Taking advantage of good mid-autumn weather, people smugglers have sent hundreds of migrants to sea in the last week, according to charities. The majority of the journeys have ended in tragedy.

“This is a massacre at Europe’s borders,” said a spokesperson for Alarm Phone, a hotline for migrant boats in distress. “What else can we say?”

“Is the European Union watching?” MSF wrote on Twitter. “Step the search and rescue capacity up, or let us save lives.”

Four shipwrecks in the space of three days have claimed the lives of more than 110 people in the Mediterranean.  A six-month-old boy was among the victims.

Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his defence minister, Linda Reynolds, have forewarned Australians they will be shocked and disturbed by the report of Paul Brereton, the inspector general of the Australian Defence Force, when his redacted version is released.

The long-awaited report into the alleged war crimes of Australian special forces soldiers will be out next week and that the alleged culprits are from Special Air Service and Commando regiments – the most intelligent, highly trained and supposedly disciplined troops in the ranks – will render the findings doubly shocking. Some elite soldiers believed they could operate criminally with impunity.

Brereton’s investigation has already been four years in the making. Meanwhile, news of some of the worst alleged crimes such as the summary execution of Afghan prisoners, has publicly highlighted the gravity of the allegations he was investigating. It appears that his investigation has uncovered a litany of alleged crimes that will tarnish the SAS’s hard-earned reputation as the “best of the best” 

Australian soldiers Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock were executed in 1902 for war crimes in the Boer war.  Australians certainly massacred Arabs and Bedouin in Palestine in 1917, and Arabs in Egypt after war’s end in 1918.  Australia’s world war two record, meanwhile, is replete with accounts of Australian troops murdering Japanese prisoners rather than accepting their surrender. Trophy photographs of Australian soldiers with dead Japanese abound. Helmet cam footage has shown the shooting of an unarmed Afghan civilian in a field.

Sections of the media have rallied around the special forces, attempting to cast doubt about the allegations that arose through often remarkable investigative journalism from the ABC and Nine. The former prime minister Tony Abbott told the Australian newspaper people should be cautious to “judge soldiers operating in the heat of combat under the fog of war by the same standards that we would judge civilians”.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/13/australia-is-in-for-a-shock-as-war-crimes-investigation-brings-reality-of-war-to-the-anzac-myth

 Wales is facing a “rising tide of poverty” which has been worsened by Covid, according to a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). 

It found low pay, unaffordable housing and a lack of childcare was trapping 700,000 people in poverty, including 180,000 children. The pandemic had hit low-paid workers in Wales particularly hard.

 The 50 richest Americans now hold almost as much wealth as half of the U.S.

 Data from the U.S. Federal Reserve, a comprehensive look at U.S. wealth through the first half of 2020, show stark disparities by race, age and class. The 50 richest people in the country, meanwhile, are worth almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, up $339 billion from the beginning of 2020.

While the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion, the poorest 50% — about 165 million people — hold just $2.08 trillion, or 1.9% of all household wealth. 

The Fed estimates the top 10% of U.S. households hold 69% of the country’s wealth, or $77.3 trillion, up from 60.9% share at the end of the 1980s. The very richest Americans are almost entirely responsible for that gain. The top 1% held 30.5% of U.S. wealth in June, up from 23.7% in late 1989. The bottom half’s share, meanwhile, has fallen from 3.6% to 1.9%.

White Americans hold 83.9% of the nation’s wealth, compared with 4.1% for Black households, the data show. While White Americans’ share of the total has dropped somewhat as the nation becomes more diverse, Black people hold the same percentage as 30 years ago in 1990. Of the 25 richest Americans, only one is not White — Eric Yuan, the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications Inc., whose fortune has risen almost seven-fold this year to $24.2 billion.

The wealthiest 1% own more than 50% of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, the Fed data show. The next 9% of the wealthiest own more than a third of equity positions — meaning that the top 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of shares.

Unlike low-wage service workers. many upper-middle class professionals are working from home, watching their retirement accounts rise in value after the U.S. Treasury and Fed pumped stimulus into the economy and markets. 

Another key reason for the wealth disparity is that the vast majority of Americans aren’t benefiting from rising stock prices. The bottom 90%’s exposure to the stock market has been dropping for almost two decades. Since peaking at 21.4% in 2002, upper middle class Americans have seen a 10 percentage point decline in their equity interest in companies. A similar pattern is seen among the bottom half.

