The Nation is the new God.

Throughout my lectures on Nationalism, I am becoming increasingly aware, that if you were to substitute the word “Nationalism” for “Religion”, the context and the surrounding wording, wouldn’t have to be modified, and we’d still end up with a perfectly rational statement.

Like Nationalism, religion relies on the rather solipsistic idea that we as a species are somehow special and important. Nationalism narrows the field down, to those who exist on a specific land mass, sometimes using religion to attempt to strengthen its otherwise weak premise; but religion, whilst casting its net further afield, nevertheless clings to the same arrogant notion that we are indeed special. To illustrate this point, I would ask you to try and locate the August 2010 edition of Scientific America, in which Kate Wong (an evolutionary specialist) shows that around 195,000 years ago, Homosapien became as close to extinction as we’ve ever came. Climate change, she argues, meant that our species had fallen to just 600 breeding couples. Somehow, beyond all comprehension, we survived, and we thrived. Around 50,000 years ago, we left Africa. We ventured into a vast unknown, and we conquered it. We suffered deaths by teeth, deaths by easily curable maladies, we suddenly hit a new phase in human and social evolution, when, on top of the simplistic tools we were devising alongside other species in the homo genus, we began making art, and tools that appear incredibly complex. Humanity, was suddenly starting to show signs of brilliance. But we were still under threat. Climate, Neanderthal, awful disease. They all played their part in bringing us to the edge of destruction many times over. These early humans didn’t care what land mass they were born on, or the colour of skin, or what happened to be your first language. And yet, Christianity seems to suppose that all of that hardship, that hundreds of thousands of years of exploration, disease, creativity and the brink of extinction, was all because the divine wanted to get us to the point where we could be Christians. It seems strikingly awful a presumption, that for 199,000 or so years of our history (it varies, whichever scientist you subscribe to) heaven looked on with indifference, as humanity struggled to survive… by the way, for those 198,000, the most testing in all our history, we managed to get through it without any divinely proscribed ‘objective moral basis’… and only in the last 2000 years, having ignored 198,000 years did it decide to get to know us, by giving a book to a bunch of illiterate warring desert tribesmen, on the same plot of land as huge oil reserves. Did Heaven not think ahead? It seems massively incompetent. The Chinese could read and write at this stage; why not given them the most important book known to man? Silly little myths in an attempt to attract a following.

Nationalism similarly uses easily discredited constructed and largely false myths to attempt to bind people. The rhetoric is very similar to religious rhetoric. It is exclusive, not inclusive. It is divisive, not binding. It can be threatening and forceful when it doesn’t get its own way.

Nationalism requires the individual submit to the will of the Nation. The Nation takes the place of God. The Nation becomes the reason to live. Prior to 1517, Europe cared little for national unity, and more for their submission to the God of Catholicism. Luther changed that, and suddenly people started to question things they’d never questioned before. They had never read a Bible in English. They had never questioned why they had to pay to save their souls from purgatory. From the moment Luther attached those The Ninety-Five Theses to the Church door in Wittenberg, the questioning began; and over the next couple of centuries, religious dogma took a knock that it couldn’t come back from. But people still desired something larger than themselves. This desire started the building of Nations. And the Nation; once drastically unimportant, now became a sort of spiritual haven for people who need to feel like they ‘belong’ to an exclusive club. Suddenly, humanity had a new abstraction that many of its members were willing to die for. The Nation replaced God.

It is both odd and a magnificent appraisal of the brilliance of our species, to me, that humanity desperately needs to look up to something abstract and beyond our realm of understanding, to cope with trying to understand what is essentially a chaotic, uncaring, and amoral universe. We create order, where order cannot be found in reality.

John Armstrong, writing in “Nations before Nationalism” argues that one influence on the emergence of Nations, was the nostalgia for a power beyond the simple State; the religious power of the past. Nations are of course vastly different, to Nations of the past. People try to cling to the idea of a Nation from what they’d consider a Golden age; the defeat of the Armada. The bravery of Boudica. It just so happens that these events took place on the plot of land we were all born on. We had no direct say or participation in them. Boudica certainly wasn’t fighting for England, she was fighting for a tribe. There has never been a time when the Nation wasn’t dynamic and ever changing. And yet Nationalism tries to grip on to a fleeting static moment. Capitalism means that the Nation State will always be at risk. Two competing concepts; Nation States and Capitalism, fighting for the same ground, will always produce division and resentment. Capitalism relies on open markets, on open borders, on little to no regulation. Nation States rely on tightly controlled borders and regulated markets for the sake of the ‘Native’ population. It is a continuous tug of war. The free movement of labour is a disaster for the Nation State.

The open flow of labour is to Nationalism, what the open flow of ideas and free thought is to Religion. Until very recently, free thought was considered heresy.

Religion is used at a very young age to indoctrinate early. The Palestinian Authority in 1994, reissued copies of a textbooks that were just full of anti-Jewish sentiment. A PA TV show for kids, based on Mickey Mouse, called Farfur, teaches kids hate. Kids are taught to pray until there is:

“world leadership under Islamic leadership”

And until that day comes, they must oppose at all times, the:

“oppressive invading Zionist occupation.”

- At my own secular primary school, we were made to say prayer every day and sing hymns. If we refused, we were sent out of the room. We were never taught to question what was being said, and I certainly didn’t hear the name “Darwin” until I was at least 12. Nations, in their quest to fill the void left by a dying God, also indoctrinate kids at a young age; the pledge of allegiance comes to mind. The celebrating of Columbus Day; a day to honour a violent thug who introduced mass genocide to an entire population. A strong educational framework, is vital for the perpetuation of weak National and Religious myths.

We have Deified our National Flag.
The Prophets of the Deified American National Flag, are Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Washington. They are almost worshiped. Their shortcomings and their obvious hypocrisies are ignored. The imagery of “Washington at Dorchester Heights” by Emanuel Leutze, shows an heroic-like stance of the young Washington, like a new age Saint, to be worshiped by everyone as they pledge allegiance. As a young America grew, in a World where religion was still key to political success, we see a whole host of literature combining religion with the new Republic, as if the new Republic were divinely ordained. The marching song of the Continental army, as it fought the British, happened to be:

Let tyrants shake their iron rods
And slavery clank her falling chains,
We fear them not, we trust in God
New England’s God forever reigns.

- Young Nations, in the 18th Century, needed God. But gradually, the Nation replaced God as the abstraction of choice among men.

To back up the authority for their myths and fairy tales, for their incomplete nonsense, and their, quite simply, invented bullshit, both Nationalism and Religion seem to point to an abstract concept, that is largely, and for the most part un-falsifiable. The problem with anything that is un-falsifiable, is that by definition, it is not testable. So, for something to be unable to be put to the test, and yet still used as a way to ‘bind’ and ‘divide’ humanity, it is dangerous. It deserves no power. A good theory is one that is falsifiable, and still manages to stand up to scrutiny….. like Natural Selection. Saying “there is an invisible monkey sat on my shoulder” is not falsifiable, and so any claims on morality, or to authority, should absolutely be considered ludicrous. Nationalism is similar, in that the concept of that which binds us as a Nation, is built on non-falsifiable abstractions. It is a passion for pedigree that has very little evidence to back it up. No nation is a stock of a single blood line, and it is perhaps more true to say that we are separated far more by economics than we ever are binded by Nationality. I can relate far more to a Pakistani gentleman of lower middle class origin, than I can with a a multi-millionaire member of the Tory cabinet, despite being born in the same Country, or even the same city.

The myths – take the legend of St George and the dragon in England – are quite evidently untrue, but for some reason Nationalists will use the imagery to conjure up passion for the ‘motherland’. Religions do the same. It is pretty obvious to any right thinking person, that given the intense lack of evidence other than a book, Jesus was not born to a virgin, nor did he rise from the dead and walk around for a few days. Sam Harris in ‘The End of Faith’ writes:

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When those beliefs are common, we call them religious; otherwise they are likely to be called “mad”, “psychotic”, or “delusional”.

- I cannot argue with this.

Nationalism and Religion; the EDL and the MAC; the British National Party and Extreme Islam; are all far more similar than they’d like to believe. Both thrive, by presenting anything that doesn’t fit the very narrow spectrum of their exclusive club, as ‘other’ and ‘other’ as ‘bad’. The rhetoric is identical, the targeted victims (be them people with slightly darker skin, or people who wish to marry someone of the same sex) will always be presented as a danger to society, whilst the religious or the Nationalistic will always present themselves as the saviours.

The Nation is the new God.

Thank heavens for the private sector!

Now that the awful public sector has rid itself of thousands of jobs, isn’t it great to see such a thriving private sector?

Well. No.

There are now more unemployed women, than in 1988. Overall unemployment is at its highest since 2009 – the middle of a recession. One in five people between 19 and 24 is unemployed. Average wages rose 2.8% since 2010, whilst RPI (inflation) rose 5.2%, which means wages actually fell by 2.4%.

So we were told that the private sector would take up the jobs lost in the public sector. George Osborne, back in November 2010, told the House of Commons in November that jobs created in the Private Sector, would:

Far outweigh

- the loss of jobs in the Public Sector.

Remember those “35 leading businessmen” that the Chancellor quoted, as some sort of economic demi-gods (I have always wondered why businessmen are considered economic experts. They are not economists. They have an agenda). They sent a letter to the Telegraph, in support of Osborne’s claim. They wrote:

“The private sector should be more than capable of generating additional jobs to replace those lost in the public sector.”

Here’s the letter in full. Tories loved to point to it, last year. I’m guessing they will be less forward in pointing to it, this year.

At its most optimistic, we we under the impression that someone who had spent their life in the public sector employed in a job they love, would now get a nice new job working the tills at McDonalds. Even that, failed to materialise. From April to June public sector job losses reached 111,000. The private sector jobs grew by 41,000. The problem is, the Government insisted in March, that only 20,000 (I say only, because it appears I have caught the bug of treating people and their jobs, as mere statistics – Am I becoming Tory? Dear God, I hope not) would lose their jobs. Unemployment rose by 80,000 in June.

Apparently, when you make people unemployed, and you devalue wages, it becomes impossible to kick start the demand needed for the private sector to thrive. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT!

EDF have just announced energy prices are to raise by 15%, despite profits of Euro1.2bn last year. Last month HSBC announced 30,000 jobs would be cut. They must be struggling right? Again….well. No. The first six months of the year saw their profits raise 3% on the previous six months, to $11.5bn. Seriously. We are now only concerned, as a World, with profit. This is emphasised in the fact that the moment HSBC announced it was kicking 30,000 people out of their livelihoods, their shares rose 3.4%. Rich people absolutely love to hear that they can make even more money now that there isn’t the annoying factor of having to pay 30,000 people.

It is clear that demand creates jobs. Not wealthy businessmen. Referring to them as “job creators” is a falsity of epic proportions. When you take money out of peoples pockets with a VAT rise, with the removal of universal services, with housing benefit cuts; you cut demand in the process. Giving the wealthiest few a tax break isn’t going to change that.

When growth is downgraded, almost on a daily basis, they insist it is Labour’s fault, Europe’s fault, the snow’s fault. No, it is the fault of holding dear to the heart a dangerous Freidman-ite economic philosophy. As with HSBC mentioned above; the epitome of the thought process that leads to this kind of system, is that the abstract concept of the “market” is deemed to be improving, regardless of how many jobs are lost. Shares in HSBC increase, as 30,000 jobs are cut. There is a dramatic evil in that process.

Labour MPs and Shadow Ministers on Twitter insist on questioning whether Strike action is necessary. They should be ashamed to refer to themselves as ‘Labour’. A Labour party, who have seemingly made absolutely no impact on the political landscape since 2010, are quietly licking their wounds as a Tory party who have no legitimate mandate to carry out the ideological attacks they are inflicting, get away with it. If we don’t have the support of a half arsed Labour Party unsure of where its allegiances lie, given it’s past thirteen years of total capitulation to the financial sector, nor do we have the support of a weak Lib Dem party who cowardly abstain when they disagree with Tory policy, then Unions are the only other way to go. There is no other option. A very radical government, requires a very radical opposition. Instead, Labour seem to be constantly worried about their ties to the Union movement, rather than pro-actively and jointly making the case against deep and vicious austerity. The Tories have cleverly managed to set the political discourse in favour of a mythical, broken public sector, and away from the real broken sector; the financial sector.

Yesterday we saw that same Financial Sector produce a rogue trader responsible for UBS losing $2bn on unauthorised dodgy dealings. Have they learnt nothing? UBS was also responsible in 2009, for helping wealthy Americans set up offshore accounts to avoid tax. Growth for the sake of the wealthy, is not real growth. The banks have been let off the hook, by having the support of government like ours, who shift the blame from them, to the constantly demonised public sector.

If anything, we are finding out, for the second time in thirty years, that harsh and forced Neoliberalism is a dangerous dogma. Monetary policy does not pull Nations out of sovereign debt crises. It never has.

Unemployment – Done.
Dismantled NHS – Done.
Bend over to be fucked by the banks – Done.
Stagnating wages – Done.
Provoke riots – Done.
VAT rise – Done.
Pull any support for poorer children (EMA) – Done.
Close as many youth centres as possible – Done.
Close libraries – Done.
Make people work until they’re basically dead, before giving them a pension – Done.
Demonise disabled people – Done.
Rising inflation – Done.
Threaten Unions – Done.
Burden of debt created by wealthy, slammed onto the shoulders of Nation’s 18 year olds – Done.
Tax cuts for the wealthy – Done.
All within 15 months.

It makes Thatcher look like a Socialist in comparison.

Tea Party: Pro-death.

The Republican debates have been quite an eye opener. I knew that those who subscribe to the Tea Party way of life, are pretty vicious in the ideological leanings, but I didn’t really know to what extent their bile was able to rise. It turns out, they are an utter disgrace. A cancer on the fabric of society. The worst type of person. The reason I take such a strict approach to the Tea Party, is that they are extremists. My staunch and outspoken Atheism takes the shape of a bullet aimed at the incompatibilities between dogmatic ideology and the humanity as a collective entity looking to survive.

The Tea Party simply represent a vicious dogmatic obsession with their ideology, which happens to be unabridged Capitalism. An ideology that insists massive Corporations are “job creators” (a phrase I hate. Demand creates jobs. Not Corporations). The Tea Party is a representation of everything that is wrong with the right wing.

During a debate, Ron Paul was asked a question about a man who has a good job, but has no medical insurance, and ends up in a coma, what should happen? Predictably, Ron Paul doesn’t particularly answer the question, he just insists the guy SHOULD have medical insurance. I am fully aware that right winged Americans believe healthcare is a luxury rather than what I believe it is; a necessity. But what struck me, to the point of speechlessness, which slowly became a distinct sense of disbelief and disgust, was when the guy asking the questions said “Should we let the man die then?” to which the Tea Party audience, yelled “Yes!!“
- This mentality, is extremist. It is taking an ideology to the extreme. Capitalism, like Socialism, when taken to its limits, is extreme ideology; in this case it becomes extreme when it decides who lives and who dies. Ron Paul started his question, by suggesting that any form of tax payer funded healthcare is Socialist, and that’s bad. This is a rather extreme position, because it fails to take into account results. The system is judged on how strictly it adheres to its ideological dogma, rather than the success or failure.

Money, in a Capitalist society is based on nothing. Actually it is based on debt. So its power comes from a collective concept of what it means. Life on the other hand, is not a concept. It transcends ideology. It is far more important than ideology. The ideology requires a constant insistence that what we own, is what makes us who we are.

