14th of January marks 100 years since the birth of Murray Bookchin. Although there are differences in his and his supporters view with our own, there are also many similarities that we should not ignore or neglect. Murray Bookchin , too, stands for a class-free, state-free society of common ownership in which money becomes redundant and the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” applies. He recommends Marx’s analysis of how the capitalist economic system works when he says, “As a study of the capitalist economy as a whole, it [Capital] has no equal today. Marx’s economic studies are central to any socialist analysis”.

His ideas described as ‘social ecology’ were always directed towards radical social change and have influenced many around the world, particularly recently in the Kurdish enclave Rojava. While not socialism there, people living in Rojava inspired by Bookchin’s libertarian thought are able to directly contribute to decisions affecting their community, and there is more gender equality and less sectarianism than elsewhere in the region. Likewise, Bookchin views the Spanish Civil War not as a struggle to defend a discredited and treacherous republican regime but to create a social revolution in Spanish society. While we in the World Socialist Movement may not always agree with the attempts to build socialism, this sort of discussion should be of concern to all of us attempting to build libertarian forms of organisation that can begin to challenge capitalism. 

Bookchin developed a political programme known as ‘libertarian municipalism’ which he saw as a method for getting from our present society of minority control and environmental destruction to a new rational and ecological society of mass democratic control. Bookchin shares with the World Socialist Movement the belief that workers must run society themselves with the use of leader-free organization. The basic building block of libertarian municipalism is the community or neighbourhood assembly, face to face meetings where citizens meet to discuss and vote on the issues of the day. These assemblies elect mandated and recallable delegates who then link with other assemblies forming a confederated council, a ‘community of communities’. The difference between this form of delegate democracy and our current form of representative democracy is that in a representative democracy power is given wholesale to the representative who then is free to act on their own initiative; in a delegate democracy the initiative is set by the electing body and the delegate can be recalled at any time should the electing body feel that their mandate is not being met, thus power remains at the base. 

“The movement . . . will be shaped by the people it has tried to assimilate and not the people by the movement”. (On Spontaneity and organisation.)

Murray Bookchin is one contemporary thinker and writer who comes close to us on a number of key points. Despite some significant differences there is much that the WSM would agree with and find of use. 

In his writings, Bookchin defends rationalism, science and technology against the current trend of New Age mysticism and life-style culture that has spread among the environmentalist movements. He also opposes so-called “identity politics”, seeing this as essentially seeking a better deal for women, gays and blacks within capitalism as well as being divisive.

Bookchin took up basically the same position as us that, for humanity to produce and consume in ecologically acceptable ways, it must first replace capitalism and its drive to make profits with a system of common ownership, democratic participation and production for use, which can make full use of modern science and technology but for ecological and human ends instead of profit. According to Bookchin, the ecology movement has a choice: either it can realise that capitalism is the cause of ecological damage and work to end capitalism or it can retreat into “ecomysticism” blaming science, technology and reason as such, calling on individuals to adjust their personal lifestyles so as to better attune with “nature”.

Murray Bookchin points out in ‘Remaking Society’ that human beings are both a part and a product of nature; that humans do have a unique significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force since humans are precisely that part of nature which has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature. Bookchin describes the human species as the brain and voice of nature, nature becomes self-conscious, so to speak. But to accomplish this, humanity must change the social system, a change from capitalism to a “community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs.” Bookchin explains, “The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less than material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory.”

Some Greens blame modern technology rather than the use — or, more accurately, the abuse — that is made of it under the present system. Bookchin answers:

  “To substitute words like industrial society for capitalism can thus be misleading . . . To speak of an ‘industrial society’ without clear reference to the new social relations introduced by capitalism, namely wage labour and a dispossessed proletariat, often wilfully endows technology with mystical powers and a degree of autonomy that it does not really have. It also creates the highly misleading notion that society can live with a market economy that is ‘green’, ‘ecological’, or ‘moral’, even under conditions of wage labour, exchange, competition and the like. This misuse of language imputes to technology – much of which may be very useful socially and ecologically – what should really be directed against a very distinct body of social relationships, namely, capitalistic ones.”

