Times are bad but the consolation is they have been worse. The very fate of humanity depends on the outcome between capitalism and socialism, since capitalism involves the threat of nuclear world war or environmental destruction. Nations are social structures ruled by definite classes. No nation is ruled or governed without a class structure — a leadership that answers to the class in power but speaks in the name of the whole nation. The real solution to the looming disasters is the socialist revolution. The only road to freedom for the workers is through their common struggle for the abolition of capitalism.
Pessimism can never be a tool for liberation, even though such gloom and doom can the sordid character of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Rather, the Socialist Party case is a heartfelt plea to unify and inspire a divided world. We each have the power to make our class stronger, and nationalism and racism weaker, by reaching out and seeing one another as one people. Though that may seem simple and naive, we have to constantly breathe the spirit of revolutionary optimism. We hold no reason to be disheartened. The apparent political indifference can not continue forever. And, when change comes, the Socialist Party will be in place to achieve its objective. The fact is the left parties have failed to overthrow capitalist imperialism nor do they promote progress towards socialism. Workers recognising their self-interest will see the absolute need for the unity of their class in order to overthrow the capitalist class.
The Socialist Party advocates world socialism. That is to say the destruction of the present class society, which consists of one class who live by owning property and therefore need not work if they so desire, and of another that has no property and therefore must work in order that they may live.
Socialism insists that this system of society, which is the modern form of slavery, should be changed to a system of society which would give every man and woman an opportunity of doing useful work. Labour would be employed in co-operation, and the struggle of man against man for bare subsistence would be supplanted by harmonious combination for the production of common wealth and mutual services without the waste of labour or material. Everyone‘s needs would be satisfied from this common stock, but no person would be allowed to own anything which he or she could not use, or abuse by employing it as an instrument for forcing others to labour . Thus the land, machinery, and means of transport would cease to be private property. Thus men and women would be free because they would no longer be dependent on property-owners for subsistence; thus they would be brothers and sisters, for the cause of strife, the struggle for subsistence at other people’s expense, would have come to an end. Thus they would be equal, for if all people were doing useful work. Thus the motto of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, which is but an empty boast in a society that upholds the monopoly of the means of production, would at last be realised.
The aim of the Socialist Party is to replace world capitalist economy with world socialism. Socialist society is mankind’s only way out, for it alone can abolish the contradictions of the capitalist system which threaten to destroy humanity. A socialist society will abolish the class division of society, and simultaneously the abolition of anarchy in production. It will abolish all forms of exploitation and oppression of man by man. Society will no longer consist of antagonistic classes in conflict with each other, but will be a united commonwealth. For the first time in its history mankind will take its fate into its own hands. Instead of destroying innumerable human lives and incalculable wealth in struggles between classes and nations, mankind will devote all its energy to the development and strengthening of mankind itself.
After abolishing private ownership of the means of production and converting these means into social property, the world socialism will replace the elemental forces of the world market, competitive and blind processes of social production, by consciously organised and planned production for the purpose of satisfying rapidly growing social needs. With the abolition of competition and anarchy in production, devastating crises and still more devastating wars will disappear. Instead of colossal waste of productive forces and spasmodic development of society-there will be a planned utilisation of all material resources and a painless economic development on the basis of unrestricted, smooth and rapid development of productive forces.
The abolition of private property and the disappearance of classes will do away with the exploitation of man by man. Work will cease to be toiling for the benefit of a class enemy: instead of being merely a means of livelihood it will become a necessity of life: want and economic inequality, the misery of enslaved classes, and a wretched standard of life generally will disappear; the hierarchy created in the division of labour system will be abolished together with the antagonism between mental and manual labour; and the last vestige of the social inequality of the sexes will be removed. At the same time, the organs of class domination, and the State in the first place, will disappear also. The State, being the embodiment of class domination, will die out in so far as classes die out, and with it all measures of coercion will expire.
With the disappearance of classes a great field will be opened for the harmonious development of all the talents inherent in humanity.
In socialism no social restrictions will be imposed upon the growth of the forces of production. Private ownership in the means of production, the selfish lust for profits, the artificial retention of the people in a state of ignorance, poverty will have no place in a socialist society. The most expedient and sustainable utilisation of the forces of nature and of the natural conditions of production in the various parts of the world, the removal of the antagonism between town and country, that under capitalism results from the low technical level of agriculture and its systematic lagging behind industry; the closest possible co-operation between science and technique, the utmost encouragement of research work and the practical application of its results on the widest possible social scale; planned organisation of scientific work; the application of the most perfect methods of statistical accounting and, planned regulation of economy; the rapid growth of social needs, which-is the most powerful internal driving force of the whole system-all these will secure the maximum productivity of social labour, which in turn will release human energy for the powerful development of science and art.