So, let’s look at the results of two rather polarised healthcare systems. The UK has a Nationalised Health Service. In 2009, the US had a largely Private Health Service, in which your ability to pay (a concept) is far more important than your life itself (reality).
Infant mortality rate (probability of dying between birth and age 1 per 1000 live births)
UK: 5
USA: 7

Under-five mortality rate (probability of dying by age 5 per 1000 live births)
UK: 5
USA 8

Adult mortality rate (probability of dying between 15 and 60 years per 1000
UK: 77
USA: 106

Case detection rate for all forms of tuberculosis (%):
UK: 94
USA: 89

Per capita total expenditure on health at average exchange rate (US$)
UK: 3285
USA: 7410

Life expectancy at birth (years)
UK: 80
USA: 79

General government expenditure on health as a percentage of total government expenditure.
UK: 15.1%
USA: 18.7%

A quick analysis suggests that the UK pays less per capita, our government spends less on our health system than the US, and yet we have “Socialised” healthcare, we’re living longer, and our children are less likely to die at a young age. And yet, all of this is grossly overlooked in favour of ideological dogma regardless of how backward, and ultimately deadly it is.

It isn’t just when compared to the Nationalised health system of the UK. The Nationalised health system of Norway provides equally as disastrous results for Tea Party enthusiasts. When a man is ran down by a car, and the first thought in the collective mind of a Capitalist society is “oh my god!! I hope….he has insurance”, who then walk away when it turns out he doesn’t, one has to ask ourselves how far they are willing to go? Is collective policing wrong? Should we have fire insurance? If our house is burning down, and we’re too poor because our insurance bills include health, road, and police, should we just accept that the fire department shouldn’t be burdened with our current predicament? Should we expect to get arrested for leaving our house if we haven’t paid our road insurance? How is that freedom? That seems to be to be substituting the ‘tyranny’ of Government for the tyranny of big business – a real tyranny because it has unaccountable, unelected powers. A two tier society, in which you’re absolutely second class if you are not propertied, is my idea of hell.

According to a World Health Organisation ranking list of 2000, the US Health System ranks 11. The UK 18th, and the USA…… a pathetic 37th. Even though, the US spends most per capita than any other Nation in that ranking list. Above the US, ranks Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, UAE, Andorra and Malta. The most powerful Nation on Earth, has a worse healthcare record, than Saudi Arabia; a desert. Japan is number one for Life Expectancy and 70% of healthcare costs in Japan are paid by the Government. The cost of an MRI scan in Japan is $US 98. In America, it is $US 1500. There is no excuse for it. A healthcare system based on the ideological position that a doctor should check your insurance before he saves your life, is doomed to fail every time. A system should be judged not on its allocated “ism” but on its success. Private health insurance is not benefiting mankind. It benefits one or two wealthy people, and a host of United Health shareholders, with private health insurance money then ending up in Rick Perry’s campaign pot.

It is interesting to note that the same group of people cheered in delight last week, as it was announced during a debate that candidate Rick Perry has overseen 234 executions in Texas since becoming Governor. It would seem that State sponsored healthcare that ultimately (as shown above) saves lives is Socialist and evil, whilst State sponsored murder is a perfectly acceptable way to spend tax dollars. This includes the execution of Cameron Todd Willigham, a man who was accused of setting fire to his family home, killing his three young children. Before he was executed, a scientist wrote to the parole board to point out the flaws in the original case against Willingham. Perry ignored the concerns, and Willingham was executed in 2004. In 2005, an investigation was set up by a new 9 member Texas Forensic Science Commission. Just before they started their hearings into the case, Perry fired all 9 members. Another nine of the USA’s top fire scientists say the science was faulty in convicting Willingham. It is quite possible that Willigham was innocent. People in that crowd last week, cheered the death of at least one innocent man. Pro-life apparently. What a disgrace to humanity.

If anyone tells you that the US healthcare system is the best in the World; be sure to point out that it isn’t. That it isn’t even in the top ten. Or top twenty. Or top thirty. That it barely reaches the top 40. That your children are more likely to die young in the US, than in the United Arab Emirites or Macau (I’m not even sure where Macau is). But be sure to let them know that if they want to execute someone based on flimsy science, Texas is the place to be!

The great Gore Vidal once said:

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

- This is true of the religion of American Capitalism.

I truly feel for America if a Republican ends up in the White House.

Why I am a Marxist

What is it that makes me a Marxist? What underlying principle guides my mindset in that direction? Those are the questions I have been asking myself, and I have come to a very basic conclusion. I am not an activist, I like to think, and to try to understand and to articulate the conclusions I come to. So, what conclusions have I come to on this specific area of my min? What is it that makes me a Marxist?

It isn’t about waiting for the “revolution” to come. It isn’t about nurturing an insane idea about a conspiracy in which global power and wealth is controlled by the Bilderbergs. It isn’t about praying every night for the state to control the means of production. It isn’t about ironically displaying a Che t-shirt everywhere I go, or trying to put myself into the exact same camp as Trotsky, or Lenin, or putting a little cross on a political spectrum. It isn’t about wishful rhetoric on stalls across England, handing out Socialist Worker leaflets and declaring that Capitalism is about to fall. It isn’t about turning a blind eye to the fact that thousands of people live off state handouts, purely because they do not wish to work. It isn’t about stooping to the absurdity that the Right Wing often stoops to when it points out the Soviet Union as the failure of Marxism or points to Cuba as the evil of Socialism, because if it were, I could point to Reagan an Thatcher’s support for Pinochet and right winged murderous thugs throughout Central America as proof of the brutality of Capitalism; but i’d be wrong to do so. What makes me a Marxist in the most basic terms, is the necessity to distrust authority that bases itself purely on abstractions, in this case; wealth. Capitalism in this sense, is like religion; we are expected to submit to a higher authority, an authority that actually doesn’t really exist and is purely a construction of the time period that we inhabit. If we look at that constructed power structure from “outside” of the confines of the context of our historical position, we must laugh at the absurdity of our apparent necessity to hand our lives over to people who pay the lowest possible fee for our labour, whilst extracting and squeezing as much out of us. It is degrading, and it certainly isn’t “freedom”.

To expand a little on that, it is the sense that the very foundation of Capitalism – the owner of a business is entitled to the largest piece of the profits, because he invested capital in the first place – is a man made ideal that is loaded with flaws. I will attempt to articulate a couple of the flaws I see.

Firstly, capital by itself is pointless. Capital must fuse with labour to be worth anything. Labour without capital is not pointless. Labour can build, create, innovate, feed and save lives. Capital by itself can do nothing. Capital is a seed in a dark room on a table. Labour is the soil, the sun, and the water. Therefore, the guiding force and the most important aspect of the deal between capital and labour, is labour. If my boss leaves the workplace for a week, the place still runs just fine. If the entire workforce leaves for a week, the company will be in financial peril. That is the practical example of the notion that labour is the most important force in the productive World. Profit on the initial investment, is simply interest, created by someone else. It is not productive in itself. Buying a road and charging people to use it, or buying a house and renting it out, is not productive. Capital is not productive. The fact that it is then passed down to the children of the Capitalists – which makes the claim that Capitalism is based on individual merit, seem laughably hypocritical – suggests a class consciousness within the Capitalist classes; a desire to perpetuate their class attacking meritocratic principles in a sort of Capitalist paradox in which inter-family socialism is desirable, as long as it doesn’t spread beyond their own class.

We talk of productivity of the workforce, not of the capitalists. The labour of the man with the capital is irrelevant. He will usually monopolise some sort of administration work within the company, which need not be monopolised. Apart from that initial injection of capital, he is largely pointless. Stock market speculation and gambling is also not a productive use of capital. The inherent flaws in this system, Marx believed would eventually lead to its downfall.

It is easy for a working public to take shots at people on benefits, as it is all the media tends to talk about. We seem though to turn a blind eye to Corporate tax cuts. It is odd, because people at the top of the Corporate ladder will have used a thriving public sector – education, health service, roads – at some time in their lives which provided the framework necessary to climb the ladder to great wealth. By announcing Corporate tax cuts, the Tory Government is effectively burning the ladder up which their donors climbed to make it difficult for others to follow, destroying opportunity for the next generation, whilst at the same time ensuring that those who used the system previously, now pay as little back into it as possible. Corporate tax cuts represent a huge piece of the Welfare pie, going to the people who need it least. That, is wrong.

Secondly, Marxists recognise the key element of Capitalism is the accumulation of capital. You set out in the market place with capital, you buy labour, you sell your product or service, and you make your capital back with more in profit. All well and good, until you hit what Marx termed as a limit to capital. Capitalism doesn’t deal too well with limits. Limits can include competition, and to get around that limit, capital will buy up competition until there is very little left. It is the reason why large coffee producers can flood African markets, buy up the small family run coffee producers, and put the staff to work for pittance in factories in poor conditions, working extremely long hours. Capital needs to consolidate power. Democracy used to be a limit. Capital bought democracy when it became the norm for multinationals and the super rich to fun political parties and candidates. It is the reason why 81% of the $19,000,000 that was spent on the 2006 election from the big oil lobby, went to the Republican Party in 2006. That money was well spent it seems, given that in the run up to the Bush Administrations refusal to sign up to Kyoto – the climate change UN protocol – briefing emails were leaked from US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky office before meetings which thank ExxonMobil executives “active involvement” in framing climate change policy. Which is odd, because in 2003, Exxon’s head of public affairs, Nick Thomas told a House of Lords Science Committee:

“I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto.”

He lied. The Bush Administrations climate policy, was dictated to them, by the most powerful and wealthiest oil companies in the US.

Democracy isn’t the only limit to be overcome. The limit in 2007/08 was 25 years worth of stagnating wages for everyone apart from the very wealthy, whose wages increased year on year in Western democracies, most notably in the UK and US. To ensure demand across the marketplace continued to thrive despite wages stagnating, Capitalism blew down this limit, by introducing a market for very very easy credit. The problem with this is that money is now entirely backed by debt and nothing else. The mortgage markets didn’t fail; Capitalism failed. This means that subprime mortgages and the securities that backed them were just products of a system that has crises after crises built into it. Don’t be fooled by the right winged rhetoric that instantly blamed and attacked the public sector and the welfare state. This sovereign debt crises is a crises of Capitalism that has been cleverly shifted away from the people who caused it (people who started off with vast amounts of capital, destroyed the system that allowed them the opportunity to make that fortune, and then left quietly with vast amounts of capital, whilst the rest of us are told we must suffer austerity) an onto the most vulnerable – those who do no have vast amounts of capital or political influence. Capitalism is amoral. Morality is not a part of Capitalism. That is why regulation is necessary.

And lastly, I am deeply suspicious of the very concept of Capitalism in regard to the individual worker. The idea being that the Capitalist advertises a job vacancy because he needs labour to fertilise his capital and gain the profit. The worker needs a job. The Capitalist buys the labour of the worker. The worker consents to allow the Capitalist to live comfortably off the back of his labour, for a very small amount of money – the lowest possible amount actually because the supply of workers is far greater than the demand for production. The worker consents to this rather odd deal, because if he doesn’t, he will starve to death. An example of this can be seen with “Family Dollar”, a chain of US discount stores. The CEO Howard Levine took home base salary of $948,654, a cash bonus of $1,894,615, stocks granted of $1,338,224, and options granted of $1,308,528. So you’d think, with wealth like that, Levine would have the human decency to pay his staff a decent wage, especially given that they are expected to work such long hours? Well, no, unsurprisingly he doesn’t treat his staff all that well. Most of the staff who are expected to work over time, are designated as “managers” at “Family Dollar“. This means that the company can get around the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, by designating the “managers” (who weren’t paid any more) as “exempt“, which meant they do not have to pay them over time. As employees struggle to cope with the horribly low pay and extremely long hours, “Family Dollar” managed to pay out $58 million in dividends in 2010. When workers have to take such awful jobs, working for horrendous bosses, simply to make ends meet, the scales are tipped firmly in the balance of the employer. The deal therefore, is not equal to start with. The Capitalist is driven by the desire to increase profits and buy a lovely new car, by using someone elses labour, to attach to his capital, and them claim some universal right over the product of that labour. The worker on the other hand is driven by survival, despite the fact that he is far more productive than the capitalist. If the business goes bust, it is more than likely that the Capitalist will have money saved, he will certainly have the experience needed to get a job in which he wont have to go long without a regular income. His workers on the other hand, having provided their old boss with the money he saved and now lives on, through their labour rather than his, will now have to either spend whatever little savings they’re likely to have on getting through a period of unemployment without starving, which could be twice as difficult if he lives in the USA and doesn’t have health insurance, and finds himself with a terrible illness.
One of the fathers of Capitalism, Turgot summed up it here:

“In all types of labour, it necessarily follows that the salary of the worker is limited to what is necessary for survival.”

In other words, when more people exist then wages are higher because the pool of labour is smaller, when less labour is needed, wages will slowly fall not because a worker is working less hard, but because a Capitalist can use the threat of starvation to insist on paying his staff less money. Capitalism posits that people are commodities.

To conclude and answer my original question; I am a Marxist because I do not believe the initial investment of capital into a business venture, provides a God-given right to claim the highest wage or the power of the business. The fact that we see this profit making right, as God-given, leads to dangerous games played by a very small amount of people who have accumulated great wealth, an it affects us all. When I sit back and really think about the current Euro zone crises, and the panic in the US over the raising of the debt ceiling, I wonder how humanity is so close to crumbling. We invented money. We invented the concepts of wealth and sovereign debt and price and wage and individual debt and stocks and we seem to think of it all as divine; untouchable; something beyond our grasp, when in actuality, it is all just one big illusion, an abstract concept, a web that we spun and eventually got stuck in. Productive people are still as numerous as they were in the 1990s, there is still the same amount of land, but there is an abundance of debt-backed money rather than savings. The difference is, productive people and land actually exist in reality, debt-backed money and capital on its own doesn’t.

That is why I am a Marxist.

A Neoliberal Attack…

Religious people are far more likely to engage in conversation about religion with me, after I mention that I have studied Philosophy and take an interest in Theology. I think they presume I will agree with their thoughts and perhaps provide reasoning to their illogical beliefs. I think they imagine that one can only speak with conviction on matters of religion, if one is religious in an academic sense. The same is true of many walks of life, not least the public sector in England. Because Tory MPs are essentially a part of the public sector, they seem to believe they have the right to talk of all public sector workers, as if they’re the official spokespeople for the public sector.

On Question Time last week, John Redwood, Tory MP for Wokingham appeared delighted as he informed the audience that as a public sector worker, he would be working longer and putting more money into his pension pot as a result of his Government’s reforms, and he was proud of it. The reason John Redwood can seem so pleased with himself that he is accepting the changes to his pension and retirement age, is because on top of the £65,000 a year he earns as an MP, he also claimed a hell of a lot of money, that regular public sector workers could only dream of. Yet, Mr Redwood seems to think his claims were perfectly reasonable, as suggested on his own personal blog:

In 2007-8 I claimed a total of £105,917. This made me the 19th cheapest MP, claiming around £40,000 less than the average. One fifth of that claim was the mortgage interest costs, the Council Tax and service charge and maintenance on a bedsit flat in Pimlico. It is entirely used to enable me to work longer days in London when there is important Parliamentary business. During my ownership it has only been slept in by myself. I do not need it for any other purpose. The deposit and repayments of capital are of course paid for out of my taxed income.

- We should be thanking him, for claiming in one year, more than a teacher is likely to earn in five years. We should be happy that tax payers money is going to fund the “maintenance” on his Pimlico flat. We should be grateful that the money spent on his mortgage interest (tax payers money) will go to buying a flat he can then sell when he retires, making a handsome profit, and giving nothing back to the public, whilst his party continue to force harsh austerity. One does wonder what the purpose of his 2004/5 claim of £13,305 for his luxurious house in Berkshire (a £1,000,000 estate which he fully owns), including £168 and £112 for his lawn to be reseeded, and how that is “entirely used to enable me to work longer days in London when there is important Parliamentary business” was needed for, but nevertheless, i’m sure it’s just as noble as the necessity of “maintenance” claims on the MILLIONAIRE’S flat in London. Thank you John “Jesus Christ” Redwood. You are a hero.