 The Millennial generation, born between 1981 and 1996, control just 4.6% of U.S. wealth even though they are the largest in the workforce with 72 million members. Young Americans’ wealth is concentrated in just a few hands. Three Millennials — Facebook Inc. co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, along with Walmart Inc. heir Lukas Walton — personally control one out of every $40 held by their generational cohort. Baby Boomers hold the majority of U.S. wealth, with $59.6 trillion, twice Generation X’s (those born between 1965 and 1980) $28.5 trillion and more than 10 times Millennials’ $5.2 trillion.

 Among the biggest beneficiaries of the Covid-19 economy is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His fortune, the world’s biggest, has jumped 64% in 2020 to $188.5 billion. On Wednesday alone, Bezos added more than $5 billion to his net worth.

The prospect for rolling back US capitalism and reforming the conditions of the working class is bleak if it is seen to depend on the Democratic Party. A whole generation of Democrats now believe]that their political survival depends on being even more bellicose on both domestic and foreign affairs than Republicans. Capitalism bends both parties to its will. There are no vital issues between the two parties. The only political issues permitted in American life have been those involving the interests of one section of big business as against another section. Great social issues affecting the lives of the people – such as the issue of war or peace, or the issue of socialism versus capitalism – these have never separated the two parties.  Reforms make their appearance only as vague campaign pledges never to be redeemed. Political patronage and public plunder persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

 

There exists disillusionment and disenchantment with the Siamese twin set–up of the two-party system. Solutions will not come from the swamp of the two capitalist parties. If the American people understood the facts before them, they would convince them that this nation is run by the corporations, and that the corporations control both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Those in public office are all the political creatures of the wealthy. The Democratic and Republican Parties are themselves only factions of Wall Street’s party, maintained by the wealthy to oppose labor’s interests and to advance the interests of the wealthy, at home and abroad. The capitalist two-party system and its ability to mislead the people depend in large measure upon deception, upon the fiction that there are major and decisive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. Over the years the differences between the two parties and their candidates have tended to dwindle to a narrow margin, if not to vanish altogether. Both parties have common war policies, both support Wall Street’s economic programs, both are united in support of the most reactionary governments in the world. Today the political parties of big business are united on one program: to place squarely upon the backs of the workers the burden of the recent wars and costs of the pandemic.

Candidates promises and campaign platforms are not especially important. The current needs of big business always comes first with both old parties. The personality of a president is unimportant to the capitalists, easily indicated by amiable buffoon, Biden and the pompous property billionaire, Trump. Congress, state legislatures, and municipal councils as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. Courts of justice, so-called, decide cases of importance not upon their merit, but in the interest of the ruling class. Ministers of the gospel are subject to the same influence and their sermons are molded to serve the same purpose.

 The aim of any electoral work engaged in by the World Socialist Party is not primarily to amass votes, but to reach the maximum audience with our ideas, to bring the message of our party to fellow-workers. It aims to establish economic equality by making all owners in common of the means upon which all depend for employment, and without which there can be no “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” This insures economic freedom for every human being. As no one would have private property in that upon which another depended for employment, industrial mastery and slavery would disappear together and competition for profit would give way to cooperation for use. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party stand for essentially the same system of exploitation, and a worker realizes that it makes precious little difference whether they are exploited by a few great capitalists or an innumerable brood of small ones. They propose to put an end to exploitation entirely by abolishing the system and transferring the means of production from private hands to the collectivity and having them operated in the interest of all alike. 

The World Socialist Party is necessarily an international party. It is as wide as the domain of capitalism.

The prospect for rolling back US capitalism and reforming the conditions of the working class is bleak if it is seen to depend on the Democratic Party. A whole generation of Democrats now believe]that their political survival depends on being even more bellicose on both domestic and foreign affairs than Republicans. Capitalism bends both parties to its will. There are no vital issues between the two parties. The only political issues permitted in American life have been those involving the interests of one section of big business as against another section. Great social issues affecting the lives of the people – such as the issue of war or peace, or the issue of socialism versus capitalism – these have never separated the two parties.  Reforms make their appearance only as vague campaign pledges never to be redeemed. Political patronage and public plunder persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

 