The development of the productive forces of world socialism will make it possible to raise the well-being of the whole of humanity and to reduce to a minimum the time devoted to material production and, consequently, will enable culture to flourish as never before in history. This new culture of a humanity that is united for the first time in history, and has abolished all State boundaries, will, unlike capitalist culture, be based upon clear and transparent human relationships. Hence, it will bury forever all mysticism, religion, prejudice and superstition and will give a powerful impetus to the development of all-conquering, scientific knowledge.
With the enormous growth of social productive forces which has accompanied the development of mankind, humanity will inscribed on its banner: “From each according to abilities to each according to needs!”
Fast Fashion Unsustainable
The so-called fast fashion industry is spewing out 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon into the earth’s atmosphere each year – more than international flights and maritime shipping combined, according to the International Energy Agency.
A 29.99 pound dress in a high street chain may be made of cotton, an innocuous-sounding natural material, but uses fertilisers which seep into groundwater and create dead zones in lakes and rivers where marine life cannot survive.
A 5 pound pair of leggings uses polyester, a fabric which is partly to blame for the 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources like oil the sector uses every year.
Clothes production including dyes and cotton farming uses 93 billion cubic metres of water annually, according to the Circular Fibres Initiative. This equates to around 37 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
Despite some retail chains launching recycling programmes for unwanted clothes, some 73% of garments still end up burned in incinerators, or in landfill. The latter produces methane, a greenhouse gas that therefore contributes to global warming. In Sweden, where clothes textiles are collected for recycling, non-reusable textiles are routinely incinerated, according to the Swedish fashion research programme Mistra Future Fashion. And there is not currently a solution to deal with the methane produced by natural cotton and wool products placed in landfill.
The Circular Fibres Initiative reckons that if the fashion industry’s circular economy fails to get going soon enough, fashion production will require 300 million tonnes of oil by 2050. That’s more than three times today’s requirements.
Retailers reckon all this pollution will disappear once the so-called “circular economy” gets up and running. The market, they say, will turn into a productive utopia where discarded clothes are efficiently recycled and sold back to customers. As such, rather than scaling back, fashion chains are expanding. Mega-chains like Zara have been ramping up the number of collections and new styles they release each year. This has led to a near doubling of clothes production in the past 15 years.
The growing ‘middle class’ in China and India is driving up demand for disposable fashion.
300 million people are employed in the $1.3 trillion global fashion industry. Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest garment producer after China, relies on apparel for more than 80% of its exports, according to the World Bank.
The only certain way to help the planet is to scale back production. There would be less need for fossil fuels, water and landfills. But this cuts across an unsurprising goal to grow its profit and dividend.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-fashion-climatechange-breaking/breakingviews-fashions-climate-frankenstein-has-no-off-switch-idUKKBN20117H
A 29.99 pound dress in a high street chain may be made of cotton, an innocuous-sounding natural material, but uses fertilisers which seep into groundwater and create dead zones in lakes and rivers where marine life cannot survive.
A 5 pound pair of leggings uses polyester, a fabric which is partly to blame for the 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources like oil the sector uses every year.
Clothes production including dyes and cotton farming uses 93 billion cubic metres of water annually, according to the Circular Fibres Initiative. This equates to around 37 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
Despite some retail chains launching recycling programmes for unwanted clothes, some 73% of garments still end up burned in incinerators, or in landfill. The latter produces methane, a greenhouse gas that therefore contributes to global warming. In Sweden, where clothes textiles are collected for recycling, non-reusable textiles are routinely incinerated, according to the Swedish fashion research programme Mistra Future Fashion. And there is not currently a solution to deal with the methane produced by natural cotton and wool products placed in landfill.
The Circular Fibres Initiative reckons that if the fashion industry’s circular economy fails to get going soon enough, fashion production will require 300 million tonnes of oil by 2050. That’s more than three times today’s requirements.
Retailers reckon all this pollution will disappear once the so-called “circular economy” gets up and running. The market, they say, will turn into a productive utopia where discarded clothes are efficiently recycled and sold back to customers. As such, rather than scaling back, fashion chains are expanding. Mega-chains like Zara have been ramping up the number of collections and new styles they release each year. This has led to a near doubling of clothes production in the past 15 years.
The growing ‘middle class’ in China and India is driving up demand for disposable fashion.
300 million people are employed in the $1.3 trillion global fashion industry. Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest garment producer after China, relies on apparel for more than 80% of its exports, according to the World Bank.