A man in the audience pointed out that the Private Sector has forced through harsh pension reforms, and so the Public Sector should do the same and “modernise”. The audience were alive with cheer! But it got me thinking; why is it always the public sector that is made to look as though it is in the wrong, like a Soviet leftover, trailing behind the private sector. People seem happy to accept the notion that if the private sector is screwing people over, then so should the public sector! Why is no one arguing that the private sector should be actively forced to lift itself up to the level of the public sector? As far as I can discern, over the past twenty five years it has been an out of control short-term wealth obsessed private sector that has been so majestically out of control, that when the bubble finally cracked, the public sector had to take the hit.

Let’s look at examples of the private sector providing a “modernising” model that the public sector ought to apparently follow:

Lloyds TSB is currently 43.4% owned by the taxpayer. Yet, its new Chief Executive, Antonio Horta-Osorio received a signing on fee of £4.1mn in shares, £516,000 in money, and an annual salary of £1.6mn with a yearly bonus of £2.5mn.

A wonderful company named Trafigura, in 2010 leased a ship called the Probo Koala to a company called Compagnie Tommy, with the intent to dump toxic waste at a waste disposal sight in Amsterdam. The site raised their prices by 20 times that quoted, because the toxic waste was deemed to be far more dangerous that Compagnie Tommy and Trafigura first suggested. So, a new company set up on the Ivory Coast agreed to take the waste, for a very cheap sum. Trafigura did not investigate just why this new company was offering to take the waste for such a cheap price. After the waste was dumped, ten people died from poisoning, and over 100,000 became ill. Trafigura said they’d tested the waste, and it wasn’t toxic, and that they had no idea why so many people became ill. The Dutch tested the waste and found it contained two tonnes of Hydrogen Sulfide. A killer gas. Trafigura spent three years publicly denying the waste they dumped in a poverty stricken area of Africa, was not enough to kill people. Suddenly, Trafigura offered to pay a massive amount of compensation of Euro152,000,000 to the Ivory Coast (which didn’t go to the victims) with the instruction that on acceptance of the compensation, they couldn’t be prosecuted or causing death in the courts. The reason they did this, is because The Guardian obtained – through Wikileaks – private company emails from Trafigura in which they quite plainly accept, as early as 2006 before they’d even chosen the Ivory Coast to dump the waste, that the waste was indeed dangerous.

According to the Guardian, Diageo PLC, the company that makes Guiness, in 2009 paid as little as 2% tax on its profits, despite racking in £2bn in profits. Diageo pays its Chief Executive £3.6mn salary. To fill this gap, it takes 20,000 ordinary British households per year.

The term “Modernising” has come to mean subtle privatising of key services in recent years. An economic laissez faire that apparently promised to solve all of our problems. The outsourcing of cleaning from NHS to private companies with £94mn worth of contacts, led to such declining standards between ’83-’00, that an extra emergency £31mn was injected into cleaning in the NHS, with the a Patient Environment Action Team (PEAT), set up to visit hospitals to ensure standards were being met; the Private sector had failed. By 2000, only 20% of NHS Trusts had achieved an acceptable level of cleanliness.

The banks aren’t the only sector that have required government bail outs in recent history. In 2002, British Energy (privatised under the Tories) had to approach the government for a £410mn bail out to finance its debts.

News of the World. I believe this doesn’t need elaborating on.

Private sector bonuses and high CEO pay, is more harmful to you and I, than highly paid private sector bosses. When money accumulates in the hands of very few people within the private sector (we spend more in the private sector, than on taxes), the cost gets passed on to us. The Bush tax cuts, along with the deregulation of the financial sector didn’t go toward greater investment, it went to increasing the pay and bonuses of those at the top, and the cost was passed on to us, through the creation of a very easy credit system. We all know how that turned out.

British Airways, under the incompetent management of Willie Walsh faced massive fines (record breaking fine actually) for price fixing, long drawn out industrial disputes with the cabin crew which the media helped by describing the cabin crew as greedy, despite 2000 of their workmates being laid off, the company making huge losses, and Willie Walsh taking in a 6% inflation busting pay rise, taking it to £743,000 and £1.1mn in deferred share bonuses. Enough to keep at least ten people on at BA, who otherwise lost their job. The media will never paint the boss as the greedy incompetent bastard in this kind of dispute. It will always find a child at Heathrow, crying, because the cabin crew strike means he wont see his mummy this Christmas. The media do not tend to side with the unions, they never will, and so neither will the ill-informed public.

Do we need to even mention the banking system? A particularly ironic take on this whole new “private good public bad” era of austerity we are living in.

Thankfully we have the Government’s new corporate team, who will help him “stand up to business”. On the panel, inevitably, is Philip Green, Topshop mogul who owns Taveta Investments, which he put in his wife’s name, who happens to live in Monaco, thus avoiding £285mn in tax. He also paid his family £1.2bn, taken from a loan in the name of his company, thus cutting Corporation tax because the loan’s interest charges were offset against profit. Oh and he also uses sweatshops in Mauritius, whilst claiming his obscene bonuses are justified because he “takes risks”. Another on the panel, is Justin King, Chairman of Sainsbury’s. In his first year, he received free shares worth over £500,000, whilst axing the £120 christmas bonus for his staff. After his staff didn’t receive their christmas bonus, King awarded his wealthy finance director £357,000 worth of shares. King was also offered 1,000,000 free shares, if he met specific targets the year before. He didn’t meet the targets, the company’s profits fell 2.9% and yet he still took home 86% of the promised shares. He will be given the same year on year, on top of his £500,000+ a year salary.

We all know that the private sector has the potential to deliver fantastic opportunities, despite the fact that its raison d’etre is unjustifiable power and wealth in the hands of people who simply injected the first dose of capital required to kick start the specific business, as if that initial injection of capital somehow creates a universal, unbreakable law, like gravity, that requires the majority of the subsequent profit and the decisions required to move the business forward, be placed in the hands of the person who injected that capital. It’s a bit of a flawed and odd concept that people just tend to accept. But, it does create opportunity (though it doesn’t necessarily have to be the only way of creating opportunity). The downside, is unregulated greed. The public sector is a constant target of abuse from the source of that greed, and the politicians that the greed of the private sector can buy. Corportocracy at its finest and most dangerous.

Isn’t it about time a Politician had the balls to stand up and say the Private Sector over the past thirty years has spiraled disastrously out of control, and perhaps needs to be able to pay people a decent living wage, as opposed to bringing the public sector down to the unacceptable level of the private sector?

This could be 1983

The Conservatives haven’t changed. It is true that they are the epitome of what it means to be wealthy, privileged, and have an in-built mechanism of contempt for anybody who isn’t wealthy and privileged. I find their politics to be vicious and nasty, and their economics to be self serving and hypocritical. They are typical of the type who wish to use a system to climb to the heights they have, and then burn the ladder up which they or their family before them, climbed.

They will always use the “deficit” (which isn’t that bad) to justify the unjustifiable, simply because no one except a tiny band of elite scumbags will ever accept their economic principles. Libertarianism is dangerous and unhealthy to a civilised society. It is built on the premise of judging a nation by how rich its most wealthy have become, how concentrated that wealth has become, rather than how society protects its most vulnerable.

Their language is arrogant, vicious, dirty, and out dated, to match their political stance. Here is a few examples of Tories being Tories.

Wandsworth Council today announced plans for the Autumn, to charge children £2.50 to use the local park. It is in response to the £55mn it needs to find in spending cuts. Instead of fighting the obvious manipulation of figures from the Treasury which suggest we’re on the verge of becoming Greece (which we aren’t), and instead of pointing out that the Treasury is in worse shape now than it was when Labour left office, and expected to get worse, with regard to inflation and unemployment……… the Council has just accepted the bullshit, and decided that along with the disabled and the unemployed, children should be the next to be hit. We now have more property millionaires than anywhere in Europe – creating an horrendous property apartheid especially in the South, we have a banking system that has managed to get away with causing chaos, and we have a mass of Corporate tax avoiders costing the system £25bn a year….. and yet Wandsworth Council think the way to go is to make children aware that from now on, any ounce of fun, is going to cost them money. The excuse? The same typical excuse Libertarians use all the time, the same tired, nasty excuse Tories have been using for decades:

“Why should Wandsworth taxpayers subsidise children from other boroughs?”

- Who thinks like that? It makes me squirm.
If that’s the case, why should the majority of left leaning voters (over 57% at the 2010 election) subsidise the jobs of a right wing government? I don’t want our family tax money to pay for our Tory MP to live so comfortably. I don’t want our tax money to go to paying a National debt whilst the very wealthy manage to pump their money into offshore accounts, and be allowed to claim expenses on running those offshore companies, against the UK tax they don’t pay. We are subsidising their ability to pay nothing. They couldn’t run a successful business in the UK, and offshore its profits, without functioning roads, a decent healthcare system, a property protection system like the police force, an education system to prepare their future workforce. And yet, their right to offshore, is supported by our Government who instead choose to attack children’s parks. Great.

The Tories main campaign poster in 2010 was this:
- So imagine our surprise when Mark Britnell, who made it into the Top Ten of the most influential people when it comes to healthcare in the country by the HSJ, former Director-General for Commissioning and System Management for the NHS and now “health policy expert” on David Cameron’s personal NHS advisory group said this to a group of Private Healthcare lobbies, organised by private equity firm Apax:

“In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer. The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

Minister for Health Andrew Lansley, who is worth an estimated £700,000, and spent the Labour years flipping his second home, claiming expenses for renovating a cottage designated his second home, before selling it for a tidy profit, before claiming for furniture for his flat in London now designated his second home, insists that he isn’t considering NHS privatisation. One wonders what his most charitable donor, John Nash, of Private Health company Care UK thinks about that. Nash donated £21,000 to Lansley’s private office, whilst they continue to make 96% of their profit from the NHS. Care UK stand to make a great deal more from increased involvement of the private sector in the NHS.

Cameron promised that front line jobs would not be cut from the NHS, before the election. Vowing to protect the NHS is a big vote winner in the UK. Cameron knew that. He then didn’t win the election, didn’t get a mandate, and so decided to rip the NHS to shreds. According to Unison, 500 jobs at St George’s Hospital in South London are to go, along with three wards and 100 beds. Similarly, Kingston Hospital in South West London announced that around 20% of its workforce will need to go, to meet the governments cost saving demands. The government repeatedly claims it is increasing spending on the NHS in real terms. Another lie. NHS spending is set to grow by less than under the Thatcher years, which is when the NHS was gutted almost to complete meltdown. Here’s how that “increase” looks on a graph:
Between 1997 and 2010, the number of doctors increased by 57% and nurses by 31%. Funding rose from around £1bn a year (less than Philip Green paid his family in dividends in 2009, which he financed by taking out a loan, which in turn reduced his Corporate tax rate as the interest on the loan could be offset against Corporate profits of his firm Arcadia) under the Tories, to £4.3bn under Labour, which increased the activity of the NHS by over 40%. It worked. We are healthier now than we were in the 1980s, we are living longer, and morale in the NHS was higher than the 1980s. Increases in spending this year, when adjusted for inflation, will be 0.024% from April 2011. Great. In fact, Sir David Nicholson, Chief executive of the NHS said this about the new spending plans for the NHS:

there has never been a time where we have had four years of flat real growth. It is unprecedented.

- There are many Tories that will argue consistently and poorly, that Osborne and the Tories are championing the NHS and funding it amazingly well beyond all recognition. Listening to them, is perilous.
Waiting lists are already sky rocketing. In Coventry, it was reported that there would be a 13 week waiting list for Hernia repair at Walsgrove University hospital. That has now increased to 26 weeks and should be considered “just a guideline” as lists are likely to increase again this year.
According to County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust:

Trust is undertaking a £60m cost cutting exercise to be delivered by 2014, including £20m in 2010/11. The trust is also cutting 300 beds. 300 nursing jobs will be lost through natural wastage Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust: equivalent cost savings of around 200 fewer jobs are required to meet financial targets. In cash terms, the trust is making cost efficiencies of £25m over 3 years. City Hospitals Sunderland: The Trust undertook a £22.5m cost cutting exercise for financial year just gone. NHS County Durham and Darlington : The NHS service providers in County Durham and Darlington are undertaking a £200m cost cutting exercise over the next 3 years. The trust is cutting 62 senior nurse posts and replacing them with 78 more junior posts. In addition, County Durham PCT has identified 110 management posts for redundancy.

The managerial posts are “in addition” to front line nursing.

Cameron told a female Labour MP in the House of Commons – the NATIONAL LEGISLATURE – to “calm down dear”. One wonders what Tory MP for Loughborough Nicky Morgan thought of this childish, sexist outburst from our Prime Minister, given that she was seen visibly laughing in the House of Commons at that pathetic remark, yet accused ME of being sexist when I simply asked if she had asked a planted question a few weeks back.
This comes a few weeks after Cameron took a swipe at ethnic minorities in his attack on multiculturalism, in which he mentioned Islam and Muslims 36 times in twenty minutes, and Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist not a single time. It was an attack on Islam, to the point where even Nick Griffin called the speech “provocative” and members of the EDL said that Cameron “understands us”.
That came about a week after Osborne referred to an openly Labour MP in the Commons as the “pantomime dame”. It isn’t surprising, their stance on homosexuality, given that whilst 100% of Lib Dems, and 99% of Labour MPs voted to repeal the nasty little Section 28 law that banned anything positive being said about homosexuality in schools, only 24% of Tories voted to repeal it. And whilst 100% of Lib Dems, and 95% of Labour MPs voted in favour of allowing gay adoption……. only 6% of Tories voted for it. So that’s homophobia, sexism, and racism all within a year. What else is left? Ah yes, class.
David Shakespeare, leaders of the Tory Councillor for Buckinghamshire Council said that poor northerners who are losing their jobs due to the cuts, should go down to London and pick the fruit of the land owners down south, instead of seeking job seekers allowance. He also said:

‘The North may replace the Romanians in the cherry orchards, that may be a good thing’

- Not even a necessary thing? Not even a regretful thing? A GOOD thing? He doesn’t mind kicking people out of their work and their jobs, he thinks it’s a great thing, because they’ll come to the south and work on his land for next to no money! He’s happy that the North is about to be gutted, again, of all funding whilst the south thrives, again, like the 1980s. Luckily I am from the Midlands, so I’m not sure i’d have to pick this overweight Tory prick’s fields, but i’m not sure if I have to bow as he drives past in his luxurious horse and cart.

Osborne announced this week that he was going to make it easier for companies to cut pay, cut pensions, dismiss people, and be allowed to get away with being discriminatory. In essence, he plans to make job security as unsafe as possible. It will be golden news to people like my boss. It is an attack on the workforce again. Presumably he will moan about Unions trying to hold the country to ransom whilst he attacks the rights of as many workers as possible, expecting us all to just bend over and take it. I hope the Unions unite and fight, I hope for a period of industrial action on a scale never seen before, and I hope a general strike is called as soon as possible If it is going to be a case of a very wealthy minority making life as miserable and difficult as possible for the many, then I hope the many fight back. Osborne claims employment rules are holding back job creation. He of course, is wrong. Job creation is held back significantly by a vast majority of big bosses plundering money into dodgy stocks or increasing their salaries beyond recognition. Why not cap private sector managerial wealth to a percentage of the lowest paid? Therefore when the lowest paid gets an increase, so does the highest paid. The extra-profit to be used to employ new people. Why attack the right of the workforce to a decent level of job security and working conditions? Why is that the only solution? Do you know what else creates job losses? It is happening on a smaller scale across the country, cuts are having affects on jobs and livelihoods. Cuts….

Derby’s Historic Industrial museum has had to close, 9 job losses.

Bishop Aukland College – 179 jobs losses.

South Tyneside College – 200 jobs to go.

Tyne Metropolitan College – 66 jobs to go.

Stockton Riverside College – 23 jobs to go.