There exists disillusionment and disenchantment with the Siamese twin set–up of the two-party system. Solutions will not come from the swamp of the two capitalist parties. If the American people understood the facts before them, they would convince them that this nation is run by the corporations, and that the corporations control both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Those in public office are all the political creatures of the wealthy. The Democratic and Republican Parties are themselves only factions of Wall Street’s party, maintained by the wealthy to oppose labor’s interests and to advance the interests of the wealthy, at home and abroad. The capitalist two-party system and its ability to mislead the people depend in large measure upon deception, upon the fiction that there are major and decisive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. Over the years the differences between the two parties and their candidates have tended to dwindle to a narrow margin, if not to vanish altogether. Both parties have common war policies, both support Wall Street’s economic programs, both are united in support of the most reactionary governments in the world. Today the political parties of big business are united on one program: to place squarely upon the backs of the workers the burden of the recent wars and costs of the pandemic.

Candidates promises and campaign platforms are not especially important. The current needs of big business always comes first with both old parties. The personality of a president is unimportant to the capitalists, easily indicated by amiable buffoon, Biden and the pompous property billionaire, Trump. Congress, state legislatures, and municipal councils as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. Courts of justice, so-called, decide cases of importance not upon their merit, but in the interest of the ruling class. Ministers of the gospel are subject to the same influence and their sermons are molded to serve the same purpose.

 The aim of any electoral work engaged in by the World Socialist Party is not primarily to amass votes, but to reach the maximum audience with our ideas, to bring the message of our party to fellow-workers. It aims to establish economic equality by making all owners in common of the means upon which all depend for employment, and without which there can be no “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” This insures economic freedom for every human being. As no one would have private property in that upon which another depended for employment, industrial mastery and slavery would disappear together and competition for profit would give way to cooperation for use. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party stand for essentially the same system of exploitation, and a worker realizes that it makes precious little difference whether they are exploited by a few great capitalists or an innumerable brood of small ones. They propose to put an end to exploitation entirely by abolishing the system and transferring the means of production from private hands to the collectivity and having them operated in the interest of all alike. 

The World Socialist Party is necessarily an international party. It is as wide as the domain of capitalism.

 Four million US citizens are deprived of having a vote on who will be America’s president. They are the residents of America’s colonies. 

An example is the island of Guam. They vote for a local legislature, a governor, and a delegate to the US House of Representatives – a delegate who cannot vote – but their choice for president, marked on the same ballot, carries no weight. It is a straw poll: a non-binding four-yearly exercise that serves merely as a barometer on who Guamanians would wish to be in the White House.  It is of symbolic value.

An American citizen living abroad is eligible to vote by absentee ballot unless he or she chooses to live in one of the sixteen US Territories such as Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and US Virgin Islands.

As well as not being able to vote for the president  their representatives to the US Congress do not have a voting power. The islands’ representative can introduce bills and push for the territory’s agenda at the congressional committee level, but has no vote on the floor.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/the-us-election-that-doesnt-count-guam-goes-to-the-polls-but-votes-wont-matter

 That free meals for children during school breaks was ever an issue is surely a brazen example of the iniquities of capitalism.

The story ran like some synopsis for an updated staging of the musical ‘Oliver’, only it isn’t fiction. Why is it that the sixth largest economy in the world, that has borrowed, and will continue to borrow, many billions of Covid pounds, jibs at a few relatively measly millions to feed children plunged into poverty through no agency of their own?

A more pertinent question is, why should a resource that’s as vital to life as is air be rationed by the ability to pay?  A society that is struggling with the present pandemic to keep people breathing would not tolerate a system denying oxygen to those without the requisite bank balance.

Yet that is the logic of capitalism. Children, many of key workers on pathetically low pay who daily put themselves at risk of infection, are at the mercy of a squabble between national and local governments as to who will provide a meal a day for them.

The logic of socialism is that food will be available to freely supply the needs of everyone, adult or child. As it will be for all necessities of life. People will take what they need because they won’t have to take or hoard more, just in case. After all no one deliberately tries to breath in more air than they need.

Such will be the outcome of socially organising production to satisfy self-determined needs, rather than the capitalist need to satisfy profit taking and the restrictions on access this necessarily entails. Surprise, surprise, this option is not being promulgated in any of the media coverage of children and their inconvenient urge to eat between term times.

