‘Many experts compare apartheid Israel to apartheid South Africa. UN resolutions helped to bring down South Africa’s apartheid regime, but real change didn’t come until countries around the world embraced a global campaign to economically and politically isolate it.’

Foreign Minister Pandor made the call in 2022: ‘As South Africans, we find similarities in our past with the Palestinians, and now I remember the funeral of Shereen Abu Akleh and what happened to her coffin. It reminds me of the gravesites that we had to carry out under the persecution of the apartheid soldiers’ (South Africa calls for holding Israel accountable for ‘inhumane conditions’ Palestinians live under, Middle East Monitor, 17 June, 2022).

In May that year Nokuthula Mabaso, an Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) leader was buried following her assassination in front of her children. She was the third activist of the shack dwellers’ movement to be killed in less than two months.    To date, 24 Abahlali activists have been killed.   Members of AbM are thus well acquainted with the state as a coercive machine of class oppression and likely know the fairytale Freedom Charter adopted by the ANC in 1955 envisaged a post-Apartheid South Africa where ‘The police force and army… shall be the helpers and protectors of the people’, ‘the right to be decently housed’ enshrined and ‘Slums shall be demolished …‘.   AbM are credited with starting UnFreedom Day, which coincides with the official South African holiday called Freedom Day, the orthodox annual celebration of the country’s first non-racial democratic elections of 1994. On the 16 August 2012 17 workers were killed and 78 wounded by the police in the Marikana Miners’ Massacre, the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against other workers since 1976. Worse still, former President Mbeki’s support for alternative remedies such as vinegar rather than antiretroviral drugs saved the state’s funds at a cost of at least 300,000 lives. Winnie Mandela to her credit ‘… said to president Mbeki: ‘Why are ARVs not toxic for the members in Parliament who are taking them but toxic for the poor?’

And ‘More than two decades after South Africa ousted a racist apartheid system that trapped the vast majority of South Africans in poverty, more than half the country still lives below the national poverty line and most of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of a small elite’ (NPR, 2 April, 2018) led by billionaire Ramaphosa.

Shenilla Mohamed, executive director of Amnesty International South Africa, told Deutsche Welle (26 April, 2019): ‘Mandela had a very romantic dream, to some extent, of having a nation where everyone is equal, where people are able to access their basic human rights, economic, social, cultural rights. But South Africa is a country where the quality of life has not improved for the majority of the population in 25 years. Issues such as racism are still in the foreground because people feel they have been disappointed by a system which began in 1994, when independence promised that everything was possible.’

Were any of  SA’s first three presidents put on trial for supporting the dictator, Mugabe of neighboring Zimbabwe?    As we have noted, Mbeki during his tenure was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousansds. Some members of the 99 percent called for him to be tried for crimes against humanity.   Was he?    Commissioner Phiyega. Ramaphosa and King Zuma share responsibility for the mass murder of miners.  Were there ever plans to put them on trial?   In June 2015, while in South Africa for an African Union meeting,  the former dictator of Sudan (and one of 15 on the ICC’s most wanted list), al-Bashir,  was prohibited from leaving while a court decided whether he should be handed over to the ICC for war crimes.  Was he? 

The answer to all the above is NO!   It is futile to punish such odious  individuals whilst ignoring the vicious conditions which made them possible. War criminals are not responsible for war, which is caused by the struggles between competing capitalist states  over markets and economic resources. War will only end with the abolition of capitalism. The dictators of yesterday, and the dictators and leaders of today, with their frightening military machines, only reflect the preparedness of their workers to ignore the bloodshed of all the conflicts before and after the war to end all wars and still to die for capitalism.

 The Labour Party seems to be relying a lot on being able to conjure up “growth” to honour its rash election promises.

Last week, Darren Jones who is the would-be chief secretary to the Treasury was reported as saying:

“If we are successful in growing the economy in the way that we think we will be, then that creates more investment” (Times, 4 January).

This is a strange argument as business investment is what brings about growth. So any growth that might take place would be as a result, not the cause, of business investment. He’s put the cart before the horse and expects it to pull the horse.

But it’s not only creating new business investment that they say the growth they think they can conjure up will bring about. A speech by their would-be Health Secretary, god-botherer Wes Street, was reported under the headline: “Labour says it would rely on growth to fund pay rises to the NHS” (i paper, 6 January). 

On the same page the same paper reported the clueless Labour Leader himself:

“Sir Keith reiterated his comments on Thursday that economic growth was key to creating wealth and improving living standards.”

But if a Labour government under Starmer is not as lucky as the Blair Labour government was in happening to be in office during a period of growth, and there is no growth at the rate Labour think they can bring about?