 Bookchin is explicit that what is required is a change from capitalism to a “community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs”:

“The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labor, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less than material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory.”

 A new report showing 45 per cent of supermarket staff still earn below the real living wage, currently £9.50 per hour outside of London and £10.85 per hour in the capital.

 Not surprisingly the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the news for 2020. Nevertheless, there were other humanitarian crises that were largely unreported. The relief agency CARE International produces  an annual report titled “Suffering in Silence,” on those neglected problems. 

Six African countries made the list, sharing a list of malaise ranging from internal displacement, hunger and malnutrition, and chronic poverty. 

Burundi, the fifth-poorest country in the world, topped the list with 2.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. The country has one of the highest rates of chronic malnourishment in the world, the report said. 

“The Central African Republic (CAR), Madagascar, Mali and Burundi have appeared on the list across multiple years, yet the people in these countries don’t get sufficient media attention,” the report said, highlighting a number of African nations on the list. 

The suffering is particularly acute for those living in the Central African Republic, a country whose “perennial” massive crises go largely underreported each year.  

“Despite its significant mineral deposits that include gold, diamonds and uranium, as well as rich arable land, CAR sits at second last on the 2019 Human Development Index,” the report added.

Madagascar is another underreported nation particularly ravaged by climate change, CARE highlighted. The island nation suffers from “recurrent, protracted droughts, and an average of 1.5 cyclones per year — the highest rate in Africa.”   The report stressed that an estimated one fifth of Malagasy people, some 5 million, are directly affected by recurring natural disasters, including cyclones, floods and droughts. 

 Non-African countries on the list also share an urgent need for aid amid food insecurity, but they also face conflict and climate change as structural factors fueling their humanitarian crises. 

 Guatemala is reeling from the aftermath of two back-to-back category four storms, Iota and Eta. Guatemala – considered a middle-income country by the World Bank – has had continued, moderate (3.5 percent) growth over the last five years. This economic stability, however, has not made much of a dent in poverty and inequality. Even before COVID-19, Guatemala had the sixth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world with close to half (47 percent) of all Guatemalan children chronically malnourished and at risk for stunting. Also worrisome is the national maternal mortality rate which stood at 108 deaths per every 100,000 live births pre-COVID. Around thirty-five children out of every 1,000 born in Guatemala die before the age of five. In desperation, migrants continue to seek a way to the United States, despite the pandemic, and despite American law which in effect bars their entry. Pervasive poverty, high homicide rates driven by gang violence, and corruption – factors that pushed migrants to flee Central America pre-COVID – have not eased during the pandemic.

Pakistan, ranked seventh on the list and the world’s fifth most populous country, has been plagued by the intersection of conflict, the effects of climate change, and pervasive poverty. In 2020, “Pakistan suffered its worst locust plague in history, forcing the government to import wheat for the first time in six years,” the report said. This was followed by extreme flooding which destroyed crops, food supplies and livestock. 

Less than 10 kilometers from Australia’s most northern islands lies Papua New Guinea (PNG), one of the world’s most culturally diverse and naturally rich nations. It hosts over 800 languages and more than 1,000 distinct ethnic groups. However, in stark contrast to its neighbor, PNG is one of the least urbanized countries globally with the lowest life expectancy in the Pacific region. The island nation is prone to natural disasters. In 2020, it faced flooding, landslides and tremors in addition to the consequences of the global pandemic. PNG is endowed with a wide array of mineral resources, including crude oil, natural gas, gold, copper, silver, nickel and cobalt, and produces a range of primary commodities such as: timber, cocoa, coffee, tea and palm oil. Challenges in development remain to date because of the rugged territory which makes transport difficult. The country’s population of more than 8 million is largely rural (87 percent) and highly dispersed; spread out across the highlands and over 600 islands and atolls. In 2020, the UN estimated that about 4.6 million people in PNG (more than half of its population) are in need of humanitarian assistance. Only 46 percent of the population has access to improved drinking water and some parts of the country face challenges in nutrition, lacking a balanced diet. Pre-COVID-19, PNG’s health system

Ukraine, the only European country on the list, is one such example. Years of conflict in its eastern regions have lost relevance in today’s media landscape, CARE said. The elderly and women have been left most vulnerable. Fear of shelling, violent clashes, and the threat of landmines and explosive remnants of war are the daily reality for those living on either side of the front line. Many people are increasingly affected by mental health issues, both due to the fear of violence as well as the long-term socio-economic impacts of the conflict. Gender-based violence is a serious problem in Ukraine with about three-quarters of Ukrainian women having experienced some form of violence since age 15.