The only certain way to help the planet is to scale back production. There would be less need for fossil fuels, water and landfills. But this cuts across an unsurprising goal to grow its profit and dividend.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-fashion-climatechange-breaking/breakingviews-fashions-climate-frankenstein-has-no-off-switch-idUKKBN20117H
Guatamalan Exodus
The threat of famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognised as major factors in the exodus from Guatamala’s rural districts in what is called the Dry Corridor, a region which stretches through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
A drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala. 2019 was the driest year in a decade with only 65 days of rain. Guatemala’s subsistence farmers depend on rainfall – which is increasingly erratic – and most lack alternative sources of water.
As a result, record numbers of subsistence farming families are going hungry: health officials registered more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five last year – up nearly 24% from 2018. It’s the highest number of acute malnutrition cases since 2015, when a severe drought destroyed harvests across Central America. At least 33,000 children need urgent medical treatment due to acute malnutrition, according to Oxfam Guatemala. Around one million Guatemalans – 15% of the population – are currently unable to meet their daily food requirements, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
After an irregular rainy season and an unpromising harvest, almost 80%
of maize grown in Guatemala’s highland region was lost, according to Oxfam.
A drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala. 2019 was the driest year in a decade with only 65 days of rain. Guatemala’s subsistence farmers depend on rainfall – which is increasingly erratic – and most lack alternative sources of water.
As a result, record numbers of subsistence farming families are going hungry: health officials registered more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five last year – up nearly 24% from 2018. It’s the highest number of acute malnutrition cases since 2015, when a severe drought destroyed harvests across Central America. At least 33,000 children need urgent medical treatment due to acute malnutrition, according to Oxfam Guatemala. Around one million Guatemalans – 15% of the population – are currently unable to meet their daily food requirements, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
After an irregular rainy season and an unpromising harvest, almost 80%
of maize grown in Guatemala’s highland region was lost, according to Oxfam.
Hunger is not a new phenomenon in Guatemala: at least 60% of the population live in poverty, hundreds of thousands rely on food aid, and almost 50% of children suffer stunted physical and cognitive development due to chronic malnourishment.
But experts warn that the additional burden of extreme weather is overwhelming these communities, which have been long ignored and repressed by the government.
Now, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus. Marc-Andre Prost, a WFP regional nutrition adviser, told Reuters: “Climate change is not responsible for this situation but it’s definitely exacerbating a situation where people don’t have the capacity to cope.”
Central America is one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee north in search of security. Amid the growing threat of famine, almost 265,000 Guatemalans migrants searching for work, safety and food security were detained at the US southern border in 2019 – a 130% increase on the previous fiscal year. Worsening hunger across the region is a factor in the rise in migrant caravans trying to reach the US overland. The caravans have been met with repression and hostility by Mexican and American authorities.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/guatemala-hunger-famine-flee-north
Debunking some immigration myths
There is a common complaint about immigration that migrants are a drain on the health services of the host nation. Recent conservative governments in the United Kingdom have taken steps to restrict access to the National Health Service to migrants. Migrants rarely bring infections that pose a threat to the host population but denying them treatment may create risks.
This article disputes this by citing research.
In the USA, Paul Van De Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted, undocumented immigrants were estimated to have contributed a net $12 billion into the Social Security system via payroll taxes back in 2007. Something similar plays out in healthcare. As two important studies led by Dr. Leah Zallman at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School make clear, in healthcare, immigrants subsidize the U.S.-born.
A 2013 study published in Health Affairs, Zallman and colleagues examined how much immigrants pay into the Medicare trust fund, relative to how much Medicare spends on their healthcare. They found that while immigrants paid some $33 billion in Medicare taxes in 2009, they only used $19 billion in health services—in other words, they subsidized the trust fund to the tune of nearly $14 billion.
In a second study, also published in Health Affairs, researchers turned to private insurance, and a similar picture emerged. Premium contributions from immigrants (including the undocumented) exceeded plans’ outlays on immigrants’ healthcare. In contrast, U.S.-born enrolees contributed less than what they used in care—a deficit of about $163 per native-born person. Including immigrants in an insurance system, in other words, makes it more actuarially sound. “Immigrants subsidize US natives in the private health insurance market,” the researchers concluded, “just as they are propping up the Medicare Trust Funds.”
