The Kurdish Issue

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It’s hard to believe that not so long ago the Kurds were being lauded on the international stage as victors and heroes. The plucky ones who, with international coalition support, saw off Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Whose women and men had bravely led the ground fight against IS and taken back the Syrian city of Raqqa that the extremists had made ‘capital’ of their caliphate. Who, as part of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), partnering with the US, drove IS militants out of their last stronghold of Baghuz in early 2019.
Young female fighters of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) were the symbol, not only the more acceptable face of the Kurdish armed struggle, but also the most interesting and media-friendly one. Rojava was viewed as a haven of grassroots democracy, based on principles of feminism, ecology, cultural pluralism, participatory politics and a co-operative sharing economy. Since 2012 it has presented a radical alternative to the nation state, articulated as ‘democratic confederalism’ by Abdullah Öcalan. 


David Graeber describes Rojava’s revolutionary autonomy as ‘a synthesis of the ideas of American anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin and other authors, Kurdish tradition, and wide-ranging experience in the pragmatics of revolutionary organization.’ It had inspired people around the world. Dreams of a pan-Kurdish state of greater Kurdistan seem remote today.


Then, on 6 October 2019, Trump announced, after a phone call with Turkish leader Erdoğan, that he was pulling US troops out of North and East Syria. It gave a green light for Turkey to invade Rojava, which it did three days later.  Faced with Turkish military might, Syria’s Kurds struck a deal with Assad, their former enemy, for an attempt at security.


On 22 October Russia and Turkey reached an agreement. Turkish troops would remain in the areas they had seized and Russian troops and the Syrian army would control the rest of the border. The Kurdish People’s Protection Unit element of the multi-ethnic SDF had 150 hours to withdraw. Both powers agreed they would not allow ‘any separatist agenda’ in the territory.


Turkey had got away with creating a 5,000-square-kilometre, ideally Kurd-free, buffer zone within Syrian Kurdistan. The Syrian Kurds, still under attack today, had been stitched up by the great powers and hung out to dry by their former allies.


The geopolitics are complex and gives Turkey clout. Turkey is host to 3.5 million refugees, many of whom would rather go to Europe. For Erdoğan they are a weapon that can be unleashed at any time on the EU and its neighbours. The countries of Europe have domestic, populist, political imperatives for keeping migrants out that trump humanitarian (and economic) reasons for letting them in. Turkey has the second-largest army of all members and housing 50 US nuclear bombs. It’s the world’s fifth-largest buyer of arms, 60 per cent coming from the US and plenty from the UK, France, Spain and Russia. Turkey also invests lavishly in lobbying power, spending $6.6 million on influencing the US government in 2018.


What’s happening in where 15 million Kurds live affects Kurds in the wider region too. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party won the March 2019 local elections, the People’s Democracy Party , a pro-peace, pro-Kurdish, bottom-up, Left alliance, did very well in the majority-Kurdish east of the country. Erdoğan instigated another round of politically motivated trials against party members, officials and politicians, accusing them of links with the outlawed PKK, which the government designates as terrorist. Elected mayors belonging to the opposition were arrested, stripped of office and replaced by government trusties.  With local democracy being destroyed, power transferred to paramilitary forces. Modelled on the hated ‘village guard’ system of government spies, ‘neighbourhood guards’ are operating in Kurdish-majority cities, armed and with the authority to search and harass locals. The so-called NGO, People Special Forces arms people to “protect” the state from its enemies. They are a paramilitary force, equipped and trained to attack opposition groups and movements. The policy is to build fear and anxiety.


The Bezos Billions

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 Bezos is among the elite set of American billionaires who have seen their net worth skyrocket since the pandemic began. The wealth of Amazon’s CEO has grown by $74 billion since the beginning of the year and now sits at approximately $189 billion.

The pandemic has also ushered in a crisis of housing insecurity, with nearly a third of Americans missing their mortgage or rent payments in June. Twenty percent of renters didn’t pay their rent on time in May and 31% weren’t able to in April.  