Since its foundation the United States has been a battlefield between the classes and been involved in a perpetual conflict. The privileged few have triumphed and have the rest of us at their mercy. The privileged few control the political machinery. Their money and their political servants write the platforms and dictate to the politicians. There is no attempt to conceal the fact that both the Republican and Democratic parties are financed and controlled by representatives of the plutocracy which owns and rules the land. Political parties are responsive to the interests of those who funds them. They get donations from the capitalist class only for the reason that they represent the interests of that class. Professional politicians of whatever party serve the interests of their masters. He who pays the piper calls the tune as the old saying goes. The policies of  politicians reflect the material interests of their masters, regardless of any theatricals to disguise the fact. Presidential election campaigns show a lot about the country’s politics that the ruling classes’ political representatives produce for public’s consumption to manipulate the public perception. It’s the power of the ruling classes to distract the voters with scandals and diversions than for the media to concern itself with genuine class interests, irrespective of the capitalists’ feuding factions.

We are living under a system which is more and more clearly revealed as the enemy of humanity. Capitalism only means poverty and oppression.  It imposes draconian cuts in living standards on the already poor, simply in the interest of still greater profits for the capitalist class. Capitalism is responsible for the thoughtless destruction of the environment. The profit motive is incompatible with safeguarding the world’s resources. So long as it is profitable, environmental destruction is perfectly ’logical’ under capitalism. 

Humanity’s problem is not limited resources but the waste of resources which is an essential part of the process of capital accumulation. Its armaments industry monopolizes most of the world’s research and development and cynically profits from wars of unparalleled destructiveness. Capitalism’s guiding principle, the quest for profit, takes precedence over any human interest. Capitalism undermines the future of humanity. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It has undergone many changes in its history, but these have simply meant finding new ways to exploit the laboring people. Capitalism is red with the blood of workers. The only solution is to destroy it and build a new social system.

Socialism means liberty, leisure, literature, art, fellowship, life itself. Society must have a new economic basis. The class conflict and political corruption must end. The Republicans and the Democrats are composed almost entirely by those in the service of the ruling class. The Republican and Democratic parties stand for private ownership and competition.

The World Socialist Party alone stands for common ownership and co-operation. The Republican and Democratic parties uphold the wage system; the World Socialist Party demands its end. What have the Republican or Democratic parties got to offer to the wage-slaves of the United States? The millions of us, male and female, black and white and yellow and brown,  produce all this nation’s wealth. The World Socialist Party demands the machinery of production in the name of the workers and the control of society in the name of the people. We demand the abolition of capitalism and wage-slavery and the surrender of the capitalist class. We demand equal rights of all the people regardless of race, color, creed or nationality. Socialism will end war by ending the war-producing system. Socialism will end this atrocity. We demand that poverty shall cease once and forever and that all children born into the world shall have equal opportunity to grow up, to be educated, to have healthy bodies and trained minds, and to develop and freely express the best there is in them in mental, moral and physical achievement. We demand complete control of industry by the workers; we demand all the wealth they produce for the enjoyment of all the people. We demand the earth for all the people. 

We know our cause is just. Forward to lay the foundations for a new society.

 The suspension from the Labour Party of its erstwhile leader Jeremy Corbyn initially appears to be of little note for socialists. There can be sympathy for the hounding of a decent man, but hey ho that’s capitalist politics for you.

Actually, this is more serious. While Corbyn does not in any sense meet the criteria set out in the our principles of what is required to be a socialist, he is throughout the media and in the popular consciousness precisely that. Indeed he probably self-identifies as a socialist.

During the lead up to the 2019 general election, in a number of BBC Radio 4 vox pops. he was frequently cited as the reason for Labour voters of many years standing insisting they would not vote for the Labour Party. Corbyn was too extreme, to the point him being denounced as a ‘communist’.

As socialists who state that socialism and communism are synonyms, that the Labour Party never was, is not and never will be a socialist party, such prevalent sentiments as expressed in those vox pops. are of concern.

Capitalism’s defenders are none to discerning when it comes to identifying perceived socialist threats. The faintest whiff of red smoke and any vaguely smouldering embers are to be stamped on. If possible the word socialist, never mind the concept, is to be anathema.

Socialist understanding of the Soviet Union from its inception is that it was state capitalist and not socialist/communist in any sense. Yet there can be little doubt that Lenin, who thought himself a socialist, found himself through circumstance as head of a ruling regime that had no way of pursuing socialism.

Thus the compromise of state capitalism proved to be no pre-emptor of socialism as perhaps Lenin hoped. However, it did allow for an ideological claim of communism in the making, an iron curtain indeed behind which the nomenclature became the capitalist class spawning the oligarchs of Putin’s non-Soviet Russia.

