The basic state pension is going up this week and the full rate will be just over £10,000 a year. This is the amount workers will be robbed of if the retirement age goes up a further year, as it will in three years’ time when it goes up from 66 to 67. There could then well be a Labour but you can safely bet they won’t do anything to stop it. Maybe they will be faced by French-style opposition with Starmer as the British Macron.

There’s talk of it going up to 68 before 2044 as currently scheduled. It’s a political hot potato which no government wants to be left holding as it won’t be popular. But there is another aspect to this.  Professor Sir Michael Marmot, an expert on health inequality, points out: 

“The most deprived two-thirds of the population do not have disability-free life expectancy as long as 68, so if you make the pension age older than that, you’re going to find a huge swath of the more deprived can’t work to 68 and will have less time time to enjoy this pension.” (Times, 31 January)

In other words, they will die before or soon after retiring. In fact this must be happening now to some extent with the retirement age at 66 and will to a greater extent when it goes up to 67. How convenient for the finances of the capitalist state. 

If you can’t work you are no use to capitalism, just an expendable drag on profits.

 Last year, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, called on workers to exercise self-restraint over wage demands so as not to cause inflation to get established. Last week he called on businesses to exercise self-restraint on price increases for the same reason.

Neither workers nor businesses are taking any notice. In Tuesday’s Times, it’s Financial Editor, Patrick Hosking, explains why business won’t be any more than workers:

“Surely, when first introduced to an economics textbook, Bailey learnt that firms are not driven by altruism or patriotism but by market forces and profit? They will charge what the market will bear (…) While modern-day corporations have to consider many stakeholders, they still see their primary duty over the long run to maximise profits for the shareholders.”

There you have it.

Explaining what “charge what the market will bear” means, Hoskins adds:

“Until businesses see more capitulation by their customers, the price escalation will go on. Business will stop lifting their prices only if enough customers defect to competitors, trade down to cheaper lines or find near-substitutes. Or stop buying at all. For the poorest households, this has happened already.”

Nice system capitalism, isn’t it?

 Dr Richard Werner, a Professor of Banking and Finance at the University of Winchester,  claimed some years ago to have found evidence that an individual bank on its own can create money ‘out of nothing’:

More recently, in an article on his blog,  he argues that banks should not be allowed to fail because they create most of the money needed to keep the economy going. He seems to think that banks have two quite different and unrelated functions: to act as a safety deposit box, keeping safe money that people don’t want to use for the time being, and to create new money. Apparently, for him, the two are unconnected.

 The Socialist Party is very rarely mentioned in mainstream media, even during elections in which we campaign, leaving us to agree with Oscar Wilde when he stated ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about’.   Here’s the latest rare exception:

The Socialist Utopia: Why socialism is ‘misunderstood and misrepresented’ – Ivo Vegter

 ‘The big winner in Russia’s recent election was the Communist Party, which jumped to almost 20 percent support. The party is today being transformed by a new wave of democratic socialist activists opposed to Vladimir Putin’s rule’   (jacobinmag.com, 2 October).

The ‘democratic socialists’ (a tautological misnomer) had an inspiring electoral slogan*  alongside a stale selection of reformist demands.    

‘“Put Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism next to each other, and you will just gasp,” Gennady Zyuganov [leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in the State Duma since 12 December 1993] said in a radio interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid. He added that “the main slogan of communism – ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ – is written in the Apostle Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians” found in the New Testament. “We need to study the Bible,” Zyuganov concluded’ (the Moscow Times, 2 September 2021).

Anyone agreeing with Zvuganov should consider reading Emma Goldman’s The Failure of Christianity (1915): ‘The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment…”Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from it. Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the “redeemer” of the people…’.

Sylvia Pankhurst too: ‘Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance. Our desire is not to make poor those who today are rich, in order to put the poor in the place where the rich now are. Our desire is not to pull down the present rulers to put other rulers in their places’ (Socialism, Workers’ Dreadnought, 28 July 1923).

‘He who does not work shall not eat’ Compare this Bibically-inspired Leninist distortion with the real thing: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha program, 1875) . Also, the vangardist Lenin again: “If Socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years” (From a speech in November 1918 quoted by John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World) with early socialist Flora Tristan: ‘the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself.’

Best start anew, with one aim:

‘Our aim is Communism. Communism is not an affair of party. It is a theory of life and social organisation. It is a life in which property is held in common; in which the community produces, by conscious aim, sufficient to supply the needs of all its members; in which there is no trading, money, wages, or any direct reward for services rendered’ (Sylvia Pankhurst, What is behind the label? A plea for clearness, 1923).

 ‘In China, a politician was revealed to have established an offshore firm to trade U.S. stocks away from prying eyes…. Feng’s company held $2 million in assets and was registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but is currently inactive.   In 2019, Feng recommended “stricter laws to prevent corruption and white-collar crime involving private companies”‘   (yahoo.com, 4 October).   The only thing surprising about this revelation fro the Pelican Papers is the paltry sum involved.   Consider, the ‘..estimated net worth of the 153 members of China’s Parliament and its advisory body amounts to $650 billion (consortiumnews, 28 July 2020)!  Clearly, ‘China is now an integral and irreplaceable part of global capitalism’ (consortiumnews, 28 July 2020) and in competition with other countries, such as the US, over trade routes, resources and areas of domination. ‘