City of sunderland College – 69 jobs to go.

Newcastle College – 171 jobs to go.

East durham college – 76 jobs to go.

New Cross library, Crofton Park library, Sydenham library, Grove Park library, Blackheath library all to close.

Oxford Brookes University – 400 support staff received “at risk” letters.

Diss weekly Youth Centre praised by police for helping troubled children, to close, and staff to lose their jobs.

Taunton Primary School – no more music teacher, no more music lessons.

A Big Society initiative – new volunteers to help out at museums in Hampshire – to replace 25 staff who have lost their jobs. Unpaid staff to replace paid staff. Great.

Five libraries in Lewisham to close.

Cuts to NHS disabled transport in Dumfries – jobs losses expected.

50% of pupil support assistants assigned to children with special needs, to be cut in Aberdeen.

21,000 job losses at Lloyds……..

….. former Lloyds boss Eric Daniels takes home a bonus of £1.45mn…..

….. new Lloyds boss António Horta-Osório takes a signing on fee of £6mn and a salary of £1.6mn.

In short, the poor need jobs to live. The rich need the poor to be as close to slaves as possible, reliant entirely on them to be able to eat, to be called lazy and scroungers and attacked as greedy if they unionise or refuse to work for a piss poor boss in piss poor conditions for piss poor pay. It is not a plan to increase job creation, it is a plan to enable the very wealthy, to get even more wealthy – to buy an extra yacht to fill the void in their soul – by asking more and more of their staff for as little as possible, and it’s always been the case. The project is designed to make people believe their tax money is wrongly being used, not just by people who claim to have a physical disability whilst they play tennis and golf 24 hours a day, but also by children playing on swings in the town next to yours, as opposed to the fact that your tax money is actually used to make sure that the wealthiest get massively insane tax cuts with Corporation tax expected to drop from 28% in 2010….. to 15% in 2020. That is what your tax money is funding. Make sure the man in the expensive house in Notting Hill thanks you for his lovely new Mercedes….. but don’t let your kids play on the park next to his house, you scrounging scumbag.

The progress the country has made since the hell of the 1980s, is about to be burnt to the ground. Do not be fooled into thinking this “has to be done”, it is Conservative party ideology, they have waited over a decade to have this chance.

They are attempting to replace compassion, with greed, and it’s working.

The necessity of Marxism

As most of you are accutely aware by my interpretation of political events, I am a Marxist. I believe Marxism can and should be used to explain the financial crises we’ve just been through, as a matter of urgency rather than consigned to the history books of failed economic orders. Because if we ignore the warning cries from Marx, or even Keynes, that there is inherent danger and crises in capital accumulation, we are simply going to repeat those mistakes.

I am a Marxist, but I understand that there is currently no working class movement any more. I do not call for the abolition of all Private property and a vanguard party to destroy Capitalism from within like a new age Soviet State. I do however believe that when the contradictions of an economic order become so vast and dangerous that they keep descending into crises, the economic order becomes unsustainable and collapses, and that is a matter for history to sort out. I don’t think we’re ready for the collapse of the economic order of Capitalism. Marx expressed that this time would come at a moment when Capitalism was at its most advanced stage. To me, we are not at that advanced stage, but we are heading there. Using Marxist dialectics, we can see that Feudalism was absolutely always going to become Capitalist, because skilled work produced better “things” and was more respectable, but eventually society progressed to a stage where skilled workers were greater in number, and Capitalism rewards skilled workers where Feudalism does not. Marx argued that Capitalism also had a problem; those with property always pitted against those without property, and the eventually those without property would not stand for their plight any longer, and socialism would follow. The argument being that if I have a nine hour day, and I have made the money after six hours that will pay my wage, the extra three hours I have to work I am essentially working for free. But that extra money is used by the Capitalist to expand the business, or to (as recent history shows) gamble it on dodgy stock options. A tension becomes apparent between the economic order and the cultural order of the day….

In Capital, Marx says:

In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

When the economic order moved away from an industrial base in the UK, to a financial sector base, suddenly there became a new tension. Instead of expanding, or money “trickling down” as it was promised to do, excess profit was ploughed into unproductive financial gambles, like naked short selling. (Which has just been an accepted practice by the Tory government in the UK, despite being banned everywhere else). The tension grew between the limitlessness of the accumulation of money with the limited notions of production, exchange, labour power, and consumption.

Marx wrote very little on the order of a communist society, because he wasn’t exactly sure how it would look. He was an historian and a theorist. Way ahead of his time. George Osborne is not even in the same league as Karl Marx. Marx wrote extensively on the failures of Capitalism and its inherent crises prone nature. In fact, I would suggest Marx (much like myself) would accept that Capitalism is extraordinarily efficient, but is naturally self destructive.

The tension today I would suggest started at the moment of the industrial revolution, and has perpetuated ever since. After the second World War is was considered the fault of protectionist policies that led to a tension between Nation States and so the United States placed itself as a force for the promotion of free capital flows and pushed for decolonisation whilst opening up markets for as much surplus capital absorption as possible across the World. Though, they did all of this not for the good of humanity, but for their own benefit. In 1944 Keynes suggested the creation of a single global currency outside of the control of any nation state. Keynes saw the contradiction between Nation States and Capitalism and that it would lead only to further tension. The U.S rejected the idea, insisting that the Dollar, backed by a fixed exchange rate against the gold, take the role. Therefore, to all other currency, their “gold” was the U.S Dollar.

There is no viable left wing alternative to the prevailing and powerful neoliberal order perpetuated by key institutions like the IMF. There are little socialist groups that have failed to leave the early 1900s, there are student socialist groups who offer nothing of any substance. There has been a rather concerted effort to discredit any form of left wing alternative for a number of years. The charge that the fall of the Soviet Union represented the fall of the entire doctrine of Marxism is a nice little gimmick as a tool of propaganda, but it simply isn’t true because the Soviet Union was not in any way Marxist. Marx argued that the State needed to begin to whither away for a truly democratic Marxist revolution to take place. The Soviet State was notoriously inflated. A system of wages still existed. The Soviet Union was one big Corporation. Money filtered upwards, and the workers had no say over investment, it was left to “management”. The Soviet Union was State Capitalism. The Menshevik exile Fyodor Dan argued prolifically, that Stalin’s Russia was entirely State Capitalist. Surplus value was still sucked out of the worker, by means of separating him from the means of production.

Accumulation by dispossession has always been a mightily popular tool for Capitalism to exploit, much like its feudal predecessor. Today this economic violence first appears as stock market gambles, and then the crises that inevitably creates is imposed on the citizens of a country who are told that austerity is the “only way”. Privatisation is used as a tool to dispossess common property like water, and hand it to very few people, whilst an effort is made by the media (the Feudal system of old used Religion to try to legitimise why it had to take things from people, today the media plays that role) using words like “freedom” and “choice” and “giving power back to the people”. It is very transparent, and yet it is essentially allowed to happen. Asset losses today is simply a way of the unfortunate majority losing so that the wealthy few can buy the assets cheap at a view to selling them as the market picks up some time in the future. In short, the crises for the many equals financial christmas for the few. So whilst religion constantly focuses on the judgement day, when those who aren’t fortunate enough to believe in their horrendous myth will end up burning in hell whilst the believers are brought into Paradise, so to financial speculators often gamble on the system falling to its knees for the many, so they will be rewarded. This can be seen on a grand scale. Blackstone Group (private equity firm) take over companies at a low price when they are struggling (not failing), strip them of assets, lay off huge amounts of staff, broke union obligations, and then sell them off for a massive profit. Goldman Sachs is rather good at this.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Freidman, the man responsible for the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions, the 20th Century’s version of Adam Smith, the biggest name in free market economic proposals that has perhaps ever existed, once wrote of the Soviet Union:

In the labour market individuals are seldom ordered to work at specific jobs; there is little actual direction of labor in this sense. Rather, wages are offered for various jobs and individuals apply for them – much as in Capitalist countries.

Two things to note here. Firstly, Freidman refers to other countries as Capitalist. Whilst pro-market fundamentalists who comment on my blog insist on telling me as often as possible that no country has been Capitalist, their hero says differently. Secondly, Freidman is implying, by his acceptance of their being a wage system within the Soviet Union, that it was not Communist. Communism requires the abolition of private property, not a perpetual wage system.

Over time, Freidman-ite followers within the Chicago School tradition have changed their tune in recent decades. They seem to be tacitly implying just how insanely wrong they were in their adherence to market fundamentalism. Rajan, Thaler, and Vishney, of the Chicago school tradition said recently:

“The Chicago School never said we wanted blind deregulation … We should really ask who were the people in 2000 who decided markets don’t need regulating. Those were not Chicago economists. Some of them were Clinton officials, and some of them are now advising Obama”

- They have seemingly moved to the Left apparently. The deregulatory obsession with free markets of the Freidman tradition is now worming its way out of its failures, and suggesting they were in favour of regulation afterall. The anti-state, regulation = impeding human freedom lobby, have now decided that government intervention is not ALWAYS a great evil afterall. In other words, they accept, they were massively wrong.

Freidman has been used by the Republican Right in America, Pinochet in Chile, Thatcher and Cameron in the UK to promote a Corporatocracy that actually is far departed from what he was arguing. Whilst I disagree entirely with Friedman’s premise, I note he was a great economist and his theories (much like Marx) have been wildly abused.

The ideological committment to deregulation, and spending cuts is what Naomi Klein calls a shock doctine. Forcing austerity on a Country that has recently experienced crises (like Chile did after the coup) simply to wipe the slate clean and attempt a neoliberal experiment. Neoliberal experiments are absolutely always a cover for the accumulation of more and more capital concentrated in fewer hands. The one great evil in my view perpetrated by Government is its attempts to limit itself through neoliberal doctrine. Government never limits itself, it simply moves its power around.

In fact, businesses in general are authoritarian by nature. Every so often a member of the human race will have a bit of an authoritarian nature about him. He will want to tell people how they should speak, how they should dress, how they should act, what being “professional” means, when you can eat lunch, how little money you will get for your labour whilst he takes the majority of it, all for the sake of profit and power. We are told we should thank these people for giving us a job. For allowing us not to starve to death. How ridiculous. They should thank us for allowing them the opportunity to acquire surplus value from our work, to fund their new Mercedes fund. At the point of setting up a business, the initial capital needed is the most important aspect of that business. But after that, the cogs, the human labour is the most important aspect. They hold the keys to true power, not the Capitalist. If the boss walks out of his workplace, it will continue without any problems. If the workers collectively walk out, the business is doomed. To ignore this power situation is for the Capitalist to pretend it isn’t there and that a struggle between the two doesn’t exist. It is authoritarian by its very nature. Lots of little Soviet states known as businesses. It is not the height of human freedom, it is oppressive, it alienates people, and it uses class division, race division, and sexual division to perpetuate itself. Labour and capital are vastly opposed.

The more right winged people I discuss the economic crises with, the more I am affirmed in my belief in Marxism, because I am yet to meet a Conservative supporter who can argue his or her case, without resorting to simple cliches that he or she has heard in the press. Cliches like “if you are in debt, you have to pay off your debt, that is why we are paying our debt as a nation, that the Labour party forced upon us“. The fallacy here is the comparison between National sovereign debt and individual debt. It is a fallacy for a number of reasons. Firstly, if an individual is in work and cannot reach his or her repayments, he or she cannot just start to work more. A Nation in debt that is cutting away the public sector necessarily has a flood of unemployed. It is the equivalent of a credit card company saying “you have to pay off your debt, whilst working only two hours a week”. That would be a more accurate representation of National debt during economic hardship, and individual debt. Secondly, individual debt like National debt is not necessarily a bad thing. A mortgage is not a bad thing. Similarly, a government investing when aggregate demand is low in order to keep people in jobs and homes, whilst the private sector is in no position to take on the horrendously inflated unemployment market, is not a bad thing. It is an investment that will be paid back.

The comparison of the UK to Greece is laughable. We still have the ability to pay our debts. We’re triple A credit rated, which suggests our spending patterns under Labour were not out of control as the right wing would have us believe (if they were, we certainly wouldn’t have the highest credit rating you can possibly wish to attain). 80% of our debts mature in 14 years. Greece has three years to pay 80% of its debts. We are not like Greece. Don’t believe the bullshit.

Norway is the second richest country in the World. It ranks bottom in the Forbes Failed States Index. And yet it has a public health system, a high standard of living, and 32% of its work force are employed in the State sector, the highest in the OECD. Tories would try to reform this, and say it’s “broken”. Norways basic egalitarian values have resulted in the gap between the lowest paid worker and the CEO being far smaller than anywhere else in the World.

I am yet to understand why it is that when Labour spent money they “didn’t have” to keep people in jobs and homes, it was deemed bad, but when the Conservative government spend money they “don’t have” (the debt is set to rise higher), at the same time making people unemployed, and presiding over out of control inflation, it is acceptable? Why is cutting Corporation Tax and the 50p top rate of tax whilst cutting winter fuel allowances for pensioners during a time when fuel is at an all time high and VAT a huge burden, along with inflation in general, perfectly acceptable?

Let’s be honest, freezing police pay, at a time when inflation is high, fuel is out of control, and on top of both of those, VAT is up….. whilst you cut tax for the wealthiest few, is not about sorting out the debt (in fact, it is tacitly accepting that their is no debt problem), it is ideological.

When your Country has a triple A credit rating, and is the fifth biggest economy in the World it is a lie to suggest we’re about to go bankrupt, or anywhere near bankrupt. It is a lie to say we are like Greece. To suggest, the UK is anywhere near unsustainable debt levels, we must look at the evidence. Here is a graph of the UK’s net debt since 1900:

I’d say that’s quite conclusive. We are not in a debt crises. We never were.

As inflation rises, as more people become unemployed, there is inevitably less disposable income, and so less money being spent in the private sector, because the pound in your pocket is worth less and you now have less than a pound in your pocket anyway. The public sector should be investing in infrastructure, education, and health. This is the best and only way to aid the growth of the private sector. The private sector, which is being expected to take up all the jobs that are being thrown away. In the long run, it will cost us more. Because with 12 people chasing 1 job, only 1 person can get the job. Therefore 11 need supporting. They need retraining. They need protecting. Who pays for them? Who gives them the money that will be spent in the private sector, to boost revenue and growth? When purchasing power of the main bulk of consumers is destabilised by mass unemployment, what then? Allow the private sector to employ people without the need for worker protection because if the worker wishes to negotiate terms for the buying of his labour power he can just be told “We wont hire you then, we’ll hire someone who will be as close to a slave as possible“. Whenever a right winger tells you what they are doing is for your “freedom” or your “choice”, note that it is for the freedom of the wealth to dictate terms of employment. What an awful prospect. There is great merit in government investment in infrastructure projects during economic hardship. When a perceived “crises” is barely even a “problem”, cutting so drastically exits the realm of necessity and enters the realm of ideology. The UK is facing massive ideological attacks.

It is apparent to me that the public sector did not fail. It was fine. The crises of the financial sector eventually moved the crises to the public sphere. The issue is and always will be (from a Marxist perspective at least) the crises of capital accumulation.

Understanding Marx is not about condoning Stalin.

The Corporatocracy

In 2010 the U.S Supreme Court over turned limitations to Corporations financing political broadcasts in the U.S. They argued that to limit financing from Corporations would be an attack on their first Amendment rights. They didn’t however set how why they have defined Corporations as some kind of living organism that has political rights in the first place. It is a worrying precedent. It means all of a sudden that Corporations are like people. Only richer and more powerful, with very different interests. People tend to vote for safe jobs, better healthcare, safe products, and a decent level of funding for education. Corporations want weak labour laws, low Corporate taxes, and regulations (safe products?) as minimal as possible.

