Peru’s Community Pot

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The ’’community pot,” is a phenomenon that’s spread across Peru in recent months as coronavirus quarantines and shutdowns have left millions of poor people with no way to feed their families.

 Soup kitchens and community pots have become a symbol of the conundrum facing a region where most of the working population labors outside the formal economy.
Economic shutdowns have forced poor Peruvians, Argentines and tens of millions of others to fall back on community-based efforts unseen in large numbers since crises like Peru’s 1990s civil war or Argentina’s financial crash two decades ago.
“I barely have anything to eat at home,” Clara Arango, a single mother of two, she lost her job as a janitor when her employer closed his shopping mall in Lima’s wealthiest neighborhood due to the antivirus shutdown that began on March 16.  said. ’’Here I have a community pot and I can pool my resources with my neighbors and we can support each other and work together.
In Peru, thousands of community pots are steaming at breakfast and lunch in neighborhoods at levels not seen since inflation topped 7,000% in 1990 in the middle of the civil war with Shining Path Maoist guerrillas. More than a third of Peru’s 32 million people have had to engage in some form of community cooking due to lack of money, 
Without unemployment benefits or the ability to work from home, a cut-price  bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, some lentil stew or noodles in tomato sauce for lunch, and leftovers for dinner aren’t proving enough to keep poor Latin Americans from leaving their homes each day to earn a living as construction workers, street vendors or other types of day laborers. The inability to keep people at home is proving a major factor in the spread of the coronavirus around the continent, where new cases and deaths are rising unchecked as an unbent curve of infection pushes intensive care wards to their limits.
Despite some of the strictest antivirus measures in the region, Peru has diagnosed 237,000 cases of coronavirus and counted 7,000 deaths, the highest number of cases per capita in the region and the second-highest per capita count of deaths.
At the same time, Peru is facing a 12% drop in gross domestic product this year, one of the worst recessions in the hemisphere, according to the World Bank.  2.3 million other Lima residents also lost their jobs by April, out of a working population of roughly 16 million nationwide. The figure is expected to leap again when May numbers are released.
 Estéfany Aquiño, 11, who is helping her mother raise her 2-month-old sister after a cesarean section that left the woman unable to leave her house to look for food. Estéfany said the community pot is her only defense against a hunger that’s become a constant feature of life.
“Your stomach starts to hurt, to grumble, and then to talk to you,” the girl said.

Common ownership and the cooperative commonwealth

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The long history of racism in the United States has held back black Americans for generations. 
Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias.
Slavery lasted for nearly 250 years – almost equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until today. University of Connecticut Professor Thomas Craemer estimates the present value of unpaid wages for just the 89 years after independence to be nearly $20 trillion using a 3% interest rate. Use a 6% rate, and that reparations bill rises to almost $7 quadrillion. That is around 50 times global GDP.
An 1865 order set aside land for black households, the promise of “forty acres and a mule.”  The “40 acres and a mule” promised to formerly enslaved Africans never came to pass. There was no redistribution of land, no reparations for the wealth extracted from stolen land by stolen labor. 

A Roosevelt Institute report by Duke University Professor William Darity and writer Kirsten Mullen estimates that at least 40 million acres should have been allocated. If the value grew at a 6% compound interest rate, it would today be worth over $3 trillion – more than the market capitalizations of Amazon.com and Apple combined.



The proportion of the United States under black ownership has actually shrunk over the last 100 years or so.


At their peak in 1910, African American farmers made up around 14% of all U.S. farmers, owning 16 to 19 million acres of land. By 2012, black Americans represented just 1.6% of the farming community, owning 3.6 million acres of land.


 Another study shows a 98% decline in black farmers between 1920, and 1997. This contrasts sharply with an increase in acres owned by white farmers over the same period.


In a 1998 report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ascribed this decline to a long and “well-documented” history of discrimination against black farmers, ranging from New Deal and USDA discriminatory practices dating from the 1930s to 1950s-era exclusion from legal, title and loan resources.


Lost land and wages are only the beginning. Add compensation for racist segregation laws, mass incarceration, employment discrimination and exclusions in government programs.
 In 2017, the racial homeownership gap was at its highest level for 50 years, with 79.1% of white Americans owning a home compared to 41.8% of black Americans. This gap is even larger than it was when racist housing practices such as redlining, which denied black residents mortgages to buy, or loans to renovate, property were legal.
A 2017 report found that the median net worth for non-immigrant black American households in the greater Boston region was just US$8, but for whites it was $247,500. This was due to “general housing and lending discrimination through restrictive covenants, redlining and other lending practices.”


Nationally, between 1983 and 2013, median black household wealth decreased by 75% to $1,700 while median white household wealth increased 14% to $116,800.


Households that identify as black or African American have roughly $800,000 less in mean net wealth than their white counterparts. Apply that to the population, and the wealth gap comes to over $13 trillion.
The idea of collective ownership has a long history in the United States. Even during slavery, a piece of ground was granted by slave masters for enslaved African subsistence farming. The Jamaican social theorist Sylvia Wynter called this land “the plot.” Wynter has explained how that these parcels of land were transformed into communal areas where slaves could establish their own social order, sustain traditional African folklore and food– growing yams, cassava and sweet potatoes. Plots were often called “yam grounds,” so important was this staple food. With the end of slavery, these plots disappeared.


The principles of collective land ownership evolved in post-slavery black America. It was central to civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms, a cooperative model designed to deliver economic justice to the poorest black farmers in the American South. In Hamer’s view, the fight for justice in the face of oppression required a measure of independence that could be achieved through owning land and providing resources for the community.


The idea of a black commons as a means of economic empowerment formed a focus of W.E.B. DuBois’ 1907 “Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans.” DuBois believed that the extreme segregation of the Jim Crow era made it necessary to ground economic empowerment in the cultural bonds between black people and that this could be achieved through cooperative ownership.


The political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard has noted in reference to black credit unions and mutual aid funds, “African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefited greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.”


 In a 2018 statement, the  nonprofit Schumacher Center for a New Economics proposed to adopt a community land trust structure “to serve as a national vehicle to amass purchased and gifted lands in a black commons with the specific purpose of facilitating low-cost access for black Americans hitherto without such access.”


While recognising that cooperation and social ownership is the way forward, the World Socialist Movement suggests that common ownership and free access to the wealth of society should be the vision for the future, not only of African Americans but for all peoples. The WSM calls for the cooperative world commonwealth.




Urban Farming – Allotments For Food

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Land set aside for allotments in the UK has declined by 65% from a peak in the “dig for victory” and post-war era. The most deprived areas suffered the worst decline, experiencing eight times the level of allotment closures compared with the most affluent areas.
Scientists estimated that the lost allotments could have provided 6% of the population with their “five-a-day” fruit and veg diet.
The waiting list for an allotment plot was an estimated 100,000 people in 2013. In recent years, the demand for allotment plots has seen a renaissance, which many younger people wanted to grow their own fruit and veg
 As the urban population was growing, urban land became increasingly valuable to developers. Yet regarding the allotment sites that had been closed, the team found that about a quarter of the land had not been developed for buildings but had been used as another form of green space.
“If the land within this was potentially suitable for reconversion to allotments was changed back to food production, the space available could meet up to 100% of the waiting list demand in the cities,” observed Ms Dobson, a PhD student at the university’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences,

Theory and Practice

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TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD, IN ORDER TO CHANGE IT.
The world we live in is a world of contradictions. The environment is in a state of decline, yet industry continues to pump pollutants into the atmosphere whilst non-polluting technologies are neglected. Thousands starve, while food stocks remain unused. We can communicate with strangers from all around the globe, yet no-one knows their neighbour. Automation could free us from labour, yet we are chained to the machine. We live amongst vast material possibilities, yet poverty is the universal experience – not just in the narrow economic sense but also in terms of the quality of lived experience.  “Never in history has there been such a glaring contrast between what could be and what actually exists.” [1]
Central to all these contradictions and reshaping all previous antagonisms is the global commodity-capitalist system. A system characterised by the production of commodities, wage labour and the market economy. A commodity is what is produced by the worker under capitalist conditions, its purpose to reproduce and enlarge capital (stored-up labour). The pursuit of ever increasing profits is the driving force behind the whole process – the fulfilment of peoples needs is a secondary and not always occurring result.
Commodities are only available in exchange for other commodities, money being the universal commodity and measure of all others. Since all goods have been turned into commodities and access to non-commodified materials restricted [2], those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have, their physical or mental labour-power. The logic of the market economy treats this labour like any other commodity; to be bought, sold and discarded as the market dictates. In effect the worker becomes a commodity. This transformation of living activity into an object creates an alienated or estranged world in which humankind does not recognize or fulfil itself, but is overpowered by the dead things and social relations of its own making.
Capitalist society is therefore split into two camps, the bourgeois or capitalist class (those who own and control the means of production – the land, equipment, machinery, buildings and raw materials necessary to create the things we need and use every day) and the proletariat [3] (those with “nothing to lose but their chains”). However, both classes are subject to the laws of the market economy [4] – our concern is with the social relation capital not the individual capitalist – the functionaries of capitalism are more and more disposable as individuals. While the rag wearing classical proletariat of Marx’s time has all but disappeared, at least in the developed countries, the fundamental division remains; power and wealth are becoming more rather than less concentrated under the control of a small minority. The modern proletariat is almost everyone; it is the working class which must destroy both alienated work and class.
The “official” history of the working class’s struggle against capitalism is an inversion, what is presented as its greatest triumphs are in reality its most bitter defeats; Leninist “Communism” in the east and reformist “Socialism” in the west where both expressions of a general movement towards state-capitalism. The greatest tragedy of these times is that in the minds of the vast majority of workers the project for the dissolution of the commodity economy became associated with its exact opposite. “So the light darkened that had illuminated the world; the masses that had hailed it were left in blacker night… By usurping the name communism for its system of workers’ exploitation and its policy of often cruel persecution of adversaries, it made this name, till then expression of lofty ideals, a byword, an object of aversion and hatred even among workers.”[5]
Though the call for a new society was never thoroughly extinguished; small and often profoundly isolated groups and individuals argued the case for a social reorganization to bring free access and control of the means of production into the hands of the whole of humanity. “From each according to ability, to each according to need!” [6]
The creation of such a society has two preconditions; firstly that technological production techniques have been sufficiently developed to be able to fulfill the material needs of the whole of society and secondly, that the majority of the population have an understanding of what needs to be done and want to carry it through. Revolutionaries are painfully aware that the first requirement has long since been reached but that the second is still far from being realized.
If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past it will be necessary to develop a theory of revolutionary practice, a theory which seeks to “get to the root of all things” and improve them. It is not a matter of choosing from one of the pre-existing ideologies of the old workers movement and basing our world view around it, but a matter of finding the “moment of truth” in all the theories of the past and synthesising this with our experience of the present.
“Theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.”[7]
DJP October 2008
FOOTNOTES
1. Ken Knabb – “The Joy of Revolution”
2. For a description of how this came to be see Karl Marx – “Capital Vol. 1” Chapter 26
3. “Proletarian”: broadly speaking “modern working class” including the un-employed and unemployable. However the proletariat is not to be understood as a sociological category of people in such-and-such income group and such-and-such occupations, but as a social relation of capitalism. It is all those who have little or no means of support other than selling their physical and mental labour-power. The proletariat is the only class capable of ending class society, as it produces the material conditions of its own enchainment.
4. “The propertied class and the proletarian class express the same human alienation. But the former feels comfortable and confirmed in it, recognises this self alienation as its own power and this has the semblance of human existence. The latter feels itself crushed by this alienation, sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.” Karl Marx – “The Holy Family“
5. Anton Pannekoek – “Workers Councils“
6. Often attributed to Marx‘s 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Programme” though it appears that this phrase was in usage years before. The subtitle to Etienne Cabet’s 1840 work “Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria” read “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his work”.
DJP

The Real Jungle

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Three large food factories have closed in England and Wales after about 250 workers tested positive for coronavirus, as the Unite union said it was aware of suspected outbreaks at five other sites across the UK.



 The confined working conditions and long periods spent by workers in close proximity – often 10 to 12 hours a shift – mean meat factories are at substantially heightened risk of spreading the coronavirus through human-to-human transmission, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.



 Unions have said the living conditions of many low-paid workers in the factories is another contributing factor, as is time spent by colleagues in communal spaces such as in locker rooms and on shuttle buses.



 Bev Clarkson, a national officer at Unite, said there were “major issues” with the health and safety of workers in the meat processing industry and urged employers to implement proper physical distancing and provide adequate protective equipment “to stop further spikes within the sector”.



 “Unite has warned time and again that coronavirus outbreaks at meat processing factories throughout the UK were likely,” she said. “The union has been in touch with the management of all three closed factories to insist that staff only return to work when it is safe to do so and when further outbreaks can be prevented.”



 The United Food and Commercial Workers union said recently that at least 44 slaughterhouse workers in the US had died from the virus and another 3,000 had tested positive.



 Public health officials in Germany are grappling with an outbreak among hundreds of workers at a meatpacking plant in Rheda-Wiedenbrück. At least 730 workers have tested positive at the Tönnies Group plant, it emerged. Germany’s agriculture minister called for an official investigation into the outbreak. Labor adviser Elena Strato says meatpacker Tönnies is cynically trying to pin blame for a coronavirus outbreak on foreign workers. Rather, the problem stems from a network of major companies and their subcontractors, who run a well-oiled system designed to let them shirk their own responsibilities as to the dangerous work and living environments they subject their employees to.



  What adjective best describes a person who will risk someone else’s life just to get richer? Ruthless? Unscrupulous? Hungry for money? Willing to disregard human rights, even? The management of Tönnies, Germany’s and Europe’s largest meat-processing company, could certainly be labeled as such. Why? Because it has known for months how vulnerable its workers, like so many others in the meat-processing industry, are to a potential coronavirus outbreak. Yet, it did nothing to reduce the risk. Workers in this industry, who tend to hail from eastern and southern Europe and are employed by sub-contractors, often endure dismal working and living conditions. It’s common for laborers butchering dead animals to work side by side, standing close to each other all day, and to share cramped living quarters, where social distancing is impossible.



 Unlike their German colleagues, meat-processing workers from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria earn a pittance — albeit a little more than they would make in most jobs back home. Nevertheless, the dire working and living conditions they have to put up with in Germany effectively make them modern-day slaves.  Tönnies is exploiting these desperate people to turn a profit. More than half the 6,000 workers at its main headquarters are employed by sub-contractors. This allows Tönnies to save labor costs, maximize profits, and enhance its competitiveness. The company has outpriced many global competitors and even exports meat to countries like Romania and China. In the past, the company has exerted considerable influence on regional and local lawmakers, who turned a blind eye to the mistreatment of foreign workers.



  20,000 pigs are slaughtered and cut up each day at Tönnies and when measured by the number of animals slaughtered  a 30.3% market share. The number of animals per farm is increasing, which indicates a growth in factory farming in Germany. Farms with 100,000 hens laying eggs are not rare. EU regulations stipulate that a pig weighing 50 kilograms (110 pounds) to 110 kilograms (242 pounds) needs just 0.75 square meters (8 square feet) of space.



 “The purely economic view and the associated intensive farming systems in animal farming are ethically questionable and no longer tolerable,” said Thomas Schröder, president of the German Animal Welfare Association.



 Meat processing is an important economic sector in Germany. According to the Federal Statistic Office, the turnover for the meat processing industry in 2019 was €42.5 billion ($47.5 billion). Tönnies had by far the highest turnover — with around €6.9 billion ($7.7 billion) — from slaughtering 17 million pigs. In 2019, 59.7 million pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and horses were slaughtered in Germany. Including poultry, companies produced almost 8 million tons of meat. Much more meat is produced in Germany than is eaten. Almost half of it is exported. German pork, offal and poultry are particularly sought after. The biggest buyer of German pork is Italy at 17%, followed by the Netherlands, China and Poland with 9% each.

There have been a number of outbreaks among employees of German meat companies in recent months.  Virologist Isabella Eckerle gives several reasons why. First, working conditions in slaughterhouses are not compatible with the hygiene measures necessary to prevent a virus from being transmitted to others. People work in closed rooms, with no possibility of maintaining social distancing guidelines. Second, the accommodation for foreign laborers is often in cramped apartments, with multiple people sleeping in the same room, meaning the virus can easily spread there as well. Another factor could be the physical strain of the work. Damp hands, gloves, aprons and clothing could promote transmission through smear infections. Many of the workers in German slaughterhouses come from outside the country. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but according to the German government, answering a question from The Left Party, in 2018 almost 50% of workers in slaughterhouses did not hold German passports. Trade unions estimate the migrant workforce currently stands at around 80%. Workers are rarely hired by the meat processing companies themselves, but instead by subcontractors, which mostly hire people in Romania and Hungary before bringing them to work in Germany. Workers received time-limited, labor-specific contracts, which means they receive fewer employment rights than long-term employees. According to the 2018 government figures, they were much likely to work evenings, nights and weekends than employees in other industries.
Officially they are paid the minimum wage, which was introduced to the meat industry in 2014 and is currently set at €8.75 ($9.81) per hour — but unions and campaign groups say workers rarely receive that much. Instead, costs are deducted from their pay for multiple reasons.
“Opaque recording of working hours, unclear costs for accommodation, transport and material leave the impression of being cheated,” summarizes Armin Wiese, an executive at Germany’s Food, Beverages and Catering Union (NGG).  “They realize they are defenseless against the arbitrariness of their employers.”



 https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-coronavirus-outbreak-in-german-slaughterhouse-was-preventable/a-53866979

Racial Inequality

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Data shows that people of colour are worse off than white counterparts and black households face the biggest deficit.



 The ethnicity gap does not stop at pay – the inequality that begins there runs through everything involving money. Almost across the board people of colour are worse off than their white counterparts and, typically, black households face the biggest deficit. Compared with white households they have lower earnings and less cash in private pensions, investments or other assets to draw on.



 Data shows that in the last year for which figures are available, black people had the highest unemployment rate of all groups; were most likely to have a household income below £400 a week; and, after Bangladeshi households, were most likely to claim income-related benefits. Only 8% of black pensioner families drew any income from a personal pension.



 Research from the Runnymede Trust shows the vast differences in wealth and assets between households of different ethnicity. The figures show that that for every £1 a white British family has, black Caribbean households have about 20p and black African and Bangladeshi households approximately 10p. Accumulated assets offer a safety net when things go wrong and can be passed down through generations.

Some of the issues are explained by the demographics of the community: black people are generally younger and live in cities, so may have higher living costs and have had less time to build up wealth. Plus, some pay gap figures reflect inequalities around education and opportunity.
However, two years ago, the Resolution Foundation thinktank found black male graduates were being paid 17% less than white male graduates – the equivalent of £3.90 an hour or £7,000 over a year. For black women, the “pay penalty” was 9%, or £3,000 over a year.
Otegha Uwagba is a writer and the founder of Women Who. She is working on a book called We Need To Talk About Money, which will be published next year. She says people often make the argument that the pay difference is a result of people clustering around low-paid industries. “But even when you compare people with identical qualifications doing identical jobs in the same geographical area, there is still a difference in pay,” she says. “It’s hard to find any other reason for that beyond racism.” She adds: “Why aren’t we doing the same thing with mandatory disclosures around the ethnicity pay gap as we have around the gender pay gap? Racism is a really ugly part of British history that people just don’t want to face up to.”
Most people’s biggest asset is their home and Uwagba says she was shocked when she saw figures showing the low level of property ownership among black Africans. While 63% of families across England own homes, the figure is only 20% among black Africans. “When you think about how people are buying homes, especially in London, and how many are relying on the bank of Mum and Dad, you can see how income disparities are perpetuated through the generations,” she says. “Money begets more money. Discrimination compounds things and wealth and income gaps are passed on to the next generation.” Even when the inequalities in pay are ironed out, it will be some time before all the other gaps are closed. With fewer assets to pass down, the problem grows. It is not only the wealth that accumulates, but also the knowledge about how to make the most of your money.
Among FTSE 100 companies, 62.% of board members are white males and they occupy 84% of executive directorships, according to the DiversityQ FTSE 100 board diversity report 2020. Fewer than one in 10 directors is black, Asian or minority ethnicity.
Cheryl Cole, the editor of DiversityQ says, “People continue to hire in their likeness – they recruit from the same small pool of candidates who went to the same small pool of universities and have the same background.” 
Things are “dire” in fund management, says Cole. Of 100,000 employees, 10% identify as Asian and only 1% as black, and the industry has only 13 black portfolio managers, according to a Diversity Project report.

Law and Order and the Police

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Instead of cities spending a lion’s share of their budgets on their police departments, Defund the Police advocates argue that money should support affordable housing, healthcare, child care, mental health treatment and other services. There has been calls for reform following the 1967 uprisings in cities across the US and as a response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991 as well as to the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014.
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously supported a resolution to determine a community-supported replacement for the city’s police force. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti also announced his intention to strip $250 million from the city’s police department budget, which tops $1.8 billion, and redirect funds into youth programs, healthcare and other areas. New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea also dissolved a plainclothes unit that has been criticised for pitting police against communities it serves. Following New York’s passage of a massive legislative package with sweeping reforms, Governor Andrew Cuomo told protesters: “You won.” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, following the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, also ordered her city’s police department to “immediately adopt” deescalation policies, including holding officers accountable for their “duty to intervene” against another officer’s use of deadly force.
Mariama Kaba argues that commissions, studies and the “best practices” that emerge from police abuse investigations from as early as 1894 only “served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests.” “The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence,” Kaba writes. “Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.”
A 2017 report from the Centre for Popular Democracy, Black Youth Project 100 and Law for Black Lives found that several major cities have “stripped funds from mental health services, housing subsidies, youth programs, and food benefits programs, while pouring money into police forces, military grade weapons, high-tech surveillance, jails, and prisons”.
A 2018 report from the National Institutes of Health determined that a “combined investment in a public health, community-based approach to violence prevention and a criminal justice approach focused on deterrence can achieve more to reduce population-level rates of urban violence than either can in isolation.”
Critical Resistance member Kamau Walton  says. “When communities are stable, healthy and thriving, we know there’s a lot less harm and violence.”
The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, for example, shifted from thinking about transformative justice within “communities” to “pods”, which are “made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you”, had witnessed, or wanted accountability for.
“Why can’t we be the ones taking care of each other, instead of police, who tend to escalate and further traumatise people when that doesn’t need to happen?” Walton argues. “Why not invest in people who are going to see you as a neighbour, a cousin, a friend, a loved one, that they care for and want to take care of? That’s the idea behind the solutions we want to see, that they need to be based in communities that see people as people, people connected to them and that they’re accountable to.”
Abolitionists argue that police don’t actually stop violence from happening, and that a better administration of justice should come from communities holding people accountable. Addressing the conditions that lead to people committing violence would prevent it from happening in the first place, they argue, while prisons don’t inherently repair the health or harms that lead to a person’s imprisonment, including their mental health, addiction or abuse.
Rather than public safety spearheaded by police, abolitionists call for the communities themselves to take the lead. Neighbours can learn to de-escalate incidents, respond to mental health issues and hold one another accountable for their communities. Most conflicts could be disrupted through mediation, or defused by social workers or mental health workers and other care providers.
The United States is the world’s incarceration capital, housing a quarter of the world’s prisoners in a nation that represents only 5 per cent of the global population.
Reformers seek to end its prison system’s legacy of racism, from its roots in plantation-era America to its echoes in mass incarceration today. The USA disproportionately jails black people — African Americans make up 13 per cent of the US but more than 40 per cent of prison populations. Following the ending of enslavement at the end of the US Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except for those convicted of a crime, allowing the adoption of “black codes” in economically devastated southern states at the end of the war to impose harsh penalties against newly freed black Americans for minor crimes, ensuring their continued “free” labour in prison. “Convict leasing” would go on to provide labour for massive private infrastructure, while legalised segregation and Jim Crow-era terror criminalised black Americans.

Dictionary Meanings

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Dear Sirs,

I recently bought a copy of The Collins Dictionary & Thesaurus in One Volume as a reference work for my studies. I would like to advise you of a significant factual and historical error it contains.

This concerns the entry under “socialism”. There are three definitions given: I refer to the third which states, “(in Marxist theory) a transitional stage in the development of a society from capitalism to communism”. This is incorrect. Nowhere in the writings of Marx, nor indeed in those of Engels, are the terms “socialism” or/and “communism” used to describe either a transitional stage or different stages of social development. In this sense Marx used the terms interchangeably to mean a society of common ownership and production for use, and therefore without buying and selling, an exchange economy, classes or the state.

As a matter of historical interest, this separation was first made by Lenin in an attempt to give credibility to the post-1917 situation in Russia, by frequently referring to that society, now generally acknowledged to be state capitalist, by the term “socialism”. As a student of Marx’s work for nearly fifty years, I assure you that the definition you give is derived from Leninist theory not Marx’s as you state.

BILL ROBERTSON

REPLY:

Dear Mr Robertson,

Thank you for your letter of 15 August. In it you state that the definition of SOCIALISM (sense 3) refers to Leninist and not Marxist theory. I agree with your assertion as Marx did not describe any intermediate “socialist” stage between the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of communism. He used the terms “communism” and “socialism” interchangeably. It was, as you rightly point out, Lenin who created this distinction to describe the situation in the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks seized power. Subsequent Soviet leaders, as you are no doubt well aware, also used this distinction, most notably Khrushchev who in the early 1960s described the USSR as a “socialist state” that would “achieve Communism by 1980”.

Thank you for taking the trouble to point out this mistake.

Yours sincerely,

ANDREW HOLMES,

Assistant Lexicographer,

Collins English Dictionaries.

Working People – Sacrificial Lambs

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Whether Americans know it or not, their government is not working for them. Their government is working on behalf of capital. Humans are now a mere secondary factor to be considered based on how it affects capital. Capitalism must be protected and nurtured, and the State must draw resources from our entire society in order to help capital survive.  People can be sacrificed—capital is irreplaceable. 



 It is no exaggeration to say that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans will die because the government is prematurely relaxing lockdowns to permit business to resume rather than prioritize human life. They will die because we did not dedicate resources before this pandemic to building an adequate system of public health care, and they will die because we made the decision during this pandemic to put the needs of capital first. Businesses did not keep working people on payrolls, because that would be less advantageous for the owners of capital. The government did not mobilize factories, nor pharmaceutical research, because that would be less advantageous to the owners of capital. And it did not release the prisoners in the jails being ravaged by this disease. What would that do for the stock market? Doctors are getting pay cuts because they are no longer making revenue for their employers with nonessential procedures; nurses are becoming sick and dying because we didn’t stockpile enough cheap plastic masks; grocery workers are forced to beg and plead and strike for a couple of dollars extra per hour, at the risk of their own lives. 



 The true beneficiaries of this crisis, from the perspective of those in charge, will be the private equity firms that rush in to buy up distressed businesses, and the hedge funds that pour money into cheap debt, and the investors that scoop up the homes that people will be evicted from. They are the ones that give a transfusion of investment the life-blood of capitalism.



 From

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/09/plan-save-capital-and-let-people-die?fbclid=IwAR1ennSKy62KFlAFBZqYfpDlmGFK7IEM8GWhJ9WqJBAQ61iPzAz1iao31fE

The Plutonomy

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Plutonomy  is a term used by Citigroup analysts and others to describe a system in which the wealthy (the 1 percent) are the driving force as well as the beneficiaries of economic growth. Basically, it means it only matters what the rich do—what they buy, what they sell, what they invest in, what they hump, and what they listen to. You and I simply don’t matter. The idea of the plutonomy was actually leaked out in a Citigroup analyst note several years ago. They accidentally said the quiet part out loud to their super rich clients. It read:

“The world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. …What are the common drivers of Plutonomy? Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, …and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions.”

 In everyday language, “creative financial innovation” translates to “unique news ways to steal from people.” Then “capitalist-friendly cooperative governments,” should be read as “governments controlled by the rich designed to fuck the people at every turn.” That’s what it means when a government “cooperates” with Citibank. And finally, “overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions.” That gobbledygook means, “invading and taking over other nations and people and then stealing their resources.”



 The Citigroup note ends with, “Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.” They’re saying that the plutonomy is too complicated for us ordinary mortals to comprehend. They are smarter, cleverer, more intuitive and show more initiative than anyone else, too. That’s why they’re billionaires and we’re not. That’s why they will always be billionaires and we will never be. In truth, they have nothing over your average person except: a) luck b) sometimes inheriting a fortune and c) being more sociopathic.  In a study covered in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that higher social class predicted an increase in unethical behavior. They showed that the rich are more likely to make unethical decisions, steal from others, break the law while driving, and cheat in contests. They are more willing to crush other human beings to get what they want and thereby they are more able to get what they want.

Billionaires in the U.S. have seen their fortunes skyrocket, increasing by 12.5 percent since the pandemic began. The Institute for Policy Studies released a study “showing that, in the eight weeks between March 18 and May 14, the country’s super wealthy have added a further $368.8 billion to their already enormous fortunes.”


 Even before the pandemic, the vaults of the rich bulged with unbelievable wealth. Even before coronavirus the three richest Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of our country, that’s 164 million people.


Recent estimates are that only 20 percent of people have 85 percent of the wealth, so as long as the government serves those 20 percent, they can almost completely ignore the bottom 80 percent of people.


This explains why our government has not seen the need to truly bailout average people during this crisis. They have sent a check for $1,200 to regular citizens while giving 4.25 TRILLION dollars to big banks and corporate America. To put that figure into some perspective, if someone gave you a million dollars a year—just handed $1,000,000 to you—do you know how long it would take you to amass 4.25 trillion dollars? It would take you 4.25 million years. 


Abridged and adapted from here




Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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