Israel-Gaza War

Some say that the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East would not have happened if the State of Israel had never been founded. But it was and it exists. And the same kind of thing could be said about countless conflict situations in the world today. So we must look at the situation as it is and, if we do, we find that, as in other such conflicts, the underlying cause is not undying enmity between two groups – Jews and Arabs – but a fight between different capitalist factions, via their respective governments, over land, resources and strategic routes. In Gaza, the Hamas organisation, who are both anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, came to power via elections in 2007 with the stated aim ‘to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’. But that was the end of any form of democracy there and, in their time in office, they have crushed multiple protests against them by rivals, expelling their officials to make sure there would never be another round of elections and killing dozens of their own people, many of them civilians. During that time the people of Gaza have been plunged increasingly into poverty with, for example, 40 per cent unemployment, with their leaders enriching themselves assisted by backers from other Arab countries and enjoying multi-million-dollar land deals, luxury villas and black market fuel from Egypt.

The continuing oppression by Israel (a country by the way where 22% of its own households live in poverty) has also of course been a significant factor, as its government has sought to facilitate the enrichment of its own capitalist class by grabbing land and keeping a tight lid on protest. Now the lid has come off – and in the most horrific way.

There is no excuse for the horrors unleashed on innocent people by Hamas nor for Israel’s savage retaliation, killing hundreds, depriving a land of food, water and power and threatening to flatten its infrastructure regardless of what may happen to the inhabitants in the short and long term. Of course Israel’s government will support its own capitalist class to the hilt – after all that is its role. And it is all part of a play book, which we see played out time and time again as governments representing their capitalist classes fail to resolve conflicts by diplomacy and resort to horrifying violence. We can only repeat the same thing we have always said when this has happened – that workers (in this case Arab and Israeli ones) have no interest in fighting one another but have a common interest in uniting with other workers to abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

 

The Australia Institute published an interesting report in April. 

Titled, Inequality on Steroids: The Distribution of Economic Growth in Australia, the report analysed the share of wealth that accrued to Australians between the period of 1950 and 2019.

In the first ten year period four per cent of the gains went to the top ten per cent.

In the next twenty year period sixteen per cent of the gains went to the top ten per cent.

In the next eight year period forty eight per cent of gains went to the top ten per cent.

In the next seventeen year period thirty six per cent of gains went to the top ten per cent.

In the next ten years up until 2019 ninety three per cent, that’s ninety three per cent of gains went to the top ten per cent.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Inequality-on-Steroids-Who-Benefits-From-Economic-Growth-in-Australia-WEB511-copy.pdf

From the Socialist Standard June 1992

The Rich get Richer

One further aspect needs to be dealt with in this the on the concentration of wealth ownership in Britain, and that is the question of what happens over time. Do the richer get richer?

From the point of view of economic theory, this is what you would expect to happen. Capitalism is based on the concentration into the hands of a tiny minority of the population of the ownership of the means of production. These function as capital for them in the sense of providing them with an unearned income. The source of this unearned income that accrues to capital is the labour of those who operate the means of production and actually produce wealth.

Ownership of capital, in other words, confers the right to appropriate a part of the new wealth that is being produced every day. Most of this new wealth—around 80 percent in fact—is used as means of consumption, by workers from their wages and salaries, by capitalists from their rent, interest and dividends, and by the state from the taxes it levies. The rest, under the spur of competition between capitalist firms to maximise profits, is accumulated as means of production, as further capital to yield an unearned income for their owners. This accumulation of capital out of profits produced by those who operate the means of production is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism is an economic system under which means of production are accumulated in the form of profit-yielding capital.

In concrete terms what this means is that the stock both of physical means of production (factories, machinery, plant, materials, etc) and of its monetary form, capital, grows over time. This is by no means a steady process—it is halted and even reversed from time to time, as in wars (when wealth is physically destroyed) and in slumps (when the same thing happens and when the value of the rest falls)—but the long term trend is upward. This must mean that in the long run those who own the means of production—the rich—get to own more means of production, more capital, i. e. get richer.