Back to Darren Jones:

“If we are not [successful in growing the economy], then the fiscal rules come first and are non-negotiable.”

So. fiscal conservatism, otherwise known as austerity. 

In any event, no government can control growth — that depends on business investment which in turn depends on the prospects for making a profit. Growth may or may not happen when a Labour government is in office but, if it does, it won’t be due to anything that government did. It would have happened anyway, even under a Tory government.

Governments don’t and can’t control capitalism. It’s rather the other way round — it is the operation of capitalism, as it passes through its cycles of boom and slump, that sets severe limits to what they can and cannot do.

Indrajit Samarajiva says of Band Aid’s charity anthem “It’s not just that these lyrics haven’t aged well. They were never good at all.”   With which we can agree, unlike his superficial critique: “I mean, this is all wrong. It does snow in Africa, although not a lot.”

In a short article titled Band aids for poverty ( July 2003) we observed:

‘Almost 20 years ago Bob Geldorf organised “Band Aid” concerts in London and Philadelphia to help the starving millions in Ethiopia. So what is happening in that country today? Local musicians are organising similar concerts to aid the starving. “Aid agencies estimate 14 million Ethiopians are at risk of starvation after the worst drought in nearly two decades. The United Nations said Ethiopia needs 1.5 million tonnes of food aid this year.” Herald (26 May) In 1984 Ethiopia was devastated by a famine which killed one million people. In 2003 we have 14 million at risk of starvation. So much for charity, so much for well-intentioned reformers. What we need is a complete transformation of society not an elastoplast on a gaping wound.‘

And today it comes as no surprise to read:

‘Ethiopia’s Tigray region faces a devastating famine, with thousands in desperate need of aid. The aftermath of war and drought leaves residents, especially the elderly, struggling for survival.’

Plus ça change!

 On Christmas Eve the Ministry of ‘Defence’ announced that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Trent, would be deployed to Guyana in South America. Sky News described the ship as one used for ‘defence diplomacy’.

What, then, was the diplomacy that required the deployment of a gunboat in support? The one-word answer is ‘oil’. The Harvard International Review (27 September) noted: In 2015, the oil giant Exxon Mobil discovered 11 billion barrels of oil off the coast of the small Latin American country. The discovery promises to change Guyana forever, catapulting the country and its people to new heights of power and wealth. Oil already generates US$1 billion in revenues annually for the government and will produce an estimated US$7.5 billion by 2040. By these forecasts, Guyana—the impoverished, rainforest-covered country of just 800,000 people—will become the fourth largest offshore oil producer in the world.

The discovery was off the coast of a part of Guyana which has been the object of a territorial dispute with its neighbour, Venezuela, since the middle of the 19th century when Guyana was part of the British Empire. In 1899 an international court of arbitration awarded the disputed area to the Britain. It’s an area compromising some 75 percent of present-day Guyana. Venezuela never accepted the decision, alleging that it was rigged, but didn’t insist too much in pursuing its claim until now.On 3 December the Venezuelan government, under Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, held a referendum throughout the country about whether or not to reject the 1899 ruling and to incorporate the area as a new province. The result was a huge majority for, but on a low turnout, and the government duly established the new province, on paper.

Venezuela, much as it would like to acquire control of the new oilfield, is unlikely to try to actually annex the disputed area. The referendum had more to do with the presidential elections later this year and as a way of trying to win votes for Maduro by beating the nationalist drum. In any event, it is not the land, mainly tropical forest with a few gold mines, that Venezuela really would really like so much as the territorial waters off the area’s coast where the oil is. Diplomatic talks have begun, with the US and Britain backing Guyana. Hence the dispatch of the Royal Navy warship to carry out its role in ‘defence diplomacy’.

Diplomacy is not a matter of working out what is the fair solution to a dispute between states. An important factor affecting the outcome is the relative strength of the two sides. In relations between states might is right. Venezuela may be stronger than Guyana and so could seize the land it claims. But Guyana is backed by the US and Britain, because these don’t want a state with an nationalist anti-American government to control the new oilfield (they want a friendly state to) or to extend its territory (in fact they have been working to overthrow government there), and Venezuela is in no position to take them on any more than it was to challenge the British Empire in 1899.

From threat to action

In another part of the world another Royal Naval warship, HMS Diamond, is also engaged in ‘defence diplomacy,’ in the Red Sea. In fact it has actually used its weapons. As the Royal Navy’s website boasted on 19 December: Diamond’s actions in the small hours of Saturday morning is the first time a Type 45’s Sea Viper missile has been used in action and the first such shootdown by the Royal Navy since the 1990-91 Gulf War.