 Again another think-tank highlights the detrimental and disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the less wealthy. Joseph Rowntree Foundation says lockdowns have hit incomes of those in insecure work the hardest.

People who were trapped in poverty before the pandemic have suffered the most financial damage during the crisis, according to its report.  Those who had been struggling to make ends meet before March last year were more likely to work in precarious jobs or sectors of the economy that had been hardest hit by lockdowns.

In its annual poverty report, the JRF charity said struggling families would find it harder to recover from the double-dip recession triggered by the renewed restrictions and rapid growth in Covid-19 infections.

According to the research, workers on the lowest incomes experienced on average the largest cut in hours at the start of the pandemic almost a year ago, with 81% of people working in retail and accommodation recording a drop in income. More than a third of single parents working in hospitality and over a quarter of those in retail were already living in poverty before their sectors were severely hit by restrictions.

In a reflection of the uneven economic impact caused by the pandemic, the foundation said that four in 10 workers on the minimum wage faced a high risk of losing their job, compared with just 1% of workers earning more than £41,500 a year.

Even before the pandemic struck, causing the deepest UK recession for more than 300 years, the foundation said that millions in the UK had lived through a “decade of deprivation” with little progress made on reducing poverty, rising hardship among working households, and a steady increase in child poverty. The charity said this rise was mainly because of the Conservative government’s austerity-era benefits freeze between 2016 and 2020, which meant that benefits had not kept up with the rising cost of living. Even after taking into account the boost for universal credit – launched as a temporary measure in March last year when Covid first hit – research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that out-of-work households got £1,600 per year less in benefits than they would have done before the Tory austerity drive began a decade ago. 

Helen Barnard, the foundation’s director, said: “It is a damning indictment of our society that those with the least have suffered the most before the pandemic and are now being hit hardest once again by the pandemic. The government must now make the right decisions to avoid another damaging decade.”

Lowest paid in UK have suffered the most financially in the pandemic, report finds | Poverty | The Guardian

“Tony Blair always envied how much money Clinton had gathered,” says Meghnad Desai, a former Labour politician and London School of Economics professor. “So he set up his consultancy and advised Central Asian dictators…”

The day Tony Blair left British politics in June 2007 he became the special envoy to the Quartet on the Middle East, during which time he set up Tony Blair Associates (TBA). All profits from TBA went to support his work in areas such as the Climate Group, Faith Foundation and Africa Governance Initiative, all of which offer consultancy on their respective topics. The mechanism was similar to Blair’s Third Way philosophy in the 1990s, except on a bigger scale: Make nice with big money, give it what it wants and then spread a little of its wealth to areas that do good things. 

Blair also spent much of the profits on a multi-million property empire for himself and his children. The financial crash of 2008 put an end to the Third Way foible in the liberal West. When the credit crunch shifted from Wall to Main Street, it was public services that were cut rather than bankers’ bonuses. Blair is said to be worth around $60 million (€53 million).

The completion of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) — which began delivering its first gas from Azerbaijan to Italy on December 30 — has shone light back on the role played by ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in brokering the deal with one of the world’s brutal dictators. In July 2014, Blair was hired to advise a BP-led consortium to export natural gas to Europe from Azerbaijan. On December 31, 2020, Azerbaijani gas from the Shah Deniz deposit in the Caspian Sea flowed for the first time along the Southern Gas Corridor.  

All TBA income was reportedly paid to Windrush Ventures 3, one of several companies Blair set up to manage his business interests that allowed him to avoid publishing full accounts. “[This is] sort of the ‘revolving door syndrome’ just cross-national rather than within the same country,” says Anna Mikulska from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Likewise, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, as chairman of the board of directors of the Nord Stream 2 project, is helping the Kremlin in its bid to finish the pipeline linking Russia and Germany. German Social Democrat (SPD) Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (1998–2005), has been working for the Russian energy industry since he retired from politics in 2005.

