The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), has been hit with a union-busting $93.6 million dollar court-imposed fine for a secondary boycott deemed illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The plaintiff, International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI), owned by the third richest man in the Philippines, billionaire Enrique Razon Jr., operates in 27 ports worldwide, mainly in poor, developing countries. On February 14 in Portland, this capital vs labor battle may be decided by a federal court judge.
Known as the slave labor act by the organized labor movement, the Taft-Hartley Act bans solidarity actions or secondary boycotts as the government’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) refers to an action not directed against the primary employer. In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act, was passed with support from both Democratic and Republican parties at the beginning of the McCarthy witch hunts. It banned all manner of class struggle: solidarity strikes, mass picketing, closed shops, including union hiring halls, and communists from holding union office.
But it was solidarity actions that built the labor movement. ILWU’s history shows that labor’s strength lies in union solidarity actions. West Coast maritime workers have long been in the forefront of U.S. labor struggles.
Razon’s modus operandi for ICTSI is raw, aggressive neo-liberal capitalism, buying up public-owned ports in developing countries, busting unions, suing competitors or government agencies and making billions in the process. If ICTSI’s owner billionaire Enrique Razon is successful in his court suit, it would be a body blow to labor’s solidarity actions.
The old IWW motto must prevail, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
Full article at
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/12/the-survival-of-the-ilwu-at-stake/
Football Capitalism
Football’s embrace of unregulated hyper-capitalism has created a growing financial disparity that is now destroying the inherent unpredictability of the sport. This is not just the big clubs often winning, as has been the case since time immemorial. It is that a small group of super-wealthy clubs are now so financially insulated that they are winning more games than ever before, by more goals than ever before, to break more records than ever before. They are stretching the game in a way that has caused the entire sport to transform and shift. The concentration of money has brought a concentration of quality and thereby success.
That is a consequence of the explosion of money in the game, which means you need a minimum amount of annual revenue (€400m in 2020, going by Deloitte’s figures) to even begin competing. On the other side, when clubs like Liverpool or Manchester City maximise that revenue through admirable intelligence, the disparity then has an amplifying effect. The gap gets even greater on the pitch. This is why we are seeing so many historic records now being broken season after season.
The last decade alone, which represents the true rise of the super-clubs alongside the huge rise in money, has seen:
a second Spanish treble a first German treble a first Italian treble a first English domestic treble three French domestic trebles in four years a first Champions League three-in-a-row in 42 years the first ever 100-point season in Spain, Italy and England ‘Invincible’ seasons in Italy, Portugal, Scotland and seven other European leagues 13 of Europe’s 54 leagues currently seeing their longest run of titles by a single club or longest period of domination. Needless to say, they have all been achieved by the wealthiest clubs in those competitions.
Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin made the issue front and centre of his introduction to the body’s 2020 annual benchmarking report, citing the “threats” and “risks” of “globalisation-fuelled revenue polarisation”.
And it really comes to something when Deloitte’s Football Money League warns of “a situation where on-pitch results are too heavily influenced by the financial resources available” as well as the danger to “the integrity” and “unpredictability” crucial to the long-term value of the sport.
Javier Tebas, president of La Liga, speaks in even graver terms. “If we don’t fix that problem, in a few years our industry will collapse.”
It is teetering on the brink because this core problem loads up so many other ongoing issues: the precarious financial health of clubs outside the elite; the tension between the super-clubs and the rest; the tension between leagues; the tension between Uefa and Fifa; the tension between self-interest and the collective that represents the inherent contradiction of professional sport.
Former Southampton executive chairman Nicola Cortese says. “These bigger clubs are now massive money monsters.”
Due to the sport’s very structure, its immense global popularity has actually funnelled more and more resources to an extremely narrow band of clubs, because they are the only ones with the reach to maximise this. It is not so much the 1%, as the 0.01%. And it is not that money guarantees success. It is that an awful lot of it – in 2020, around €400m – is the single most important requisite to even compete.