Changing estimates

So much for the theory, but is it confirmed by the facts? For all but the recent past the facts are not easy to come by. In Britain they nearly all come from the statistics about estates left in wills which the Inland Revenue has been collecting since death duties were introduced in 1894. Until 1960 it was left to individual academics to convert these into figures for the ownership of wealth by the living. They often used different methods, which meant that their estimates were not always comparable, but there was broad agreement that until the Second World War the top 1 percent owned about 60 percent and the top 10 percent about 90 percent of personal wealth, as a study quoted by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in its first report in 1975 showed (Table 1).

This slow long-term fall in the percentage shares of the top groups should not be equated with a fall in the amount of wealth they owned, but rather, as we shall see, with a slower rate of increase in their wealth than that of other groups.

From 1960 the Inland Revenue began producing its own yearly estimates. According to these, between 1960 and 1975 the share of the top 1 percent declined from 38 percent to 23 percent, that of the top 5 percent from 64 percent to 47 percent and that of the top 10 percent from 77 percent to 62 percent.

These figures were challenged by those who argued that they underestimated the concentration of wealth ownership. The critics correctly pointed out that the figures, being based on wealth declared to the Inland Revenue for death duty purposes, inevitably left out the wealth of the rich that was placed in discretionary trusts and other such devices or given to relatives before death precisely to avoid paying death duties. Defenders of capitalism, on the other hand, argued that the figures overestimated the degree of inequality as they did not take into account the wealth owned by the 60 percent or so of the population whose estates did not have to be declared to the Inland Revenue because they were too small. Individually the amounts were small but, in view of the millions of individuals involved, when added together made up a significant amount.

The Labour government that came into office in 1974 set up a Royal Commission, in the time honoured way, to bury its promises “to launch a fundamental attack on the principle of the hereditary transmission of great wealth, with its associated power and privilege” and “to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. (Did the Labour Party once really talk like this?). This recommended that both types of non-included wealth should be taken into account, and the Inland Revenue now produces each year adjusted figures which do this. This new series of statistics began in 1976 and in fact shows that the distribution of wealth has changed very little since then (Table 2).

So the change between 1975, when the top 10 percent were said to own 62 percent, and 1976, when they were said to own 50 percent, resulted purely from a change in the way the statistics were calculated. Calculated on the old basis the figure for the top 10 percent in 1989 would still be between 60 and 70 percent.

Statistical illusion

But this is not the only purely statistical factor that is involved in the figures. What the figures show are the percentage shares, and not the actual amounts of wealth, of the various categories. These shares are shares in a cake (the stock of wealth) which, as we saw, expands in the long run. This means that, for one group to maintain its share, it must get the same share of the new wealth that is being accumulated. Thus if, as is generally assumed, before the First World War the top 10 percent owned 90 percent of accumulated wealth, then, for them to maintain their share, 90 percent of the newly accumulating wealth would also have to go to them. That they were in fact able to more or less maintain this share until the Second World War (see Table 1) is a testimony to the poverty of the rest of the population whose incomes were so low that they had to spend most of it on items of immediate consumption.

If during this period the other 90 percent had between them been able to accumulate more than 10 percent of the newly accumulated wealth, then the share of the top 10 percent would have fallen, despite the fact that they were continuing to accumulate wealth and even to accumulate more of it in real (as opposed to percentage) terms than the rest of the population.

It was precisely this situation that did occur from the 1950s on. Regular and more or less steadily-rising real wages and salaries meant that the non-rich began to acquire more wealth in the form of household goods, cars and houses. When included in the figures this had the effect of reducing the share of the rich, but this is the only effect it has had and it is purely statistical.