By posing as communist for over 70 years, the Soviet regime has been responsible for considerable ideological damage that actual socialists have to deal with. Present-day inheritors of Lenin’s legacy continue to serve to obscure the ubiquity of capitalism throughout the world, be it ‘free market’ or state capitalism.

This serves ‘free market’ capitalism particularly well politically as those state capitalist countries who continue to don the communist mask tend to the brutally authoritarian, thereby confirming the popular conception.

There is, though, a risk in all this for capitalism in that the concept of socialism may be traduced, but it continues to exist and where that may lead is unpredictable. For example, while the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 could not of itself have led to socialism, had the idea inspired the working class around the world to seriously consider what was possible for it to achieve, then capitalism would have had a problem.

Therefore, any hint of socialism succeeding, however erroneous, must be pilloried and, where possible, crushed. Even politicians who are merely trying to ameliorate the worst effects of capitalism without challenging capitalism itself must be thwarted and shown to fail. All the better if those politicians self-identify, or failing that can be branded, as socialists/communists/Marxists.

Thus the case of Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party takes on a significance for socialists. On his being elected leader a whole mechanism of vilification was slipped into gear. Ironically, it was his declared support for a beleaguered Semitic people, Palestinians, which ultimately led to his downfall, branded a denier of anti-Semitism.

As a case study in character assassination, it should serve as a warning as to the opprobrium that will be manufactured and freely distributed to the public should anyone appear to be gaining influence contrary to capitalism’s well-being.

The synthetic outrage produced through blending anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has proved to be powerful. It has placed a brand of aggressive ultra-nationalism beyond criticism and forged a potent political weapon to strike down opponents, leaving them apparently morally, as well politically, compromised.

The wider impact is to identify anti-Semitism with socialism. It doesn’t matter that Corbyn really isn’t a socialist, just another would-be reformer of capitalism. If this is indicative of action that can be so vigorously pursued against a reformer, what can those expect who do wish to replace capitalism with socialism through the agency of a self-aware working class acting on its own behalf.

Once the working class is so motivated, then such a political weapon will be blunted. But until then, those who have accepted the task of propagating socialist ideas need to take heed of what could be the personal consequences of becoming more influential.

There is the further, perhaps more important, point concerning democracy. Socialists do not advocate the suppression of ideas, rather they should be brought out into the open and subjected to scrutiny. Through debate erroneous notions can be exposed and correct ones clearly identified. This does not preclude individuals continuing to expound erroneous ideas, the safeguard being their dismissal by the majority. That is democracy.

This most definitely applies to socialists. If some, or even all, we advocate can be demonstrated objectively to be wrong, then so it must be. It would be utterly pointless finding some mechanism whereby such a demonstration could be suppressed. This applies to all bodies of ideas and ideologies. Any agency working to frustrate this for self-serving purposes is opposed to democracy.

The Socialist Party was vigorously opposed to Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. However well meaning, his ideas would not have brought the benefit of socialism to the working class. This for the very good reason that socialism is not something that can be conferred, it must be achieved by the working class itself.

This opposition was open and political, not personal. His subsequent vilification though the media, and by many of his own backbenchers, served the interests of the working class not one iota. But it has most definitely served the interests of capitalism by casting guilt by association, however vague and erroneous that association may be, with socialism. The juicier story is proving to be the ongoing, and rather laboured (pun intended) anti-Semitism row. If there is a strand of anti-Semitism running through the Labour Party it would be one of the threads of racism sown into all societies based around national identities.

Zionism is but one manifestation of this and it is quite possible that those who take a specifically anti-Zionist stand slip into expressions of anti-Semitism without recognising they are doing so. While the world continues to be divided by national boundaries, so will the curse of casual, as well as intentional, racist comments and behaviour.

Suspending Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party not only won’t cure the problem, it deflects from the root cause. It would well serve those who are celebrating Corbyn’s predicament to examine their own attitudes as to whether they can honestly acquit themselves of ever having had a racist thought. To quote a statement attributed to a Jewish teacher, ‘Let he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone.’

Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn will now take stock and come to realise that the best interests of society are to be served through pursuing actual socialism, not some reformist parody. In which case he may come to realise suspension, perhaps expulsion, from the Labour Party is a blessing, even if initiated by dark deeds.

DAVE ALTON