Evidence from Spain similarly strengthens the economic case for covering everyone. It passed a law in 2011 that “gave an explicit right to free health care for all people living in Spain, both Spanish and migrant, irrespective of their legal status, making Spain one of the most migrant-friendly health systems in Europe.” In 2012, a newly elected conservative government reversed this expansion. They were met, however, with a wave of resistance, including civil disobedience. Some 1,300 doctors and nurses pledged to defy the law and treat immigrants regardless of documentation status. After elections in 2018, the new left-wing government of Pedro Sanchez restored coverage to all. In 2018 Spain spent some $3,323 per capita on healthcare—compared to more than $10,000 in the United States. It seems unlikely that the 2019 figures will change that overall picture much. As such, the policy of extending universal healthcare to immigrants has not bankrupted Spain’s system.
A study from Germany that found that a policy of limiting healthcare access for asylum seekers and refugees actually led to larger healthcare costs on the long term. Furthermore, a study in several European countries found that extending access to primary care achieved large savings in direct medical and non-medical costs. Both studies concluded that inclusion of migrants in health systems reduced the risk of health conditions—which could be treated cheaply—progressing to complex and expensive illnesses.
In conclusion, migrant inclusive health systems reduce long term health expenditure, help to tackle shortages of workers, especially in the health and social care sectors, boost economic growth, and promote social integration in host countries.
This article disputes this by citing research.
In the USA, Paul Van De Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted, undocumented immigrants were estimated to have contributed a net $12 billion into the Social Security system via payroll taxes back in 2007. Something similar plays out in healthcare. As two important studies led by Dr. Leah Zallman at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School make clear, in healthcare, immigrants subsidize the U.S.-born.
A 2013 study published in Health Affairs, Zallman and colleagues examined how much immigrants pay into the Medicare trust fund, relative to how much Medicare spends on their healthcare. They found that while immigrants paid some $33 billion in Medicare taxes in 2009, they only used $19 billion in health services—in other words, they subsidized the trust fund to the tune of nearly $14 billion.
In a second study, also published in Health Affairs, researchers turned to private insurance, and a similar picture emerged. Premium contributions from immigrants (including the undocumented) exceeded plans’ outlays on immigrants’ healthcare. In contrast, U.S.-born enrolees contributed less than what they used in care—a deficit of about $163 per native-born person. Including immigrants in an insurance system, in other words, makes it more actuarially sound. “Immigrants subsidize US natives in the private health insurance market,” the researchers concluded, “just as they are propping up the Medicare Trust Funds.”
Evidence from Spain similarly strengthens the economic case for covering everyone. It passed a law in 2011 that “gave an explicit right to free health care for all people living in Spain, both Spanish and migrant, irrespective of their legal status, making Spain one of the most migrant-friendly health systems in Europe.” In 2012, a newly elected conservative government reversed this expansion. They were met, however, with a wave of resistance, including civil disobedience. Some 1,300 doctors and nurses pledged to defy the law and treat immigrants regardless of documentation status. After elections in 2018, the new left-wing government of Pedro Sanchez restored coverage to all. In 2018 Spain spent some $3,323 per capita on healthcare—compared to more than $10,000 in the United States. It seems unlikely that the 2019 figures will change that overall picture much. As such, the policy of extending universal healthcare to immigrants has not bankrupted Spain’s system.
A study from Germany that found that a policy of limiting healthcare access for asylum seekers and refugees actually led to larger healthcare costs on the long term. Furthermore, a study in several European countries found that extending access to primary care achieved large savings in direct medical and non-medical costs. Both studies concluded that inclusion of migrants in health systems reduced the risk of health conditions—which could be treated cheaply—progressing to complex and expensive illnesses.
In conclusion, migrant inclusive health systems reduce long term health expenditure, help to tackle shortages of workers, especially in the health and social care sectors, boost economic growth, and promote social integration in host countries.
Cut working hours without wage cuts
With the average worker clocking 47 hours a week, Americans work more hours per year than almost any other industrialized country — 423 more than German workers, 248 more than workers in the United Kingdom, and 266 more hours a year than French workers, according to the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. The United States is also the only industrialized country without national parental leave benefits or legally mandated paid vacation. Most European countries require at least 20 days of paid holiday and vacation time — the French actually get an entire month of annual vacation.
Back in the early days of industrial capitalism, it was not uncommon for workers to work anywhere between 10-16 hours a day. But a bloody, centuries-long battle fought by socialists, unionists, and other similar groups in the United States won us the 40-hour work week in 1938.
Prominent economists like John Maynard Keynes were even making utopian prophecies that we’d all be working 15-hour weeks in the 21st century.
Keynes’s prediction wasn’t based so much on the continued victories for labor as it was on a belief in increased productivity. Perhaps due to automation, or perhaps in combination with other amazing human achievements, steady increases in worker productivity would make it so that workers could simply work less and less until the weekday/weekend ratio was flipped: two days of work, five days off.
“It was such a struggle for the early organized working class to originally shorten the work week,” economic analyst Doug Henwood explained to Truthout. “But since then, it’s just completely fallen off the radar as a demand of the labor movement. And of course, organized labor is so desperate at this point anyway that they’re not really making many demands. But even just that imagination of what we can do with a shorter work week — it’s just largely disappeared from the conversation.”
“We don’t see payoff from increased productivity in the form of more leisure — it’s just more and more work,” Henwood explained. “The tendency of capitalism, especially in the American system, is just to work more and harder.”
https://truthout.org/articles/its-time-to-shorten-the-american-work-week/
Marx’s son-in-law wrote a pamphlet called the “Right to be Lazy” but his call has gone unheard and unheeded.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm
Careers (Short Story)
A Short Story from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard
During the 1940s schools had the equivalent of what I suppose today would be called “careers” officers. Three people (it was usually three) would visit a school and pupils of fourteen and fifteen would be called in, one-by-one, for an interview about their job prospects. The interview took place with a head teacher present and was, at least in my own experience, a scanty and one-sided affair. It should be borne in mind that this was 1949 just four years after the end of the second world war and there was a serious shortage of labour. The resultant devastation wreaked by the Blitz called for massive re-building, but the thousands slaughtered both at home and abroad meant that jobs were plentiful but at very low wages in most cases.
In those days (and I suspect the situation is still prevalent today despite mass unemployment) poor families viewed their offspring’s school-leaving as a time when perhaps a little more money would be brought into the house to help alleviate hardship. The word “career” did not come into the thinking of people who spent a major part of their existence wondering where the next meal was coming from. And as far as I know not one child went from my school to either Grammar school or to a university. As for me, I was aware that, like my brothers before me, I would one day quit school and be expected to do something to contribute to household funds, but what that “something” was going to be was a thought I had never entertained. I think I fondly imagined that once freed from dreary old school I would spend joyous hours reading and writing or tearing round streets on the clapped-out old bike a neighbour had passed on to me. And I was encouraged in this self-deception simply because no-one at home had thought to discuss with me how I was going to earn a living, though once my father had remarked that he would not want to see me end up at Tate & Lyle’s, the sugar factory on the other side of the Thames.
I remember my career interview with as much clarity as though it was yesterday. Hauled in from the playground where I had been taking part in a game of net-ball, sweaty and dishevelled, I entered a room where four people, one woman, two men and the headmaster, sat round a table and eyed me suspiciously. But without looking at me the woman asked “What are you going to do when you leave school?” Without a moment’s hesitation I told her “I am going to write, Miss”. There was a stunned silence. I knew by the smiles of disbelief on the faces of those present that I had voiced a preposterous idea. The headmaster cleared his throat. “Heather writes very competent essays and poetry and edits the school magazine, but her other subjects are weak, particularly her maths. She could never earn her living as a writer.” I keenly felt the injustice of this statement. I had never said that I wished to earn my living as a writer. I had been asked what I was going to do when I left school and had answered in all honesty that I was going to write.
The woman said, still avoiding looking at me directly (I noticed that nobody looked at me or even addressed their remarks to me; they spoke only to each other) “What about an office job?” The headmaster stroked his chin. “Yes,” he said, “we had given that some consideration.” I wondered who had given that “some consideration” because it certainly wasn’t me. Then one of the men consulted his notes. “You could get a job in a shop,” he told me. Well, he didn’t actually tell me, he told the others. The second man ventured another splendid proposal. “What about a factory?” I was beginning to feel that eventually someone would come up with the bright idea of suggesting sending me up chimneys like poor Tom in The Water Babies.
I was gazing out of the window as they talked among themselves. I heard murmurs of “Pleasing appearance” and “Nicely spoken”. How could they tell? I had spoken only six words since I had entered the room.
The rest of that interview has always remained rather hazy for me. When I left that room depression descended heavily upon me. I saw, in my mind’s eye, years and years of office, shop and factory work stretching out before me. The attitude of those people, helpful though they may have thought they were being, had instilled in me the notion that I really wasn’t up to much, that I was in some way deficient. Now I know what is meant by a self-fulfilling prophecy. If children are told they cannot do this or that, then the chances are that they never will. To me education means always starting with the premise that kids are unique and social little beings, that they can do anything. But if they are treated as I was, only as fodder for a capitalist system, then in all probability they will become unhappy adults doing work that in their hearts they despise. That is what happened to me.
Heather Ball
We Stand for World Socialism
There is great confusion in the world today over the question of what is socialism. Our aim in the Socialist Party is to try to clear this up.
While Labour politicians talked about socialism, in practice they carried on running capitalism. They did introduce certain reforms which ameliorated the effects of some of the worst features of capitalism in the spheres of health, housing and family support. Collectively, these became known as the ‘Welfare State’ – but they were not socialism. The essential feature of capitalism, that very thing which makes the system one of exploitation and robbery of the mass of wage workers by the ruling class of capitalists, namely the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, this remained untouched. That did not stop the ruling class from denouncing Labour governments as ‘socialists’ or ‘communists’ at every opportunity. They made the most of their control of the media and almost all sources of information to imprint this ‘big lie’ on people’s minds.
The Socialist Party exposes the whole machinery of capitalist exploitation of the working-class. The Socialist Party does not oppose supporting reforms under capitalism. What we do not embrace reformism attempting to build support by allying with openly class collaborationist parties. Our generation is living through a fundamental transformation of society in which international capitalism must be displaced by socialism if civilisation is to thrive.
Socialism must involve the total transformation of social relations. This will mean:
1. The abolition of the private ownership of the means of production.
2. Elimination of competition and production for exchange value and its replacement by democratic planning and production for use.
3. Workers’ and people’s management of the economy and society.
4. The institutionalisation of mass forms of democracy, freedom of association and criticism. Progressive elimination of differences between manual and mental labour, town and country, men and women and between different races.
5.The abolition of wage labour.
6. The elimination of classes.
7. The disappearance of the state.
8. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
We stand for an end to the oppression and exploitation of man by man. We live in a world torn by crises and wars. We live in a society which puts a price tag on everything. Our generation is increasingly disillusioned. We seek new paths, new roads forward. We search for social change. The world can be changed. For our generation and for humanity it must be changed. As socialists we believe that this social ferment must be harnessed to the great task of transforming this society—of building a new world. We stand for a world which can eliminate poverty and hunger and war; a world in which freedom is more than a word in a textbook; a world in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the producers themselves and the wealth of mankind are available to all. We stand with the oppressed, with all those who struggle for a better world. Above all, we declare our full solidarity with our fellow-workers. Around the world humanity is saying “Enough” and is beginning to move. Though our lives and conditions be different; though we live in different parts of the world; though our struggles take different forms; ours is a common goal—an end to the oppression and exploitation of man by man. What democratic rights we have were not handed to us on a silver platter—they were won in struggle. For most working people democracy remains a word without meaning. We are cut off from the ability to make decisions affecting our own lives. The giant corporations determine all the key questions. What does democracy mean to those deprived of his or her heritage and birthright? Or to the worker whose strike is broken by the corporate controlled courts and police forces? Or to non-whites faced with racism? Or to the many who live in poverty, denied the social power to escape it? Or to women denied by law the right to control their bodies. Behind the facade of parliamentary democracy lies the fact of a fundamentally undemocratic distribution of power that is inherent in capitalism. The Socialist Party works to extend democracy to all areas of life.
How can the world be changed? Certainly no elite will serve the task. We do not want to replace one group of masters with another. Nor do we want the patronising assistance of those whose real interests lie with the present system. We must look to those whose interests lie in change—to the working people, the people who work in the factories and offices of our society. They built the society—and they too are cut off from power and progress by the tiny minority that owns the wealth. The bosses need the working people—but the workers don’t need the bosses. Despite the relative complacency of the working class, it is clear that their very life situation forces them to come repeatedly into conflict with the system. They find themselves in daily conflict with the employers in the struggle for decent wages and security. It is the people, when they see the need for real social change and are armed with socialist ideas, that will build world socialism.
Those who doubt that socialism would ever come about are challenged today by the existence of the world’s peoples who are clearly on the road to the most thoroughgoing social change in history. A new world can be created—a world which will put people before money, which will create a participatory democracy every level. The potential of mankind virtually limitless, if it is freed from economic and social oppression. People everywhere are beginning to break from the conservatism of the old order. New movements are being formed, new directions are being tried. A new generation faces the task of finding the means to take up the struggle which the old movements have failed to carry—to participate in the international movement for socialism. We are part of the world community of socialists. We have no illusions that the way will be easy, no visions of quick success. But the future belongs to humanity and socialism.
The Coming Catastrophe
A report, which took the form of a survey of 222 leading scientists from 52 countries, conducted by the international sustainability network Future Earth, found that
world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the existence of humans, because the sum of the effects of the crises is much greater than their individual impacts, according to a new global study.
