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.

Bricks and mortar

This is Samantha Cameron, the wife of David Cameron:

This is a section of 300,000+ people:

The public are very similar to Sam Cameron, in that they’re being fucked by David too.

This is a gimp:

A gimp is traditionally expected to keep quiet and do as he’s told. He has a master. He must take all the abuse, he mustn’t have an opinion, and he must be kept on a short lead in case he disobeys.

This is Nick Clegg:

Nick Clegg has a master, does what he’s told, has had his opinion beaten out of him, and now just obeys. Right now, you are drawing a comparison in your minds between Nick Clegg……… and a gimp.

I went to the TUC rally in London on Saturday, accompanied by close to half a million people. This is what I saw:

Support from all over the place.

My favourite banner quote all day.

My thoughts exactly:

The march across the Thames.

£250 for bacon? Bloody Aussie’s. First they give us Fosters, and now overpriced bacon.

The reason this amazing human being looks so bright, is because he jumped in front of my shot at the very last second. He makes this picture so brilliant.

I am fully aware that this guy holds a bit of a resemblance to me. This is worrying.

The spirit of Che!

Damn right.

Possibly a little bit extreme. Unless we’re now referring to the Foreign Secretary, as “The Hague” in which case, I fully support this.

Lots of families!

The Met officer looks pretty guilty to me. He must really fucking hate Starbucks. He is probably one of those annoying people who insist on talking to you about their favourite coffee.

Carnival type of atmospheres at marchers are fantastic. This man has moves!

The aftermath at Trafalgar.

The Business Secretary, Lib Dem Vince Cable today said he was listening to the Unions, but would not budge on the Coalition’s plans for austerity.
In 2010, before the election, Cable said this:

“We have deep, long term problems….. a financial aristocracy which regards tax paying as something for little people not themselves.”

“People are desperate to see the back of this Labour government. But they don’t want the same old Tories. And make no mistake they are exactly the same.”

Today on BBC Radio, speaking about the top rate of tax, Cable said this:

“It moved up to 50p in an emergency because we had to have a sense of solidarity that everybody was bearing some of the pain, and the chancellor said in the budget that we’re going to have to move away from that. I agree with him. The Liberal Democrats agree with him.

- Essentially what he is saying is there doesn’t need to be a ‘sense of solidarity that everybody is bearing some of the pain any more’ because whilst the disabled, the elderly, and the most vulnerable lose all sorts of care, Cable is allowing the richest few to pay less tax. What an obscene man he has become. I wonder if the Vince Cable of 2010 who warned of the “same old Tories” would appreciate the Vince Cable of 2011 becoming one of the same old Tories. It is the biggest ideological attack in many many years. It is not the “only way”.

The issue from Tory MPs and those who seem to have very short memories, and an apparent lack of attention to detail, now seems to be that no one is setting out an alternative, to deep austerity. As if Neoliberalism is the only possible way. The problem with that is…
1) Labour set out an alternative before the election.
2) Pre May 2010 Lib Dems had an alternative.
3) Reforming the clear imbalance between cuts and taxes is an alternative. Tax more, do not cut Corporation tax, raise it. Impose a stricter set of regulations on banks and impose a far far higher levy. Robin hood tax. Close all tax avoidance loopholes. Ensure that Companies such as Diageo agree to pay back all of what they owe over a set period. Do not abolish tax on offshore profits bought back to the UK. DO NOT abolish the 50p tax rate, as Vince Cable announced would be abolished as early as 2013. Stop promoting the idea that we are like Greece. We aren’t, in any way like Greece, nor were we heading that way. That’s an alternative. It is a wholly left wing alternative, but an alternative nevertheless. Keynes set out an alternative. Stiglitz set out an alternative. Roubini, McCulley, Romer, Krugman, Pettifor, Pissarides, Kalecki, Blinder, and many many other economic and political theorists have many different alternatives than deep austerity. Thereisabetterway.org sets out alternatives. To ask ordinary people to sacrifice their jobs and their livelihoods, for the sake of a mass of tax cuts, is not the only way. To claim no one could possibly come up with an alternative, is massively ignorant.

Violent action is provoked by violent economic policies.
There is an alternative.

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.

The logic of incentive

According to our financial experts, the reason we couldn’t punish bankers, and curtail the bonus culture, or slap a tax on banking bonuses or transactions in the UK was because the “best people for the job, will leave the country“. We were told that the market system dictates that if you take away the incentive, no matter how unjustifiably large those incentives are, the best people will all flee the country to some fucked third World country, where oversight and regulation and taxes are low. It encompasses the entire scope of human nature, and sums it up by telling us that monetary incentives are what ultimately drive us, and anything else would be evil socialism and that government should be off our backs but big business should be allowed to stab as many backs as they wish, because it’s capitalism, so it’s okay. I think that pretty much sums up Friedmanite economic theory.

The utterly ridiculous Mayor of London, Boris Johnson claimed recently that a 50p top tax rate, and an extra levy on non-doms would force 9000 bankers in Britain to flee the country. Boris’ office said:

Boris is determined to highlight to everyone, including George Osborne, that this [bonus] tax is already having an adverse impact and should it become a more permanent feature of our tax system it would have an extremely devastating impact on London’s long-term prosperity.