The 1982 English First Division TV deal was just £5.2m and the total international rights were a mere £50,000 from Scandinavia. The wage bill of the wealthiest top-division club was less than three times the bottom club, which meant there was a period when two of the best paid players in England – Michael Robinson and Steve Foster – both played for Brighton and Hove Albion. It also meant that as many as 13 clubs could finish in the top four in England, as many as 12 in Spain, and that teams including Aston Villa, Steaua Bucharest, PSV Eindhoven and Red Star Belgrade could win the European Cup. Football, in effect, was too small an industry to feature anything like the current inequalities. There was far more mobility within the sport.
The total Premier League TV rights for the current 2019-22 cycle are now worth £8.4bn. The total Champions League prize money is now worth €2.04bn, having grown from €583m just 10 years ago. Such forces have seen Manchester United go from a turnover of £117m at the start of the millennium to £627.1m in 2018-19, the most recent figures available. The biggest clubs are no longer the financial size of local supermarkets, as was the case just two decades ago.
Money has simply led to more disparity.
Returning to wages, the ‘stretch’ from the bottom to the top in the Premier League has gone from 2.85x in that breakaway season of 1992-93 to 4.7x last year. In Spain, it has been as high as 17.2x, and in some mid-size leagues like Switzerland over 20x.
This is relevant because of how crucial wages are to the working of the sport. Repeated studies – most notably by Stefan Szymanski and Tim Kuypers – have highlighted that they condition results to a greater degree than anything else. Arguments about net transfer spend are close to irrelevant.
“Buying the most expensive players doesn’t automatically generate good sporting results,” Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano wrote in his book The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance. “What does generate those good results is having the best players in your team and paying them the salary they deserve.”
“I had the money to buy players,” Cortese says. “But not the money to keep players.”
This has been the primary issue for most Premier League clubs seeking to grow, despite the influx of TV money that has allowed high transfer fees. By the competition’s latest figures, the big six paid 51.3% of the total wages. This disparity has led to a corresponding disparity in results. And thus the unpredictability of football – the lifeblood of the sport – begins to dissolve. Absolutely every metric shows the sport across Europe is more predictable than 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.
The average points won by champions in the five major leagues has shot up. England might only show a marginal change from the 2000s to the 2010s, but the change becomes much more pronounced if you focus on the last three seasons. It then extends to 96.7 points – and that’s before you even bring in Liverpool’s current season.
Greater disparity has pushed up the requirements to win the league. That can be seen in the most ominous figures of all: the title-winning streaks. In some leagues, it is getting impossible for almost anyone else to win. Prior to this run, Bayern Munich had never won more than three Bundesliga titles in a row. They have now won seven in a row, which is by far the longest streak of league victories in Germany’s history. It is also one of eight such situations across Europe.
There are then situations like in Croatia, where Dinamo Zagreb have won 13 of the last 14 titles, or Dundalk, who have won five of the last six Irish titles. There has never been a situation where so many of Europe’s leagues – 13 of 54 – are suffering such domination at the same time. That it extends from the very top, to mid-sized leagues like the Austrian Football Bundesliga, to the bottom and the Andorran Primera Divisió, shows the depth of the problem.
It also shows the effect of Champions League prize money, which has become one of the most profound problems in the game, as influential as anything else in creating this disparity.
The difficulty in qualifying for the competition, of course, is just another representation of that disparity.
That is emphasised by the fact more clubs finished in England’s top four in the first five years of the 1990s than in the 20 years so far of the new millennium: 11 to 10. The number for 2010 to 2019 as a whole is seven, down from 13 in the 1990s and 1980s, and 15 in the 1970s and 1960s. The other major leagues tell a similar story, and that without a defined big six.
It is not just that the wealthiest clubs are winning much more, however. It is that they are winning by much more.
So many clear victories are perhaps the clearest indication of the ‘Overton window’ effect of this: where gradual shifts over time make abnormal situations feel normal to anyone watching on. Thrashings of the scale the wealthiest clubs now dole out – Manchester City beating Watford 8-0 or Bayern Munich beating both Mainz and Werder Bremen 6-1 this season – used to be so much rarer. Even 5-0 thrashings were comparatively uncommon. Looking at England’s wealthiest four clubs – which has varied since the start of the Premier League – over a fifth of their games are now won by three goals or more. For the 90s, that was just over a tenth, at 12.6%. Even the mighty Real Madrid did not used to win like this. Together with Barcelona, their percentage of wins by three goals or more has jumped from 20.5% in the 90s, to a staggering 37.8% now.
