Occasionally on social media there are comments from pro-capitalist shills along the lines of you call yourself a socialist but you’re using commodities that are provided by capitalism. A totally spurious argument obviously. One that ranks along with describing the former Soviet Union and others as ‘communist’. Socialists will continue to use whatever platforms are possible to propagate the socialist case. The organisation listed in the piece below is yet another example of those who wish to control free speech and censor beliefs that don’t correspond to their particular world view. ‘Hate’, like other labels, is an emotive term used to shut down differing opinions.

‘The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a UK-based non-profit tied to the Labour Party, aims to “kill” Elon Musk’s X platform with help from top Democrats in Washington, according to internal documents leaked by a whistleblower. Musk has declared “war” on the organization in response.

In several monthly planners distributed to staffers this year, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) lists “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as its top annual priority, according to files leaked to journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker a report claiming that advertisements could be seen alongside pro-Nazi posts on X. Musk called the report “manufactured,” and his lawsuit alleges that its sole purpose was to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”

Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, rebranding the platform as X and rolling back most of its censorship policies. Within days of Musk’s purchase, the White House announced the creation of the now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board,’ ridiculed by conservatives and free speech advocates as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” A week later, the CCDH joined two dozen other liberal NGOs in calling for an advertiser boycott of X.

The CCDH was founded by Morgan McSweeney, chief of staff to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and former director of Labour Together, a think tank closely associated with Starmer’s Labour Party. Labour Together has been advising US Vice President Kamala Harris’ election campaign, and more than 100 Labour Party activists are currently campaigning for Harris in the US.

CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, who worked with McSweeney at Labour Together, aided Starmer’s rise to power by leading advertiser boycotts against his left-wing opponents. Among these opponents was ‘The Canary’, a leftist news site driven out of business over accusations of anti-Semitism from the CCDH and its subsidiary, ‘Stop Funding Fake News’.

In the US, the CCDH has lobbied the White House to censor Covid-19-related “disinformation,” unsuccessfully tried to get similar content banned from Substack, and led multiple campaigns against Musk.

According to internal documents, Ahmed is aware that the CCDH’s activities risk crossing a line between advocacy and lobbying, which is illegal for non- profits. Before scheduling meetings with lawmakers earlier this year, someone in the organization advised staff to “understand our limitations” as a non-profit organization, but still to “inch towards our goal of regulatory action.”

In a series of posts on X Musk pronounced the CCDH “a criminal organization,” and declared that “this is war.”’

 From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the early winter of 1966 Hoover Limited sent a minor manager from their vacuum cleaner factory in West London to the massive plant in Merthyr Tydfil South Wales where they made washing machines. The manager took a train to Cardiff where he was picked up by one of the company cars and chauffer to take him to a hotel where he was to stay for a couple of nights. During the journey both men were silent, without the chatter which usually enlivened their journeys together. When they arrived at the hotel they got out of the car and looked across to some high land where floodlit earth machines were at work. Then the driver spoke. ‘Aberfan’ he said. It was November 1966 and they were looking at the site of the worst mining-related disaster in British history.   

Aberfan is a village in South Wales which was once heavily dependent on employment at the nearby Merthyr Vale colliery. It now has a community centre, flourishing with its swimming pool, fitness rooms and café. There are also two schools, which provoke unbearable memories of that tragedy fifty years ago. Coal mining began there in 1869, when a pit was sunk on the banks of the Afon Taff; in 1875 the first commercial coal was brought to the surface – the beginning of a history proud enough to accentuate the grief and misery which devastated the village in October 1966. On that occasion the deaths did not originate underground, in a coal mine; many of the people who died were buried and suffocated in lethal slurry from the open ground above. A total of 144 people were killed in minutes; 116 were children and no survivors were found after 11am. Many of those who did survive have since suffered from persistent psychological disorders – for example the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2003 recorded that half have suffered from PTSD, which for about a third of them will persist as a lifetime disorder. A typical comment was by the author Laurie Lee who, after visiting Aberfan a year afterwards, described the school children there as ‘…the unhealed scar tissue of Aberfan’.  The colliery was closed in 1989.