A lifeless, soulless, dead entity like a Corporation, having the rights assigned to people, is an awful step in the wrong direction. Should a Corporation like ITT have rights, in the US? ITT owned 25% of Focke-Wulf, the manufacturer of the Luftewaffe Nazi aircraft that was used to shoot down American airplanes during the war. It then won $27,000,000 in compensation after the Allied’s bombed the Focke-Wulf factory during the war. ITT also made radar and radio equipment used by the Nazis. ITT were funding the killing of Allied troops. ITT also helped to fund Pinochet’s control over Chile. One of the most evil dictators in the World. Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of ITT during the war, was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery for his service to the Country.

Exxon, whose named used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, are responsible for shipping oil to the Nazis, even after Pearl Harbour. They also contributed, through a bunch of subsidiary companies, to Himmler’s personal fund. They now have the same rights as US citizens.

Profit before people.

The 2010 ruling means that climate change takes a back seat because it isn’t in the interest of oil companies. That the 1% of scientists who dispute man made climate change will be the only ones who are listened to. American Petroleum Institute, whose members include Exxon, have began to finance mainly Republican candidates this year. Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs quite openly said:

“At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.”

Koch Industries Inc, gave $1.79mn to candidates. 90% of those candidates were Republicans. This of course comes as President Obama proposed ending subsidies for Gas and Electric companies by 2012. Apparently those companies aren’t happy that their Welfare cheque is about to be scrapped. A Welfare cheque that adds up to over $45bn. Their Republican bitches will of course defend them. But no universal healthcare! Healthy citizens = bad. Rich oil companies = great.

Republicans in the US House of Reps voted to cut off all funding to the UN Climate Change panel, the IPCC, because according to Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri Republican:

“The IPCC is an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science, which is the last thing hard-working American taxpayers should be paying for”

The idea that it is “dubious science” is laughable. And the phrase “hard working Americans” is an empty one. Those same hard working Americans, I doubt want to see their money going to a mass of Corporate tax cuts either. Blaine Luetkemeyer’s claim of “dubious” apparently isn’t without irony, given that in 2004 he introduced a bill, based on Biblical principles, to the Missouri State Legislature, to define marriage as between a man and a woman. All for personal “freedom” as long as he gets to define what “freedom” means.

One the “dubious science” claim surrounding Climate Change, it always seems to come from Republicans. So I wondered why that could be? And then I found this. It shows Oil company contributions for 2010, and which Party – Republican or Democrat – those funds went primarily to. I think it’s pretty conclusive.

Roy Blunt, the United States Senator, from Missouri and whose campaign funds came mainly from big oil ($293,400 altogether) opposes cap and trade and supports drilling for oil on US coastlines. The League of Conservation Voters, who work to turn environmental issues into national priorities said that Blunt is:

“In his twelve years in office, Rep. Roy Blunt has taken good care of Big Oil by maintaining their costly tax breaks while continually voting against opportunities to create clean energy jobs, reduce pollution and improve fuel economy for Missourians,”

One wonders who runs the World? What a wretched democracy we all seem so proud of.

America is not the only country who laughably refer to their Corporatocracy as a Democracy. Britain is just as bad. Our Tory Government is funded heavily by the financial sector and very wealthy individuals. Apparently there is no money left to pay for the care of disabled people, or to keep arts centres open. But there is money, for a 83% tax payer owned bank to offer its CEO a £4.5mn bonus in shares, on top of his 3.2mn bonus for 2010. There is enough money to give one man, a bonus (on top of his salary) of £7.7mn. We are still an economy controlled by the Financial sector. It is not Capitalism.

The Municipal Governing Body of Greater London is the City of London Corporation. It’s main control is over the City of London financial district. There are residents whom live there, but their vote is not very important, given that the majority of the votes for that region, are given to Corporations. They are called “non-residential voters”. Corporate voters. A Corporation may appoint a number of people to cast votes on its behalf based on how many employees it has. The employees don’t get a say, the CEO gets the vote. Those who are appointed voters can vote twice. Once for their Corporation and once for their own vote. Residents of the area can only vote once. It is one big Corporatocracy. The Republicans over in the States would be proud. They’d some how manage to refer to it as “freedom” and “giving power back to people“.

Corporate regulation is essential. Corporations have one legal requirement: profit. Humans, i’d argue are motivated not just by profit, but also by compassion, loyalty, doing the right thing, the advancement of the species and survival. Corporations, by law, must ignore all that stuff if it conflicts with their ability to make profit, and that is a dangerous thing.

Today we learnt that the Tory Government’s next line of attack against its much hated public sector (which, again, remember did no wrong, and caused no problems itself) is the attack on public sector pensions, because they are unfair in relation to private sector pensions. Well, instead of forcing equal misery across the public sector to match that of the private sector, why don’t you make the private sector pay up more?

Damn right i’m a Marxist, especially in this climate of horrendous shock right winged economics.

Let’s stop referring to Corporatocracy as Democratic.
Let’s stop referring to Corporatocracy as freedom.
Let’s stop blaming government for failings, when Government is pretty much owned by the Corporate World.

The point is, Corporations do not deserve rights. They are not people. Government is supposed to work for the people, not for the very wealthy, and at the moment there is no government in the Western World that is not wholly run for the benefit of the very wealthy. It is not democracy. It is not at all what the Founders envisaged.

Blinded by Patriotism

In 2003 the Americans tried to convince the World that Al Jazeera had been infiltrated by spies, in an effort to produce propaganda for the war in Iraq. It is an interesting and mightily hypocritical claim by the U.S who have a media largely in bed with the American Government, and largely responsible for the biggest manipulation in war time history. Propaganda is an absolute specialty of the United States of America.

Ex CBS reporter Dan Rather stated recently, on the subject of his unquestioning adherence to absolutely everything the Bush Administration was insisting, that:

“Had journalists questioned the deceptions…the invasion would not have happened.”

The truth is, Al Jazeera is the only news network in the World who were investigating the horrors of the U.S invasion of Iraq. Where were the U.S press, the freest press in the World, when the population of Fallujah were being massacred? Phrases like “terrorist” and “insurgent” were being used everywhere, to describe anyone in Iraq who wanted to fight back against the U.S invasion.

Fox went along to an anti-war rally in 2004, and suggested several times, that the protesters were “unpatriotic“. Fox went along to the Tea Party rallies in 2009 and 2010 and referred to them as “true patriots“. Fox was the most watched news broadcaster for news on the war. Throughout coverage of the war in Iraq, Fox displayed a little waiving American flag in the corner of the screen.

Similarly, MSNBC played a segment every week, called “America’s bravest”, which showed photos of American soldiers deployed in Iraq.

Peter Arnett, a reporter with NBC was fired for questioning the legitimacy of the war. He had interviewed Iraqi officials and said the American “first war plan had failed”.

A Maryland University study into the media affects on public perception of Iraq, found that 57% of mainstream media viewers believed Iraq was involved in 9/11. 69% believe that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11. 22% believed WMDs had been found in Iraq. 80% of Fox News viewers had one or more of the above misconceptions.

Media watchdog group “FAIR” found that 79% of all 319 news stories on Iraq in 2003, were sourced from Government officials or Military officials.

The media became the mouthpiece for a barrage of lies and propaganda. This is evident even today. When Wikileaks leaked the war files, the news outlets, from Fox in the US to the BBC in the UK focused almost entirely on Wikileaks itself. American Republicans are referring to Assange as a traitor for exposing their criminal activity. The UK media was focusing on Assange personally. No one focused on what the war logs were saying.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, along with a team of researchers, surveyed 4,800 people in Fallujah and concluded that dramatic increases in cancer rates and infant mortality since the relative genocide by American troops, is “worse than Hiroshima”. After Fallujah, US Marines admitted, after first strongly denying, that they had used white phosphorus. The report is open for any to read, called “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009“. It shows a 38 fold increase in leukaemia (compared to a 17 fold increase, after Hiroshima), a ten fold increase in breast cancer, and an increase in brain tumours. This sharp rise if health defects, was not helped by the fact that the city continued to be blocked off to essential supplies, by the US, long after 2004.

Whilst the U.S networks were struggling to understand a map of the Middle East:

And using handy little catchphrases that seemed to give credit to the horrors:

Al Jazeera was getting right into the heart of the situation, and showing images, like the one below, which is beyond awful. (I have spent the past few minutes looking at this photo, and it is something I cannot comprehend without being overcome with quite profound sadness):

It is then, no wonder that the one media outlet that was actually bothering to do some investigative journalism, rather than imbedded journalism (in which the Western Military dictates what a Journalist is allowed to see and where he can go), showing pictures and videos of innocent people’s lives ruined, in the same way that Fox and CNN were after 9/11 were bombed. The Al Jazeera Kabul and Baghdad offices were bombed by the Americans, who also drew up plans to bomb the Al Jazeera office in Doha – Qatar!. Why? They weren’t harbouring terrorists. They were just a threat to US mass propaganda. We were not supposed to see the destruction and terrorism left by the Americans. We were supposed to see a happy population, joyfully welcoming the Americans as great liberators fighting for freedom. If people fought back, we were supposed to believe they were “insurgents” who “hated our freedoms”, rather than the fathers of dead children or orphaned children.

The “reality” of war, is not a natural reality, it is a construct. When thousands are killed in American and British aggression it is called the “reality of war“, simply because a Western Government has used the word “war” to describe it. But when a far smaller number are killed by extremists, it is called “terrorism” and it is “evil”. It is the creation of a narrative that seeks to propel Western aggression as necessary, to defeat evil. Whether that evil be Communists, Muslims, Vietcong, or Arabs. That is the public narrative. The truth is that if your dictator opens up his markets to American Capitalist ventures, he will be propped up for years to come. The moment he closes those markets, we will take them by force.

How blurred the lines of “reality of war” really are, and absolutely always in favour of the Western World. Vietnam, the propping up of Latin American and Middle Eastern Dictators, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, the invasion of Iraq. None of it is labelled “terrorism”, and yet what else is it other than the spreading of terror and death across Nations that aren’t ours.

It isn’t new. The British Empire did it in Australia. Terrorised the Country but apparently it was for their own good. What if Aboriginal Australians had invaded England? Rome labelled anyone who disagreed with its policies as “Barbarians”. The concealing of crimes behind romaticised ideals is not new. Especially with America. America celebrates Columbus Day. A day when Europe began the mass genocide project across that continent.
The great American author Kurt Vonnegut sums this up in his book “Breakfast of Champions“:

rout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.” The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made.

It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate. If they studied their paper money for clues as to what their country was all about, they found, among a lot of other baroque trash, a picture of a truncated pyramid with a radiant eye on top of it. Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about.

It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength.” A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout.

The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. Like this [the Liberty torch].

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines

Vonnegut is ingeniously pointing out the illogical mental illness of Patriotism and its refusal to accept the horrors that came before it, and are committed in the name of it. It is a delusional, non-existent entity that exists to hinder human progression rather than help that seed to grow. A heartfelt anthem and a flag are just ways to mask injustice. It is a clever social construction, to make you think what you are doing is for the greater good and that the greatest good is the Nation State, when in fact the truth is, it is all for the sake of profit.

The dominant superpower will always place itself as the moral standard, and we buy into the bullshit, because it takes too much effort to stop playing on Fifa, and actually read.
Instead of seeing a little girl marched out of her home, crying and scared and made to kneel down on the floor with her hands in the air, by our troops, isn’t presented in the media. Instead, the media will have experts in to talk about how awesome our aircraft is, or how the Democrats are trying to block Defence funding. As if any of that bullshit matters.

We don’t see a bunch of vicious soldiers shooting random people or committing mass murder in Fallujah. Instead, we see a Saddam statue being brought down and how wonderful and free Iraq now is. We don’t see the pictures of a family digging their dead child out of the rubble, instead we only hear words like “insurgents” and “terrorists”. If my child had just been killed by American forces, for no reason, I’d fucking do all I could to kill the bastards too.

We are all desensitised to war, by this obsession with an us VS them mentality. Consumerism is a useful tool against the questioning of the immoral actions of big business and government. It is a simple narrative to understand, we don’t have to read too much into it, we’re busy working our arses off for shit we don’t need, so we consume easily accessible news, without questioning its motives or its intentions. We are apparently the good guys, and they are apparently the enemies, that is how it is presented. A healthy dose of National Pride, by making pictures of American soldiers draping their flag over the head of the statue in Baghdad, ensures that we are kept docile and unquestioning. We don’t want to seem unpatriotic.

Whereas, the reality is that the good guys are the idiots who are compelled to fight to perpetuate the economic war system, on both sides, rather than joining hands and fighting the very people who profit from war and make it a rational product of Capitalism. Do we really believe that the American private defence contractors and oil companies would love to see a peaceful World? They exist, to profit from war. Therefore, the financial sector profits from war. It is gross manipulation. These are the real bastards, not a few farmers in Afghanistan.

David Cameron went to Kuwait and told them that 20 years ago a brutal and violent dictator invaded their home land, and they had a right to defend themselves. How offensive; we sold those arms to that brutal dictator, before we designated him a brutal dictator, because he was nice to our businessmen. I keep seeing arguments defending Cameron’s arms sales across the Arab World as “good for jobs in England”. Economic matters are being placed above human rights. It is believed that British arms were used in the massacre of protesters in Libya this week.

Blair’s government lifted sanctions on the sale of weapons to Libya in 2004. Since then British companies have sold £500,000,000 worth of arms to Libya n 2009 alone. This includes Sniper rifles, tear gas, and crowd control ammunition. Are we seriously suggesting that selling tear gas and crowd control ammunition to a dictatorship, is going to be used to protect itself from an evil outside force? They are always going to be used against protesters, to keep the dictatorship in power. For that, I don’t care how many jobs it creates in the UK, we should be ashamed.

And so whilst the Libyan government uses our weapons, like Saddam did before him, on its own people, the rest of the World will sit back and have lots of UN meetings and keeping saying “please stop“.

Sometimes, death is good for the economy, and so we are all expendable.
Was is an essential ingredient of Capitalism.

A place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
- Charles Bukowski

Whilst David Cameron continues to sell arms to violent nations, ignoring the fact that hundreds of fellow Brits are stranded in Tripoli, I thought I’d give you a bit of context on how Tories tend to view those who don’t own a great deal of wealth. Tory Peer Lord Lang, The Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Business appointments has announced that the committee that looks into business employing former ministers, said that he would only accept people to his panel:

“who had experience and proven success in a relatively important profession or trade – somebody who had achieved distinction – rather than a waitress or bus driver.”

- A beautifully elitist attitude if ever I saw one.

One should also bring into view, the alleged fraudulent behavior of Lord Lang in the past. He is a part-time director of Marsh & McLennan, a US company, and the World’s biggest insurance brokers. In 2004 they settled out of court, for massive fraud. They had moved clients toward insurers who Marsh and McLennan had payoff agreements with. They also solicited rigged bets for insurance contracts from those insurers. The CEO resigned and they settled out of court.

Another bad news week for the economic situation. Osborne must be wondering how long he can keep saying “obviously these figures are concerning” before he starts to realise he’s absolutely to blame.
Firstly, over here in the U.K, the government and it’s slightly more mental-than-usual support base spent Monday singing the praises of the horrifically dogmatic Libertarian George Osborne because public sector net borrowing showed a £3.7bn surplus. Rising VAT and raping public services of all funds brought in more money? Who’d have thought it!!! Of course there would be a surplus rise. I am not sure why that’s even news. I don’t think that most Tory supporters understood the point of public sector net borrowing and how it is funded.

This is evident with today’s announcement, that the UK economy shrunk worse than expected in the final sector of 2010. Initial reports said the economy shrunk by 0.5%. Comically, Osborne (remember, this man is our Chancellor) blamed the snow. Now it turns out the economy shrunk by 0.6%. If you look at the ONS figures from 2008 recession, to now, it tells quite an impressive story. Recession struck, and GDP fell massively. From 2009 to the end of 2010, the economy was growing and actually recovering substantially. And then Tory policies took hold, and the economy is shrinking again. The ONS figures show that if we don’t experience some sort of miracle bounce, we are about to hit a double dip recession very soon.

