to many of the working people of the world. Capitalism is responsible for the destruction of the environment. War and the armaments industry monopolise most of the world’s research and development, cynically profiting from destructive conflicts. The root cause of all this is capitalism’s guiding principle, the quest for profit, which takes precedence over any human interest.

We, socialists, organised in the World Socialist Movement declare that to the working class through the ballot box, will abolish the capitalist system of ownership with its accompanying class rule and oppression, and establish in its place socialism — an industrial democracy — wherein all the land and the tools of production shall be the common property of the whole people, to be operated by the whole people for the production of commodities for use and not for profit. We ask our fellow workers to organise with us to end the domination of private or state ownership — with its poverty-breeding system of production — and substitute in its place the socialist cooperative commonwealth in which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his or her faculties.