Climate breakdown and extreme weather, species loss, water scarcity and a food production crisis are all serious in themselves, but the combination of all five together is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity unless swift action is taken.
The links among the crises are clear in many cases, but the methods the world has chosen to try to solve them do not take account of these connecting factors. For instance, extreme heatwaves can add to global heating, because they release vast amounts of stored carbon from affected ecosystems, in a feedback loop. It has been seen clearly in the Australian bushfires, which are already contributing significantly to the store of carbon in the atmosphere.
The links do not stop there: as the heatwaves damage natural ecosystems, killing off wildlife and flora, they also lead to greater water scarcity, and in turn damage agriculture. These combined effects exacerbate the harm done to people struggling with food and water shortages, in a vicious cycle.
Faced with these crises in nature individually, it could be possible to fix the problems causing them. But confronted with multiple interlinked emergencies that in combination amplify one another’s impacts, people are facing unprecedented dangers and many communities cannot cope.
Future Earth, found that the responses to these emergencies by governments, civil society, business and institutions did not recognise their interlinked nature. Trying to solve the problems individually, without taking account of the “cascading” impacts, was likely to be ineffective, the scientists said.
More than a third of the scientists surveyed said the five crisis types would worsen one another “in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse”.
While the risks are amplified when they are connected, so too are the solutions, however. Whenever action is taken to remedy environmental problems, the benefits also cascade: for instance, nurturing wildlife and flora in a wetland can also reduce water pollution and soil erosion, and protect crops against storm damage, alleviating water scarcity and allowing for more food production.
“Despite the ubiquity of connections [between these looming crises] many scientists and policymakers are embedded in institutions that are used to thinking and acting on isolated risks, one at a time,” the report says. “This needs to change, to thinking about risks as connected.”
The authors of the report, “call on the world’s academics, business leaders and policymakers to pay urgent attention to these five global risks, and to ensure they are treated as interacting systems, rather than addressed one at a time in isolation.”
The report also warned of social problems that scientists identified as potential major risks for the future. These included the rise of populism and fake news, trends in migration and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Poor UK
The proportion of people with a job who live in poverty went up for the third consecutive year in 2018 to a record high, according to a report that shows rising levels of employment have failed to translate into higher living standards.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said while paid employment reduces the risk of poverty, about 56% of people living in poverty were also in a working household in 2018, compared with 39% 20 years ago.
Seven in 10 children in poverty are now in a working family, the charity’s annual UK poverty report found.
Single-parent families have been the worst affected by the trend of wages falling behind living costs, it added. Working single parents accounted for three in 10 households in poverty in 2018, compared with two in 10 in 2011.
The JRF’s executive director, Claire Ainsley, said it was an indictment of recent government policy that the number of people in poverty across the whole workforce jumped from 9.9% in 1998 to 12.7% in 2018.
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said: “The government must crack down on business models based on poverty pay and insecure jobs. Zero-hour contracts should be banned and the minimum wage must go up to at least £10 an hour right away.”
Approximately 14 million people are in poverty in the UK – more than one in five of the population, including 4 million children and 2 million pensioners, up by 400,000 and 300,000 respectively over the past five years.
A family is classified as being in poverty if it has an income of less than 60% of the median income for their family type, after housing costs. A family’s income includes earnings from employment, self-employment, state benefits and inheritances.
The report said people were more likely to be in poverty if they lived in certain parts of the UK, in a family where there is a disabled person or a carer, if they work in the hospitality or retail sector, or if they live in rented housing.
The worst-hit regions were London, the north of England, the Midlands and Wales, while the lowest poverty rates were found in the south of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the JRF said.
The charity was especially concerned about the rise in young people living with their parents, who in a previous era would have started to buy a house and start a family of their own, which it named “concealed households”.
Twenty years ago, 20% (2.4 million) of 20- to 34-year-olds lived with a parent or guardian. That proportion rose to 30% in 2018, affecting 3.9 million people, the JRF found.
The report describes in-work poverty as a “critical issue for our economy” and calls for action to reduce job insecurity, lower housing costs and increase earnings for low-paid workers.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/07/uk-live-poverty-charity-joseph-rowntree-foundation
Conservation for who?
Investigators sent to northern Congo by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to assess allegations of human rights abuses gathered “credible” evidence from different sources that hunter-gatherer Baka tribespeople living close to a proposed national park had been subjected to violence and physical abuse from the guards over years. Armed ecoguards partly funded by the conservation group WWF to protect wildlife in the Republic of Congo beat up and intimidated hundreds of Baka pygmies living deep in the rainforests.