As Common Dreams reported Monday, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) also saw unprecedented growth in demand this spring.


While Amazon reported $13.9 billion in income in 2019, Bezos’ company managed to pay just $162 million in federal taxes last year—a 1.2% tax rate despite the United States’ 21% federal tax rate for corporations. The previous two years, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Amazon paid $0 in federal income tax.


While setting a new record on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the group wrote, Bezos’ company also cut a $2 per hour temporary raise given to warehouse employees when the pandemic began and in May Amazon reportedly told workers its paid sick leave policy doesn’t apply to its warehouses.


Bezos gained $13 billion today. That’s more than the GDP of about 50 countries. Bezos has added $61.4 billion to his net worth this year. A report in from the US labor department suggests that if the US Economy does recover the vast majority of US workers can expect to return to work at a lower wage. This will be due primarily to two factors. One an overly large pool of unemployed workers all competing for the same job and secondly the Corporations needing to recover lost profits through the pandemic. There are already a large number of “white collar workers” who have taken wage cuts so as to keep their jobs and those Corporations will not restore those cuts when (if) the economy recovers.

Questions on a Falling Populations

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Falling fertility rates – the number of live births per woman go hand in hand with better education and career opportunities for women, their access to contraception and abortion and lower child mortality rates which mean women on average have fewer children.
For lower-income countries, a falling birth-rate could spell better living standards as a smaller number of children each get a bigger piece of the pie, whether that’s health or education.
However, in countries where fertility rates have already been falling for years, shrinking further could cause problems. These countries will have to work out how to care for a growing older population, with fewer younger people to work as carers and to pay into the safety-net system.
A lot of the worries about caring for an ageing population assume everyone will be ill in old age.
But as well as life expectancy, the world has been making gains when it comes to “healthy life expectancy”.
In pretty much every country around the world, with the notable exception of Syria, new babies are expected to spend more years in good health than those born in the year 2000 – five extra healthy years on average.
In Rwanda, the average baby has gained 22 additional years of expected life in good health since the start of the millennium.
In higher-income countries like the UK, Germany and the US, healthy life expectancy has increased by between one and three years.
“The fears around an ageing population have to be put into perspective,” says Prof Sarah Harper at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing.
“The health of older adults is already much better than it was,” even a few decades ago, she points out, meaning older people can be “active, healthy” and paying in for a greater proportion of their lives. The elderly may well have to work for a lot longer. Governments are already raising the retirement age for pensions.
And, as Dr Hannah Ritchie at the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data team points out: “We don’t even know what the world of work will look like in 50 years”.
Fertility rates and life expectancy are two parts of the equation when it comes to whether a population is growing or shrinking. The third is migration.
Countries that end up with much smaller populations of young people might want or need to attract young people from elsewhere. The world could become even more culturally and ethnically mixed, says Dr Ritchie.
No matter how big the gains in healthy life expectancy, the “oldest old” will probably always need care towards the end of their lives.
Dr Tiziana Leone at the London School of Economics warns countries with ageing populations face a crisis in terms of their health and social care systems.

We need to start now, by training the right workforce – “we’ll need fewer paediatricians and gynaecologists”, she says. Carers will be “as important as doctors”

A shrinking population is “a good thing” for the environment, according to Prof Harper.
But Dr Ritchie points out that economic growth is a stronger driver of climate change than population growth. If the world becomes richer and consumes more despite the numbers of people shrinking, environmental gains aren’t guaranteed. Equally, while wealth and pollution have been linked over the past century, in recent years it’s the richer countries that have been able to reduce their CO2 emissions by investing in technology. And this pattern could continue.

Population and socialism

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Yes, it would be  correct to say that socialism would be a lot easier to implement and operate with less people to provide for. But if wishes were horses, all beggars would ride, as the old saying goes. Socialism will inherit the problems capitalism has created for itself.


The reality is that globally the population is growing and the question is, can it be reduced? The stark answer is not immediately – even if fertility rates were lowered. The number of people in a country continues to rise for years after people stop having children– a phenomenon known as population momentum. 