What interests me, is that Boris, along with every other Conservative both here and America seem unable to admit that London’s long-term prosperity was not attacked by the idea of a bonus tax, but instead by the free ride that the Conservatives gave to bankers, allowing them to gamble horrendously, for twenty five years. Why are they unable to admit that their precious free market system failed miserably? Their logic no longer applies. Johnson should therefore be ignored on this one. Especially given that the Tories matra has been that we are “all in this together“.

The article goes on to say that Goldman Sachs would consider moving their offices abroad because of a super tax suggested by Alistair Darling, the then Chancellor, earlier this year. This is the same Goldman Sachs who were forced to settle $60million out of court to stop an investigation by the Massachusetts Attorney General into whether or not Goldman promoted drastically unfair and impossible home loans across the State. This is the same Goldman Sachs that stands accused of selling dodgy packaged mortgages that they knew were going to fail, to investors, and then betting against them, making a fortune through it, prompting an ex-Goldman worker involved in the scandal to write the book “How I caused the credit crunch“, the same scandal that lead to Goldman Sachs paying a record $550million settlement after being sued by the SEC for fraud. Why are we all allowing ourselves to be held to ransom, by a bunch of criminals? Incidentally, when the 50p top rate of tax finally came into force in April 2010, Goldman did not make good on their threat. They still do business in the UK. Goldman didn’t leave. The 9000 bankers didn’t leave. The Tories, as ever, were wrong.

Now, ignoring the logistics of moving to another country so quickly, upping your family out of the place they call home, simply because you now only make 1.2million instead of 1.5million in bonuses each year; the apparent science that offering higher rewards will improve performance, is actually flawed and realistically cannot be called a science. It is a manipulation more than anything. A threat. Keep paying us unjustifiably high amounts of money, or we’ll leave, and your country is screwed. It is why politicians are effectively useless, because they have very little say over economic matters. We all know these bankers will not leave the country in one huge banking emigration day.

A group of economists working out of M.I.T and the University of Chicago conducted an experiment using a number of students. They gave the students a number of assignments, including mathematical and scientific problems to solve. They offered the first group a very small amount of money as an incentive to complete the assignments. They offered a second group a higher amount, and they offered a third group a large amount of money. The theory put forward by the defenders of market principles, or those with free-market-failure-denial would argue that those offered the most amount of money, would perform the best. The reality was different. The students offered the highest incentive, failed miserably. The students offered the medium amount and the students offered the lowest amount both ended up with similar results. Both beating the students offered the most.

The economists then took the experiment to Madurai, in India, with higher incentives, fearing that maybe there wasn’t enough difference in incentive when the experiment was conducted on students in the US. In India, they offered the first group a weeks wages, they offered the second group; a months wages, and the third group; two months wages. The stakes in India for such rewards, would be far higher than at M.I.T. Again, those offered the smallest incentive performed pretty much identically to those offered the medium sized reward. Those offered the top incentive, did the worst again. So, the higher the incentive, the lower the performance. Why? Firstly, we now have to accept that free market theory is just that; a theory, and whilst some of it is relevant and works well, there is much of it that has failed recently, and analysing the entire process in this way, can only be a good thing.

It is true that if you don’t give people the money they clearly deserve for the work they have done, they will not perform highly, they will be unmotivated and annoyed. So yes, money as an incentive does work to an extent. The experiment showed that when you give someone a simple task and tell them they will be paid a certain amount for completing that task, the incentive works. But when you give people a difficult task, which requires long term thought, creativity and problem solving skills of the highest calibre, the incentive doesn’t work. I’d suggest the reason for this, isn’t simply ‘human nature’, it is mainly because our society and our universal culture rewards greed and excess and so that trait of greed which exists in all of us, becomes amplified. Human nature is so vastly complex, to sum it up in such a simple way and create an economic system around it, is a problem. And so a highly problematic task, is rewarded in three ways according to the research, and those three ways are personal from than simply the need for money. Those three things are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

Autonomy states that if you want a difficult and complex task completed, self direction is better. Figuring it out for yourself is far more rewarding than having someone tell you how it’s done, it is far better than having a demanding manager micro-managing your every move. Leave your workers to do the job their way. Social commentator Dan Pink points out that the Australian software company Atlassian tell their employees that on one day of the second quarter, they can spend the next 24 hours working on whatever project they want, with whomever they way, and any way they want, they have to then show their results the following day at a staff meeting filled with drinks and cakes. That one day has lead to huge advances in software fixes and new ideas and creations. This did not involve a promise of a bonus or any extra money. They performed to the best of their ability, without the need for more money.

Mastery means improving and understanding what we are doing, far better than when we started. I read a lot of history books, not because it is economically valuable, but because I enjoy it, and I like to know that I can debate and talk about historical events with a degree of mastery. People add to opensource, in their spare time for no money reward, but because the work is autonomous, and they improve and learn as they go. What they create, then becomes free, they do not sell it. It is not economically valuable for the individual. Evil Communism at work again.