What is going on in the Red Sea is an aspect of the question of who controls the Persian Gulf, its oilfields and the trade route out of it. In 1980 President Carter laid down the Carter Doctrine that: ‘Gulf oil reserves were of vital interest to the US and the US would therefore be justified in preventing outside domination of the region by military intervention’. This was invoked against Iraq in 1991 and in 2003. Now the threat is from Iran, with the US relying on Israel to counter this. In fact Israel has already bombed Iran on a number of occasions.

Israel is currently engaged in a war of revenge against the Hamas administration in Gaza. The West supports this because Hamas is an enemy of Israel, its asset in the region, only cynically advising Israel not too kill too many Gazans.

Iran and its allies and proxies see the Gaza war as a chance to weaken Israel as the West’s asset. The pro-Iran government of Yemen has been attacking ships bound for Israel or owned by Israeli capitalists. This has led major shipping companies to re-route their ships round Africa, with serious consequences for international trade.

The following is taken from an article titled Darwinism Is The Daddy Of Communism And Other Evils

‘In a previous essay, we briefly mentioned that the theory of evolution had spawned some very evil progeny such as communism and Nazism.  It is imperative that folks grasp the truth of that (we will discuss this point further near the end).  To help them do so, we are going to look more closely at the effects of the theory of evolution – Darwinism – on key actors who developed and implemented these demonic ideologies.

 Your home as ‘fictitious’ capital

In more recent times the opportunities to ‘make money from money’, so to speak, have expanded for the ordinary person.  For example, the 1980 Housing Act introduced by the Thatcher government in the UK gave council house tenants the legal right to buy their council homes at a discounted price. This combined with the introduction of mortgage interest relief significantly impacted on the property market and widened popular participation in it. Around the time of the First World War three-quarters of the UK population rented their homes; by the early 2000s the situation had reversed with over 70 percent of the population nominally owning their homes – although the percentage has since declined due to the increasing difficulty of would-be first time buyers to get on the housing ladder. 

While rising house prices might put the idea of owning a home beyond the reach of some would-be first time buyers it is, paradoxically precisely these rising house prices that makes the idea of buying a house such a financially attractive proposition. While houses prices as a multiple of average earnings fell during the late 19th century (which explains why rented accommodation was such a widespread phenomenon in the early 20th century Britain), that trend has reversed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, boosted by the relative stagnation in wages. The benefit of owning a home, steadily appreciating in value, instead of paying ‘dead money’ for some over-priced rental property is all too obvious.

A few people with the financial resources to engage in the ‘buy to let’ business might find themselves in the position where they can comfortably live off the rents of their tenants. However, for the vast majority who have purchased a home, renting it out is simply not an option.  Even taking in lodgers would be impractical in many cases.

Consequently, most homeowners continue to depend absolutely on some form of paid work since, with home-ownership, comes financial commitments such as mortgage repayments. True, you might manage to sell your home and realise a capital gain (particularly if the property market is booming) but you still have to find somewhere else to live. It is this makes the idea of treating one´s home as (fictitious) ‘capital’ – as some commentators do – somewhat problematic.  You cannot be without a home since it is a basic human need (unlike other forms of fictitious capital). 

If you do sell your house at a time when house prices are rising then you have the problem of having to pay more for some other house you may subsequently wish to purchase. On the other hand, as well as going up, prices can also come down as occasionally happens after a property boom. Having to sell your property in a slump could very well plunge you into dire financial difficulties that you may never recover from, financially speaking.

The above qualifications notwithstanding, it is nevertheless the case that a fairly large percentage of the working class do indeed engage in the speculative buying and selling of property at some point in their lives.  Normally, the primary means of purchasing a property is via a loan (mortgage) from a bank.  Bank loans (in this case for consumption as opposed to the production of commodities) is, as we saw, a classic example of fictitious capital. 

In the past, at least in the UK, it was building societies (or ‘mutuals’ controlled by their members) that had a virtual monopoly in the issuance of mortgages. This changed in a big way in the 1980s with banks entering the mortgage market and offering a variety of different mortgages to suit different customers. Mortgage loans as a percentage of total bank loans has subsequently grown very significantly. 

These are ‘secured’ loans inasmuch as your home serves as collateral , meaning that if you fail to keep up with your mortgage repayments the bank can take possession of your home. The same is true of auto loans.  However, there are also various kinds of unsecured loans where collateral is not required such as personal loans, student loans and credit cards. These are riskier from the standpoint of the lender and for that reason sometimes attract a higher rate of interest. With the growth in the both the volume and diversity of consumer debt the exposure of working people to the machinations of fictitious capital has increased greatly in recent years.  

However, when we are talking about fictitious capital what more likely springs to mind is not so much our monthly mortgage repayments or our credit card bills but an institution like the stock market. Most ordinary people would have little, if any, direct experience of dabbling in the buying and selling of shares. Essentially the stock market is the domain of the wealthy private investor or else (and to an increasing extent), institutional investors. However, what happens here is in principle no different from what happens when you place a bet on a horse in your local betting shop after having studied its ‘form’.  