Thus, the projection is that global population will go from approaching 8 billion today to about 11 billion in around year 2100 then plateauing and then finally begin to drop back to about what it is today. But even now such high figures are being challenged by experts in the field who suggest lower numbers and a an earlier date for the decline to commence


So socialists fully expect and are required to plan for an increased number of people, something that we cannot avoid regardless of any family planning which is already being increasingly adopted without any compulsion by better educated and more empowered women, even in patriarchal dominated cultures.


Our argument is that with rational allocation of resources that should not be a problem and free access can still be accomplished. We do have the capability of comfortably coping and still create a sustainable steady-state, zero-growth economy eventually. 


This is not to say that population numbers and density will not be a critical crisis for capitalism and another reason why for the sake of humanity it must be done away with.


Along with a population rise we also have the related issues that will arise in the future. 


Firstly,  the demographic problem of higher numbers of elderly with less adults of working-age to support them. China’s one-child policy resulted in what was called the 1 – 2 – 4 paradox. One active worker supporting retired parents and because of better health prospects his or her grand-parents. Such family support is essential in countries lacking social safety-nets for the old and frail. 


Secondly, we also have the situation of urbanisation and over-crowding in slums and shanty towns of some major cities as the industrialised plantation-type cash-crop farming leads to the demise of the small-farmers. (To be exacerbated by climate change in many areas of the world)


And thirdly, we have the nationalist prejudice against the movement and migration of people. We witness this right now. The youth of Africa thwarted by lack of prospects seek opportunities in Europe where there is already a declining work-force that requires an influx of newcomers. But rather than be welcomed, they are being excluded. 


Socialists cannot deny these conditions result in suffering and misery for as long as we live under capitalism. But we challenge the view that solutions cannot be achieved with the establishment of a cooperative society. In fact, only socialism can overcome them.


 And that is the reason why great changes in people attitudes on how we view our world are required.


More Houses to Live In

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Promises to revitalise high streets with a new breed of shops should be abandoned in favour of turning town centres into residential hubs, creating at least 800,000 homes, according to a report by the Social Market Foundation (SMF)that aims to influence a Downing Street review of planning laws. Its report, ‘A New Life for the High Street,’ that under a “conservative assumption” 5% of commercial land could be released for development, allowing at least 800,000 homes to be built.
It said the decline of the traditional high street could not be reversed by policies that “turn the clock back” to a time before online shopping, especially after the trend accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. Homeworking was also likely to become a permanent feature of many jobs, leading to further declines in footfall in town and city centres and the closure of more retail outlets.
Empty shops should be given a new lease of life as homes or be demolished in favour of modern apartments to support “new and more beneficial uses for town-centre sites”.
SMF research director, Scott Corfe, “Nothing can stop the demise of traditional high street shopping so it would be better for politicians to support the next chapter in the story of the high street, with hundreds of thousands of new homes that bring new life to our urban centres.”

Worse to come?

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British households have suffered the biggest hit to their finances since the oil crisis of the mid-1970s.  Against a backdrop of rising job losses four months into the crisis, the Resolution Foundation thinktank said the average household in Britain had suffered a 4.5% drop in income in the month of May, compared with their average monthly income level in the financial year ending March 2020, before the pandemic struck.