To give you a bit of context, since mid-2010, construction output has fell 2.5%, household expenditure fell 0.1%, utilities output fell by 4.6%, mining output fell by 4.5%. Here is the graph:

Anyone who looks at this graph and believes the Government know what they’re doing, is seriously deluded.
If you look at employment figures, they were recovering up until the last quarter of 2010. Now, they are worsening. It isn’t surprising given that the Government has decided to kick another 40,000 people out of work at the NHS. The cutting of simply back office staff (as if that’s a good thing anyway) is ridiculous, it will hit front line services.

Predictably Danny Alexander at the treasury couldn’t answer why the situation was worse than previously expected, without starting his sentence with “Well, we inherited…blah blah utter bollocks“.

This of course wont affect Gideon Osborne, who is a trust fund baby. He will never be insecure. He will never struggle. This is because Osborne is set to inherit a 15% stake in a wallpaper and fabrics company called Osborne & Little. He is worth £4,000,000. Despite this, he flipped his second home in order to pay less capital gains tax. The Lib Dems found that Osborne owed £55,000 in Parliamentary expenses abuses on his second home. Quite comically, he spent £47 of taxpayers money on a copy of a DVD of his own speech on “value for taxpayers money“.

As the misery is spreading, due to the less fortunate being expected to pick up the bill for the extravagances of the very fortunate, there is wonderful news for the banks. RBS, despite recording a loss of £1.1bn, gave out bonuses close to £1bn for 2010. Apparently nothing has changed since 2007. But then it isn’t surprising, we apparently as a nation collectively decided that to beat right winged economics and its massive failings, we need more right winged economics.

This is even more evident in the U.S. After the Republicans in Congress decided they will be forcing through some incredibly steep spending cuts, and a very weak Obama tacitly accepting, the Wisconsin assembly have voted to strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights.

What a horrible World we live in, when we decide it is more important for the owners of capital to treat humanity as a commodity, than it is for those people to live securely.

Essentially, what the Governments of the UK and US are telling us, is we do not understand what is best for us. What is best for us, apparently, is letting the private sector exploit as much as it wants, without us being able to stop it. They have cleverly managed to take a crises caused by Neoliberalism, and use it to push through some of the most Victorian style Neoliberal reforms we’ve ever had the misfortune to have forced upon us. The market doesn’t set wages. The base rate is set by very greedy employers. For this, unions are essential. I would urge all public sector workers in Wisconsin to collectively walk out. Let’s see just how unimportant Republicans think you are then.

Don’t let them tell you it is democratic. Being controlled by one CEO whom you cannot overthrow no matter how much you value your 2nd Amendment right to bare arms against tyrants, a CEO who is not accountable to you and whose main function is profit; being controlled by him, is not democracy and it is not freedom. It is Corporate tyranny.

Meanwhile David Cameron gave us his multiculturalism is dead speech, in which he mentioned the words “muslim” and “Islam” 36 times, in a 20 minute speech. Racism has always been a tool used by the fortunate to stifle collective action.

Thomas More once commented that

In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the World, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organising society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible.”

When you analyse the rhetoric, it would appear that Thomas More was correct. The pretext of organising society after the financial crash has run thusly:

The Financial institutions should be bailed out.

The Public Sector should pay for the failings.

People will lose their jobs as a result of cuts.

Benefits for the unemployed must be cut, even as six people chase one job.

Help the one person who gets the job, fuck the other five.

Massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Play on racial tensions.
One wonders how it has managed to get to this point. But it isn’t new. Racism has always been played upon, during time of crises.
During the American Civil War, very wealthy white Southerners managed to convinced poor white Southerners to go and fight for their right to keep black slaves. Why? How were they convinced that slavery would be beneficial to everyone? Well, they weren’t convinced. Racism was played up and the economic consequences were played down. If you convince a bunch of poor white people that those who are “racially inferior” want to be treated equally, and how they will infiltrate your kids school with their “barbaric culture”, you are very carefully constructing a social narrative that ignores the fact that the rich white folk, simply want slavery to save money on labour costs. If you can employ a black slave to do your work for free, you’re not going to employ the poor white person, regardless of how low you’re allowed to pay him. Slavery screwed over poor white people and poor black slaves. The only people who benefited, were the rich white people. And yet, poor white people were willing to die to perpetuate a system that held them back.

This critique can be applied today. Somehow workers have been convinced, through constant negative media attention, that Unions are a great evil that need to be purged. It’s madness. During the British Airways strike, the media and so the mindless public at large took the line that the Union was to blame for the problems. The management who were screwing over both the workers and the customer were largely treated like the victims. The CEO of BA Willie Walsh had recently been forced to make BA pay the largest fine in Aviation history, after he was found guilty of price fixing. Somehow, the wealthy have managed to convince the workers that it is in their best interests, not to fight for better pay, and better conditions, and health benefits. We have been convinced, that exploitation and overbearing tyrannical management, is great for everyone. It is very U.S orientated approach to society. Which is kind of funny. America has weak unions, and strong anti-union laws. You’d think, under the rhetoric and the narrative that unions are a great evil, that America would be a pretty happy society…

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development conducted vast research into which countries people feel the happiest living in. It is all subjective, the people were asked if they thought their lives were predominantly affected by positive or negative experiences. Sample questions included:
Did you enjoy something you did yesterday? Were you proud of something you did yesterday? Did you learn something yesterday? Were you treated with respect yesterday?
They quizzed 1000 15-100 year olds, from 140 Countries.
Surely, with all that Capitalism and so little union involvement, America should be steaming ahead? Far ahead of those EVIL SOCIALIST OPPRESSIVE EUROPEAN States weeping uncontrollably in their Government-run lives, right?

As of 2009, here is the top ten happiest Countries out of the 140 polled:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Netherlands
4. Sweden
5. Ireland
6. Canada
7. Switzerland
8. New Zealand
9. Norway
10. Belgium

Their governments probably forced them to be happy, whilst talking through the Telescreen in the wall. Note that Canada is sixth.

Perhaps it is all because whilst the happiest people in Denmark enjoy their EVIL SOCIALIST Government forced happiness, the US citizen, in his plethora of freedom, is working hard!!!
Well, no.
Firstly, Denmark’s unemployment rate is at 2%. Far far below the UK and US levels.
Secondly, 9th place in the list, Norway has GDP per capita nominal of $84,543. Denmark has GDP per capital nominal of $55,113.The US has GDP per capita of $47,132. The US lags behind Sweden and Switzerland on this as well. The UK meanwhile lags behind Belguim, Singapore, Belguim, Japan. All figures from the IMF.

As far as public debt goes (Osborne always mentions, as do most Tories, just how badly in debt we are, verging on Greece) as of 2009 figures, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the UKs public debt as a percentage of GDP is 68.10%. Greece’s is 144.0%. Here is the list of Countries in between the UK and Greece, for public debt, along with their debt as a percentage of GDP:

Iceland 123.80, Jamaica 123.20, Italy 118.10, Belgium 102.50, Singapore 102.40, Ireland 98.50, Sudan 94.20, Sri Lanka 86.70, France 83.50, Portugal 83.20, Egypt 80.50, Dominica 78.00, Nicaragua 78.00, Israel 77.30, Germany 74.80, Malta 72.60, Hungary 72.10, Austria 68.60, United Kingdom 68.10.

Perhaps the UKs GDP itself is awful? What with Labour OVER SPENDING!!!!!!!!!!1111
Oh wait, no, we have the sixth largest economy in the entire World. Our little island, is the sixth largest economy in the World. Greece, is 31st.

Perhaps our debt is the worst we’ve EVER known? It must be pretty bad if we’re privatising absolutely everything and kicking thousands out of work?

Okay that’s only 100 years.
What about in the larger context?

So it turns out the Nation’s debt, is still at one of it’s all time lows. Which begs the question, why do we believe the bullshit that has spread? The bullshit of a dire economic situation, is used purely to further the cause of an ideological attack, and nothing else.

It is amazing. We are further empowering the financial institutions that are responsible for the problems. None of them have faced criminal charges. In the 1970s the power of the labour movements was clearly defined as the problem. Today, the problem is clearly the power of finance capital. And instead of putting a foot down and regulating the power of finance capital, we are loosening the chains even greater. Crises in this case, is inevitable. We will have another crash. But whilst we have a politics (not a democracy) funded and run by the very very wealthy, there can never be change.

Private funding of political parties and inherited wealth from Stock Market speculation, are the great evils and the most anti-democratic and dangerous ideals of our generation.

Politically, the left is week. They are in a daze because they have spent the past ten years being the Right. Ed Balls, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor cannot complain, he spent his years in office given up economic power to the financial sector. It is as if the political left (I make a distinction between the left, and the political left, because the political left is really the centre-right) doesn’t understand why its unwavering support for Thatcherite policies, has failed so miserably. It is odd, because our Political Left is still scared of certain lexis. Socialism is considered a dirty word and Capitalism is considered a golden word. Why? Capitalism failed everyone other than the very wealthy. Labour politicians do not like to be seen to align themselves with unions? Why Tories have no problem aligning themselves with greedy tax avoiding billionaires who endulge in questionable and often unethical business practices. Those businessmen represent a very narrow group of people. Unions represent thousands upon thousands of people who would be far worse off without the many industrial gains that have been made over the past century, thanks to collective bargaining.

We need a strong united academically gifted Left for the theory, and a strong united working people’s party for practice. Note, this does not mean a local Socialist party….. they are all, as far as I can see, still living in 1917.

So it turns out, all is not as dire as it seems. The multiculturalism card, I maintain, is being used to ensure a division between the lower classes who will be losing out whilst the rich class will benefit greatly. If we are inspired to concentrate on Nationality and Culture rather than the fact that the Polish worker, the Pakistani worker, and the British worker are all being massively screwed over, we wont rise up and fight back. Attacks by Unions as being attacks on the British public will be further propagated. As if it is their fault. It is a smoke screen designed to make us forget about the fact that the very people and the very economic ideology that got us into this mess, are going to be the ones who benefit the most.

The Big Society will rescue us though, so it’s okay.
(ignore the fact that according to Voluntary Sector Cuts, £53,000,000 has been cut from their budgets).

Student strikes.
General strike.
Union united.
Mass protests and rioting.

Libertarianism must be fought against as if it is a foreign invader. Our children do not need to be born into “a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes“.

Cameronism

Neoliberalism: The tyranny of Big Business, under the mask of “Freedom“.

I have always wondered how the very fortunate manage to convince the very unfortunate that perpetuating that system is to everyone’s benefit. Thatcher managed to convince a mass of people that the Unions were evil, and were strangling the Country. She killed off the Unions, and bosses began the biggest exploitation effort since the 19th Century. Jobs shipped abroad daily, wages kept lower than ever before, and homes repossessed with the homeless rate doubling. How were people convinced that that was a good thing for the Country? Northern England still hasn’t recovered from what she did. It would seem that if you add the words “freedom” and “giving power to the people” to the end of a speech that is essentially going to destroy those people, you will have convinced them.

One has to wonder, if this was a people power thing, why not mention it during the run up to the election. Such a social and class engineering project doesn’t come into being over night, it takes years of planning. They knew this would be the case. So why not mention it, if it’s so great? I’d suggest because if a political party was to suggest privatisation of the NHS and the public services, before an election, they would be so massively unelectable, they would have no MPs left. So, the answer is to manipulate a population into voting for you, and then systematically destroy their life.

The fact remains, no one has given the Tories a mandate to do this. They did not win the election. More people voted for a slower reduction of the deficit, and less cuts. More people voted centre and centre-left political parties, than who voted for the Tories. Economically, if not socially, the Tories have no democratic right to be doing what they are proposing to do.

Any time mass privatisation is suggested, the phrases “more power to the people” and “freedom” are banded about. I am always very suspicious of this, because it never quite turns out that way. It was “freedom” that drove Thatcher to privatise British Gas and the railways. British Gas is now run by one CEO who rises prices in line with an increase in oil prices, but then when the oil price lowers, he keeps British Gas prices high, raking in massive profits. For charging customers obscene amounts of money for no legitimate reason, boss of Centrica (which runs British Gas) was Knighted for “services to business“. The Chief Exec, Sam Laidlaw (who went to Eton, unsurprisingly) increased the cost of gas for consumers by 35% in 2006, for no reason whatsoever, and made record profits, when asked about it, he answered “Well, I am not about to apologise for making a healthy profit“. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

One wonders how long they can keep blaming Labour, given that unemployment and the deficit were shrinking in May 2010. They’re now both on the rise.

David Cameron does not have the mandate to be privatising the entire public sector. And yet, in the Telegraph today, he shamefully used his dead son as justification for the most worrying of plans I’ve yet to hear him say:

And though I was always so grateful for the tremendous care my eldest son received, I never understood why local authorities had more control over the budget for his care than Samantha and I did.

I never understand why my boss, where ever I choose to work, has the right to be as rude and obnoxious and speak down to us as he so wishes. But apparently that’s “freedom“. What a wretched freedom it is. Allowing business the freedom to dictate terms and conditions for its workers, with absolutely no balance, is not freedom. Replacing democratic oversight with a dictatorial boss whose only objective is to make more money, is not freedom.

I would never use a dead relative to promote a political agenda. He should say it like it is; Cameron and Osborne are Libertarians. It is why there is a mass of tax cuts for the very wealthy whilst the public sector is being gutted. It is why the banks are not being hit. It is why he is demolishing the NHS and the public sector as a whole. It is something beyond scary.

“Instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition in individual public services – as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS – the state will have to justify why it should ever operate a monopoly.”

What the hell? Damn right you should have to justify privatisation, logically because you are changing the system. You have to justify why you are changing the system. But mainly, because it has never fucking worked as promised in the past. The Tories privatised the railways, and now no one can afford to go anywhere. The Tories sold off the Council Houses, effectively entirely privatising the housing system, and now no one can afford homes. The Tories privatised electricity, and now old people die because they cannot afford to heat their homes in winter. So damn right you have to justify why you are handing even power to big business. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

One of the most worrying aspects of these proposals, is that the White Paper will lay out plans to make the proposals irreversible. Cameron said the Government would:

“make it impossible for Government to return to the bad old days of the standard state monopoly”

It is an ideological attack. It is Social engineering on a grand scale. Because those of us on the Left would argue that the bad days, especially where British Gas and the railways are concerned, and looking at the private health service in America; revolves around the private sector. It has to be resisted. By making this right wing plan irreversible, he is ironically presiding over the biggest Government in decades, because he is forcing Right Winged tyranny on those of us who oppose it completely. He is effectively banning the Left Wing. What if the Labour government had given more power to the Unions, and made it irreversible? Surely we’d be hearing how Orwellian that actually is?

What if recession hits again. Which it will. It means that the only legal response, would be to do nothing. Keynesian economics would be entirely banned. What basis do they have to ban it?

The difference is, the power. The Unions represent hundreds of thousands if not millions of ordinary people. Their power is legitimate, if we are talking about giving power to ordinary people. Syndicalism, is not a bad idea. Giving power to a very narrow set of businessmen is not, and could never be considered the height of human freedom.

It amazes me that we have got to a position where we are being convinced en masse, that privatisation is “handing power back to the people“. It is such a falsity that it is almost funny. When we elect a politician, we know their face, we know their name, and if we don’t like them, we vote them out. By privatising the public sector, they are practically selling democracy to the man with the most money and calling it “power to the people“. We are getting to the stage where local representatives cannot do a thing, because their power is being handed to faceless businessmen, who we do not see, ever, never mind elect. Corporations act as little Stalinist States, where money is forced upwards, from the bottom. Those at the very top are always going to want more. Those at the bottom are always going to be squeezed for as much productivity and as little money as possible. We are therefore ruled by a Stock Market system, that relies on very very dodgy deals that have no social benefit whatsoever. Has it enriched our lives thus far? Longer working hours, ever more slimy bosses with a deluded sense of superiority? Stagnating wages with no real chance of an increase? Unions unable to exercise any power? An out of control financial sector? No housing? Gas and electricity more expensive than ever before? Less job security and more worry than ever before? I have argued previously that Democracy and Capitalism are entirely incompatible. This proves it. We are not a Democracy. We are wholly run and controlled by the power of big business. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

Orwell’s worry about an overbearing Government should not come to symbolise just the abstract concept of a State. Corporations are just as dangerous.

