TRADE UNIONS AND THE TROTSKYIST LEFT
Speaker: Howard Moss.
Sunday morning, 27 March, at 10am BST. Please note that the clocks will have gone forward, therefore this is GMT + 1.
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Loss Leader
Don’t place trust in leaders, leaders tell lies,
They’ll rousingly speak of national missions,
But in their hard hearts personal ambitions
Echo, and all humanity denies.
Their bellicose blather’s so much foul breath
That poisons the air in far too many lands,
They’ve got indelible blood on their hands
Spilled by those they mustered and marched to death.
Leaders talk of courage, dismissing fear,
Of honour gained through personal sacrifice,
Privilege of paying the ultimate price;
All the while the leader leads from the rear.
Though leaders may rise and leaders may fall,
Pity is, there’s no need of leaders at all.
D.A.
The number of UK households struggling with large debts increased by a third in 2021, even before the winter rise in energy prices and the removal of the £20 uplift in universal credit payments.
Analysis and research carried out by the Jubilee Debt Campaign found that in September 2021 almost 10% of households reported that loan and interest repayments were a heavy financial burden, a 35% increase on the previous year’s figures.
Households also reported that their average monthly loan repayments reached a record £373 in 2021, up 22% on the year before and the highest figure for at least a decade.
Surging food and petrol costs have added to the strain on finances since the research was done, and the Jubilee Debt Campaign said the rising cost of living threatened “to push people who are already living on the edge further into debt and poverty”.
Citizens Advice said 5 million people had indicated that they would not be able to afford April’s energy price rises, while in a survey by the Money Advice Trust one in five adults said they were likely to borrow or use credit in the next three months to cover essentials.
Analysis of households’ reports of repayments on unsecured debt, so does not include mortgages. It showed that in nominal terms and when inflation was adjusted for, these were running higher than over the past decade.
Joe Cox, the senior policy officer at Jubilee Debt Campaign, said, “The worsening debt crisis is toppling households up and down the country … “
Number of UK households with large debts rises by a third | Borrowing & debt | The Guardian
Living standards in Britain are expected to fall at the fastest annual rate since the mid-1950s and will take until at least 2024 to return to pre-Covid levels, according to the government’s independent economic forecaster.
Real household disposable incomes per person would fall by 2.2% in 2022-23 as earnings from work fail to keep pace with soaring inflation.
It said the fall would be the biggest in a single financial year since modern records began in 1956-57, and that it would take until 2024-25 for inflation-adjusted living standards to return to their pre-pandemic level.
The OBR said the damage for families would mean lower levels of consumer spending in the UK economy.
The new Nationality and Borders Bill will make the UK “one of the most anti-refugee countries in the world”, a leading international charity has said.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which employs over 35,000 personnel across 70 countries, branded Commons votes on Tuesday night “shameful” after the Tory MPs ripped out amendments proposed by the House of Lords. Tory MPs reinserted clauses that will allow the government to send refugees offshore and detain them indefinitely – a policy which aid groups say has caused “terrible suffering” when tried by Australia.
“It’s shameful that the government has rejected these moderate, sensible changes, which would have removed some of the cruellest elements of the Nationality and Borders Bill,” Sophie McCann, MSF’s UK advocacy officer, said. “In its current form, the bill will enshrine the UK as one of the most anti-refugee countries in the world, at a time when the devastating impact of war and conflict is absolutely evident.”
Ms McCann added, “The government cannot be serious about this bill – it is unworkable, exorbitantly expensive, and inhumane, targeting some of the most vulnerable people in the world.” She continued, “There is nothing ‘fair’ about criminalising, detaining, pushing back and imprisoning refugees in offshore detention centres simply because of how they arrive in the UK. Closing off routes to the UK will only push people into the hands of criminal gangs and into more dangerous methods of attempting the journey.”
Pauline Chetcuti, head of policy at the charity Oxfam, said the bill “flagrantly undermines our obligations under international law”, adding, “The Ukrainian conflict painfully illustrates how innocent civilians everywhere have no choice but to flee conflict, persecution and violence. We need an asylum system that is based on the principle of protection, not punishment,” she said.
Research conducted by Chatham House last month indicated that most Belarusians do not want their country to participate in this war, and they believe that Belarusian involvement will have catastrophic ramifications.
Belarusians can be divided into two groups based on whom they support.
The first group gets most of its information from state television, and supports Russia.
The second group receives news from the independent media, and supports Ukraine.
The first backs Lukashenko, the second opposes him.
About 1,000 Belarusians have already been arrested for peacefully protesting; others are sabotaging infrastructure used by the Russian military.
Hundreds have joined volunteer detachments of the Ukrainian army.
Most Belarusians are united in their objection to the war into which Lukashenko has dragged them. Whether they can make their voices heard or will be silenced again remains to be seen.
O Truth, how many falsehoods are broadcast in thy name
The USA and its allies in Europe won the Cold War when the USSR finally collapsed in 1991. It was a humiliating defeat for state-capitalist Russia. Ukraine, an area that had been contested for centuries, became an independent state. The violence which is an integral element of world capitalism has erupted yet again. Once again we see how capitalism cannot develop an effective means of preventing violence. Force is a necessary part of capitalism.