Purpose, is pretty self explanatory. A company without its eye on a purpose, becomes pretty dangerous. Now, right winged economics would have us believe that a primary motive for any company should be profit making. This isn’t true. Look again at Goldman Sachs. They took their eye off their purpose to provide sensible mortgages and a helpful responsible banking service, and instead kept their eye firmly on profit, which has been catastrophic. Profit and purpose should be interlinked. Purpose should serve the community, and not just shareholders. There must be a reason for people to want to improve.

Now, what this all means is that when you combine the three, it is interesting to note that our motives, are based almost firmly on concepts that don’t involve money. Money certainly plays its part, we all want to feel secure, but once we have a degree of security, we are not just consumers nor economic statistics, we have personal reasons for the work we do. If we leave people to it; dress in what makes you feel comfortable, talk in a way that isn’t imposed on you from those above, create, innovate and at the same time laugh and talk, instead of simply saying “look, if you do this, you get $2000, but do it my way. Oh and there’s a really important person coming through the office later, when you see him, make sure you bow and call him Sir, for he is above you.“, you will almost always see better results. Once the boss is off your back and the carrot made out of gold has been put away, and employees are treated like people rather than cogs in a money making machine, you will almost always see better results. The logic is now based on quite strong research. Free market obsessives can no longer claim their way is the only way, and this makes me happy.

The nature of “Change”

It amazes me that people actually consider any party; Labour, Tory, or Lib Dem of being the “party of change”. Absolutely unreal to believe that. I voted Liberal Democrat, almost in a moment of madness. I suppose I got caught up in the excitement of the election. It amuses me how many fellow students actually believe they were voting for “change” for the Liberal Democrats. It makes me feel like banging my head against a wall. The same feeling I get when people say “Well Gordon Brown caused this mess, so the Tories have to fix it!!!“. I am actually quite ashamed of myself for voting. I agree with the Lib Dem policy on Trident, and I agree with them on laying the foundations for a Greener economy. I disagree, profoundly with them and the Tories and Labour, on pretty much everything else. But my main issue with them, and my main issue with why they offer no real change, is because they still seem to believe that democracy is only acceptable in the Political sphere, and that the economic sphere is best left to faceless businessmen, as if they know what’s best for the World and the rest of us should just accept it.

Why was financial reform not at the top of the agenda? Why did centre-left and left wing parties allow the political discourse to become one of the necessity of savage public spending cuts? Why did centre-left and left wing parties allow the discourse to suggest that it is the public sector that is to blame, that government spending is to blame for the deficit? It is because they are not centre-left or left wing parties, they are parties for the rich, by the rich. The Lib Dems offer no real change. They offer the status quo, and the status quo is centre-right.

Financial deregulation was started by the Conservatives in the 1980s. It continued under Labour. The Liberal Democrats did not oppose it. The Liberal Democrats have no plans to reverse it. What they have basically been telling us for thirty years, is that government spending distorts the market by artificially affecting the demand side of the economy, whereas a bank offering easy imaginary money to stimulate our obsession with debt fuelled consumerism, is perfectly acceptable. They decided that it’s okay for a bank to use our money and our savings, not to invest in productive enterprises that progress mankind, but in totally non-productive speculative gambling and massive monopolising corporate take overs and mergers.

The very people who got us into the mess over in the private financial sector, are the same people who finance the parties across the World who are now not offering any kind of financial reform to stop them doing it again. A global banking transaction tax is surely only going to end up being passed onto consumers? The financial industry holds us all to ransom. When we hear them say that capital will flow out of the country, and cause investment to drop, if tax is put up……. they’re right. A lot of people dispute it. But they are correct. You almost have to bribe them to try and get them to stay in the Country. Bribing with political power, is usually the way it’s done. If you look at Latin America, what tends to happen when a Latin American government tries to invest in social justice, and attempts to help it’s people through a better standard of schooling and health, is that either America funds a right winged coup (see Nicaragua), or capital flows out of the country, which is then brought to it’s knees, and the Western World blames the evils of Socialism. When in reality, what is happening, is that slowly, politicians have less and less power, they have to give in to the owners of great wealth, otherwise capital flows out, and investment falls. The economic sphere, has the most power, and we have no say over that. Financial speculation has absolutely no social good. It is a cancer on the fabric of society. The financial industry, holds the World to ransom. And until the public have some control over the economic sphere, it is never going to change. The Lib Dems, certainly aren’t going to change it.

If you think through the logic of this, you’ll see that so long as economic power remains privately concentrated, everybody...everybody…….. has to be committed to the one overriding goal: and that’s to make sure that the rich folks are happy.
Whenever a reform measure does come along somewhere, they have a big propaganda campaign against it saying ‘it’s going to hurt jobs, it’s going to hurt investment, it’s going to hurt business confidence and so on. That’s just a complicated way of saying unless you keep business happy, the population isn’t going to have anything.