Independently of what has happened to the non-rich, the rich have gone on accumulating wealth and so getting richer. The November 1991 issue of the official government publication Economic Trends contained a table which showed how the total amount of “marketable wealth”, broken down by category, had changed each year from 1976 to 1988, all in 1988 money so as to

be comparable. The general trend was upward, though there was a fall in 1981 corresponding to the last recession; the total increased from £752 billion in 1976 to £1317 billion in 1988. Of this extra £565 billion, 13 percent went to the top 1 percent, 39 percent to the top 5 percent and a massive 58 percent to the top 10 percent (which explains why their share increased over the period from 50 percent to 53 per cent), while a meagre 4 percent went to be shared amongst the 22 million in the bottom 50 percent.

What is even more interesting than how the total amount was divided amongst the categories is how the average amounts of wealth held by each person in the categories changed (Table 3). As can be seen, despite a smaller percentage increase than the rest of the top 50 percent, the average holding of those in the top 1 percent increased by some £132,000, more than that of those in any of the other groups. So the gap between the amount of wealth held by the individual members of top 1 percent and that held by the rest of the population increased. There is no reason to suppose that these years were exceptional in this respect, except perhaps that in some earlier years the gap between the average holding of the top 1 percent and that of the top 5 percent may have narrowed.

So the conclusion can only be that the so-called decline of the rich this century is a statistical illusion. Their share has only fallen, and then only after the Second World War, because the non-rich came to acquire more wealth. But this acquisition of wealth by the non-rich made no difference whatsoever to the position of the rich. They continued to get richer in the sense of coming to own more wealth in real terms (the only meaningful sense of the word “richer”). But not only this their average holding of wealth increased more in real terms than that of the non-rich. Defenders of capitalism who say that the rich have not got richer are conveying misinformation.

Adam Buick

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-rich-get-richer-1992.html

 

How does a money-free society where quality goods and services are produced for free use, not for profit begin to sound? And no longer being cash-strapped is the only benefit either. No leaders misleading, no states competing with each other for resources and sending workers to fight other workers. Want a real equal society? No classes either.

‘Retail sales in the UK dropped in September as the high cost of living continues to pressure households’ budgets, according to the latest sales-monitor report from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and KPMG published this week.

The survey said that UK retailers reported weak sales last month as cash-strapped consumers avoided big-ticket spending and delayed winter clothing purchases due to unseasonably warm weather.

Although the amount of money Britons spent while shopping rose by 2.7% year-on-year in September, expenditures were down by 4.1% compared to August, figures showed.

“Big-ticket items such as furniture and electronics performed poorly as consumers limited spending in the face of higher housing, rental, and fuel costs,” said Helen Dickinson, CEO of the BRC. “The Indian summer also meant sales of autumn clothing, knitwear, and coats have yet to materialize.”

September marked the second weakest month of the year so far and was well below the inflation rate, indicating the volume of goods sold declined.

Sluggish retail sales have added to concerns over year-end profits, as soaring interest rates squeeze household incomes while the number of jobless is rising in the UK. The downturn in sales comes ahead of the so-called “golden quarter,” the run-up to Christmas when shop owners can make the most of their annual yields.

“The fight for Christmas shoppers will be fierce this year, with promotions likely to be earlier and abundant in a bid to loosen tight household purse strings,” said Paul Martin, UK head of retail at KPMG.

“Consumers will continue to seek out good deals, with price driving purchasing decisions. This is likely to be one of the most important golden quarters that we have seen in years.”

The cost of living crisis in the UK has sent consumption plummeting, while fears of a recession in the country are mounting as successive interest-rate hikes are taking their toll.

The Purchasing Managers Index, a measure reflecting overall economic health, indicated a contraction in August and September, and unemployment has been climbing for three straight months.’

 

As John Keats has it: ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft…

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies’.

Gathering swallows X in the skies doesn’t have quite the same ring to it does it?

Thankfully the season when the various circuses known as known as Party Conferences, roll into various towns is over for another year. If William Shakespeare were around to chronicle these events would he write them as comedies, or as tragedies?

At the Tory Party conference the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt threw some red meat to the acolytes gathered there.