Stephen Corry, the director of tribal defence NGO Survival International, said: “This UNDP report is a devastating indictment which should spell the end of WWF’s model of ‘fortress conservation’ which has caused so much damage to people and the environment throughout Africa.
The allegations included Baka tribespeople being beaten by the ecoguards, the criminalisation and illegal imprisonment of Baka men, summary evictions from the forest, the burning and destruction of property, and the confiscation of food. The UNDP’s social and environmental compliance unit heard how the ecoguards allegedly treated the Baka men as “sub-human” and humiliated some Baka women by forcing them to take off their clothes and “be like naked children”.
Stephen Corry, the director of tribal defence NGO Survival International, said: “This UNDP report is a devastating indictment which should spell the end of WWF’s model of ‘fortress conservation’ which has caused so much damage to people and the environment throughout Africa.
The allegations included Baka tribespeople being beaten by the ecoguards, the criminalisation and illegal imprisonment of Baka men, summary evictions from the forest, the burning and destruction of property, and the confiscation of food. The UNDP’s social and environmental compliance unit heard how the ecoguards allegedly treated the Baka men as “sub-human” and humiliated some Baka women by forcing them to take off their clothes and “be like naked children”.
The report says: “These beatings occur when the Baka are in their camps along the road as well as when they are in the forest. They affect men, women and children. Other reports refer to ecoguards pointing a gun at one Baka to force him to beat another and guards taking away the machetes of the Baka, then beating them with those machetes.
“There are reports of Baka men having been taken to prison and of torture and rape inside prison. The widow of one Baka man spoke about her husband being so ill-treated in prison that he died shortly after his release. He had been transported to the prison in a WWF-marked vehicle.”
The draft report adds: “The violence and threats are leading to trauma and suffering in the Baka communities. It is also preventing the Baka from pursuing their customary livelihoods, which in turn is contributing to their further marginalisation and impoverishment.” The report adds: “Baka men find they can no longer go into the forest to obtain honey. They fear that they are no longer able to trap small animals without running the risk of being severely punished by the ecoguards. There are numerous reports of Baka caught in the forest being beaten.”
The UNDP acted after it received appeals from the Baka in 2018. One, signed by people in Mbaye village, said: “They ban us from going to the forest. If we make camps in the forest the ecoguards burn them down. Many Baka are dead today. Children are getting thinner. We are already finished off with the lack of forest medicines. We tried to tell our difficulties to the WWF but they do not accept them. They just tell us we cannot go to the forest.”
Local Congolese WWF officials interviewed by the UNDP team “acknowledged the evidence of abuse against the Baku” by the guards, says the report. “Such occurrences were presented as isolated incidents due to the existence of a few bad apples among the ecoguards in what was otherwise a successful operation. A WWF staff member … explained that these incidences were occurring because of the psychological ramifications of putting someone in a uniform and giving him a gun, which for some men represents a licence to commit abuse.”
he $21.4m flagship Tridom 11 project in northern Congo set up in 2017 with money from the WWF, UNDP, the European commission, US and Congolese governments and the Global Environment Facility, as well as logging and palm oil conglomerates, includes as its centrepiece a 1,456 sq km area of forest known as Messok Dja. This global biodiversity hotspot is rich in wildlife, including elephants, gorillas and chimpanzees, and has been lived in and used for the hunting of small game by the semi-nomadic Baka tribes for millennia.
Investigators identified multiple failures to adhere to human rights policies and standards, and said little consideration had been given to the impact of the project on the Baka peoples.
Not only were communities given little information that their customary land was to be turned into a protected area, but funders had assumed that the conservation project would bring environmental and social benefits, says the report.
Investigators also said they found no evidence that the UNDP had taken into account the risk of co-financing the project with palm oil and logging companies whose work by its nature threatens large-scale biodiversity loss.
“Logging, palm oil and tourism companies, as well as conservation NGOs are working together to steal Baka land. All the relevant UN policies and laws regarding respect for indigenous peoples and human rights were ignored from the beginning,” Stephen Corry explained.
The report strongly criticises the way conservation is practised in central Africa. “The goal of establishing Messok Dja as a protected area was pursued by following the established patterns of conservation projects in the Congo Basin, which largely exclude indigenous peoples and treat them as threats rather than partners,” it says.
The international NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) found that WWF had only consulted the Baka communities likely to be affected by the park seven years after the idea had been conceived and long after discussions with government and logging companies had begun.
“By then it was far too late in the process. Information provided to communities has been incomplete and provided late,” the FPP report said.
The Socialist Standard carried an article some years back on this topic
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2015/2010s/no-1334-october-2015/material-world-exiled-gardens-eden/