Slurry

The basic cause of the disaster was tipping – the deposit of spoil of varying content and consistency  which had been extracted from the colliery, onto the ground overlooking  Aberfan when more convenient lower sites had been filled to their limit. By 1966 there were, looming above the area so that they could be distantly viewed from that hotel, a number of mounds – or tips – which were known by numbers 1 to 7, the last of which was the most ominous. There was no proper regular inspection and maintenance of the tips to check on their stability although they were composed of loose rock and other extracted material within a massive layer of sandstone. This was a dangerously absorbent composition which through the addition of water from underground springs could develop into a slope steep enough to accelerate the descent of the heavier spoil and slurry which would wipe out whatever – and whoever – lay in its path. In fact some local councils had questioned, in 1963, whether it was safe to dispose of the colliery waste in that way, particularly when in the direct path of such a descending geological missile there were the village primary and senior schools as well as other inhabited buildings. But any such questions were effectively ignored by the local National Coal Board.

Schools

On that dreadful day – 21 October 1966 – South Wales had already suffered several spells of torrential rain, which in itself was enough of a problem for the pupils of the local Pantglas School as they scurried from home to the last school day before  breaking up for the half-term holiday. Soon after 9.15 am a mass of liquid containing material brought up from the mine broke free from the tips and began to smash down towards the village and the homes and the schools and the children below. A gang of workmen who were on Tip 7 to inspect a fault with the railway which carried the disposable material from the mine were resting with a cup of tea when they saw the rapidly approaching disaster but they were unable to warn the village about it because the cable of their telephone had been stolen (although the subsequent enquiry was clear that no warning could have improved the situation). The gang watched helplessly as a mass of over 150,000 cubic metres of saturated mining spoil broke free, moving down the slope in a series of surges. Some of it clung to the ground, leaving about 40,000 cubic metres to carry on into Aberfan.  ‘All I could see’ remembered one of them ‘… was waves of muck, slush and water… I couldn’t see – nobody could …’ The first victims were a farm and twenty houses which were swiftly obliterated with all the occupants. At Pantglas School the teachers were checking and recording attendance when the buildings were overwhelmed by a compound of muddy rubble up to ten metres deep. One eight-year-old recalled ‘… a tremendous rumbling sound and all the school went dead … Everyone just froze in their seats. I just managed to get up and I reached the end of my desk when the sound got louder and nearer, until I could see the black out of the window. I can’t remember any more’. The slurry eventually came to halt at about 9.15am; the damage had been done and by 11am the last living child had been brought out from the school; it was several more days before the last body could be found.

Nationalised

The reaction of their employers, in whatever context, and their political defenders was tediously predictable. One of the more prominent of these was the late Claude Granville Lancaster who went to school at Eton then trained at the Royal Military College Sandhurst and who eventually inherited the excessively stately Palladian Kelmarsh Hall in Leicestershire from his father along with the family investments in coal mining and farming. Like his father he was a Conservative MP, in his case for Fylde. When the Attlee government nationalised the coal industry Lancaster recognised the inevitable and ‘… gave all his support to the National Coal Board … to do his best to bring what he felt was much-needed drive and decisiveness to its cumbersome and slow-moving organisation’. He had an early opportunity to live up to these standards when the slurry came down on Aberfan but he was abroad, in what were then known as the Trucial States (since 1971 the United Arab Emirates). Soon after he returned another MP asked him to comment on the possible cause of the tragedy. To which this meticulous expert in coal mining replied ‘I fancy that you will find that it was a trickle of water’.

Another, rather different, example was a man who was raised, not into the ancient land-owning nobility but by Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to be chairman of a key nationalised industry. This was Alfred Robens who was Labour MP for Wansbeck and then Blyth until he took over Britain’s coal mines which also entailed him being ennobled, so that he became Baron Robens of Woldingham. He took to all of this with a determination which was expressed in his car being numbered NCB1 and his  access to a private jet plane and a posh flat in a most expensive part of London. These privileges he defended behind a style of management later described most moderately as demanding.

Chancellor

This style came under focus as the people of Aberfan were grappling with their demanding emergencies. To be specific on that day of 21st October Robens did not, as was expected of him as the overlord of the mines, attend that scene of suffering – although his staff falsely assured the Ministry of Power that he was there soothing the distress of the people. In fact he chose to attend a ceremony at the University of Surrey to be installed as Chancellor. The anger which this aroused locally was aggravated by his opinion that the original cause of the avalanche was ‘some … natural unknown springs’ which was particularly provocative to the grieving local people who had long-standing acquaintance with that very water source since they had played there as children. When the official enquiry was seriously critical of Robens’ behaviour throughout he offered to resign from the NCB but this was dismissed as unnecessary. At the same time the NCB refused to pay the full cost of removing the tips- an attitude which persisted until the first Blair government agreed to meet the bill – although without the interest which would have considerably raised the total. This evasion was pointedly described by another Labour MP Leo Abse as ‘… the graceless pavane danced by Lord Robens and the Minister, as the chairman of the National Coal Board’ and more recently by the Geoscientist –The Fellowship Magazine of the Geological Society of London:   ‘What happened in Aberfan was a mass betrayal of intergenerational equity … not only ripped the heart out of one small Welsh village – it sucked life out of an entire industry’. When Robens took over there were 698 pits; when he left there were 292. Which left the Thatcher government to carry on so that in the Merthyr area nearly 30 percent of the able-bodied were unemployed, apart from the other adults whose industrial diseases had led to them being registered as disabled.

