Category: Capitalism

Grunwick

Capitalism No Comments

Having just read The Rotters Club by Jonathon Coe which is set in and around Birmingham in the 1970s I was most interested in a piece therein where there is a description of a picket travelling down to London to support striking Grunwick workers. The description of the police violence that occurred is, subjective view, one of the best things in the book. The violence described is harrowing so a look into the Grunswick dispute was called for.

Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories was a non-union company processing 35mm film and other formats. You would post your film and remuneration of to the company and receive twenty or thirty six six by four glossy photos back from then.The majority of their workforce were female and Asian. Following a dismissal other workers joined a picket. Workers were advised to join the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff. In September 1976 13y striking workers were sacked. The strike lasted from August 1976 to July 1978. Its objective, union recognition, failed to materialise.

The below is from a Brave.com search, police violence at Grunwick.

The Grunwick dispute (1976–1978) was marked by extreme police violence, primarily involving the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group (SPG), which was deployed for the first time in an industrial dispute. The SPG, modeled on paramilitary units from Northern Ireland, employed aggressive tactics including charges into crowds, flying wedges, and physical assaults, such as dragging picketers by their hair or grabbing women, resulting in numerous injuries including broken bones.

Key details of the violence include:

High Arrests and Injuries: Over 550 arrests were made, the highest figure for an industrial dispute since the 1926 General Strike. On November 7, 1977, 243 picketers were injured (12 with broken bones) and 113 arrested in a single day.

Media Narrative: Mainstream media heavily focused on images of injured police officers (such as one with a head wound), which framed the narrative around picketer violence while often downplaying the severity of police brutality against predominantly South Asian female strikers.

State Coordination: The Labour government and Home Secretary Merlyn Rees supported the heavy police presence to enforce court injunctions against secondary picketing, with Prime Minister James Callaghan encouraging a proactive police response to suppress the mass demonstrations.

Escalation: Violence peaked during mass pickets in June and July 1977, where thousands of trade unionists and supporters clashed with police attempting to escort non-striking workers and lorries into the factory. 

Extract from the Socialist Standard December 1977

‘A year ago few people had heard of the dispute at the Grunwick film-processing laboratories; today, the effort of the strikers to win union recognition has become a national cause célèbre. The events surrounding the dispute have been obscured by the press, which would have us believe that Grunwick is some kind of elaborate game in which one side tries to drive a bus through a gateway and the other side tries to stop them. The principle involved is lost amid reports of how many policemen were injured and how many demonstrators arrested. It is also difficult because socialists, while seeing the trade-union struggle as necessary, also recognise its futility in terms of the revolutionary political action we call upon workers to take.

Members of the SPGB have attended the Grunwick demonstrations in order to sell literature and distribute a leaflet putting the Party’s view on the dispute. The first paragraph of that leaflet states:

The dispute at Grunwick will come to an end…but the class struggle will go on. The Socialist Party of Great Britain believes in the urgent need for workers to join together, not simply for the defensive right of union recognition, but for the purpose of organising for social revolution—NOW. The need for class unity for Socialism is the pressing task of the age.

That, above all else, is the message of the SPGB. To abandon it would be to abandon our claim to be socialists.’

Read full piece below

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/09/wage-labour-and-capital-case-of.html

Twenty Five Years On

Capitalism No Comments
From the Socialist Standard, October 2001
‘So, the line-up in the next – military – episode in the continuing struggle for control of the oil resources of the Middle East is, on the one side, a section of the local capitalist class using Islam to rally mass support and, on the other, the Western capitalist powers using “democracy” as their ideology to win mass support for war. But “Islamic State” versus “Democracy” is only the ideological smokescreen disguising the real issue at stake: control of oil resources and trade routes. It is not an issue worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood.
As Socialists we declare our opposition to both sides in this war and call on the working class of the world to unite to bring capitalism to a rapid end so that no more lives are sacrificed to further the economic interests of rival sections of the world capitalist class.’
Adam Buick

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-middle-east-connection-2001.html

Poverty in families

Capitalism No Comments

 

A recent study showed that nearly half of parents are struggling financially after having a baby.

In some cases this has even led to them watering down baby formula milk in order to save money. This can be really serious for an infant, as it may result in growth problems and developmental delays. Baby banks supply clothes, nappies and baby wipes to parents, but get few donations of baby milk.

This is what life can be like for some of the poorest workers under capitalism: essential items such as baby formula can barely be afforded. A society that results in this level of poverty needs to be replaced by one where meeting human need is the priority.

worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Hold the tears

Capitalism No Comments

 

So Starmer is about to resign as an MP. This will allow him to follow the plan he set out after he resigned as PM, i.e.:

“I will now focus on other things and that will be international affairs including defence, security, trade and technology in a fast-changing world.”

A cynic might translate this as:

“I shall reap the dividend of eleven short years in parliament by selling the tiny remnants of my soul to defence corporations, multinationals, big tech, bankers and investors. A quick message to all of you who have worked 40 odd years to gain a pitiful pension to last you through your uncomfortable final years, it appears you joined the wrong pension scheme. So long suckers”

worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Himalayan flash floods

Capitalism No Comments

With record summer heatwaves and ‘weather whiplash’ events, global warming is fast becoming normalised. Now shocking video has emerged of unsurvivable flash floods in Nepal and Tibet, probably caused by a melting Himalayan glacier. Geologists have been warning about this for years, and there have been similar previous floods.

The death toll continues to rise as the water recedes. Rescue work is underway as local villagers scramble to help survivors, and aid workers pour in from elsewhere. But in the boardrooms of the world’s corporate powerhouses, eyes do not move from the bottom line figures. Nothing matters except profit, even while capitalism heats the planet and melts glaciers.