It is speculative gambling but on a vastly larger scale, of course. The stupendous wealth that can be made on the stock market rams home the point, again and again, that it is not through hard work that one can become incredibly wealthy. This breeds a kind of cynicism towards work born out of the belief that what is officially supposed to motivate us to work is precisely the lure of money.  If we go along with that belief, how could we not feel cynical, when we see fortunes being made by others who don’t have to lift a finger to do that? When we struggle to pay the bills on the meagre wages we earn it is perhaps understandable that some might feel resentment.

Sometimes, this can be misconstrued as ‘envy’. However, the ‘politics of envy’, as it is called, is an ideological snare and a trap for the unwary. To ‘envy’ someone is to covet what they have and, indeed, to want to become like them (and hence to perpetuate the very system they benefit from). However, it is structurally impossible, not to say nonsensical, for the majority in a capitalist society to come to find themselves in the same economic position of the minority of being able to live off the unearned income that this majority, after all, provides them with. It is not envy that this majority should feel but, rather, outrage.

ROBIN COX

Which mainstrean journalist quotes Wilde on charity approvingly?

Oscar Wilde once said of charity that it “is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” This rings out in my head like the tolling of some monotonous perpetual bell whenever I see glossy, curated footage of celebrities engaging in charitable pursuits, seemingly unable to anticipate anything other than fawning gratitude from their audience.

Doubles down on the futility of reformism?

We are putting the world’s most expensive plaster on a wound which will continue to rip itself open without the appropriate stitching.

And concludes:

When the cameras stop flashing and the interviews are concluded, the people featured in the press will still be experiencing homelessness, as will thousands of other people whose faces we might never see.    Poverty and structural inequality prevail, while the grotesquely wealthy head home, PR opportunity secured and conscience appeased till the next time?

Note to Head Office: please send Lennie Pennie, a columist for The Herald (Scotland) 3 free Standards!

We say: Human rights law is a noble thing, but under a capitalist economy, nobility is a bourgeois virtue. In reality, human rights rest upon a fundamental – wilful, gleeful – ignorance about the basis of capitalist society.

Yet cannot dispute the facts presented here in a recent Human Rights Watch article titled Tragedies Born of Negligence in Iraq:

122 killed by a fire in a wedding hall. 82 killed by a fire in a Covid-19 hospital. Three months later, another hospital fire claimed the lives of 92 more.     Though they may seem to be freak accidents, these fires were preventable tragedies sharing one common theme: gross negligence.    Government investigations into these fires found that local authorities were negligent in their failure to enforce safety regulations and conduct inspections. Contractors used cheap, highly flammable construction materials to cut cost.

1. From which song are the following lyrics taken?

‘I heard a siren from the docks / Saw a train set the night on fire / I smelled the spring on the smoky wind’

[Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl. The town is Salford.]

2. Which was the first language in which a translation of Marx’s Capital was published?

[Russian, in 1872, which I found rather surprising] 

3. In Liverpool, what was known as the dockers’ umbrella?

[The Liverpool Overhead Railway, which ran above the docks and Pier Head. It closed in 1956.]

4. Who described British people to his mistress as follows: ‘people who carry an umbrella can never … understand the moral significance of war, because they cannot love that supreme, inexorable violence which is the chief motor force of world history’? 

[Mussolini]

5. In the American South, what was the underground railroad?

[A secret network of escape routes for slaves. In this connection I recommend Colson Whitehead’s alternate history novel The Underground Railroad]

6. The COP28 climate summit was held recently in UAE. What does ‘COP’ stand for?

[Conference of the Parties (very boring answer)]

7. What happened in Spain on 26 April 1937?

[The bombing of Guernica]

8. Why is an early australopithecine skeleton known as ‘Lucy’?

[After the skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was played in the expedition’s camp] 

9. Which city has a monument to the cholera epidemic of 1832, in which 402 people died?

[Sheffield. The monument is on a hill, the other side of the railway station from the city centre]

10. What does Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ refer to?

[A character in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. The following lines from the song echo a passage from the book: ‘Now Tom said “mom, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy /

Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries /

Where there’s a fight ‘gainst the blood and hatred in the air /

Look for me mom I’ll be there”’.

The Springsteen song is based on an earlier song on the same subject by Woodie Guthrie]

 The capitalist class, as a result of their control of the means of mental production, focus the attention of the working class on things that are often of little concern or consequence e.g. reality television, royalty or republicanism.  In an article titled It’s Long Past Time to Abolish the British Monarchy we read: