Germany Wants Immigrants

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Petra Bendel, chairwoman of the Expert Council of German Foundations for Integration and Migration (SVR), said that Germany would continue to rely on migration for the foreseeable future, even in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Bendel said migration was the key to solving the problem of “demographic shrinkage of the population.” 
Despite rising slightly in recent years, Germany has consistently had one of the world’s lowest birth rates since the end of the second World War.
The share of people with a migrant background in Germany rose to 21.2 million last year, the Federal Statistical Office said in a report on Tuesday. They represent roughly 26% of Germany’s population. The figure represented a 2.1% increase from the previous year, but it was the slowest rise in people with a migration background since 2011.
In Germany, a person is considered to have a ”migration background” (Migrationshintergrund) if they, or at least one of their parents, were born without German citizenship. Being born in Germany is not an automatic qualification for citizenship as in some countries, although in the majority of cases, eight years residence will suffice. Of the 21.2 million people with a migrant background, just over half were born as German citizens, meaning at least one of their parents had become or was a German citizen.
Some 65% of all people with a migrant background came from another European country. Of these, roughly, 7.5 million (35%) people with migrant background came from a fellow EU member state. Asians accounted for 4.6 million people or 22% of all inhabitants with a migrant background. Some 3.2 million (15%) came from the Middle East and just under 1 million people (5%) had roots in Africa. A little over half a million people (3%) came from North, Central and South America and Australia. The largest single group, forming some 13% of people with a migrant background, originated from Turkey. Those from Poland and Russia followed respectively.

Breaking the Trust

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America’s Congress has an opportunity, a real chance, to cross-examine the powerful men in charge of the tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook and Apple. But whatever happens on Wednesday, this won’t be end of the story. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s anti-trust panel said it would hold a hearing in September to discuss Google’s dominance in online advertising.
 These corporations apply shrewd and ruthless Copy/Acquire/Kill strategies. Copy others’ ideas, buy a company that threatens you – and even potentially kill it off.
Their practices has been difficult to police. Traditionally, anti-competition, anti-trust law has been focused on consumer pricing. In a typical monopoly or cartel, there’s a simple test. Are consumers paying more because of a lack of competition?
The US “trusts” of the early 20th Century were found to be driving up prices. Companies like Standard Oil and railway companies used their dominant position to harm consumer’ interests.
That’s much harder to prove with hi-tech companies.
For example Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are free. Amazon often drives down prices to beat competition. Google’s search engine is free. YouTube – owned by Google – is free. And apps on iPhones can often be downloaded for free.
Critics say that these companies hurt consumers in a more subtle way, killing off smaller companies and strangling other businesses. The charge is that they are in fact damaging the economy. That’s what legislators are looking to examine.
The corporate bosses have already lost one battle before the hearing even begins. They wanted to be grilled one by one. But that’s not going to happen. They’ll be questioned together and the hearing will – perhaps aptly – be virtual.
“We want to leave as little room as possible for them to hide behind each other,” Sarah Miller, from the American Economics Liberties Project, told me last week.
With companies like TikTok and Huawei attracting the ire of the Trump administration, one defence will go something like: “Break us up, over–regulate us, and you give Chinese tech companies more power.”

A Free Lunch for Workers?

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A government-commissioned review into food and healthy eating by the National Food Strategy warns that the country’s eating habits are a “slow-motion disaster”. It warns of the toxic connection between poor diet and child poverty. It calls for many more children to be eligible for a free meal at school, as “only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional standards of a school meal”.
The review says they should be available to a further 1.5 million children, in addition to the 1.3 million already eligible – so almost one in three children would get free meals. The extension of free school meals, at a cost of £670m per year, would bring them in reach of all children in families claiming universal credit. Such a move would aim to stop pupils being hungry at school. It also proposes making a long-term commitment to feeding more families over the summer holidays, by making another 1.1 million children in England eligible for the “holiday activity and food programme”. Included as well is the expansion of the Healthy Start fresh fruit, milk and vegetables voucher scheme for pregnant mothers, increasing its value and encouraging supermarkets to supplement the voucher with free fresh produce.
The review issued warnings about “misleading packaging” of unhealthy products and the report challenges the “false virtue” of how the food industry presents itself. Behind the ethical ambitions, the report suggests there is still a culture of “unhealthy multi-buy offers”. Report author Henry Dimbleby said a nutritious diet was the “foundation of equality of opportunity”. He spoke of some apparently healthy fruit snacks that are “clothed in a veneer of goodness and might not be better for you than a Mars bar”. Dimbleby was scathing of brands and supermarkets that mislabelled sugar-filled products as healthy sweets. This practice was rampant, he said, though he singled out popular M&S sweets for particular criticism, saying: “I have had a bugbear about Percy Pigs for a while. Percy Pigs are a sweet that is marketed on the front with all-natural fruit juice and it’s right by your kids’ little fingers, and on the back [of the packet], if you understand calorie labelling, the first four ingredients are forms of sugar. I just think that is not right.”
There are serious consequences, says the review, with one in seven deaths in the UK attributable to poor diets.
“A nutritionally poor-quality diet is the leading risk factor for ill-health in the UK, yet we do not treat it with the same seriousness afforded to other risk factors. That has to change,” said Susan Jebb, Oxford University professor of diet and population health, who worked on the report.
The Socialist Party does not oppose reformism because it is against improvements in workers’ lives. The current proposal to introduce increased free school dinners is a more noble aspiration than could scarcely be imagined – an attempt to eradicate poor diets and consequent poor health of children.
However, any subsidised services that falls into our laps becomes an opportunity for those that live off our labour to lower their costs, and increase their profits.  Free school dinners would be an example of this process in action. Working people with children would be relieved of the cost of providing those meals to their children. This would result in a decline in the monetary cost of maintaining themselves and their family, and thus a decrease in the upwards pressure on wages. The typical wage would then tend to fall towards something nearer to living costs of those of a childless worker. This would thus benefit the employing class, both through cutting the overall direct cost of wages, but also through ending the situation in which childless workers were paid unnecessarily from the point of view of the employers. The employer could be prevented from gaining from this process by an increase in taxation – whether nominally on the workers’ wages or directly on employers’ profits; this would serve to cream off the difference between the old and the new prices of labour power. In this way, the free school dinners scheme could be made to pay for itself. This would, though, merely represent a redistribution of poverty for the working class, the intervention by the state into the labour market to ensure a more efficient allocation of the workers’ ration, so that children get a protected share. 
Our criticism is, then, that by ignoring the essence of class, it throws blood, sweat and tears into battles that will be undermined by the workings of the wages system. All that effort, skill, energy, all those tools could be turned against class society, to create a society of common interest where we can make changes for our common mutual benefit. 

Working People – Less Leisure

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The gender divide between the amount of paid and unpaid work being carried out has decreased since the mid-1970s, according to a thinktank, but it remains significant. The findings set out in the report, entitled The Time Of Our Lives (pdf), suggest total working hours among men and women are now close to being equal.
In a study to examine changes in the last 46 years in how people use their time, the Resolution Foundation said men are now doing less paid work, while women are doing more. It said women have increased their paid working hours by five hours and 18 minutes to 22 hours a week, while reducing their unpaid hours – such as time spent cooking, cleaning and taking care of children – by two hours and 44 minutes to 29 hours a week. Meanwhile, men have reduced their paid hours by eight hours and 10 minutes to 34 hours a week, while increasing their unpaid hours by five hours and 35 minutes to 16 hours a week.
While both groups do 50-51 hours work a week, men on average do about 12 hours more paid work than they did in the mid-1970s, while women now do about 13 hours a week more unpaid work. However, the report also highlights what it described as a “new divide” across household income levels, with women in high-income households having the biggest increase in paid work.
In contrast, the fall in paid work among men has largely been driven by those in low-income households who are working three hours fewer per day than they did in the mid-1970s. 
The foundation suggests the result of this is that the gap in total hours of paid work between high and low-income households has grown from 40 minutes per week in 1974 to four hours and 20 mins in 2014-2015.
It also noted one in seven workers in low-income households want an increase in their hours of work, compared to just one in 30 workers in high-income households.
George Bangham, economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Debates around how people spend their time often focus on a single goal – speeding up the move to a shorter working week to enable more time for socialising, sport and hobbies. But this isn’t how people’s lives have changed over the past four decades, desirable as it may be.
He explained, “Men are doing less paid work, while women are doing more. Both have less time for play, with childcare up and leisure time down. Instead, a worrying new ‘working time inequality’ has emerged, with low-income households working far fewer hours per week than high-income ones.” He added: “As many households rethink their time use in light of the lockdown, it’s important to remember that while some people want to work fewer hours, others want or need to work more. And for many, control of working hours can be as important as the amount they do.”

The Pandemic and the Jobless

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The Institute for Employment Studies (IES) said approximately eight people are claiming benefits support for every job opening, up from 1.5 people per job before the crisis began in March.



The number of job vacancies in Britain has plunged by almost half a million since January to 333,000 in June, hitting the lowest levels since comparable records began in 2001. With companies making redundancies, putting hiring plans on hold or furloughing their workers, the numbers of people claiming unemployment-related benefits has climbed by 112% since March to reach more than 2.6 million – resulting in an average of 7.8 benefit claimants per vacancy. Young people leaving education this summer will also be hit hard by the crisis, with more than 100 graduates competing for every job requiring a university qualification.
Competition among job hunters has become increasingly intense, with businesses receiving hundreds of CVs for the relatively few openings they have on offer.
Mitchells & Butlers, Britain’s biggest pub chain had recorded a fourfold rise in applications for front of house jobs on average. One of its All Bar One venues, in Liverpool, has received more than 500 applicants for a single bar staff role.
 A restaurant in Manchester had nearly 1,000 applications for a receptionist post within 24 hours. 
Jobs websites have recorded a sharp rise in people hunting for work in recent weeks. Candidate searches rose by 30% in June compared to the previous month, according to the website TotalJobs. Data compiled by LinkedIn from its platform of more than 27m UK profiles suggests that finding work has become at least three times more competitive.
The Institute for Employment Studies said inner city areas and former industrial towns were bearing the brunt of the unfolding jobs crisis, with an average of 20 benefit claimants for each job vacancy in these areas. London is the worst affected, amid a plunge in the number of people travelling to the centre of the capital for work, which has had a severe knock-on effect for retail, leisure and hospitality outlets in the city.
It said the London borough of Brent had been hardest hit, with almost 50 benefit claimants for every vacancy, up from just eight in March. Four of the ten worst-affected areas are London boroughs, while places outside of the capital such as South Tyneside, Bolsover, Merthyr Tydfil and Tameside in Greater Manchester were also among the hardest hit.
As many as 9.5 million people – a third of the UK’s workforce – have been been placed on the government furlough scheme, which covers 80% of workers’ wages. However, economists fear that the Treasury closing the scheme at the end of October could trigger mass unemployment unparalleled since the 1980s.  Growing numbers of companies are making job cuts amid a sharp downturn in demand for goods and services triggered by the pandemic.
Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies, said he expected unemployment to mount further in the toughest jobs market for a generation.
“At least 1 million more people are on out of work benefits who don’t have incomes, and who are looking for work as the economy reopens. So we have double whammy: many more people looking for work and very few jobs being advertised,” he said.

The failure of the co-operative movement

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In many minds the co-operative movement as it exists to-day is associated with Socialism and the struggle to overthrow the Capitalist system of society. In continental countries it is customary for the trade unions, the co-operatives, and the “Labour” parties to work in very close contact and it is vaguely understood that their joint aim is “Socialism.” In fact, their unity is only possible, because the so-called Labour Parties are actually concerned not with the abolition, but only with the reform of Capitalism.


When English co-operators speak in this strain they have some apparent justification in the fact that Robert Owen, whom they usually claim as the pioneer of co-operative principles, did during part of his life actively preach to the workers the necessity of finding means of escape from Capitalism. Owen lived in an age when machine production in factories was first making its brutal way in England. A new era was opening, an era of amazing profits for the fortunate few and of almost incredible suffering for the masses. He saw that the workers were helplessly enslaved to the owners of the land and the factories, and he thought that he had discovered a way out. If to labour in another man’s factory or on another man’s land meant hideous poverty for the labourer, then surely the remedy lay in securing land and machinery for the labourers to work themselves. So far it was sound enough, but Owen soon had to realise two things. The first was that the then ruling class had no need to solve the poverty problems of the workers, and certainly did not intend to give up freely their own right to own and to live by owning. The second was that at that time when the workers were uneducated, voteless and unorganised, it was unthinkable that they could hope to obtain possession of the wealth of the country against the opposition of their political rulers. In due course, therefore, Owen announced his solution.


He proposed that small groups of workers should aim at establishing self-supporting “villages of industry” in which there should be no employer, no master—little oases in the desert of Capitalism. They were to own the “land and means of production in common,” and it was anticipated that the idea would spread, until finally the workers would all have achieved their emancipation.


The initial difficulty, of obtaining the necessary capital, was to be overcome by the formation of “union shops” which would buy goods wholesale and sell them to the members at retail prices. A surplus would accumulate in the hands of the society which would otherwise have gone into the pockets of shopkeepers. Then, in due course the fund would be used for the setting up of “villages of industry.”


Between 1825 and 1834 some 400 or 500 of such shops were started, but the whole movement turned out a failure. They failed chiefly because enthusiasm waned with time, and there was no other attraction to secure the continued loyalty of the members once they lost faith in the ultimate end. In addition it was difficult, if not impossible, owing to the existing law for a body of workers to secure protection for their funds.


In 1826 one such store was formed in Brighton, and it is suggested in the cooperative “People’s Year Book” (1926, p. 13) that 1926 should on that account be celebrated as the centenary Year of the movement. The writer in the Year Book says of the Brighton cooperative store that in it “the co-operative movement had definitely started on the lines still followed more or less closely by every consumer’s co-operative society now existing in the world.” In his opinion, however, even so early as that, the pioneer co-operators at Brighton and elsewhere had already lost their interest in the more ambitious and far-reaching plans of Robert Owen : “The schemes of Owen were as much unlike the aims of the first co-operative societies as chalk is unlike cheese.”


But whatever may have been their intentions the shops founded by the early co-operators in England did not prosper, and it was a renewed effort in 1844 at Rochdale which contained the novel feature which was to lead to the modern developments.


The Rochdale innovation was the “dividend on purchases.” This provided a permanent inducement to members to remain loyal irrespective of their views on the desirability of reforming society. Great and growing numbers of workers have thus been drawn into the co-operative movement until to-day it is claimed that in Great Britain there are nearly 5,000,000 members, with £140,000,000 share and loan capital and an annual surplus of over £21,000,000.


In face of these imposing figures, and in view of the continued expansion of the movement, how can we seriously speak of co-operation as a failure?


It is a failure because it has not, will not, and cannot, solve the basic economic problems of the working-class. Owen saw, even if he failed to realise all its implications, that the dominance of capital was the root evil. He sought a means of escape, but although the modern co-operators praise him, they have long ago abandoned the intention of carrying on the work he planned.


“Union shops” were to be a means to an end. The co-operative movement has made “divi-hunting” an end in itself. The funds accumulated in the shops were to be used for the foundation of societies in which all the members would co-operate in working their own property held in common and share the proceeds on a footing of equality. The modern movement accumulates funds for the purpose of making further profit out of the employment of wage-workers.