‘Government plans to impose tougher benefit sanctions to drive people into work will cause “destitution” and “punish people already struggling to afford essentials in the cost of living crisis”, charities have warned.

Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference, chancellor Jeremy Hunt said 100,00 people are leaving the labour market every year for a “life on benefits”. He said this is why the government is replacing work capability assessments and examining the sanctions regime.

Hunt claimed: “It isn’t fair that someone who refuses to look for a job gets the same as someone trying their best.” But charities have expressed fear that further punishments will force people to seek low paid work which poses a serious danger to their health – or risk being plunged into greater poverty.’

https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/benefit-rules-sanctions-jeremy-hunt-tory-party-conference/

Not to be outdone, the ‘workers’ friend’ Party, laughing called the Labour Party, gave notice of where their priorities lie: ‘MILLIONS of out-of-work Brits are a “horrible, painful toll” on the public purse and are “dragging” down the economy, a top Starmer ally declared.

Shadow Cabinet Minister Peter Kyle said: “There are 2.5million people that are just unknown to the economy for reasons that we don’t understand, and there’s no exercise to go find them.

“There are 700,000 young people who are not in education, training or work. And that figure has been growing, not diminishing.”

The shadow science and tech secretary hit out: “All of these things are personal tragedies, but they’re also taking a horrible, painful toll on our economy. “It is dragging our economy down. So we need to get cracking on it.”

The tough talk came on first day of the Labour Party conference, with Mr Kyle suggesting they should instead be put to work in tech and green energy jobs.’

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/24329382/scale-of-jobless-brits-is-horrible-painful-toll/

Both messages should please their capitalist masters who are always looking for more workers to exploit and provide them with more surplus value.

Isn’t it well past the time when the working class, employed wage slaves or not, should be looking at the real alternative? Don’t be taken in by these charlatans!

 

A news source reports that,  ‘Argentina’s central bank on 12 October hiked the country’s benchmark interest rate for the sixth time this year, in yet another attempt to reign in soaring prices that have been weighing heavily on incomes, pushing millions below the poverty line.

The rate was raised to 133% from 118%, shortly after September inflation data showed that consumer prices in the country spiked 12.7% month-on-month and 138% annually, which is the highest rate in three decades.

According to a report by the National Institute for Statistics and Census (INDEC) released last month, soaring prices pushed Argentina’s poverty rate to 40.1% in the first half of 2023. This means that two out of every five people in Argentina now live below the poverty line, some 11.8 million people.

Another report by the Centre of Argentine Economic Politics (CEPA) think tank showed that wages in the country are unable to catch up with inflation, with the median wage only covering 85.6% of the basic food basket in August.

Some analysts suggest that with the economic crisis this deep the latest key rate hike may have come too late.

“It is no longer useful to raise the rate, expectations have gone away and raising it at this time is not going to contain the flight from pesos to dollars,” a national private banking manager told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Private analysts forecast inflation to reach 173.2% this year, while the rating agency Moody’s projects 200% for this year and 350% for 2024.

The rate hike came just ten days before the presidential election in the country scheduled for October 22. Most candidates have pledged to cut spending to close Argentina’s fiscal deficit, a key element that is driving inflation. However, outsider candidate Javier Milei, who won the August presidential primary, has put the focus of his campaign on getting rid of the peso entirely and adopting the US dollar.’

 The Royal Commission’s proposal to solve the Palestine troubles by partition has met with a mixed reception.

The recommendation is to split Palestine up into three pieces, an Arab State, a Jewish State, and a portion which will remain under the British Mandate.

At the recently concluded Zionist Congress opinion was sharply divided. A two-thirds majority, headed by the Zionist Chairman, Dr. Weizmann, voted in favour of the principle of partition, largely on the grounds that it was the best that could be expected from the British Government under the circumstances. The decision was only come to after long and heated discussion, and the news of it called forth protest from some leading Zionists in America and elsewhere.

Among the professed spokesmen of working-class interests there is also a conflict of views.