Coal mining was always a dangerous occupation, to be taken up only because there was nothing less threatening on offer. This was the case in Aberfan. At the same time the miners had to struggle against a poverty as concentrated as the risks they endured in and around the pits. And the harsh reality of all this is that the employing class have an enduring priority that production – of coal or whatever – should be as cheap as possible. As they did in Aberfan with the over-looming tips and the workers’ homes. This was untouched by the continuing requirements of nationalisation with the substitution of management by an ex-left wing Labour MP for a traditionally aristocratic Tory. In commemorating that disaster it must not be ignored that Aberfan was an episode entirely typical of the demands of class ownership for human suffering and denial.

Ivan

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/01/aberfan-disaster-in-hillsides-2016.html

‘Southern Africa is currently in the grip of its worst food crisis in decades, with more than 27 million people facing severe hunger due to the impact of a months-long drought, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said.

The drought, which is attributable to the El Nino weather phenomenon, has ravaged crops, killed livestock, and left entire communities without sufficient food supplies, creating what WFP spokesperson Tomson Phiri described as a potential “full-scale human catastrophe.”

During a press briefing in Geneva, Phiri highlighted the urgency of the situation, stating “the need for action has never been clearer.”

“This is the worst food crisis in decades,” the WFP spokesperson said.

Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have declared national disasters because of the drought, while Angola and Mozambique are also severely affected. The WFP estimates that around 21 million children in the region are now malnourished, exacerbating an already dire situation as communities face soaring food prices and dwindling resources.

The WFP has outlined plans to provide food and cash assistance to more than 6.5 million people across the seven hardest-hit countries until the next harvest in March. However, the states have so far received only 20% of the $369 million they require.

The drought, which the US Agency for International Development described as the most severe in 100 years during the crucial January to March agricultural season, has wiped out vast swathes of crops. This crisis has caused food prices to skyrocket, which has exacerbated the challenges facing vulnerable communities.

In addition to the food crisis, the drought has had other far-reaching consequences. Zambia, which relies heavily on hydroelectric power from the Kariba Dam, has faced severe power blackouts as the dam’s water levels have dropped dramatically. In April, Zimbabwe, which shares the dam with Zambia, declared a national disaster in response to the crisis, which it described as the worst in 40 years.’

 With less than 3 weeks to go, the American presidential election is neck and neck. Trump is favoured by workers from poorer backgrounds with lower levels of education and employment prospects. Harris is supported by workers whose social and educational background enables them to expect better paid wage slavery.

Trump is seen as an unspeakable, bigoted monster by Harris supporters. Harris is seen as a ‘soft touch’ for America’s ‘enemies’ by Trump supporters. Whichever wins will take over the running of the capitalist system that operates, in the US as elsewhere, in the profit-making interests of a tiny minority. The direct opposite of the no-profit, production-for-need society that socialists aim to see established on a world scale.

REFLECTIONS ON GEORGES SOREL (ZOOM)

‘More than one billion people live in acute poverty, with nearly half of them in countries experiencing conflict, according to a new United Nations report.

Countries at war have higher levels of deprivation across all indicators of “multidimensional poverty”, according to an index published on Thursday by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), reporting “markedly more severe” disparities in nutrition, access to electricity, and access to water and sanitation.

Research across 112 countries and 6.3 billion people revealed that 1.1 billion people endure poverty, with 455 million of them living “in the shadow of conflict”, according to the Multidimensional Poverty Index.

“Conflicts have intensified and multiplied in recent years, reaching new highs in casualties, displacing record millions of people, and causing widespread disruption to lives and livelihoods,” said the UNDP’s Achim Steiner.

The index showed that some 584 million people under 18 were experiencing extreme poverty, accounting for 27.9 percent of children worldwide, compared with 13.5 percent of adults.