The game has been engulfed by capitalism, driven by the same motivation: money.
The Champions League has become so popular that its prize money is simply immense: life-changing for many clubs and game-changing for the sport as a whole. It is so drastic that it distorts football.
Merely turning up in the group stage this season earned clubs €15.25m. Getting to the Istanbul final will be worth €62.25m – and that’s before you factor in many related rewards. The near £100m Spurs earned last season was enough to launch them past Chelsea into the top 10 of the Deloitte Football Money League.
The Champions League does much more, however, than creating this huge financial capital. It also creates a football capital – and what you might call the ‘Everton problem’.
It is just another way the game is so conditioned towards the richest. The massively free player market makes it a race to the top, where the richest are able to accumulate the best in a way never seen before. Every player obviously wants to be in such a competition. This means that even if clubs like Everton have the money to pay competitive wages, they are still mostly getting cast-offs, a level of player short of the true elite. And when they do have a player who can perform at Champions League level, like Romelu Lukaku, he is quickly picked off.
It was the glamour of the Champions League, after all, that first attracted Roman Abramovich to football. That is their platform: the entire planet. The description of “global clubs” is so apt. Only a handful of clubs – Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Arsenal, Juventus, Bayern Munich, AC Milan and Internazionale – are capable of truly benefiting from it. They just have a distinctive global fan base, and thereby a ready-made market, that is impossible for anyone else to replicate.
Football has become show business. The stadiums are big TV sets, where 22 performers are performing. It’s show business, in some ways, more than sport.
75th Anniversary of the Dresden Bombing
In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.
Kurt Vonnegut’s in Slaughterhouse-Five, who was one of some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war held in and around the city and who survived the bombing, called it “carnage unfathomable.” Some 200,000 incendiary bombs along with 500 tons of high-explosive munitions including two-ton “blockbuster” bombs were dropped during the initial raids, sparking thousands of fires that could be seen from 500 miles (800 km) away in the air. The heat generated by the inferno melted human flesh, turning many victims into piles of goop. Men, women, children, the sick, the elderly, refugees and Allied POWs and even the animals in the city zoo — all were incinerated together. The 2700º Fahrenheit (1480° C) fire-storm sucked all the oxygen from the air; many thousands suffocated to death. The following morning, a wave of more than 300 United States Army Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers pounded the survivors with over 700 tons of explosives. On February 15, US warplanes bombed the city’s south-eastern suburbs.
Dresden, Germany’s seventh-largest city, was the largest urban area in the Third Reich that hadn’t yet been bombed. It had been spared from Allied attack because it was an important cultural city — known as the Jewel Box for its celebrated architecture — with relatively few significant military targets. It was a city of refuge, with 19 hospitals and more than a million refugees fleeing the horrors of the Red Army advance encamped there. But by the time it was all over, some 25,000 men, women and children were dead and nearly 90 percent of the homes in central Dresden were obliterated.
An RAF memo to airmen the night of the attack explained that “the intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most” and “to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s in Slaughterhouse-Five, who was one of some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war held in and around the city and who survived the bombing, called it “carnage unfathomable.” Some 200,000 incendiary bombs along with 500 tons of high-explosive munitions including two-ton “blockbuster” bombs were dropped during the initial raids, sparking thousands of fires that could be seen from 500 miles (800 km) away in the air. The heat generated by the inferno melted human flesh, turning many victims into piles of goop. Men, women, children, the sick, the elderly, refugees and Allied POWs and even the animals in the city zoo — all were incinerated together. The 2700º Fahrenheit (1480° C) fire-storm sucked all the oxygen from the air; many thousands suffocated to death. The following morning, a wave of more than 300 United States Army Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers pounded the survivors with over 700 tons of explosives. On February 15, US warplanes bombed the city’s south-eastern suburbs.
Dresden, Germany’s seventh-largest city, was the largest urban area in the Third Reich that hadn’t yet been bombed. It had been spared from Allied attack because it was an important cultural city — known as the Jewel Box for its celebrated architecture — with relatively few significant military targets. It was a city of refuge, with 19 hospitals and more than a million refugees fleeing the horrors of the Red Army advance encamped there. But by the time it was all over, some 25,000 men, women and children were dead and nearly 90 percent of the homes in central Dresden were obliterated.