- Professor Noam Chomsky

There are no left wing intellectuals left within the political system any more. Politics demands leaders of Parties who pander to the public mood, which is artificially created and implanted, by the media. Immigration is a great example. Migration is caused by global inequality, nothing else. When capital and goods are free to flow across the World, so will human beings. It is our survival instinct at work. And so the only real way you deal with immigration, is to deal with global inequality. Stop the IMF destroying poorer countries with ideological warfare. A global initiative to tackle exploitation. A Global bill of rights ensuring a minimal standard of living for all human beings. In the 21st Century, where it’s considered morally acceptable to allow someone to amass a fortune worth billions of pounds, it seems abhorrent that it is considered morally acceptable to allow another to starve to death as a result of nothing more than this nightmare of an economic system. A Global financial sector regulator that is fully independent of any private interest. To sum up, a Global initiative to create a socially responsible form of Capitalism, rather than a regressive Darwinian form of Capitalism we’ve all had forced down our throats. Global solutions, to Global problems. Politicians across the UK and the World, especially in the developed Nations, pander to idiots, bigots, and xenophobes who do not understand the World, and offer easy and quick Colonian-esque solutions to complex problems. The Lib Dems do not offer any change here either.

So, who do we vote for, for real change?

Is Obama a Marxist?

No.
That is the short answer to the question.
Whenever a politician deeply angers the American right wing, I start to really like that particular politician. They must be doing something right.
Plenty of Glenn Beck addicts, and right winged Americans who seemingly have no idea what Marxism actually is, keep throwing the word MARXIST at Obama. I take great offence at this, because I quite like Marx. I also quite like Che Guevara.
I quite like Marxism, I quite like Bakunin too. And Obama is quite the opposite. And here’s why.

He isn’t forcing business to meet production quotas.

Those same businesses that aren’t forced to meet production quotas are also not run by the workers.

He has never called for a mass workers revolution.

Nor are the above three points ever going to happen.

Left wing, does not mean Marxist.

Government interference in some aspects of the economy, in order to prop up demand during capitalist busts, are not Marxist. In fact, they are Keynesian. Which again, is not Marxism. The World is not as black and white as the right wing likes to make out. The choice isn’t Reagan, or Marx.

A Marxist would not put ex-bankers in his Treasury.

Actually, A Marxist wouldn’t have a treasury, because a Marxist wouldn’t be in power, because power wouldn’t exist.

Regulation on amoral industry to stop it becoming immoral industry, is not Marxist.

Keynes was not a Marxist.

Safety nets like Social Security, are not Marxist.

There is no democratic control of the means of production.

Wages exist.

Your State and National borders exist.

Government programs paid for by taxpayers are not Marxist because A) Money would be abolished under true Marxism, and B) Government wouldn’t exist under true Marxism, because Marxism is pretty close to what Bakunin and Kroptkin advocated.

Being black, and friends with Muslims, does not make him a Marxist terrorist who hates White people.

Nor does it make it so, if Glenn Beck says it.

Obama is President. Head of a Government. A Nation State. The very concept of a President, Government and State is anti-Marxist.

In fact, any kind of government regulation set by the State from Minimum wage to Medicare, runs contrary to Marxism, because it legitimises the State.

No industry is Nationalised (unless you count the police force and fire department as industries, by most Right Winged Americans tend to over look those).

And before you say it, Healthcare in the U.S is not Nationalised.

Ask your local supermarket chain if they’re making a profit. If they are, then Marxism has not come to America.

Being Atheist, does not make one a Marxist. (Obama’s religious beliefs are irrelevant).

Obama has never tried to suggest that private property be abolished, that division caused by the free flow of capital is the root of all evil, and all means of productions be taken over by a workers revolution. Until he does, he in no way can be considered Marxist.

The Founding Fathers were neither Socialist nor neoliberalist proponents, because they did not know what Socialism and Neoliberalism were. Are you a proponent or exponent of Chrositographicness? You’re neither, because you don’t know what it is, neither do I, I just made it up. Similarly, the words Neoliberalism and Socialism would have made no sense to the Founders. Stop trying to manipulate their words to suit your agenda.

Higher taxes on the rich, does not mean Marxism. In fact, Marx never mentions the concept.

Just because Obama hung around with members of Socialist and Communist parties in his college days, does not mean he wishes to turn America into the USSA. It’s like saying, he was friends with a few posh British people, and so that clearly means he wishes to revoke independence and become a colony of the British again.

A society that uses welfare to further perpetuate the division between employer and employee, is not Marxist.

Obama is further to the right than Britain’s Liberal Democrats, who are centre-left. He is further right than the Swedes. Both the Lib Dems and the Swedes are not Marxists. The entire World other than crazed right winged Americans understand this. In fact, Swedish healthcare, EVIL MARXIST healthcare, ranks close to the top of the World rankings. America’s system, well, let’s just say it’s fucking appalling. Swedish education, including higher education is free for all, and they still have a higher rate of social mobility than the U.S. EVIL MARXISTS!!!

If we were to look at the politics of, say, Conservative hero Disraeli, we see that actually, by todays standards, Disraeli is more ‘Socialist’ than Obama could ever hope to be. Obama is a one nation conservative of old.