Child mortality in conflict settings was 8 percent, compared with 1.1 percent in peaceful countries.

It also said that 83.2 percent of the world’s poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The index, compiled jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), used indicators such as a lack of adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, nutrition and school attendance to assess levels of “multidimensional poverty”.

The index included an in-depth study on Afghanistan, where 5.3 million more people fell into poverty during 2015-16 and 2022-23. Last year, nearly two-thirds of Afghans were considered poor.

“For the poor in conflict-affected countries, the struggle for basic needs is a far harsher and more desperate battle,” said Yanchun Zhang, chief statistician at the UNDP.

India was the country with the largest number of people in extreme poverty, affecting 234 million of its 1.4 billion population.

It was followed by Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The five countries combined accounted for nearly half of the 1.1 billion poor people.

OPHI Director Sabina Alkire said “poverty reduction is slower in conflict settings – so the poor in conflict settings are being left behind. These numbers compel a response: we cannot end poverty without investing in peace.”’

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/17/un-report-says-1-1-billion-people-living-in-acute-poverty

REFLECTIONS ON GEORGES SOREL (Zoom)

Will the supporters, whose number must be falling daily, of the Labour government, be cheering the latest proposal from it as an example of how much more, in contrast to those other nasty capitalist supporting political parties, it cares for the welfare of the people? Pensioners excepted of course.

The MailOnline, 15 October, posits that, ‘ Labour wants to give millions of obese, unemployed Britons free fat-busting jabs used by celebrities in a desperate bid to get them off the couch and ‘back to work’.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting is planning to offer jobless Brits free jabs of the controversial ‘miracle’ weight loss drug, Ozempic.

Sir Keir Starmer today backed the idea, insisting it could help ease demands on the NHS and boost the economy.

But the news comes despite dire warnings that some 3,000 Brits to fall ill so far this year after taking either Ozempic and Wegovy.

Defending the drugs, the PM told the BBC: ‘I think these drugs could be very important for our economy and for health.’

He added: ‘This drug will be very helpful to people who want to lose weight, need to lose weight, very important for the economy so people can get back into work.

‘Very important for the NHS because, as I’ve said time and again, yes, we need more money for our NHS, but we’ve got to think differently.

‘We’ve got to reduce the pressure on the NHS. So this will help in all of those areas.’’

‘Speaking in the Telegraph, the Mr Streeting claimed Ozempic or Mounjaro jabs could kickstart a major back-to-work drive and boost productivity, with weight-related illness costing the economy £74billion a year. ‘

The phrase originated by a Bill Clinton supporting American in 1992 still applies; It’s the economy stupid.’

The aim, as is that of whichever capitalist executive Committee is in power,

is to reduce the financial burden of the capitalist class as a whole.

The article also notes that, ‘It comes as the government last night confirmed that pharmaceutical giant Lilly will pump in £279million into developing new drugs and treatment in the UK.’ Shades of Covid. Can we soon expect a state propaganda drive designed to shame and demonise those who refuse to comply? Will those receiving state benefits be threatened with the loss of them if they don’t obey|?

The extracts below are from an article in the Socialist Standard, May 1915.

‘In one of his recent utterances the leader of the Tory Party said that political power was absolutely in the hands of ihe working class, a con­dition that lent itself as a field for the demagogue. If Mr. Lloyd George and his party could persuade the working class that they were the friends of the poor, they might remain in office indefinitely. The condition of the working class being the same under either administration, it matters nothing to them which party is in office; but the fact remains that the Chancellor has an enormous following of workers who fervently and devoutly believe him to be the embodiment of progress, the friend of the workers, who understands their troubles and devises schemes to bleed vested interests for their benefit.

When these reforms are examined, they are easily seen to be mere contrivances in collective economy on behalf of the class he represents. The Chancellor himself does not attempt to conceal this fact. The frequency and vehemence with which he advertises it reveals what is his estimate of working class intelligence. For in many a speech he quite openly reassures his class of his loyalty to them, and demonstrates, in their own every-day business language, the effectiveness of his deep laid schemes to wring yet more profit from the working class. What other construction is it possible to place on the following from his preface to “Dr. H. A. Walters’ Exposition of Recent British Social Legisla­tion”?

“No attitude could be more short-sighted, or more paralysing in its influence upon social policy, than that of the man who shrinks at the immediate cost of great social reforms which aim at increasing the vigour and efficiency of the millions by whom the country’s material wealth is produced.”