An RAF memo to airmen the night of the attack explained that “the intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most” and “to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
Churchill, not known for his compassion, was appalled by the savagery of the attack, calling it “an act of terror and wanton destruction.” After seeing photographs of the devastated city, the prime minister asked, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” In a top secret memo dated March 28, 1945, he wrote:
“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.”
As many as 600,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing over the course of the war. Many of these victims died during the war’s final months, when Germany’s defeat was certain and such slaughter served no valid military purpose. At Dresden trains were running again within three days of the bombing. And while the Nazis may have started the air war by bombing British cities, killing 14,000 civilians during the Blitz, the destruction of Dresden was disproportionate.
From here
The Way to Go
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’” asks Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” says the Cheshire Cat.
In capitalist society there are only two decisive class forces: the capitalists and the workers. The historic mission of one is to maintain the capitalist system, that of the other is to overthrow it. The working class are the ’grave-diggers of capitalism’ and the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. The working class is not the gravedigger of capitalism by virtue of any intrinsic merit it possesses as a class qualifying it for that role, but because of the objective role it plays in the production process of capitalism. Thus it can be, and indeed has always been, that the very class which alone is capable of destroying capitalism and with it all class society, is itself deeply imbued with the ideology of the ruling class it is historically destined to overthrow. The contradiction between the objective role of the working class as an agent of social revolution, and its own lack of consciousness of that role, makes necessary the education of the workers to be class conscious and aware of their role as the agent of social revolution. The revolution must be a process of mass self-emancipation. This guiding principle underlies all socialist principles. For sure, socialism from ‘above’ always has an appeal as long as we live under a system of domination, hierarchy and exploitation. When struggles are defeated or when workers are beaten back, the loss of confidence that ensues allows for organisations or individuals step in claiming to liberate the masses ‘from above’. Ideologies that tell people that they are unqualified, that others are best equipped and hold the right way, the best way — the only way — can keep people from trying to change things. If self-emancipation is the goal, it must be the means as well. To paraphrase Eugene Debs, if a saviour can lead you into the promised land, he can lead you back out again too.
Despite all the obvious failures of capitalism, workers still hold doubt that socialism offers them anything better. Can we blame them. Movements purporting to be socialist have brought authoritarian state-capitalism or liberal welfare statism. Building another socialist movement now requires once more re-envisaging a future that articulates and incorporates those once held socialist ideals which were distorted. The Socialist Party’s mission is the the extension of democracy to the whole of society, the socialisation of private productive property and replacement of the anarchy of the market by a rational planning.
Well-supported arguments for these conclusions exist, other than these measures will lead to bureaucratic domination, general poverty and ecological disaster.
Socialism signifies a “society of free and associated producers” based on the “associated mode of production” as Marx said. He also explained that this “union of free individuals” was the crowning point of the producers’ act of self-emancipation where individuals are subject neither to personal dependence – as in pre-capitalism – nor to material dependence – as in commodity (capitalist) society – excludes, by definition, private property in the means of production, commodity form of the product of labour, wage labour and state. Here the freely associated “social individuals” are the masters of their own social movement, subjecting their social relations to their own control. Human society, when we get it, will be a free association of social individuals. It will not be a one-party workers’ state.
Socialism’s basic conceptions of universal human emancipation and of the free association of individuals are not complex. A world without private property or money is not complicated to comprehend. But it is the socialists’ unfinished task.
The wage system, in spite of all the refinements of sophistication, is the same in all ages, in all lands, and in all climes. Its victims work, propagate their species, bear all the burdens, and perish. The shackles of the slave and the scourge of the master symbolise the reign of King Capital. Not until slave and master have both disappeared forever, and the equal freedom of all has been established, can we lay any proper claim to civilisation.