There is a reason why the Public and Private sectors are separate. They have different values. Profit seeking should never place itself in the public sector.

It took a Labour backbencher, Labour MP Chuka Umunna, to force Barclays to admit that it had only paid 1% Corporation Tax in 2009, even though it made profits of £11.9bn. That is absolutely obscene and completely unjustifiable. Unless you’re a Tory, obviously. Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays told the Treasury Select Committee that Barclays paid £2bn in taxes in 2009. It turns out he was very misleading, because those taxes are payroll taxes and its employees National Insurance. It paid just 1% Corporation Tax. It is paying bonuses worth £3bn. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

If that wasn’t enough, Barclays (remember, the tax it saves, is obviously for our benefit, for the people!) helps to fund Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. It lent £750mn to Zimbabwean officials who had siezed land from White farmers, in 2007 alone, in order to “boost farm production“. Didymus Mutasa, the National Security Minister of Zimbabwe got a large chunk of Barclays money, even though he masterminded the ousting of white farmers….. who were left homeless. Mugabe has three farms, that he was able to take over, thanks to the funds from Barclays. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

If you’re disabled, tough. If you’re a child in a low socio-economic area, tough. If you want a borrow a book from a library, tough, it’s closed, fuck off. If you’re the CEO of a tax avoiding, corrupt regime propping up Bank…. great, have a bonus! FOR THE PEOPLE!!

So that begs the question, why is David Cameron focusing purely on the public sector? The public sector did not fail to the extent that he is suggesting. The public sector didn’t cause the biggest financial crises we’ve ever seen. The private sector has failed miserably, far far worse than the public sector could ever imagine. The private sector created a culture of short term gain at the expense of long term stability. It gave everyone credit cards to artificially inflate demand, to keep wages at the very top getting higher and higher whilst (unsurprisingly) wages for the rest of us stagnated. It is the reason that my boss can keep us on minimum wage, and squeeze extra work out of us, without ever offering a pay rise, and talking to us as if we are socially inferior. It is a class system. The neoliberal system. And it doesn’t work. It is a hopeless, dire, miserable little system.

David Cameron is focusing purely on the public sector, because like all Tories, he is unable to recognise the absolute failure of the Private Sector, and instead focuses all his energy on attacking the public sector. He constantly mentions benefit fraud, as do most Tory supporters. People cheating benefits is their big gripe. Yet it costs just £900mn a year. Corporate Tax avoidance (like Barclays) cost us £25bn. Get your fucking priorities in order.

I am unsure how the Liberal Democrats can continue to let this happen. They have no shame. If they keep referring to themselves as Progressives, it is going to be the main source of ridicule politically for years. Freedom, for a left of centre party, should never mean the freedom for big business and a class of business elites, to control every inch of our lives.

I hope to God that one day humanity opens its collective eyes to the absolute abuses of this horrendous right winged economic system we are force fed. It is not here to work for you and I. It is here to work for a very narrow wealthy elite.

I smell Class War.

The Unions, the Student movement, UK Uncut, and anyone who relies on public services, and anyone who hasn’t got an essential part of their soul missing, should fight back. The last thing this Country needs, is Cameronism. I give it a month before England has its name changed to McEngland, or Nike Air England.

Thatcherism and its supporters like to boast that they beat the dragon of Socialism. The Country and the World will never be truly free until it has immunised itself from the disease of Neoliberalism.

Neoliberal Democracy: Of the rich, for the rich, by the rich.
FOR THE PEOPLE!!

The Pig Society Part II

The Big Society grows ever stronger, and support grows ever wider, charity bosses and workers applaud it and sing its praises, because it is a wonderful plan that is definitely not a cover for a mass of Corporate tax cuts.

That is what delusional Conservatives believe.
Except, it’s bullshit.
The voluntary sector is being absolutely gutted of funding.
As the previous post pointed out. But to make it clear, the Guardian today featured a story of a lady named Denise Marshall. She is Director of Eaves and also the Poppy Project. These charities work with victims of domestic abuse and sex trafficking. She has dedicated her life to this cause. She has fought some pretty high powered members of the criminal underworld across Europe. Eaves provides housing and counselling for victims of abuse. They offer up to 35% savings on gas and electricity and other necessities for vulnerable women. In short, Denise Marshall is a heroine. She was recognised for this in 2008 by being given an OBE. She is one of the very few who actually deserve the honour.

Denise is now handing back the OBE, to David Cameron personally, because she has said that the extreme and needless cuts to funding for charities and organisations like Eaves, means she will no longer be able to support and fight criminal gangs who traffic women for the sex trade. She feels that she would be hypocritical and unworthy of an OBE when she can no longer protect the women she has the award for protecting.

Marshall said:

“I received the OBE in 2007 specifically for providing services to disadvantaged women. It was great to get it; it felt like recognition for the work the organisation has done.

But recently it has been keeping me awake at night. I feel like it would be dishonourable and wrong to keep it. I’m facing a future where I can’t give women who come to my organisation the services they deserve – I won’t be able to provide the services for which I got the OBE.”

“If you run a refuge where you don’t have the support staff it just becomes a production line, where you move people on as quickly as possible to meet the targets. You’re not helping women to escape the broader problems they face. They may get a bed, but no help with changing their lives and moving out of situations of danger.”

“I’ve worked in this sector for almost 30 years. I don’t want to sound melodramatic but I don’t think I have ever felt as depressed and desperate as I do now,”

How then, do the Big Society advocates justify the fact that on the same day as a true heroine feels she can no longer protect very very vulnerable women in her care, the Tories are trying to stop an EU law on the banning of naked short selling (which I shall try to explain as much as possible shortly)? The EU law, if the Tories get their way, will not affect the UK on naked short selling. Germany have banned it, the U.S have banned it, Australia have banned it, Hong Kong have banned it, Japan have banned it. We have kept it. It makes a very small elite group of speculators very rich, whilst risking money that is not theirs. How are these people protected, yet the vulnerable women like those that Denise Marshall represents have their funds slashed. The Government and its banking friends and business associates are sitting sipping champagne, whilst Rome burns. Nero would be in awe.

Short Selling (not naked short selling) is a little confusing, and utterly absurd. It has no social use. It is not to the benefit of any of us. It is dangerous and it should be banned. When you buy shares, you buy them in the hope that the price will rise and you can sell them some time in the future, to make a nice bit of money. It is all to do with how you obtain shares. You and I would buy shares. Naked short sellers borrow shares in the hope that the price will fall. So, if for instance I was to borrow 5000 shares from Broker A. I will then sell them at £1 a share, so £5000, hoping the price falls. Say the price falls by half. I now buy back all the shares, at £2500. I have netted myself a nice little £2500 and I give the 5000 shares back to the Broker A.

Naked Short Selling is different, because you don’t even borrow the shares you’re selling. You don’t have them. You’re selling a promise that you will obtain the shares that you’ve just sold, at some point in the future. You may as well walk into a bank, take all of their money, and promise to give it back at some point in the future. There is then an incentive for short sellers to wreck companies, because the share price has to fall for them to meet their promise. On a grand scale, this can lead to massive crashes.

This little practice lead necessarily to the 1997 Asian Financial Crises, that left millions in poverty. This wasn’t the fault of too much Government interference in people’s lives, or too many people on the dole. It was a direct result of unproductive short sellers and a massively deregulated financial sector.

The law looks to ban naked short selling in the EU. The UK will be trying to exempt itself from that banning.

This of course comes days after the announcement that there would be vast changes to the offshore tax laws, which mean that large and medium sized businesses who offshore their profits and then move them back to the UK, no longer have to pay the difference between the tax they paid in their tax haven and the tax they pay in the UK. They no longer have to pay any tax on profits that are made outside the country and brought back to the UK. Not only that, but they can claim expenses against tax they pay in the UK, to fund their overseas departments. That represents one of the biggest changes to Corporate tax law, and a massive shift of wealth from the poorest due to cuts, to the very wealthiest on a level far beyond anything Margaret Thatcher could have dreamed of. Suddenly the veil of an omni-benevolent Tory government is falling off, to be replaced by a face stamped with the logos of Diageo and Barclays.

On the 9th February, George Osborne told the House of Commons:

Those entrusted by us to regulate those bankers and run our economy washed their hands.
Meanwhile the rest of the country is left paying every day for their failures.
The government has to pick up the pieces.

It would seem that what Osborne believes is “picking up the pieces” entails giving away massive tax cuts, destroying the voluntary sector, and inviting the World’s naked short sellers to come and set up home in Britain.

Welcome to the Pig Society.

Why the Big Society is a load of bollocks

I have taken it upon myself to write a bullet point list of why the Big Society is a load of bollocks.

It’s a Tory plan.

In principle, is sounds lovely, and cuddly; a Country where everyone helps the little old lady cross the street, and the struggling girl trying to lift her suitcase up a flight of stairs, or a disabled man trying to reach food on the top shelf, or inviting a homeless drug addict round to Christmas dinner and letting him touch your wife’s breast. It all sounds lovely. But it’s a Tory plan. So obviously it isn’t all that it seems. Putting two and two together is not difficult, because this breed of Tory isn’t much better than the last breed at hiding their sinister motives.

Tories and their supporters are notoriously unable to critique their dogmatically held economic principles, no matter how flawed or dangerous it is. They simply put a new mask on it, every couple of years. A rebranding. Putting sparkly bits on dog turd.

Compact Voice, an agreement between the Voluntary sector and the Government, took London Council to court over plans to cut £10mn worth of funding. They won the right to a judicial review, after the court found that the plans to cut funding to 200 projects for lower socio-economic areas of London failed to meet statutory equality duties. So given that it takes a court order to promote a Big Society that the Government is apparently massively in favour of…. what is going wrong?

First you must look at the current Tory leader. Margaret Thatcher. Actually, it’s a posher looking shinier version of the mad old witch, but it nevertheless, is Thatcher. Dogmatically gelling himself to out of date, unfounded economic principles that didn’t work last time, and wont work again. Economic principles that cause more misery than joy, and only work to enrich a few people; the same people who happen to be socially retarded bastards of the highest calibre.

Thatcher famously said “there’s no such thing as society“. This is exactly what David Cameron is saying when he tries to promote his “Big Society”. The mask behind the motive, is that people will volunteer in their communities, rescue libraries, save post offices. The problem is that local communities are being drained of all resources.

When you take the mask off, the choice is “run your library yourself, of we’re closing it down“. And that’s horrendous. It is no different to what Tories always attempt to do, it just has a new mask. It would seem that the “Big Society” is a clever PR stunt, to cover up the fact that the Government is taking money away from the public sector, washing its hands of all social responsibility, in order to fund a mass of tax cuts for the very wealthy. The evidence for this can be seen with the recent offshore Corporate tax rule change; the biggest change in its history. Public money is being taken away from your library, and given back to people who run a business in England, but store their profits elsewhere, and pay no tax on it. Not only has the offshore tax system been scraped, the Corporate tax rate will be dropped by 4% by 2014. Public money is being taken away from your child’s school, for purely ideological reasons, and given to the very rich in the form of tax cuts; the very same very rich people who happen to fund the Tory Party.

Last year, George Osborne stood up in Parliament and told us all he was instantly getting rid of 490,000 jobs. Half a million people unemployed, in less than ten seconds. The Tory backbenchers cheered in joy. The Big Society is the tedious and futile hope that the voluntary sector will suck up the jobs that have been, and will continue to be destroyed by the Government. When millions are unemployed and in desperate need, the Government is washing its hands of them, and telling the rest of us to deal with it. We didn’t create this mess. The Financial Sector; many of whom donate to the Tory party, and all of whom are taking home a mass of money in bonuses this year created the problems.

The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations said:

“In Scotland we’re already delivering the big society. David Cameron’s big idea simply describes a lot of what already happens throughout Scotland’s third sector, from active volunteers in communities across the country to excellent public services run by charities.

“But government cuts are dangerously undermining our capacity to even continue the valuable work we were doing before the crash, never mind becoming the thriving third sector that Scotland so badly needs.

“Right now we’re on a knife- edge. The local lifelines that so many people rely on face vicious cuts, leaving the most vulnerable without the support they need. It’s going to take more than rhetoric to save our services.”

It is impossible to engage the Voluntary sector, when you are taking billions our of it, and giving a couple of million back whilst telling everyone you’re definitely funding it adequately. It is a joke. Most charity leaders don’t buy into it. They recognise that whilst Charity organisations face cuts of close to £5bn, plus the added issue of receiving less due to the scrapping of tax relief on donations, the promise of a couple of extra hundred million pounds, is minuscule. A £100mn “transition fund” is the equivalent of taking a loaf of bread away from you, handing you a slice of bread, and telling you to feed your family.

In fact, the Office for Civil Society’s promise of an extra £470mn for Voluntary organisations over the next four years, during a Parliament of intense Council cuts, is nothing in comparison to £500mn over the past three years. The Charity Commission will also be required to cut its funding by 27%.

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, the Executive Director of the UKs leading voluntary and training service; “Community Service Volunteers” said:

“So there are a lot of very worthwhile programmes – for example volunteers working in child protection as promoted by the minister for children – which are now under threat of closure.”

Do not buy into the Big Society hype.
It is not just a cover for public sector cuts, it is a cover to transfer wealth to a very narrow wealthy elite, through a mass of Corporate tax breaks.
In plain, it is Tories being Tories.

Multiculturalism in England

At the Student protest rally in London last November, I saw a group of people marching together; laughing and joking, holding a sign saying “Jewish and Muslim Students Unite“. A Jewish guy was holding the hand of a Muslim girl. Sadly, I didn’t manage to take a photo of those two. But I got a photo of the banner. I cannot think of a better symbol of the success of multiculturalism in this country, than that group of young people. Whilst the older generation (and a few crazed extremists) likes to cling on to some oddly indefinable nostalgic sense of “Britishness”, the rest of us are getting on with each other, just fine.

David Cameron today has claimed that Britain has become too tolerant of extreme Muslims. It is an unfortunate speech because it comes on the same day as the biggest EDL rally in its history in Luton, later today. Cameron’s mistake is that he mentioned Muslim extremism particularly, and not English Nationalism too.

Both are intolerable thugs, yet both are just not important. They should be ridiculed and ignored.

Cameron makes this speech a year after Merkal of Germany made pretty much the same speech in which she argued that German Multiculturalism had failed, and argued for a strong German national identity……… a strong……. German…. national identity…………. I wont point out the obvious flaw there.

He claimed that too many Muslim organisations are showered with public money, without doing anything to combat extremism. The question is, are the extremists part of these groups showered with public money? If they are, then of course they should be trying to combat the extreme element. But if they aren’t, then why should they? It’s like claiming that all middle aged men should be using their time and influence to combat the fact that a large number of paedophiles, tend to be middle aged men.

It would be terribly ignorant to suggest that there isn’t an extreme element of Islam in the UK. There is. Is it a threat? No. It is a fringe group of fundamentalists, just like the EDL, or should not be acknowledged or given a platform whatsoever. When either EDL or Muslim groups start to propagate violence, then it is up to the security services to make sure they don’t make good on their pathetic threats. But whilst they keep talking about “the word of God”, we should shake our heads, wondering how humanity hasn’t managed to progress past the middle ages, philosophically.