The ‘hike’ in the top rate of tax by the Obama administration for 2013 to 36.9% is not at all a tax hike, and just a rise from the Bush era. Between 1993, and 2000 (also known as the boom years), the top rate of tax was …. 39.6%… exactly as the President has proposed for 2013. By mad Republican standards, every President has been a mad Socialist. Except for Bush. Reagan would certainly fall into the category of ‘Marxist’ by 21st Century Republican standards.

George Orwell’s 1984 does not represent a Marxist style of government. It was a critique on the misuse of Marxism for totalitarian gain. It is an Authoritarian government; Stalinist, if you will. The whole point was to critique Stalin. Orwell was a Marxist. 1984 was not Marxism. Saying “it’s like 1984!!” when speaking of Obama is nonsense and then saying he’s a Marxist, is incompatible. You do not have a telescreen in your house. You do not have a number assigned to you by the single ruling party. You do not have to work changing history for the government owned media, and your kids do not report you to the thoughtpolice who then do not go on to torture you into submission. Therefore, stop using the phrase “big brother society”, your scare tactics wont work.

Obama is not, never has been, and never will be a Marxist.

The rationality of not voting.

There is a presumption among many people, after last weeks leadership debate, that the Liberal Democrats are some extraordinary force for change in British politics. It amazes me. They are still centrists, much like New Labour. They have quasi-radical policies I agree with; scraping Trident comes to mind. But overall, they aren’t much different. They are market liberals. It would be incredible if the Liberal Democrats became the next Government, not because they offer radical change, but simply because the name “Liberal Democrat” has been largely ignored in British politics since it’s inception. But, they do not offer a change of system. They offer the same system, with a couple of tweaks. Their supporters seem to be assuming a change. Clegg in the debate said of the MPs scandal, and home switching, and other ridiculous expenses claiming that:

“I have to stress, not a single Liberal Democrat MP did either of those things”

…… Clegg himself collected £1,657.32 in expenses, on family groceries. Oh the irony. Lib Dem MPs Richard Younger-Ross, John Barrett, Sandra Gidley and Paul Holmes were all forced to pay back over £16,000 for claiming huge amounts of money for renting posh flats near Parliament. Oh…the…irony! Chris Huhne, the multi-millionaire, claimed £119 for a trouser press. The irony continues.

The choice in my constituency is between Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, and BNP. Now, i wont vote Tory out of principle. I wont vote Labour because they no longer represent my view. I wont vote BNP because i’m not a despicable nazi, and I wont vote Lib Dem, because they don’t represent my view either. If I have to give in to this system I dislike, then I will support a party of the left. Of which, none seem to actually exist.

So I wont be voting.

The cliche among Western democracies has been “if you don’t vote, you cannot complain” in suggestion that if Labour win and you didn’t vote against them, you have no right to complain. I disagree. I wont vote, because I do not believe any of them are fit the run the Country. I do not believe they have the right to have a say over so many lives. When they inevitably fuck up, lie and cheat, and are seen to not actually do what is expected of them, I can happily say that I haven’t empowered any of these bastards, and so I have every right to complain.

It is a rather difficult choice to decide not to vote. By not voting, I am in essence voting. Because by not voting, it isn’t because I am apathetic. It isn’t because I don’t understand Politics. It is simply because no political party represents my views. Not voting, is a rational decision for me. I consider myself of the Anarcho-syndicalist variety. I have no love for Capitalism. I don’t particularly like the idea of the Nation State, and Democracy is only acceptable to me, at a grassroots level. The current democratic system, is a mash of democratic and undemocratic principles. It says “This is the system that people who you have not elected have put in place, your job is now to elect one person to be the figurehead of that system”.

To vote in this upcoming election, would mean that I am giving my blessing to a system I am not too fond of. And since Labour, the Liberal Democrats and The Conservatives all offer no real change except a change of businessman running the show, and a few weakly tied bandages on a system that has recently failed miserably; for me to vote for any of them would be an endorsement of that system, and I cannot out of principle bring myself to do that. A system that says that Conservatives will win and cut spending, forcing the homeless rate back up, and the suicide rate sky rockets. Labour then get in a few years later when the misery gets too much, and a few extra regulations are placed on businesses that work only to help us all ignore the fact that those same businesses are openly tax avoiding. Then, an economic bubble will burst, the Tories will blame Labour again, despite them both being to blame. The Tories will get back in and force cuts again and so the cycle continues. A self perpetuating avalanche that negatively affects the majority, but keeps the wealthy minority happy. It is not the democracy that centuries of warfare has been fighting for. It is not democracy when there is no real choice. It is a group of businessmen, all fighting for control over a single system. It is that system that is tyrannical because there is no choice, we are stuck with it.

The public do not chose the agenda. We simply endorse an entire agenda of one party. One party, out of two or three to be precise. But all Parties rest on the assumption that human nature, is greedy and self interested. I disagree profoundly with this assumption, and so no party that represents that view, is ever likely to acquire my vote.