Remember the class struggle
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The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, entitled Continued Surge in Strike Activity Signals Worker Dissatisfaction With Wage Growth, noted that the spike marked “a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” The jump in numbers, EPI explained, “is largely fueled by an increase in stoppages involving at least 20,000 workers.” Key examples include public school teachers in North Carolina, West Virginia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Kentucky and unionized workers at General Motors, Stop & Shop, the University of California, and AT&T. The data include only information on work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers that last at least one full shift
“Strike activity surged in 2018, with 485,200 workers involved in major work stoppages—a nearly twentyfold increase from 25,300 workers in 2017,” according to the report, which cited data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). “The surge in strike activity continued in 2019, with 425,500 workers involved in major work stoppages.”
EPI’s report was highlighted on Twitter by Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, who declared that “We’re just getting started. Cheers to all the strikers who are showing us the way. Workers have power. Not alone, but in action together. Solidarity is the way forward.”
The report’s co-author, by Heidi Shierholz, EPI’s senior economist and director of policy, explained, “Even though we are 10 years into an economic recovery and the unemployment rate is under 4%, working people are still not seeing the kinds of robust wage growth that those at the top have seen for decades. The increase in strike numbers shows that workers understand that joining together in collective action remains an effective way to raise wages and benefits, and improve working conditions.”
The other author, Margaret Poydock, a policy associate at the think tank, pointed out that “the resurgence in recent strike activity has occurred despite current policy that makes it difficult for many workers to effectively engage in their fundamental right to strike.” She also praised the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the Democrat-majority U.S. House last week but is unlikely to be approved by the GOP-controlled Senate and Trump. “Corporate influence has eroded labor law and allowed worker protections to stagnate,” said Poydock. “We need fundamental labor law reforms like the PRO Act in order to bring worker protections into the 21st century.”
Along with the PRO Act, the EPI report promoted “additional solutions under discussion that would strengthen the right to strike, including extending unemployment benefits to striking workers, creating tax-deductible strike funds to make it easier for unions to sustain long-term strikes, and forming digital picket lines to inform consumers of real-life collective actions during online interactions with the workers’ employer.”
The Dow is at a record high and unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades – but 140 million people are also poor or low wealth. Sixty per cent of African Americans are poor or low-income, as are 64% of Hispanics, but the largest single racial group among America’s poor and low-income – 66 million Americans – are white.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, explained:
“Yes, the Dow is at a record high and official unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades. But measuring the health of the economy by these stats is like measuring the 19th-century’s plantation economy by the price of cotton. However much the slaveholders profited, enslaved people and the poor white farmers whose wages were stifled by free labor did not see the benefits of the boom.”
Workers know solidarity is the best way to fight back.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/11/were-just-getting-started-says-union-leader-worker-strike-activity-hits-35-year-high
Poisoned Air
Air pollution from burning fossil fuels is responsible for more than 4m premature deaths around the world each year.
Children, especially those living in low-income countries, are particularly affected with an estimated 40,000 dying each year before they reach their fifth birthday because of exposure to particulate pollution from fossil fuels.
“Air pollution is a threat to our health and our economies,” said Minwoo Son, clean air campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia. “Every year, air pollution from fossil fuels takes millions of lives, increases our risk of stroke, lung cancer and asthma, and costs us trillions of dollars.”
Burning fossil fuels costs the global economy about $8bn a day, according to a study.
The study found:
NO2, from petrol and diesel vehicles, power plants and factories, is linked to roughly 4m new cases of asthma in children each year. Approximately 16 million children live with the condition due to exposure to fossil fuel pollution.
Tiny particulate pollution – known as PM2.5 – is attributed to roughly 1.8bn days of work absence because of illness each year.
China, the US and India are hardest-hit financially by the impact of dirty air with estimated costs of $900bn, $600bn and $150bn each year respectively.
Inequality in wealth and work
The world’s richest 2,153 people controlled more money than the poorest 4.6 billion combined in 2019, while unpaid or underpaid work by women and girls adds three times more to the global economy each year than the technology industry, Oxfam said.
The top 15 Indian billionaires are worth $197.8 billion combined
Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India, to highlight the level of inequality in the global economy, Behar cited the case of a woman called Buchu Devi in India who spends 16 to 17 hours a day doing work like fetching water after trekking 3km, cooking, preparing her children for school and working in a poorly paid job.