The one, Utopian though it was, aimed at abolishing the wages systems, private ownership and profit-making. The other merely aims at redirecting the stream of profits from the private trader to the cooperative members. It has not and cannot solve the poverty problem either of its members or of its employees.


The basic fallacy in the co-operative idea is a wrong explanation of rent, interest and profit. Yet the position is simplicity itself to all who have missed or have won through the haze of mystery shed by the professional economists. Because the means of production—land, factories, steamships, etc.—are privately owned, the workers who wish to operate these instruments must first enter into a one-sided bargain; one-sided because the goad of semi-starvation forces their hand. They bargain to produce wealth for the owners of capital and receive as the price of the energies they sell wages or salaries which, over the whole field of Capitalism, are only a small proportion of the values they produce. What the Capitalists get is a property-income, something which arises from their monopoly and not from their services, and which varies according to the size of their capital. Rent, interest and profit, if the terms are cleared of some looseness which surrounds their common use, are merely names for this income which goes to the owners of property because they are owners.


Co-operators want to eliminate the middleman and redirect the flow of profit—but what is profit? Profit is the child of private ownership and is obtained by the exploitation of the workers. Co-operative “divi.” is derived from the exploitation of the cooperative employees. The relation between the latter and the societies is precisely the same as that between other workers and their employers.


Owen wanted to eliminate capitalist ownership. The extent to which this could be done by the co-operative movement is illustrated not by the fact that it has five-million members, who with their families make up perhaps a third of the population, but by the contrast between the numbers it employs and the total number of wage-earners. It employed in 1924 about 200,000 persons out of about 16 million workers in Great Britain. Its employees were only 4.16 per cent. of the whole number of its members, and that percentage was actually less than the 1914 figure of 4.85 per cent. Its capital looks large, but against the great mass of capital in the hands of the Capitalist class it is insignificant.


The co-operative movement has all the trappings but none of the substance of success. Its members are still wage-earners, still exploited by the Capitalist class and still, therefore, poor; its employees are in the same condition. If the societies as at present constituted extend until they cover the whole working-class that will still be true.


It has made no inroads into the Capitalist system, and it could not if it would. As the Scottish Co-operator pointed out (23.8.23.) the movement was then weaker than it had been before the war, “weaker financially and weaker administratively.” It does not challenge the Capitalist class or the principles of Capitalism. As Mr. J. A. R. Marriott, M.P., said at the Jubilee celebrations of the Oxford Co-operative Society (Oxford Chronicle, Oct. 13th, 1922): “If he thought the co-operative movement a menace to the private trader he would certainly not be there. But there was plenty of room for both to live and flourish.” This is true inside Capitalism, but under Socialism there will be room neither for private, nor co-operative, nor municipal, nor State Capitalism to continue the exploitation of the workers.


Co-operation has solved no working-class problems and discovered no new principle. It does not abolish profits and interest: it only “defines the rights of capital” (Cooperative News, July 10th, 1926). “It says to the capital-owner . . . ‘we pay you interest and our obligation to you ends with that.’ ” Sir Thomas Allen (C.W.S. Director) wants to see “those who had capital, those who had labour, and those who had intellect and organising power” to “work in a real co-operative way . . . ” (Cooperative News, July 3rd, 1926).


It has disputes with the employees, strikes and lockouts, sometimes pays less than its private Capitalist rivals (see Co-operative News, 18.8.23.), and has even been known to call in a Capitalist Labour minister in a Capitalist Government to settle its differences with its employees.


When trade is slack it sacks members of its staff, introduces all the familiar speeding-up and wage-reducing devices of its competitors, and in short, behaves like any other joint-stock Capitalist concern, that is, it behaves as it must, being a Capitalist organisation inside a Capitalist system of society.