One should view human nature as so intricate and inexplicable, that it is deeply atrocious and manipulative for advocates of a particular social or economic system to claim to have tapped into it. The idea that human nature is inherently greedy, and self-centered seems to have become the prevailing philosophy, but it has taken over a century of forcing it upon Nations like Latin America, riots against Thatcherism, propaganda against any system that suggests otherwise (if you wonder why a child in Africa is allowed to starve, you’re automatically a “communist” or a “bleeding heart liberal” apparently), pounding home the idea that businessmen “create” wealth and so it’d be apparently immoral to redistribute that wealth to people who can’t actually afford to live; that Authoritarianism is a great evil – unless it’s in the workplace, then it’s wondrous. Should such a small amount of individuals be allowed control over such vast resources? No. It has taken over a Century and the loss of many lives, to become almost universally accepted that a small amount of individuals controlling a vast amount of resources is perfectly acceptable, and even desirable. It is simply a philosophy. It is not universal truth. It is not objective fact. Durkheim and Jung both suggest that human nature is supremely malleable. I accept that whilst human nature is not free of instinct (we are only animals after all), within the political and economic realm, it is deeply, deeply malleable. Furthermore, the Capitalist system was not developed and put into practice by a group of philanthropists concerned with the development of the human good inline with our basic nature; they simply put in place a system that protected their wealth and developed a political system to further enhance it.

Canadian author Stephen Garvey says:

“Western societies are fundamentally driven by capitalism. So Western Democracy through its autocratic, hierarchy is an excellent political system to maintain and expand the global capitalist agenda. I say this point, based on a majority of people being deceived into believing they have say, a final say, through elections.”

For those who consider this to be strictly false, take note of the amount of money the U.S has spent spreading “democracy“. Do you truly believe it is for the benefit of the people? No of course not. It is because democracy, is a pretext for this morbid version of Capitalism that exists purely to further the wealth and by definition; power, of a select few. It is why Castro is considered evil, yet Pinochet was supported vigorously. It is why we overthrew a democratically elected President of Iran and replaced him with a dictator in the Shah. Capitalism and Democracy, the Western way, complement each other, and for that reason, I am dead set against it.

Professor Noam Chomsky said:

“Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you are affluent, you can have a lot of it. It shows up in all sorts of ways. It shows up if you get in trouble with the law, let’s say, or in any aspect of life it shows up. And for that reason it makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom, it makes it possible for you to amass that commodity. [...] what you’re going to find is that the defense of free institutions will largely be in the hands of those who benefit from them, namely the wealthy, and the powerful. They can purchase that commodity and, therefore, they want those institutions to exist, like free press, and all that. As long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.”

To vote for one of the main parties, is a vote for the way the system is. And given that there is not a way to vote out the current system, to vote is by definition, undemocratic. The system is undemocratic, in that it isn’t about free and fair elections between people who wish to help make life better for the majority. It is a system based on which party is the wealthiest, which Lords and businessmen bankroll them, and what they expect in return. The majority of us rely on information from political parties and the media (which has it’s own political agenda) to make up our minds. We are not autonomous. We do not decide for ourselves. Therefore, a political party’s purpose, is simply to manipulate and influence opinion to it’s own ends. All three of the main parties, operate from the assumption that we are all self interested.

Human nature, whilst it has the potential to be greedy; is also loving, compassionate, reliant, ugly, detestable and every other possible trait we may show. The system we live in today, quite obscenely rewards greed and so greed as a trait, is amplified. Competition is built into our nurture from a young age, from the school system onwards, so competition upon greed, is amplified. In reality, the degree of variability between outright greed and utter benevolence is huge.

Rudolf Rocker once said:

“The causes which underlie the processes of social life have nothing in common with the laws of physical and mechanical natural events, for they are purely the results of human purpose, which is not explicable by scientific methods. To misinterpret this fact is a fatal self-deception from which only a confused notion of reality can result.”

The three main parties in UK politics, disagree with Rocker, and for some reason think they are experts on human nature. As if economic Darwinism is ethically justifable. Whilst it isn’t apparently popular to say this, but I’m all for a huge rate of tax, universally, on the richest 2-3%.
I am of the belief that once necessity has been taken care of (basic food, drink and shelter for everyone), then profit and riches can exist. It is not ethically justifiable to allow one man to own much wealth, whilst another starves to death, in my opinion.

My ideals are Syndicalist. They are also Anarchist, in that I believe all forms of power and control over others, should be able to legitimise itself. To that end, I do not believe the State has legitimate authority, nor the Capitalist. However, in a system in which the most power is wielded by the Capitalist, I believe the State has a role to play in curtailing that Capitalist power. In that respect, I am a Statist. But only when the State exists within a Capitalist system. I am a great supporter of workers rights. Hence the Syndicalism. I am and always will be entirely suspicious of anyone with a lot of money and a lot of power.

So, I will not be voting.

The Abstraction

Around the year of Muhammad’s birth, the Arabians within the central penninsula were actively resisting the Byzantines and the Persians, and in fact organised religion and empire in general. They did not however, escape the pull and the “meaning” that comes with abstract concepts invented by humanity, plaguing the West at the time. The Arabians instead practiced the concept of “Muruwwah”. This idea stressed the importance of courage and patience, endurance and honour. It kept the tribes going. It was a concept that penetrated every aspect of their lives. They were taught that society would fall apart without it. And yet, when logic prevails, Muruwwah doesn’t actually exist. It’s a subjective man made concept.