“And on the one hand you see the billionaires who are all assembling at Davos with their personal planes, personal jets, super rich lifestyles,” he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-inequality-idUSKBN1ZJ00B
The top 15 Indian billionaires are worth $197.8 billion combined
Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India, to highlight the level of inequality in the global economy, Behar cited the case of a woman called Buchu Devi in India who spends 16 to 17 hours a day doing work like fetching water after trekking 3km, cooking, preparing her children for school and working in a poorly paid job.
“And on the one hand you see the billionaires who are all assembling at Davos with their personal planes, personal jets, super rich lifestyles,” he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-inequality-idUSKBN1ZJ00B
We will never capitulate
The Socialist Party is a political party, which means that its concern is the struggle of the working class as a whole for political power. Whereas the primary concern of trade unions is the economic struggle for better conditions, the Socialist Party concerns itself with unifying our fellow-workers, giving them direction, filling them with the spirit of the class struggle, orientating them towards the overthrow of the capitalist system. Its aim is to effect the capture of the state-machine to acquire political power by the workers.
The Socialist Party participates in the election campaigns as a separate and distinct independent political party. It is anxious to have its representatives in all the legislative bodies. But its election campaigns and its activities are fundamentally different from those of the left-wing. We socialists are not here to help the masters to govern the masses. We are here to help the people press their masters, get from the capitalists and their government a maximum of concessions. We do not spread the false notion that there can be cooperation between the exploited and their exploiters. In other words, we conduct our election campaigns in the spirit of the class struggle. We use the platform of Parliament, from which our voice can be heard better than the voice of private citizens, to help organize the workers and help them conduct all their daily struggles. We do so, not by pretty speeches, not by telling the law-makers, who are servants of the Big Business, how fine and noble they are, but by heading great movements of the masses which would make those gentlemen sit up and take notice. In other words, while the Left solicit votes in order to reform the State and thereby to make it more effective for the capitalists, we socialists practice revolutionary parliamentarianism, by which is meant strengthening the working class and weakening its enemies. We go to the law-making institutions, not to tinker them up for the benefit of the capitalists, but to be a monkey wrench in their machinery, preventing them from working smoothly on behalf of the masters. We use, while there, every step of those agents of the capitalists to expose them before the people, to show what these so-called representatives of the people and what all these so-called democratic institutions actually are. The workers no longer look to the benevolent action of the Labour Party for help in attaining the workers’ objective – the emancipation from wage slavery. The Socialist Party is the political organisation of the working class
The aim of the Socialist Party is to replace the world capitalist system with world socialism which will mark the end of classes and private property. We aim at ending the present capitalist system to its very foundation, such as its various institutions, organisations, even its traditions, science and art. which all are accessories to the capitalist system. we intend to realise a society that has neither rich nor poor, without classes, a society whose members can all secure their food, clothes and dwelling. Exploitation, oppression, and degradation will not exist in socialist society. Commodity production, that is, production for sale or exchange on the market, will not exist. The system of wage labour will be abolished and the guiding principle of labour will be “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” The means of production will be held communally and private property will be eliminated.
With the abolition of classes and class distinctions, all social and political inequality arising from them will disappear. The conflicts of interest between workers and farmers, town and country, manual and intellectual labour will disappear. As classes will not exist, the State will not be necessary as an instrument of class rule and will gradually have withered away. The social relationships between people will be above-board and principled. Labour will be conscious and enthusiastic as the way of life rather than only as a means of survival. The forces of production will be unleashed and there will be high standards of social wealth. There will be broad and profound advances made in the fields of education, art, culture and science, as the masses of people are free to pursue these endeavours. There will no longer be the struggle between opposing classes. The debates and discussions between old and new, humanity and nature, what is correct and incorrect, will propel the development of human society forward.
Real power in this class struggle lies with the workers themselves, the Socialist Party shall strive for their awakening and organisation.