“Since then, he has become one of Putin’s most effective Trojan horses in Europe speaking out against Transatlantic sanctions and policies aimed at countering [President Vladimir] Putin’s hybrid threats toward the West, while the current CEO of the pipeline is none other than Putin-confidant and ex-Stasi officer, Matthias Warnig,” Benjamin L. Schmitt, a researcher at Harvard University, says. Schröder received $600,000 in salary for 2019. Since 2017, Schröder has also served as an independent director of the board of Russia’s biggest oil producer, Rosneft.

Schröder’s pro-Russia stance, is in part a hangover from one of his SPD predecessors, Willy Brandt and his policy of detente toward the USSR from the early 1970s. “The truth is that German and Russian utilities/gas companies have a very long working relationship and Germany somehow sees this as a market relation,” Mikulska says.

“Projects like the Kremlin-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline are used within the Russian Federation as a means of enriching contractors with close ties to Putin and is not limited to domestic allies of Putin,” Schmitt says.

Both Blair and Schröder built a brand of center-left politics termed the Third Way in the mid-1990s. “They transformed their parties into winners by effectively giving the leading industries in their economies exactly what they wanted — light-touch regulation of finance in the UK and labor market reform for the car sector in Germany to keep a lid on wages and hence improve export competitiveness,” says Brown University’s Mark Blyth. “Where they are now is where they would have been anyway had they never governed — high up corporate — at the dodgy end of energy and money.”

2 former European leaders and their post-Soviet power plays | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 12.01.2021

 At the beginning of the year one bitcoin was worth £5,614 before almost reaching £30,000 at the end of last week. Anyone who bought cryptoassets at the beginning of the year was sitting potentially on a 400% gain, an extraordinary return in a year.

Shares in London are back to where they were in late February last year. 

House prices in 2020 rose by 6%, helped by the chancellor’s temporary stamp duty holiday. 

 The Bank of England has infused the financial system with cash meant to be loaned to chase a positive rate of return but investors prefer to make outlandish short-term capital gains rather than income from productive investment.

Such policies have substantially increasing the net worth of the top 10% richest people who control half of Britain’s assets, such as shares and property. 

 The Guardian view on Covid’s widening gaps: the rich are getting richer | Coronavirus | The Guardian

Last year, to mark the 75th anniversary of the UN, it conducted various townhall discussions, dialogues and an online survey from January until November, 2020. The report, Shaping Our Future Together, showed that people across the world were unified in their concerns, with the current coronavirus pandemic being the foremost in their minds.

The peoples of the world are unanimous – access to basic services such as universal healthcare must become a priority going forward. So too should global solidarity, helping those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and addressing the climate change emergency. People around the world also called for safe water and sanitation, and education. Rethinking the global economy and making it more inclusive to tackle inequalities was another concern. Meanwhile addressing climate change and destruction to the environment also remained top long-concerns for respondents.

The collective thoughts of the world’s future by some 1.5 million people, including those from various organisations and networks, from all countries across the globe has been been highlighted in a global initiative by the United Nations, which it called the world’s largest conversation on the future people want.

“When you ask people about their fears and hopes for the future, when you ask people about their expectations of international cooperation about their priorities in the immediate, post-COVID, there is remarkable unity across generations, regions, income groups, education groups, and from people from different political direction,” Fabrizio Hochschild, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General.

Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern and South-eastern Asia – had listed access to universal healthcare as an immediate short-term priority, according to the report. In these regions the call for increased support to places hardest hit by the pandemic and greater global solidarity ranked top. Next was the need for universal healthcare.

“This reflects the grim reality reported by UNDP – that daily COVID-19 related deaths have exceeded other common causes of death throughout much of 2020. Emergency services, health systems and health workers are under enormous strain around the world, with indirect health impacts also expected to rise,” the report noted.

UN Secretary-General, António Guterres noted that the COVID-19 pandemic “has had a disproportionate and terrible impact on the poor and dispossessed, older people and children, those with disabilities and minorities of all kinds”.