Man has always confined itself to abstractions. The problem with abstractions, and in particular abstract philosophies and concepts, is that whilst they attempt to provide dogmatic objectivity, they are by nature, massively subjective.

Humans have always placed an unattainable goal ahead of us, a goal that throughout our lives sucks up our hopes, our desires, our dreams, our human decency, like a sponge. The concept of Heaven, which is largely derived from the concept of an eternal World of Plato and other Greeks, tells us that this life is going to be a bit of a disappointment, but your dreams are going to come true in Heaven. Heaven acts as a sponge for positivity whilst the World we live in is a reflection of negativity. There is no Capitalism in heaven. There is no poverty in heaven. There is no climate change in heaven. And yet, the majority of us do not care to see our fantasy of a Heavenly World reflected on Earth. Why is that? Heaven is a man made fantasy ideal, and yet we place it in a box labelled “other“.

The Nation State is a product of colonialism. The Europeans carved up Africa into Nation States as a way of control. We could control the labour force, we could control slavery, we could control information, we could control the movement of capital. Nation borders are meaningless. They always have been. They are meaningless, because they exist in the collective mind of humanity only. The Nation State did not exist before humanity, it did not exist for the majority of the time humanity has been on the planet, it will not exist after humanity, and it does not exist to anything else other than humanity. And so therefore, it is meaningless, because it doesn’t exist. Like organised religion, the Nation State was used as a method of control by humanity over humanity.

As Capitalism took hold, Nation States no longer had the control over labour, slavery and capital that they once had. Nation States are entirely at odds with Capitalism. In fact, Nation States only really work when an economy is entirely protectionist, and Empires exist. Nation States were never about race, or identity, or culture, or anything of the sort. They have always been about control. Control previously lay at the feet of the Monarch. The State, was the Monarchy. Man and State were the same thing.
Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld says:

“What made the state unique was that it replaced the ruler with an abstract, anonymous, mechanism.”

Nationalism by logic then, is less than 500 years old. Racism grew with colonialism, and whilst the cancer of racism has largely been destroyed, remnants still remain and people are still quite unapologetically racist, with no actual reasons for their racism. Nationalism is an “other”. It is something we think is larger than ourselves, it is largely pathological because before human beings, and after human beings, England will not exist. A land mass that we once inhabited will exist. But England, and it’s abstractions that work simply to disassociate ourselves with the rest of humanity in the same way as Christianity and Islam and America and Pakistan and sexuality does.

Corporations today have more rules, more regulations, more limits on information, labour and capital than any Nation has. Corporations and their laws are just as abstract and nonsensical as Nation States. Corporations are the modern day Nation States. You all look a certain way, talk a certain way, waste your life trying to obtain this subjective and abstract concept of “success”. We are now governed by Capitalism or a form thereof. It tells us if we work hard enough, we can achieve anything we wish. But that simply isn’t true. Capitalism is the dome that we are living under, and it’s promise of ‘everything’ is in the same box as Heaven…. “other”. It is religion.

Catholicism, Protestantism, Capitalism, Democracy, Fascism, Communism, Materialism; they are do not exist. They are ideals that soak up hopes and dreams and say “YOU CAN HAVE THEM IF YOU……. work hard enough/are white/keep buying shit you don’t need/own nothing because the State owns it for your benefit………. but eventually you’ll be the perfect happiness.” They are the “other“. The concept of Heaven is very similar. The concept of Plato’s eternal realm is very similar. Abstractions that don’t actually exist in anything other than man’s mind, are used to control man. The men who create these concepts have created them for the purpose of control. Feudalism was a system of control. Capitalism is not much different. There are still Lords who suck up the majority of the wealth at the behest of the many. The U.S Constitution protects a certain class of person. The USSR protected a certain class of person. Whether or not it was designed with that specific goal in mind is debatable, but perhaps subconsciously a certain class of people always assume they are best placed to rule.

The Catholic Church was set up to spread the word of Jesus, yet ended up being perhaps one of the wealthiest institutions on the planet. In the 16th Century, instead of helping the poor that Christianity swears to do, the Catholic Church took money off of the poor, to finance St Peters. They found ridiculous ways to justify the selling of indulgences because the abstract concept they were attempting to spread, which they had inevitably corrupted, demanded obedience, even though the entire doctrine was based on conjecture, dodgy history and man made abstractions.

Catholicism created a culture of idol worship with the creation of Saints. We in the modern era have took that idol worship that the Bible strictly forbids, and our new idols are National pride, pop stars, sports stars, TV presenters, authors. They are also in the realm of “other“. Their public success is largely fatuous, worthless, and offers very little in the sense of the progress of humanity, but they’re worshipped as idols. We salute a flag that we invented, We wear the clothes that the stars wear, we recite their words, we want our bodies to look like theirs, we concentrate far too much energy on being like them, than being like ourselves. Why is that? Is that natural? Perhaps so. Humans have always created an abstraction that we place above ourselves, perhaps because we cannot cope with the notion that we as a species are the height of intelligence. And yet, we are. We created God. We created Nations. We created all other abstractions, the very same abstractions that today hold us all back and group us together into ridiculous categories.