There are many many English Nationalist bloggers who blog exclusively concerning Islamic fundamentalism. They never mention violence and racial discourse by English Nationalism, because they are a part of that propaganda machine intended to imagine Englanders as the great victims. It is of course nonsense, but it isn’t just English Nationalists who play that card….

The Islamic Standard takes fairy tale delusions to the next level. It is religious folk like he, that I despise. They are the cancer of the Earth. He states of a soldier who has recently died in combat:

The family said in a statement: “Martin was proud to be in the Parachute Regiment and serving his country. He served three years as a Police Community Support Officer in West Yorkshire Police before joining the PARAs.”

So not only was he in it for the money like many soldiers, but actually believed in this war against Islam and though anyone can change whilst still alive and become a better person, I can’t help feeling the world is a better place without this nationalistic enemy of Muslims on the planet.

One wonders why he thinks we should be a “friend” of his brand of Islam, when he preaches the total overthrow of our entire culture, and replacement by his.
It’s an ugly sentiment. It makes me angry to read it. But knee-jerk reactions, to Religious Fascism is what leads to the rise of National Fascism, and that’s fucking horrendous too.
It is ironic that he uses the term “nationalistic”. Nationalism is the mirror image of Religious fundamentalism. Both are fighting for a silly little concept, an outdated, human invention. A non-divine, delusion. He lives in a Country that allows him the freedom to wish death upon anyone who isn’t the biggest fan of his fairy tale delusion, and yet he condemns it. As an Atheist, I do not condemn him to death, I do not want to impose my ways on him. I’m sure he can be a nice, civilised, loving person, when he isn’t being a massively racist thug. Whether the man who died was a soldier or not, is irrelevant to Islamic Standard, because in his “about” section, he states:

We also don’t condemn our brethren who do violent acts in the UK, they have their evidence, we have our’s and we love them for the sake of Allah, they are our brothers and sisters and we would never agree to hand them over to the kufr Taghoot authorities and believe to side with the Kuffar, aid them in their war against Islam by either spying on the Muslims or joining their crusading armies and police forces are acts of Kufr Akbar (major disbelief).

- He does not condemn terrorism. He loves them, actually. For the sake of a fairy man in the sky, he loves terrorists. But he doesn’t love Western terrorism. The terrorists have to be Muslims. Violence and murder is perfectly acceptable, as long as you’re slightly Arabic. Because his God apparently differentiates between the skin colour or culture of his murderers. He condemns Western aggression throughout the World (which I do too), but he does not condemn Muslim extremism, when its aim is to install its punitive religious bullshit on those of us who would rather drink our own piss than submit to religious “values”. What if his “brethren” (a word that always makes me laugh, a product of religious delusion) who “do violent acts” kill a child? Is that not condemnable? What about an innocent old lady (I know extremists like to try to justify their inherently violent nature, by suggesting that no one is “innocent”, but that’s a cop out)? is that okay too, because it’s a fight for a massively overrated religion?
He, in short, is a thug.
But he is entitled to his bullshit, in this country. I entirely disagree with him. I find him a virus that the immune system of humanity should be intent on weeding out with logic and reason. But I will always defend his right to be a Fascist, in the same way that his mirror image – the EDL have the right to believe the bullshit that they believe. They are a very small minority who do not condemn violence against those who entirely disagree with them, but want others to understand, believe and treat them like our superiors. It isn’t ever going to happen from me. He condemns me for who I am. He condemns me, because I am not a Muslim.

Cameron argues that Multiculturalism has failed.
He’s wrong.
It hasn’t failed.
Thirty years ago, the Tories ran a campaign in Birmingham with a leaflet stating “If you want a nigger as a neighbour, vote Labour”. Thankfully, that sort of far right Nationalist bullshit is past us. Now, your kids could be white and Christian, playing football in the street with their black, Muslim and Sikh friends. My dad coaches youth cricket teams; the young players are all very very good friends, and are all mixed culturally. Cultural integration is a slow process that takes a generation or two to take hold. This new generation of children are far more culturally aware and integrated that we ever were. Cameron’s speech is inflaming a culture of suspicion of the “other” that until now has been left to the idiots on the far right. He is giving a credible face to that intolerance, especially by not referencing the anti-British values of the EDL.

That being said, I am no fan of organised religion, and if I had my way, no religious organisation would be receiving public funds, and I absolutely wouldn’t tolerate religious schools. I do not want Christian influence on politics and law, just like I don’t want Islamic influence on politics and law. I do not want fairy tales to influence reality. Cameron would do us all a credit, if he is taking a swipe at Islam, to also take a swipe at extreme Christians. Contrary to Christian belief, Western law is not based on Christian reasoning. It is based on social evolution and common sense. Law should be based on irrefutable fact, not on largely discredited miserable fairy tales from 1500-2000 years ago, in the desert. Whilst religious people like to suggest that homosexuality is unnatural, I would suggest that religious belief, is the most unnatural and vicious pessimistic invention humanity has ever had the misfortune to invent. The moment we no longer need such bullshit, is the day when we have evolved to the level that we can truly call ourselves civilised. Fundamentalist Islam, like Nationalists in the EDL are not civilised. They are barbaric thugs and nothing else. Do not let them convince you otherwise.

Multiculturalism has not failed.
The experiment of Nation States has failed. The experiment of one overriding National identity has failed. The experiment of organised religion has failed.
Nation States are a left over from Colonial days. They have nothing but a violent history. They are like a market place, always looking for resources to plunder. It doesn’t matter if it is Western Nations or Middle Eastern Nations; the rich ones always want more. It isn’t Islam vs Christianity. It is the rich vs the poor. Always will be. Religion is used as a way to separate the poor Westerners from the poor Easterners, when actually they have more in common with each other than they think. They should be joining hands and fighting back. Racism has always been used as a divisive tool to stop popular uprisings.

We are all a product of multiculturalism. A British identity has always been a little bit obscure. For most of our history, since the year 0, we were a Catholic country, in which the majority of our citizens considered themselves loyal to Rome before loyalty to the Nation. Protestants and Catholics fought for their vision of what it meant to be British. The English fought the Scots. The Royalists fought the Republicans. The Enlightenment thinkers struggled against the “traditionalists” of the elites. Darwin struggled to find a time to reveal the greatest discovery in the history of mankind, in the face of religious fundamentalists, so backward in their thinking, so dogmatic in their delusions, who would have liked him to have been silenced. We are a land of multiculturalism. I guarantee my idea of what it means to be British is far away from what David Cameron thinks it means to be British. Perhaps, in a very broad sense, we can deduce that to be British, is to believe in Democracy, the rule of secular law, and socially liberal values of acceptance. And tea drinking. Lots of tea drinking.

I have always argued that mass migration is linked entirely to global inequality. We, as a Western State had a foot up the ladder of global Capitalism long before Middle Eastern countries started to climb. We used our days of Empire to secure great wealth, that has kept us relatively privileged ever since. We pillaged the World and then blocked our borders to them. We stole resources and labour supplies, and gave nothing back. Now we are complaining that the people we left behind, want a better life for themselves and their families in the UK. That to me, is irrational. The balance has to be tipped toward the centre economically. Flooding the World with American and British multinational companies, is not fair. It is perpetuating the problem, it results in war and in hatred. Always will do. Especially when mixed with religion.

Fundamentalism in religion, is built on a bedrock of intolerance, hate, violence, delusion, anger, and whilst their mindset is undoubtedly influenced by their religious beliefs; they also must have psychological issues in the first place, to allow themselves to condemn large sections of humanity, who have done nothing personally to upset or hurt them, to a violent, miserable death. This is the legacy of religion. To call any religion, the “religion of peace and love” is a contradiction in terms.

George Bush said he had heard the voice of the Christian God, who told him to go to war in Iraq. Absolute madness. And very very worrying, that a man who has such strong delusions can acquire the position of the most powerful man in the World. It is the 21st Century and our leaders are no different from the 16th Century European leaders who were raging wars based entirely on religions. It is almost beyond comprehension that our history for the past 2000 years has been plagued by the dictatorship of a work of fiction. Christian fundamentalism has been the driving force behind the power of the Catholic Church for decades.

If those of us who are sensibly minded, and optimistic for the future of humanity, those of us who are not infected with the disease of organised religion, all accept that it isn’t Islam itself or Christianity itself that are the problems, that they are just systems for spirituality; and we accept that it is indoctrination into extreme tendencies that are the problem, throughout the World of organised religion, we are sure to prevail. Logic, reason, and fact always prevails.

Moderate Christians, Muslims, Jews, English, Middle Eastern etc should be banding together, and enjoying each others company, learning from each other, and progressing. We should not be suspicious of each other, and we should not be condemning each other, purely for the beliefs one has.

Be black, be white, be gay, be straight, be Muslim, be Christian, be Jewish, be Atheist, be female, be male, be fat, be thin, be happy, be miserable, be sporty, be artistic, be eccentric, be philosophical, be left, be right, and live together.

I do not want to see people as being Muslim first. David Cameron is pointing and saying “look, a Muslim, be suspicious“.

Communism before Marx

There are people I am familiar with who seem to dismiss the philosophy of Karl Marx without knowing why they do so. Most are Conservative supporters, blissfully unaware of the irony of their unwavering support for an economic system that has so miserably failed us all over the past few years, and is destined to do so again (from a Marxian perspective), whilst trying to outright dismiss the tools used by Marx to critique the system.

Marx, to me is a Utopian and one of the most forward thinkers in generations. We can use Marx as a tool to critique the failings of the system that we live under, and to highlight its weaknesses. Does this mean that those of us who consider ourselves Marxists wish to overthrow the entire system and abandon all property rights? Of course not. We recognise the fundamental differences between early Capitalism of the time in which Marx was writing, and the massively complicated system that we live under today. We simply use Marxist thinking to try to explain the structural weaknesses and inherent contradictions within that system. Marx, in that respect, is more relevant today than he has been for decades. More so than Thatcher, more so than Reagan, more so than Osborne. None of whom are in the same league as Karl Marx for economic and social critique and scientific understanding.

I have promised a classmate at University, that I would try to explain why Karl Marx was simply a product of history, and was not responsible for the fundamental idea behind his writings, but simply someone who managed to create a thesis if you will, a consolidation of thoughts and ideas belonging to the tradition of collectivism throughout history. He simply provided a scientific analysis for the linear progression of society from feudalism, to imperialism, to capitalism, to communism. He was not the first to promote egalitarian principles.

By the 1st Century BC, the Jewish community was spread from Israel right the way to the far western front of the Roman Empire. They weren’t an organised community as such; there were a few factions. The Pharisees and the Sadducees are the most famous, purely because they were pretty hostile to one another. But there existed a group called the Essene. Pliny the Elder is one of the very few historians who mentions them, but they are mentioned elsewhere, if you look hard enough. They existed on the Western coast of the Dead Sea. They were like a family; very close. They practiced a system of property sharing. If one of their members had two loaves of bread and one had nothing, the one with two loaves would share one. They were not threatened into doing so, or forced in any way, it was simply part of their nature. They were not a different section of humanity. They prove that humanity is not necessarily motivated entirely by greed. They lived in a society where greed was not rewarded, and so the trait of greed was not amplified, as it is in the system that we live in. Human nature is so vast and so unpredictable, it takes the form of whatever society it is a part of. It is not greedy alone. The Essene also used a system of income distribution according to need. This was 2000 years before Marx wrote arguably his most famous line; “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” They did not own slaves, instead they worked to help each other. Today, we would call them communists.

The Didache, an important first century Christian document known as “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles“, states:

“Share everything with your brother. Do not say, ‘It is private property.’ If you share what is everlasting, you should be that much more willing to share things which do not last.”

The Archbishop of Constantinople, and very important early Christian teacher, John Chrysostom, remarked:

“The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor, even if they have acquired them honestly or inherited them legally. Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life.

Many Christian sects throughout the Middle Ages were the last remnants of real Christianity, not the monstrous sect of privilege and pomp we have today. Those old Christian sects presented a problem for the ever powerful and rich central Church. The Waldensians for example promoted the ideas of social justice and looking after those less fortunate. The lived in a commune. They were very forward thinking, noting in the 12th Century that the Catholic Church was corrupt and full of power hungry maniacs. They were thus declared heretics by Pope Lucius III, many were burnt as heretics because they had shown “contempt for ecclesiastical power”.

The 17th Century group known as the “diggers” were a radical sect who wished to overthrow the feudal system and replace it with small powerless egalitarian agricultural communities. They started to plant crops in privately owned fields, to help the fact that food prices had rocketed. They invited the poor to all join in. They pulled down private enclosures of land. The shared food and goods between them.

Max Beer, the German historian writes:

…there cannot be any doubt that common possessions were looked upon by many of the first Christians as an ideal to be aimed at.”

It would seem that many of the early Christians followed their earlier Jewish Essene brothers in advocating common ownership rather than private property. And why not? After all their sacred text says this:

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.”

Christianity’s most popular names have pronounced similar sentiments to those pronounced by the Essene and early Christians. In the fourth Century, St Augustine’s teacher, St Ambrose wrote quite emphatically:

Nature has poured fourth all things for all men, to be held in common. For God commanded all things to be produced so that food be common to all and that the Earth should be a common possession to all. Nature therefore created common right. Habit created private right. Since, therefore, His bounty is common, how is it that you have so many fields, and your neighbor not even a clod of earth?

It would seem that one of the greatest advocates of early communist ideals, and a man who understood class conflict, was the priest and instigator of the peasants revolt, the priest John Ball. He was an early revolutionary, born in the wrong era. He was known to try to whip up aggression among the peasants against the Lords of the land and the Monarchy. He was an early communist. And yet no one knows his name. In his day, he was simply known by the Nobility as “the crazy priest”. One of his many speeches reads:

” My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill have they used us ? and for what reason do they thus hold us in bondage ? Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve ? and what can they show, or what reasons give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves ? except, perhaps, in making us labor and work for them to spend.

They are clothed in velvets and rich stuffs, ornamented with ermine and other furs, while we are forced to wear poor cloth. They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of the straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labors in the fields; but it is from our labor they have wherewith to support their pomp. We are called slaves; and, if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice…. ”

That was six centuries ago. An early Karl Marx, and certainly not crazy.
In the same era as Ball was sparking up popular dissent in England, a group called the Taborites were living what was considered an heretical life by the Catholic Church, in the Czech city of Tabor. They also practised communal living; sharing all the land and all property. They announced that in their community, there were no masters and no servants.

A 16th Century revolutionary whose name is not known, but who historians call “the revolutionary of the upper Rhine” once wrote:

What a lot of harm springs from self seeking!….. It is necessary therefore that all property become one single property.

Reading Thomas More’s Utopia (I have a bit of an obsession with 16th Century History), you soon come to a couple of paragraphs that make you wonder whether or not you are readin a 16th Century writer, or a modern Marxist. I have put the two paragraphs together in one quote here, because it’s far easier to read that way:

“I am quite convinced that you’ll never get a fair distribution of goods or a satisfactory organisation of human life, until you abolish private property altogether. So long as it exists, the vast majority of the human race will inevitably go on labouring under a burden of poverty, hardship, and worry.

In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the World, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organising society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible.”

So you see, there were many revolutionary freethinkers throughout history who would today be labelled evil communists. And yet, we revere them as great people from the past. Thomas More is now Saint Thomas More (which always amuses me; cannonising a man who wished to burn to death any man who dared to own a copy of the Bible in English). The early egalitarian Christians planted that seed that became slowly entwined with the money tree of Medieval Europe and its corrupt power structure. Modern day Christianity, and especially Catholicism should feel ashamed to link itself in any way to the early Church whose name it has so violently stolen and pissed all over.

Karl Marx did not come up with the ideas he speaks of in the Communist Manifesto, all by himself. He had a very rich history of egalitarian thought and rebellion behind him. He modernised those thoughts, and consolidated them, creating a beautifully crafted popular critique of the vile Capitalist world he inhabited. That was his genius.