Communist writers, who claim that the Jews in Palestine have been building up a flourishing business under the protection of the British Government, back the Arabs. They urge resistance to the partition proposal and the establishment of an independent Arab State in Palestine, of which the Jews are to be members on an equal basis. The Communists put this forward on two grounds: The right of the Arabs to self-determination and the need to curb British Imperialism.

On the other side, opponents of the Communists, like Abramovich and Orenstein, favour the continuance of the mandatory system and oppose the Arab viewpoint. In doing so they overstate the Jewish case, though probably unconsciously, painting a beautiful picture of Palestine under the Jews, where Socialist ideas will flourish.

The state of affairs in Palestine is not clear cut. There is an old social system side by side with a new, and both subject to an over-ruling Imperial power. Within each again there are class interests that cut across racial and national feelings. And, to still further complicate matters, there is the peculiar international position of the Jew.

The Arab lives under a semi-feudal regime with the land-owner despoiling the peasant of nearly everything. The coming of the Jews introduced modern industrial methods which threaten the incomes of land-owners, partly by offering the peasants a way of escape from fleecing, and partly by competition. Hence the influential Arabs are opposed to the continued immigration of Jews and strive to stir racial hatred among the poor by using the religious bogey. They are opposed to partition and want an independent Arab State.

The Jew, hunted out of various occupations in the East and the victim of pogroms, has been drifting into Palestine for decades. The immigration  of the Jew has been vastly increased since the War, until at present it has reached from fifty to sixty thousand a year. How the Jews are permeating Palestine may be appreciated from the fact that, in spite of Arab immigration, the Jewish section rose from 17 per cent. of the population in 1930 to 30 per cent. in 1936. This antagonises the Arab, who foresees himself being swamped in the rising flood. On the other hand, the growing Jewish section pays the bulk of the tax revenue but receives the least benefit from it, which is a permanent source of complaint.

To the Jew, interference with immigration would have serious consequences. Palestine is perhaps the only place to which he has free access. A large proportion of the immigrants are representatives of families that have been left behind in other countries in dire straits, penniless and denied almost any opportunity of earning a living. To these the immigrant sends back contributions that enable the relatives to buy the necessaries of life. Thus, as one writer puts it, if the Arabs succeed in stopping Jewish immigration into Palestine it will mean starvation to millions of Jews.

The Jewish migration has brought with it to Palestine the capitalist system with its antagonistic classes. While, on the one hand, it is making the desert flower and bringing into existence flourishing towns, on the other hand it is replacing the feudal method of fleecing by the capitalist exploitation of wage-workers. To quote Mordekai Orenstein: —

  You will find in Palestine a highly organised capitalist class, a vigorous and aggressive Jewish clericalism, and a modern Jewish Fascism with all the usual characteristics from strike-breaking to the base murder of a distinguished working-class leader.

—(Page 10, “ Jews, Arabs and British in Palestine.”) 

He also adds that you will find there a strongly organised working class. But, towards the end of the pamphlet, he laments that: —

   Considerable sections of Jewish workers in Palestine have not as yet reached the realisation of the vital urgency of forging this supernational weapon [Jewish-Arab proletarian unity] in the political struggle in Palestine.—(Page 21.)

It may be added that partition, by restricting the area open to Jews, must have a considerable effect on their immigration, which is some explanation of Zionist opposition.

The attitude of the British Government is based on simple principles: The safeguarding of British capitalists’ interests, as represented by such things as the oil pipe between Mosul and Haifa; security of Imperial air routes, communications through the Suez Canal, and so forth. Their policy of divide and rule leads them to favour different sides at different times, and to keep racial animosities alive as long as they do not become too dangerous.

The support of both Jews and Arabs during the War was bought by promises that have not been kept, and cause irritation to both sections.

The Mandate has evidently outlived its uses to British capitalism, and the partition system is to take its place. This will give Arab and Jew (like the North and South of Ireland) something to quarrel over for years to come, to the hindrance of propaganda for working-class solidarity against the international capitalist class.