The workers of the world have everything to gain by peaceful co-operation, and everything to lose by war. The principal causes of war can be abolished by destroying the political and economic supremacy of the exploiting class. Enough has been said over the year to show that those who are aware of the real forces at work in the modern capitalist world hold out little hope for a future in which war will not rear its ugly and brutal head.
The only political organisation in this country to consistently hold and propagate the view, during that the League of Nations and then the United Nations would inevitably fail in its professed purpose of preventing war was the Socialist Party. We knew that peace would not come merely from the setting up of “right” machinery, nor would war come because we may lack this machinery. We knew that, given the capitalist system, with the competitive struggle for markets and its conflicts over spheres of influence, etc., war was inevitable. As a result, our analysis was not welcomed by the many peace groups. It is not sufficient to work simply for peace. Our task is to work for a new social order.
Problems still remain because the causes of war were not removed. When the capitalists are faced with threats to their interests they will not stop to consider the “rights” or “justice” of the case. They will not forfeit their “right” to act in their own interests. They will move to defend these regardless of the legalities of international law.
“…war, organised war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide.” Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man.
The decision on whether and when to use force is therefore dictated first and foremost by our national interests. In those specific areas where our vital or survival interests are at stake, our use of force will be decisive and, if necessary, unilateral.
The Socialist Party because it understands the nature of capitalism and its inevitable development refuses to be lulled by all sorts of reformers who pander to ignorance by claiming to have solutions for problems that are incapable of solution within the framework of capitalism. We are aware that this attitude is unpopular.
The UN has failed to agree on a treaty to protect the high seas from exploitation. Despite two decades of discussion, there is still no treaty protecting international waters.
Scientists, environmentalists and conservation organisations blaming states that were “dragging their feet” for the “glacial pace” of talks.
Currently, a patchwork of international bodies and treaties manage resources and human activity in areas beyond national jurisdiction – including fishing, whaling, shipping and seabed mining. Some countries, including Russia and Iceland, have called for fisheries to be excluded from the agreement.
Dr Essam Mohammed, Eritrea’s representative in the negotiations and interim director general of WorldFish, a non-profit research institute, said: “At the moment, there is a governance vacuum in the high seas, and for the ocean and developing countries, the status quo simply isn’t an option.” Swiftly advancing marine technology would lead to “an unprecedented race for marine resources in unregulated waters”, Mohammed said. “The delay in striking a deal means high risk for the health of the ocean. “All member states of the UN need to recognise the urgency to save the ocean and the people who depend on it to survive,” he said.
Prof Alex Rogers, a marine ecologist and science director of the non-profit company REV Ocean, said: “There are states here that are dragging their feet and deliberately prolonging the treaty talks. But we know the ocean is being degraded and is losing biodiversity. Climate is also having an impact on the ocean. The longer these negotiations are strung out, the more biodiversity we lose.”
Will McCallum, head of oceans at Greenpeace, who attended last week’s talks, said negotiators spent “hours and hours” on non-contentious sentences.
Accurate information is difficult to obtain on the conditions on the ground in Ukraine. Many times we are required to rely upon biased media outlets. It is with that important caveat that the blog relays a promising development among the Russian armed forces.
In the Okhtyrka district in the north-east of Ukraine, where it said 300 Russian servicemen are refusing to carry out attacks. The troops have now left the field of operations.
The more mutiny the merrier. Let the Russians put into practice the words of the International.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.
As long as capitalism lasts there will be a conflict of interests; in other words, war is caused by capitalism and cannot be avoided under that social system. We have had two global wars and countless regional and local conflicts over the struggle for raw materials, trade routes and spheres of influence. Capitalism is a competitive society and the logical outcome of the resultant conflict is military violence. Capitalism by its very nature breeds competition between nations and this produces threats and counter-threats which leads to ultimatums, eventually, military action. The awful truth is that it is members of the working class who own no part of these resources who take part in the resultant conflicts and suffer the resultant tragedies of war.
The tragedy of war is that our fellow workers have no reason to go to war; their interests are not involved. Yet we are the ones who do the fighting and the dying. For almost 120 years, this organisation has been consistent in its opposition to nationalism, in the belief that nationalism is a killer epidemic, creating conflict from which those with the least to gain have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.
Socialism will abolish war because it will bring a community of interests; it will be a society without frontiers, without nations, without classes, without conflict. Socialists can therefore say without any hesitation that there can be only one way to achieve lasting peace across this planet and that means an organised retreat from nationalism in all its forms and an escalation of the struggle for global working-class emancipation. War is an ever-present menace so long as capitalism survives. The sordid squabbles over markets, trade routes and other considerations, give way eventually to armed conflict, but no working-class interest is involved, and no social problem is solved by fighting. When each war is over, all that can be said is that countless workers have died to preserve the conditions for another holocaust later on. Someone once said that the next war really begins where the last one ends. We could not agree more. So it will continue until those who do the work of the world understand that only when class ownership of the means of living, has been abolished will it be possible for the people of the world to live in harmony. When this is achieved exploitation and the hunger for profit will disappear and there will no longer be tragedies like Yemen or Ukraine. We ask that workers set aside nationalism and join together to root out the real problem itself—capitalism.
The real needs of people the world over can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers.
PEACE AMONG THE peoples, no peace BETWEEN THE CLASSES
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