Despite the government ramping up spending to cushion the economic blow, with 9.4m jobs furloughed on its coronavirus job retention scheme and £9bn of fresh funding for the benefits system, it said income levels for the typical family had crashed back down to 2006-07 levels in a matter of months.
The thinktank said the hit to incomes was bigger than the one families suffered during the 2008 financial crisis. The income of typical working-age households fell by 2.7% as a result of the banking crash little more than a decade ago.
The Resolution Foundation said the financial impact from Covid-19 comes after a decade of stalling improvements for living standards in Britain. After one of the weakest economic recoveries on record following the 2008 financial crisis, workers’ average pay after accounting for inflation only returned to its pre-crisis peak in December, following 12 years of sluggish growth. It said the decade of lacklustre gains meant the poorest 10th of households in Britain had incomes no higher on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic than in the early 2000s.
The Resolution Foundation said ministers providing emergency funds to cushion the economic fallout had prevented a worse outcome, with the study finding that the poorest fifth of households had seen no immediate hit to their income at all during the first phase of the crisis. Without action, the poorest families would have seen their incomes collapse by at least 8%, it said.
The Treasury’s furlough scheme is due to be cut back from the start of next month, before it is closed completely at the end of October. Last week, the government’s economics forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, warned at least 10% and up to 20% of the 9.4m jobs protected by the scheme could be made redundant when it is closed. The OBR warned unemployment was on track to more than double to levels unseen since the 1980s before Christmas.
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said, “Working people must not pay the price of the pandemic. The government should step in with much greater targeted support to save jobs in hard-hit sectors like retail, manufacturing and aviation,” she said. “The more people we keep in work, the faster we can get ourselves out of recession and get living standards rising again.”
Adam Corlett, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “The government’s unprecedented policy response has played a critical role so far in protecting millions of households, and particularly the poorest, from the worst of the crisis. But for many the threat of further income falls looms large.”

Why GDP?

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 Two economic professors find a dead rat while on a long stroll. In disgust, the older don dares his younger colleague: “if you eat it, I’ll pay you $10,000”. The younger economist makes a quick cost-benefit analysis in his head, then accepts the challenge, to his colleague’s surprise. 



 Sometime later, realizing the enormity of his financial loss, the older man offers to reciprocate to get his money back. Feeling ashamed of being the only one to eat a dead rat, his younger colleague quickly agrees.

A few days later, feeling quite foolish about what happened, the younger don laments: “Looks like we both ate dead rats for nothing”. The more senior professor reassures him, “Yes, but remember we increased GDP by $20,000”.
GDP has been increasingly challenged on many grounds as a measure of economic and social progress. Clearly, GDP does not take account of other dimensions of wellbeing, natural resource depletion or environmental damage.  Much care work by family members which goes unremunerated and thus unrecorded.
Excluding some economic activities, but not others, when calculating a country’s national income is also problematic as it is difficult to agree on what economic activities should be included to enhance welfare.
Interestingly, US and European statistical offices only started national income accounts after the Second World War using Simon Kuznets’ pioneering work for the Roosevelt administration.
Robert F. Kennedy famously quipped over half a century ago, GDP “measures everything, except that which makes life worthwhile”.

They call it sport

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While news in the UK revealed the abuse of gymnasts, a Human Rights Watch report has found child athletes in Japan often suffer physical and verbal abuse and sometimes sexual abuse when training for sport after documenting the experiences of over 800 athletes in 50 sports. 



 The 67-page report released on Monday titled “I Was Hit So Many Times I Can’t Count” looks at Japan‘s history of physical punishment in sport and includes first-hand accounts of athletes being punched, kicked and whipped.



 “For decades, children in Japan have been brutally beaten and verbally abused in the name of winning trophies and medals,” Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said in a statement.



 https://www.france24.com/en/20200720-japanese-child-athletes-brutally-beaten-and-abused-human-rights-watch-report-finds

The Parable of the Table. (1909)

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From the July 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

[An extract from the speech of Gustave Hervé of his trial] Ah! I know that I wound your conscience, gentlemen of the jury. Your conscience pricks you all the more because you feel that I am speaking the truth. I feel sure that when I say this I wound the universal conscience which the Paris Bar with its eloquence, knows so well how to interpret.



But do you believe that Voltaire, Diderot and the rest of the encyclopaedists were able to avoid treading on people’s corns?



It is a lamentable fact that every time a new form of society is about to come forth from the womb of one on the point of death, it always does so by a long and painful child-birth, producing in every family, and in every heart, trouble and anguish; suffering that every innovator would fain spare those whose convictions he hurts.



As for us revolutionary Socialists, we have discarded the folds of this flag on which the names of so many deeds of butchery are displayed in letters of gold.



Flags are but emblems; and are worth something only in so far as they represent something worthy. What, after all, is one’s native country? Or what, in actual fact, do all these “fatherlands” consist?