The world is ours
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Ours is a class society. The handful of capitalists who are in control of the factories, the banks, the natural resources and the government, are steadily reducing the living standards of working people and eroding our environment. Those who protest against the capitalists are still under the influence of reformism. Reformism thinks only of how to solve problems within the framework allowed by capital. Reformists are concerned for the health of capitalism. Goods are not produced to meet the needs of the people but to make profits for the bosses. If it is profitable to pollute the streams and the sea that will happen. If it is profitable to destroy food crops in a starving world to keep prices up, they will certainly be destroyed. For working people the future is less and less certain. Wages fall or remain stagnant while hours increase and working conditions deteriorate. People are homeless or living in overcrowded homes. People live in squalor so a small clique of very wealthy individuals can live in luxury.
Capitalism is a system of exploitation. The capitalist class seek to maintain its wealth and power. Profits can be made only by fiercer exploitation, cutting down the living standards, of the masses, taking away even such concessions as were previously made. A handful of capitalists control our world and make vast profits off the sweat and toil of the working people and the natural resources of the land. All the major means of production – the factories, forests, farms, fisheries and mines are in the hands of a relative few capitalists. The people at the centre of the corporations extract huge fortunes accumulated from the backs of the working class. This anarchic system wastes a great deal of social wealth. Capitalism is an obstacle to the further advancement of the material well-being of society. It is unjust, wasteful and irrational. Under capitalism, the only way to get rich is to trample over somebody else. There is only room for a few capitalists. Capitalism today means the possible collapse of civilisation.
If all the natural wealth of our planet were being utilised to provide for the needs of its people, there wouldn’t be any problem. But that’s not what’s happening. Everything is produced in order to make a profit. When the profit system goes bust, the World’s population is left helpless. But we don’t have to be helpless. We’re the majority. If we get together, we can be tremendously powerful.
The material and technical resources for a socialist society unquestionably exist today. No competent researcher would doubt that insofar as it depends upon natural resources and the means of production and distribution, everybody could have a comfortable home, abundant nutritious food, ample opportunity for recreation and education, security against accident, sickness, and old age; and the sense of independence and self-respect that goes with these things. What we actually have, however, is mass misery and widespread poverty. This appalling contrast between what might be and what is arises from the nature of the economic system – capitalism. That system acts as a brake upon production so that, as the phrase goes, you have “want in the midst of plenty.” It should be added that socialism envisages planning on a world scale. National boundaries are as artificial and restrictive and socialism is in essence a global economy. Every effort to establish “planned” production under private capitalism breaks down, since the warfare between rival capitalists, in a nation and capitalist groups in different nations disrupts such efforts.
World socialism can set free the scientists and technicians to work with adequate resources to plan for still greater efficiency in the use of our resources and thus for greater abundance of leisure as well as goods. The spectre of insecurity will be removed. The undemocratic economic domination of the few over the many will be at an end. No one can predict the cultural advances which may follow this release of the human spirit. The one way to security, to peace, to freedom, to cultural advancement is the path of socialist revolution. This is your choice – capitalist chaos or a world of civilisation and culture.
YOU CHOOSE HOW WE USE TECHNOLOGY
The future is not a rosy one
In-work poverty is not new. In the late 1990s Gordon Brown brought in tax credits to top up the earnings of those not making enough to get by from their wages alone. Critics said it would simply encourage employers to pay low wages because they knew the government would provide a top up.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation noted in a report released last week, many of those with jobs are struggling to get by. Britain still has a poverty problem, but now it is concentrated among the employed rather than the jobless. The official definition of poverty is someone who lives in a household where the money coming in – typically from pay and benefits – is below 60% of the median income for a similar family type after housing costs. According to the foundation, 56% of those below the poverty line live in a household where someone is working.
As the benefits system has become less generous, people have needed to work longer hours to get by. The Resolution Foundation thinktank estimates that a single parent with two children in a job earning the “national living wage” needs to work 23 hours per week to live free of poverty, compared with the 16 hours required in the absence of benefit cuts made post-2010. This helps explain why earnings growth has been so weak even as the official jobless rate has fallen to below 4%. Britain looks like a full-employment economy but also has large pockets of under-employment. If demand for labour increases, employers don’t need to pay more to attract new workers; they simply have to offer existing workers more hours at the current rate. There are more people on zero-hour contracts, more people who would work longer if they could.