If the vigour and efficiency of the working class is increased, so too is unemployment and competition. It is sheer humbug, therefore, to say that such legislation benefits the working class as well as the employers. He claims to be giving something to the workers but assures his class that like “corn thrown upon the waters it will be returned to them a hundred-fold after many days.” That is the essence and meaning of all legislation on the lines of ninepence for fourpence.

This is the nature of all the reforms instituted by the executive of the capitalist class—”put­ting capital into health” is the Chancellor’s expression. Collective capital is expended through Government departments, with the object of placing at the disposal of individual capitalists an improved commodity on the labour market—workers whose labour will bear richer fruit, in the shape of surplus value. In other words, fuller and more complete exploitation. How do the exploited benefit ?

We are told the old methods of social reform, like the poor law, were merely palliative, while the new method, like the Insurance Act, is preventive as well as palliative. The lie should be apparent, for if the working class, after the reform, produce more wealth for less wages, or for the same sum total of wages, than before, then instead of being preventive of poverty, it is productive of more poverty.

The followers of the Chancellor who have been emphasising in the Press the “economy of higher wages for agriculture,” not only in the articles, but in the title itself, admit that such reforms operate against the working class; or they fail to understand the meaning of economy.

… The workers as commodities are weighed in capitalist scales, according to capitalist standards and ideals, on the labour market. Supply and demand always operate against them, and when their cost of production—or cost of living—falls likewise.

The workers of this country had practical experience of this truth when Free Trade was established. The Cobdenites, like their modern prototypes, were all for cheapening the food of the people—only, as Marx pointed out, that they might be supplied with cheaper labour power. The wages of the working class were reduced fourteen per cent. in commemoration of the establishment of that beneficent and progres­sive measure.

The frequency with which efficiency is being advocated in the Press and on the platform, makes its frequent exposure necessary. Neither by reducing the cost of living nor by increasing the national share of the world’s market can it assist the workers. In the latter case the working class of England, if insufficient to overstock the labour market, can be augmented from abroad. Labour power is carried by its owners to the place where it is in demand; and the ex­ecutive of the capitalist class in each country adopt measures to facilitate its passage, in the same way that they increase its productivity.

The old methods of social reform—so called—never touched the fringe of the poverty pro­blem (no problem at all, by the way, because it exists in the midst of plenty). Blankets, coals, and doles only served to prolong misery here and there. The new method, heralded with false sentiment and yet claiming to be essen­tially business-like and practical, increases the total sum of poverty. Old or new, Tory, Liberal, or Labour, all are designed solely to stem the tide of revolution. Lloyd George and all his satellites may warble their sentimental love song to the workers, wooing them for their votes, but all the crowd of political pimps and touts, philanthro­pists and social reformers of every method, though they pipe humanitarianism till they choke, have only one sentiment for the workers—contempt.

“Social reform is the antidote to revolution par excellence,” and no political sect ahouts louder for the antidote than does the fraudulent Labour Party.

“Every party is now committed to social re­form” said Mr. Philip Snowden, and for what purpose we have shown. Is it to be supposed that the class that lives by robbery will forego even a fraction of their wealth or privilege, un­less compelled to do so ? Can anyone imagine a class revelling in luxury and vice, and that has so lived for centuries, voluntarily conceding to the class they rob any reform that would dimi­nish their helplessness ?

There is no record in history of any ruling class, oligarchy, or monarchy, making any concession to a subject class, unless under compul­sion. The nature of the capitalist class is the same as all previous ruling classes, utterly selfish and desirous of conserving its position.

“A State without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation,” wrote Burke. That is the reason why every party—with the exception of the S.P.G.B.—”is now committed to social reform.” Capitalist society has reached that stage in its develop­ment where the vast majority have no real interest in conserving it. Though the know­ledge they require is within their reach, they only partially realise the possibility of successful revolution.

There are no reforms possible or likely of application under Capitalism, that can improve the condition of the working class. Moreover, it is but adding insult to injury for the capitalist class or their representatives to promise even real reforms for the improvement of working-class conditions. When the working class wake up they will see that no class or section pos­sesses the power to experiment over their heads—either for or against them. They will use the political power which Mr. Bonar Law says they possess to control the forces that stand between them and the means of life. Knowing, they will cease to be the dupes of either sentimental or practical reformers.’

F. F.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1914/no-117-may-1914/social-reform-old-or-new/