“It has pushed an estimated 88 million people into poverty and put more than 270 million at risk at acute food insecurity,” Guterres said. 

The second short-term priority was a call for greater global solidarity and increased support to places hardest hit by the pandemic. Indeed, Guterres said in his speech that the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted serious gaps in global cooperation and solidarity.

“We have seen this most recently in vaccine nationalism, some rich countries compete to buy vaccines for their own people, with no consideration for the world’s poor,” he said. Guterres continued that the pandemic has highlighted the “deep fragilities in our world” and in order to tackle them we need to reduce inequality and injustice and to strengthen the bonds of mutual support and trust. He also added that the world needed “a networked multilateralism, so that global and regional organisations communicate and work together towards common goals”.

“And we need an inclusive multilateralism, based on the equal representation of women, and taking in young people, civil society, business and technology, cities and regions, science and academia,” he said.

Guterres said that while the pandemic was a human tragedy – it can also be an opportunity.

“The past months have shown the huge transformations that are possible, when there is political will and consensus on the way forward,” Guterres said.

 He ended that he was confident that working together the world can emerge from the pandemic “and lay the foundations for a cleaner, safer, fairer world for all, and for generations to come”.

COVID-19 Pandemic Shapes the Future World People Want | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

It would appear that the World Socialist Movement does indeed express the interests and desires of our fellow-workers and it has come up with the required solutions necessary to end humanity’s problems. 

 Yet another statistic that indicates population decline rather than the Malthusian myth of a looming over-population problem.

Thefigures released by Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) showed that the country had seen no increase in population for the first time since 2011.

 83.2 million people were living in Germany at the end of 2020. Destatis attributed the population plateau to lower immigration because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an increase in the number of deaths.

Since German reunification, the population has — with only a few exceptions — tended to increase. However, this population growth has resulted exclusively from positive net immigration. Without more people immigrating than emigrating, the population would have been shrinking since 1972 with more deaths than births in every year since then. 

Germany’s birth or fertility rates have been well below global and even European averages ever since the Second World War.

The number of deaths appears to have risen noticeably. The estimate for 2020 is 755,000 to 775,000 births compared with at least 980,000 deaths.

The estimated net migration into Germany of between 180,000 and 240,000 for the year. That would be the fifth successive year in which the number sank following the peak during the migration crisis of 2015.

Germany population flatlines for first time in decade | News | DW | 12.01.2021

More than a third of the UK’s poorest families have seen their already meagre incomes squeezed during the pandemic because they have had to spend more on food, gas and electricity, and home schooling, a study by the Resolution Foundation thinktank found. 

While UK household spending broadly dropped and financial savings increased during the Covid crisis, this was not the case for many low-income families, who saw basic living costs surge. While higher-income groups were able to save money they would ordinarily have spent on commuting, eating out or holidays – and often spent this windfall on luxuries – those in the lowest income cohort often struggled to make ends meet, the study found. Many poorer families found the extra costs of feeding and entertaining children at home pushed up spending when schools closed, as did the need to equip school-age sons and daughters with laptops and broadband access for online learning.

Normal coping strategies employed by poorer families – visiting friends and families for occasional meals, or using the library for free internet access, and charity shops for cheap clothes – became harder as a result of household mixing restrictions and the closure of libraries and non-essential retail.

The government had failed to provide effective support for the poorest families, it said, and with the third lockdown expected to last months, it urged ministers to retain the £20 pandemic top-up to universal credit beyond April, as well as boost other benefits for the low-paid.

“The study shines an unforgiving light on the absence of targeted, adequate support for families on a low income, who today face the combined insecurity of Covid-19 and increased financial pressure,” said the study. This added pressure came after years of weak growth in living standards for the poorest households, in turn leading to a general worsening of mental health, it added. It said: “Financial worries have been added to the general stress and anxiety of the pandemic for many families with children.”

Dr Ruth Patrick, a lecturer in social policy at the University of York, who leads the Covid Realities research programme said: “While the need for the lockdown is clear, there is an equally urgent need to address the additional financial pressures that families on a low-income face through greater income support to families with dependent children.”

Poor families’ living costs have surged during pandemic, UK study finds | Society | The Guardian