Housing has become a lot more expensive for those on low incomes. Most of those affected by in-work poverty are not owner-occupiers, so while ultra-low mortgage rates have kept housing costs down for those who own their own homes, renting has become more expensive. That helps explain why some of the highest levels of in-work poverty are to be found in London. Kensington and Chelsea in London is the most unaffordable place in the country at 44.5 times average annual earnings. House prices in some other parts of the country have risen out of reach for young adults. According to the ONS, the average full-time worker could expect to pay about 7.8 times their annual earnings on purchasing a home, compared with about 3.5 in the early 1990s.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation noted in a report released last week, many of those with jobs are struggling to get by. Britain still has a poverty problem, but now it is concentrated among the employed rather than the jobless. The official definition of poverty is someone who lives in a household where the money coming in – typically from pay and benefits – is below 60% of the median income for a similar family type after housing costs. According to the foundation, 56% of those below the poverty line live in a household where someone is working.
As the benefits system has become less generous, people have needed to work longer hours to get by. The Resolution Foundation thinktank estimates that a single parent with two children in a job earning the “national living wage” needs to work 23 hours per week to live free of poverty, compared with the 16 hours required in the absence of benefit cuts made post-2010. This helps explain why earnings growth has been so weak even as the official jobless rate has fallen to below 4%. Britain looks like a full-employment economy but also has large pockets of under-employment. If demand for labour increases, employers don’t need to pay more to attract new workers; they simply have to offer existing workers more hours at the current rate. There are more people on zero-hour contracts, more people who would work longer if they could.
Housing has become a lot more expensive for those on low incomes. Most of those affected by in-work poverty are not owner-occupiers, so while ultra-low mortgage rates have kept housing costs down for those who own their own homes, renting has become more expensive. That helps explain why some of the highest levels of in-work poverty are to be found in London. Kensington and Chelsea in London is the most unaffordable place in the country at 44.5 times average annual earnings. House prices in some other parts of the country have risen out of reach for young adults. According to the ONS, the average full-time worker could expect to pay about 7.8 times their annual earnings on purchasing a home, compared with about 3.5 in the early 1990s.
Home ownership has collapsed for adults in their prime working age, according to official figures that show those in their mid-30s to mid-40s are three times more likely to rent than 20 years ago. In a reflection of surging house prices and a lost decade for wage growth since the financial crisis, the Office for National Statistics found that a third of 35- to 44-year-olds in England were renting from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than one in 10 in 1997. Home ownership had become increasingly concentrated among people over the age of 65. Almost three-quarters of adults in the generation that includes baby boomers born after the second world war own their own homes outright, up from just over half in 1993.
Since the launch of the scheme in 1979, which allowed social housing tenants to buy their homes at reduced prices, the proportion of council properties in Britain has slumped from 33.2% to only 17.6% in 2017. The findings from the ONS come with potentially damaging implications for living standards for the current generation of adults under the age of 65, who are poised to enter retirement in worse financial health than their parents. Someone who owns their home outright could expect to maintain their living standards on a pension pot of about £260,000, while someone who rents privately would need almost double this, at about £445,000.
If the declining home ownership trend continued for the current generation of 35- to 44-year-olds, older people in future would be more likely to live in private rented accommodation than today. The ONS found early signals to suggest the current trajectory could continue, including figures showing that 15.8% of 45- to 54-year-olds rent from private landlords, up from only 5.6% in 1997. One in three of the millennial generation, born between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, are expected to never own their own home, with many forced to live and raise families in insecure privately rented properties. Renting from a private landlord tends to be most common at younger ages but then gradually declines as people take out mortgages or receive an inheritance from family. However, the ONS said that people in every under-65 age bracket were now far more likely to rent privately than 10 or 20 years ago.
Lindsay Judge, the principal research and policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation thinktank, said, “The prospect of renting privately in retirement will alarm many people as it could mean high costs, and low levels of housing security. It also carries huge cost implications for the state as the UK’s housing benefit bill could escalate,” she said.
Nathan Long, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, a financial investment platform, said that many middle-aged private renters would face problems in the future.
“Not only were they born too late to benefit from final salary pensions, they were born too early to benefit from a lifetime of automatic pension saving and many won’t be able to call on their house if times get tough,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/09/how-poverty-has-become-the-scourge-of-those-in-work