Some there are within its ranks who look further, but these are learning by hard experience that they are, if anything, less able than Robert Owen to achieve the object which he set before him. “The Rochdale pioneers desired to solve the land and housing problems of their generation. . . . Co-operators now realise that these problems can only be solved by Parliament. They have entered politics to realise the ideals of the pioneers” (Daily Herald, April 24th, 1921). This is part of a speech by Mr. Barnes, Co-operative M.P., in which he explained why a Co-operative Party was formed and was necessary.


Co-operation has not and cannot emancipate the working-class. Only Socialism will do that. The workers cannot escape from the effects of Capitalism by joining cooperative societies. Neither can they escape Capitalism by retiring into Owen’s “villages of industry.” They must obtain for society as a whole the ownership of the means of production and distribution which are now the property of the Capitalist class. For this they must organise in the Socialist Party for the purpose of controlling the machinery of government. Once possessed of power they can then reorganise society on a Socialist basis of common ownership. Owen’s ultimate aims can only be achieved by Socialist methods.


Edgar Hardcastle
Socialist Standard, May 1927.

The Destruction of Australia’s Wildlife

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Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by Australia’s devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020, according to scientists who have revealed for the first time the scale of the impact on the country’s native wildlife.
The Guardian has learned that an estimated 143 million mammals, 180 million birds, 51 million frogs and a staggering 2.5 billion reptiles were affected by the fires that burned across the continent.
 Not all the animals would have been killed by the flames or heat, but scientists say the prospects of survival for those that had withstood the initial impact was “probably not that great” due to the starvation, dehydration and predation by feral animals – mostly cats – that followed.
Dermot O’Gorman, WWF-Australia’s chief executive, said: “It’s hard to think of another event anywhere in the world in living memory that has killed or displaced that many animals. This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history.”
Chris Dickman, a professor in ecology at the University of Sydney and fellow of the Australian Academy of Science who oversaw the project, said its central finding was a shock even to the researchers. “Three thousand million native vertebrates is just huge. It’s a number so big that you can’t comprehend it,” he said. “It’s almost half the human population of the planet.”
A peer-reviewed study by three ecology professors in June concluded that the fires had caused “the most dramatic loss of habitat for threatened species and devastation of ecological communities in post-colonial history”.

The American Caste System

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Caste is not a term often applied to the US. It is considered the language of India.



 Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, journeyed to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families were untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
“For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”
Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.
And he said to himself: “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” 
In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.  A human hierarchy had evolved in the United States, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. 
In 1913, Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man born to the bottom of India’s caste system, born an untouchable in the central provinces, arrived in New York City. He came to the US to study economics as a graduate student at Columbia, focused on the differences between race, caste and class. Living just blocks from Harlem, he would see first-hand the condition of his counterparts in the US. He completed his thesis just as the film The Birth of a Nation – the incendiary homage to the Confederate south – premiered in New York in 1915. He would study further in London and return to India to become the foremost leader of the untouchables, and a pre-eminent intellectual who would help draft a new Indian constitution. He would work to dispense with the demeaning term “untouchable”. He rejected the term Harijans, which had been applied to them by Gandhi, to their minds patronisingly. He renamed his people Dalits, meaning “broken people” – which, due to the caste system, they were. It is hard to know what effect his exposure to the American social order had on him personally. But over the years, he paid close attention, as did many Dalits, to the subordinate caste in the US. Indians had long been aware of the plight of enslaved Africans, and of their descendants in the US. In 946, acting on news that black Americans were petitioning the United Nations for protection as minorities, Ambedkar reached out to the best-known African American intellectual of the day, WEB Du Bois. He told Du Bois that he had been a “student of the Negro problem” from across the oceans, and recognised their common fates.
“There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”
Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar to say that he was, indeed, familiar with him, and that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India”. It had been Du Bois who seemed to have spoken for the marginalised in both countries as he identified the double consciousness of their existence. And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channelling the “bitter cry” of his people in the US: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”
There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe, with rungs inside that designation – the English Protestants at the very top, as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight for North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order, on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom: African captives transported in order to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for 12 generations. There developed a caste system, based upon what people looked like – an internalised ranking, unspoken, unnamed and unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously, to this day. 
The American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to the Colony of Virginia in the summer of 1619, as the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not. Over time, colonial laws granted English and Irish indentured servants greater privileges than the Africans who worked alongside them, and the Europeans were fused into a new identity – that of being categorised as white, the polar opposite of black. The historian Kenneth M Stampp called this assigning of race a “caste system, which divided those whose appearance enabled them to claim pure Caucasian ancestry from those whose appearance indicated that some or all of their forebears were Negroes”. Members of the Caucasian caste, as he called it, “believed in ‘white supremacy’, and maintained a high degree of caste solidarity to secure it”.
Caste is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of others, on the basis of ancestry and often of immutable traits – traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favouring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.  The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India and the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the US relied on stigmatising those deemed inferior in order to justify the dehumanisation necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom, and to rationalise the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from a sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power: which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources: which caste is seen as worthy of them, and which are not; who gets to acquire and control them, and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence: who is accorded these, and who is not. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In the US, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy – the frontman – for caste.
Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture, and serve to reinforce each other. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the US. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception – whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critically and tragically, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.
One of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and US senator Charles Sumner, as he fought against segregation in the north. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none.”
 “A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists to until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes,” wrote Madison Grant, a popular eugenicist, in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.”
In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in the US. It was titled An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realisation that the most accurate term to describe the workings of US society was not race, but caste.
The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention – a social construct, not a biological one – and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the US, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of ‘the race problem in America’,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”

River Fish Migrations Disappearing

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Populations of migratory river fish around the world have plunged by a “catastrophic” 76% since 1970, an analysis has found.
The decline in migratory fish populations is higher than that for land and ocean animals, whose populations have fallen by an average of 60% in the last 50 years. “Freshwaters are disproportionately at risk to human pressures, since they are affected by everything happening in the surrounding catchment,” said Michelle Jackson, at the University of Oxford.
The fall was even greater in Europe at 93%, and for some groups of fish, with sturgeon and eel populations both down by more than 90%. Populations of sturgeon in the Great Lakes of North America, for example, have dropped by 95% from historic levels.
The average fall in populations was 84% in Latin America, while there has been a 59% decrease in Asia-Oceania, although there is limited data there and not enough from Africa to determine any reliable trend. In North America, the fall was less dramatic, at 28%. This is probably because large declines occurred before 1970, but also as a result of a growing number of dams being removed. “For migratory fish, there’s nothing worse than a dam,” said Zeb Hogan, at the University of Nevada and an author of the new report. Studies have shown only a third of world’s great rivers remain free-flowing, while in Britain, for example, 97% of the river network has been interrupted by human-built structures.
“Catastrophic losses in migratory fish populations show we cannot continue destroying our rivers,” said Arjan Berkhuysen, at the World Fish Migration Foundation. “This has immense consequences for people and nature across the globe. We can and need to act now before these keystone species are lost for good.”

Jewish Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism

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“…Religion and race, national independence and patriotism, are now, from the worker’s point of view, just so many ruling-class devices useful for the purpose, among others, of stirring up hatred when and where they may want it…



 …Socialism alone is worth struggling for. That is the message of the Socialist to all the working-class dupes of the closely-allied superstitions of religious, racial and patriotic rivalries. Jewish workers and Arab workers both suffer, but not because they are Jew or Arab, or because they happen both to be in Palestine, but because they are workers and therefore exploited by those who own and control their means of life. The Jewish workers cannot solve their problems by transferring their misery from New York or Berlin to Jerusalem. The world will be fit for Jewish workers and Arab workers to live in when, and only when, the working-class, as a whole, have gained political control for the establishment of Socialism…”



 Socialist Standard, October 1929.

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