Allow me, if you please, gentlemen of the jury, to draw for you a mental picture, to speak if I may a kind of parable, which will the better help you to understand what our feelings are. One’s native land, every country, no matter under what form of government it be masked, is made up of two groups of men, consisting on the one hand of a quite small number, on the other including the immense majority of people.



The first of these is seated round a well furnished table where nothing is lacking. At the head of this table, in the seat of honour, you find the great financiers; some, perhaps, are Jews, others Catholics or Protestants, or it may be even Freethinkers. It is possible for them to be in entire disagreement on questions of religion or philosophy, and even on questions affecting their individual interests, but as against the mass of the people, they are as thick as thieves.



Seated on their right and left hand you have Cabinet Ministers, high officials of every department of civil, religious or military administration. Paymasters-general with salaries of 30, 40, and 60 thousand francs a year: a little further off fully fledged barristers, by their unanimity glorious interpreters of the “Universal Conscience” – the whole Bench and Bar, not forgetting their precious assistants, the solicitors, notaries and ushers.



Large shareholders in mines, factories, railways, steamship companies and big shops: manorial magnates, big landed proprietors; all are seated at this table: everybody that has two-pence is there too, but at the foot. These latter are the small fry, who have for that matter, all the prejudices, all the conservative instincts, of the big capitalists.



Ah! gentlemen of the jury, I wish that you may be of the number of these privileged ones seated around this festive board. Verily, you are not so badly off there, after all, you know. In return for a little work – when you have any work at all – work I say which is oft-times intelligent, occasionally agreeable, which always leaves you with some spare time for yourself, directive work that flatters your pride and vanity – in return for this you can enjoy a life of plenty, made pleasant by every comfort, every luxury that the progress of science has placed at the service of Fortune’s favoured ones.



Far from the table I see a great herd of beasts of burden doomed to repulsive, squalid, dangerous, unintelligent toil, without truce or rest, and above all without security for the morrow; petty shop-keepers chained to their counters, Sundays and holidays, more and more crushed by the competition of the big shops; small industrial employers, ground down by the competition of the big factory owners; small peasant proprietors, brutalised by a sixteen to eighteen hours day, who only toil that they may enrich the big middlemen: millers, wine factors, sugar refiners. At a still greater distance from this table of the happy ones of this world, I see the crowd of proletarians who have but their strength of arm or their brain for sole fortune, factory hands, men and women exposed to long periods of unemployment, petty officials and shop-assistants forced to bow and scrape and hide their opinions, domestic servants of both sexes, labouring flesh, cannon fodder, matériel of “pleasure”.



There are your beloved countries! Your country to-day is made up of this monstrous social inequality, this horrible exploitation of man by man.



When the proletarians doff their hats to the flag as it passes by, it is to this that they uncover. They in effect say: “What a splendid country is ours! How free, kind and just is she!”



How! how you must laugh, Mr. Attorney-General, when you hear them sing: “ah! glorious is death indeed,

When for our native land – for liberty – we bleed!”

Musk Gets Bonus

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Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk qualified on Tuesday for a payout worth an unprecedented $2.1 billion, his second jackpot since May from the electric car maker following its massive stock surge.



 Despite Tuesday’s stock dip, and importantly for Musk’s personal finances, Tesla’s six-month average market capitalization for the first time has reached $150 billion. That triggers the vesting of the second of 12 tranches of options granted to the billionaire in his 2018 pay package to buy Tesla stock at a discount. 



 In early May, Musk’s first tranche vested after Tesla’s six-month average stock market value reached $100 billion. Each tranche gives Musk the option to buy 1.69 million Tesla shares at $350.02 each, less than a quarter of their current price. At Tesla’s current stock price of $1,594, Musk would theoretically be able to sell the shares related to the tranche that vested in May and the current tranche for a combined profit of $4.2 billion, or almost $2.1 billion per tranche.



 https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-tesla-stocks-musk/teslas-musk-qualifies-for-2-1-billion-payday-idUKKCN24M2PY

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