Until we abolish this inhumane system, these human tragedies will continue.

worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Poverty in families

Capitalism No Comments

A recent study showed that nearly half of parents are struggling financially after having a baby.

In some cases this has even led to them watering down baby formula milk in order to save money. This can be really serious for an infant, as it may result in growth problems and developmental delays. Baby banks supply clothes, nappies and baby wipes to parents, but get few donations of baby milk.

This is what life can be like for some of the poorest workers under capitalism: essential items such as baby formula can barely be afforded. A society that results in this level of poverty needs to be replaced by one where meeting human need is the priority.

worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Mass delusion?

Capitalism No Comments

 

‘Mass delusion’ is among the many labels that have been attached to Donald Trump’s rule and the support for him by tens of millions of Americans. But what about the delusion that affects the vast majority of the world’s population? They believe it’s natural and inevitable that millions should suffer grinding poverty while the 56,000 wealthiest people on the planet own assets three times as large as those of the poorest half of humanity combined .

There’s nothing natural/inevitable about this at all. We can fix it but only if that majority comes together to set up a system of common ownership and voluntary cooperation with free access to the abundant goods and services the world could provide..

The Socialist Party of Great Britain – Part of the World Socialist Movement

Summer of discontent

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Grimly facing drought, hosepipe bans, wildfires and yet another heatwave? You won’t be comforted to know that ‘greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea level and ocean heat content all reached record highs in 2025’ (phys.org). European rivers are at record lows. The US has had its hottest July on record, as has the Sahel, Central America, France and Spain. And don’t stock up your freezer with ice cream because you could soon be facing rolling energy blackouts.

It’s not all bad news though. Water company bosses are still getting bonuses, oil companies are cashing in like never before, and tech stocks are going stratospheric.

Still think capitalism is humanity’s best hope? We say it’s time to consider the alternative.

worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Nagasaki mon amour

Capitalism No Comments

Some events, like some people, are inextricably linked together. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one such event.

Two events in reality, following the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima a few days later, 9th August 1945, another atom bomb was used to kill occupants of the city of Nagasaki.

Extract from Socialist Standard November 2019

‘The atom bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – affectionately named: ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ by the perpetrators – instantly killed 100,000 Japanese people. An additional 100,000 died of injuries and radiation poisoning in the following months. But these bombs are akin to peashooters compared to the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, invented in the 1950s, which packs a punch hundreds of times greater than its smaller cousin.

Alex Wellerstein’s Nukemap model (nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ ) illustrates this bigger punch, by allowing the user to choose the location and size of the hydrogen bomb in a simulated detonation. I chose London as my target and selected the biggest bomb from the drop down menu; known as the ‘Tsar Bomba;’ produced in Soviet Union times, it weighs in at a whopping 100 Megatons (100,000 Kilotons) which makes it around 7000 times the size of the US atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Or, put another way, this single bomb exceeds the total explosive capacity of all munitions used during WWII by a factor of twenty. The result of the simulation indicated that 18 million people would be caught in the blast covering a radius stretching north to Cambridge and south to Brighton; of which around 6 million would be killed instantly and a further 6 million would suffer substantial injuries. The model helpfully clarifies that such casualties do not include the effects of radiation which are apparently too difficult to estimate. In such circumstances advising children to shelter under their school desks is not really going to cut the mustard as a strategy for survival.’

Tim Hart

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/11/nuclear-threat-resetting-doomsday-clock.html

Why they dropped the bombs

A two part article from the Socialist Standard.

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/why-they-dropped-bombs-2005.html

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/blog-post_29.html

Something for the weekend: Great Train Robbery

Capitalism No Comments

On the 8th August 1963 train robbery occurred, the amount stolen was the equivalent of almost forty nine million pounds today. (Bank of England inflation calculator).

‘Mail Train robbery

The two-and-a-half million pound mail train robbery was audacious and glamorous enough to have come from the pen of the most imaginative crime fiction writer.

In that, it was typical of a recent strengthening trend in crime. The big, well planned robbery is becoming increasingly profitable for the crooks and so more and more of a headache for the police.

This is hardly surprising. The existence of private property elevates money into the key to a secure life. The moneyed man is always the privileged man and he does his best to make sure that he keeps both the money and the privileges.

There are plenty of such privileged— and honoured—men whose wealth has been amassed from the exploitation of the other class in society. Or perhaps they inherited it from their ancestors’ historical equivalent of the Cheddington hold-up.

This sort of wealth is respectable—it has come from what has been well called legal robbery, which conforms to capitalism’s needs and so its moralities.

Robbery, forgery, embezzlement, and so on, do not conform and the men who try to get rich by practising them are anything but honoured.

Be that as it may, crime is inevitable as long as capitalism lasts; offences against property make up die overwhelming majority of crimes today. Capitalism without crime, in fact, is simply impossible.

Ironically, it is capitalism itself which asks for some of its crime. Do not the armed forces, so essential to capitalism, encourage just the sort of knowledge and the mental attitudes which are useful in a desperate, quick-fire robbery?

The driver of the Cheddington train said that one of the gang advised him to keep quiet because there were some “right bastards” there. Well, it is the “right bastard” who makes an excellent Commando or bomber pilot.

All of this is not to justify nor to condone the criminal. Indeed, any one who tried to take away from the Cheddington gang any of the money they have stolen would soon find that, in their own unmistakeable way, they are as firm in their support of property rights as any bank boardroom.

Capitalism is an unpleasant social system and crime is only one of its many excrescences.’

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/search/label/Great%20Train%20Robbery

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