Gilmac

From the Socialist Standard  September 1937.

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/01/divide-and-rule-in-palestine-1937.html

The Guardian (13 October)  is one of many news outlets reporting on the demand made by Israel that Palestinians in Gaza leave within 24 hours.

‘The Norwegian Refugee Council, which works in Israel and Palestine, has described Israel’s demand that 1.2 million people in Gaza leave their homes as a war crime.

Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, released the below statement

“The Israeli military demand that 1.2 million civilians in northern Gaza relocate to its south within 24 hours, absent of any guarantees of safety or return, would amount to the war crime of forcible transfer. It must be reversed.

“The collective punishment of countless civilians, among them children, women, and the elderly, in retaliation for acts of horrible terror undertaken by armed men is illegal under international law.

“My colleagues inside Gaza confirm that there are countless people in the northern parts who have no means to safely relocate under the constant barrage of fire.

“The loss of civilian lives caused by deliberate or indiscriminate use of force is a war crime for which the perpetrators will have to answer. We fear that Israel may claim that Palestinians who could not flee northern Gaza can be erroneously held as directly participating in hostilities, and targeted.

“The United States, the UK, the European Union, and other Western and Arab Nations who have influence over the Israeli political and military leadership must demand that the illegal and impossible order to relocate is immediately rescinded.”

The Israeli military claims the order to Palestinians “is for your own safety”.’

 

DID YOU SEE THE NEWS? (ZOOM)

Cutting Earth

 

Take a spade and cut a sod one spit square,

Lift that clod of earth, then identify

Precisely where the roots of the nation lie,

Has a border line been drawn clearly there,

Showing where one soil ends and the rest starts?

Judge just how heavy it is and appraise

Yourself as to how many lives it weighs,

Estimate the number of broken hearts

Required to thoroughly saturate it

With the blood of martyrs, or supposed foe,

Or simple patriots who think they know

Their national story. When they relate it

Though, they find the fiction reveals that earth’s

Everyone’s, everywhere, of equal worth.

 

D. A.

 

‘The latest escalation of the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict is not projected to pose immediate risks for the global oil market, crude traders told Bloomberg on Sunday as they prepare for the market to open.

On Saturday, Palestinian armed group Hamas launched thousands of missiles at Israel and deployed its militants to infiltrate Jewish settlements near the country’s border with Gaza. In response, Israeli authorities launched the ‘Iron Swords’ operation.

According to the latest updates, more than 600 Israelis have been killed since the launch of the surprise attack by Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israel has destroyed or damaged more than 400 sites in Gaza. Over 300 Palestinians have been killed, many of whom were civilians. Almost 2,000 have been wounded.

The “oil-disruption scenario would be if conflict spread to Iran,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official, told the agency, adding that such sequence of events looks unlikely.

Iran, a major oil producer and also an OPEC member, is seen as one of the key backers of the Hamas group that launched this weekend’s offensive on Israel.

“It is unlikely to impact oil supply in the short term,” hedge fund trader Pierre Andurand of Andurand Capital Management said, as cited by Bloomberg. “But it could eventually have an impact on supply and prices.”

Iran, for its part, has publicly expressed support for the Palestinian attack.

According to McNally, “crude prices would immediately spike on the perceived risk of a disruption,” if Tel Aviv responds by striking any infrastructure in the Islamic Republic.

Shipments of Iranian crude have rebounded to a five-year high, becoming increasingly important to the market. The latest hostilities could prompt Washington to deal more aggressively with Iranian cargo flows, which are moved –with the tacit blessing of the US– mostly to China.

“I think this development will mean stronger enforcement of Iranian sanctions, so less Iranian oil going forward,” Andurand told the agency, adding that the domino effect in the region is impossible to predict.

The Islamic Republic could respond by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway in the north of the Arabian Sea that sees nearly 17 million barrels of crude passing every day.’