To break away from these abstractions, and concentrate on reality, is in a sense Anarchism. Libertarianism evolves from the idea that we must break away from abstractions, and whilst I think Libertarianism goes too far to the right, I understand it’s principles. But then Anarchism itself, is dogmatic, and an abstraction……and…………… ARGGGH!!!! I don’t know how to end this blog.

Historical healthcare

“Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.“
- Winston Churchill

OH MY GOD Churchill was a communist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Or not. Actually, definitely not. Unless you’re a conservative American. If Obama had said what Churchill said, Glenn Beck’s head would have exploded live on TV.

Historic day for America. Obama’s healthcare plan passed. Which means more than 30,000,000 more Americans will be insured; insurance companies will no longer be able to oppressively discriminate on any basis, and best of all; Republican and conservative Americans hate it. They seem unable to differentiate between slightly left of centre beneficial policies, and Stalinist Communism.
Obama was absolutely correct when he subtly digged at the Republicans for their appalling use of fear tactics to attempt to win this argument. They should be ashamed of themselves. They, in my eyes, are comparable to those who opposed the Civil Rights Act in ’64.
Obama said:

“We didn’t give in to mistrust or to cynicism or to fear. Instead, we proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things.”

Whilst the Republicans continue to complain about the evils of Socialist medical care, I thought i’d sing it’s praises.
We in the UK have a National Health Service. It is a single payer system. It is government run. It would, in short, make Glenn Beck’s face explode in rage.
According to the World Health Organisation:

The UK’s EVIL SOCIALIST life expectancy (m/f):77/81

The US’s free market haven life expectancy(m/f): 75/80

The UK’s EVIL SOCIALIST Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 6

The US’s free market haven Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 8

The UK’s EVIL SOCIALIST Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 98/61

The US’s free market haven Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 137/80

The UK’s EVIL SOCIALIST overall World Health standing:18th

The US’s free market haven overall standing:36th

In short, whilst Republicans keep complaining about how awful Socialist medicine is……… we in the UK will continue to enjoy it, whilst living longer.

For a World superpower that basis itself on freedom, I’m not sure how they can justify being so terrible in the healthcare rankings. The US even ranks below Singapore for infant mortality. That’s appalling. But, apparently allowing more children to die than 35 other countries, is far more Constitutional (as is sending the living children to war on the basis of a lie, when they’re older), than giving them a better healthcare program safety net. In fact, half of all personal bankruptcies in the USA are believed to be partly the result of ridiculously extortionate healthcare costs.

Republicans and the Tea Party movement is simply a movement to protect the profits of American insurance companies. To fight against a bill that prevents insurance companies from turning down insurance for patients with pre-existing conditions, and cancelling insurance when people get ill, on the ideological basis that the new bill is “big evil socialist government” is pathetic. I cannot believe insurance companies have been allowed to get away with their utterly immoral practices for so long.

In fact, I watched Republican John McCain tell a room full of people live on Fox News that the British NHS refuses to treat patients over 75. The extent of this ridiculous lie was rendered even more ingenious given that on that very same day, my 83 year old grand mother was being treated on the NHS after having a heart attack. They saved her life. The irony of John McCain’s position is, most of my family, if we lived under the current US healthcare system, would not be able to afford healthcare, and the rich conservative and Republican anti-socialised medicine brigade would have no problem denying us care.

To deny people the right to healthcare whilst you yourself can afford it, in my opinion, is no different to me blocking the road when an ambulance needs to get past. I’m fine and healthy. I paid taxes that went to fix that road. So fuck them!!! That’s the attitude. The “individualist” attitude plaguing the West. The Republican attitude. Today, it was defeated. My face is one of complete smugness today.

McCain today argued that the bill promoted big government. I’d argue that is irrelevant. Our British NHS has survived for sixty years, and whilst it has it’s issues, it is better than the American system. Big government or small government is not the issue. It is the equivalent of approaching an uninsured suffering child and saying “We wont help you, because, erm, well, BIG GOVERNMENT!!!!” Perhaps an injection of big business to curb the excesses of big insurance and big business, is not such a bad thing. I fully support it.

My only issue, is that the bill doesn’t go far enough. After eight years of Republican misery, the fact that anyone actually pays any attention to those lunatics amazes me. President Obama didn’t seem strong enough. He allowed Republicans to populate their lies and fear tactics; the same tactics they used for the war on terror. It has to stop. The Republicans are an international laughing stock. And yet, their usual cry of “SOCIALISM!!! HIGH TAXES!!! BIG GOVERNMENT!!! COMMMUUUUNIIISSSM!!!! NO STIMULUS!!!!!” against anything slightly left of Reagan, seems to generate sympathy in America. The rest of us look on in amazement. Today, that horrendous and selfish tactic lost.

I look forward to watching the psychotic Glenn Beck tell everyone America is now Soviet Russia.

Big Brother Society

The era of reality TV has many critics claiming the word “reality” is far too loosely attributed to those shows. Big Brother is undoubtedly the King of reality TV. Blogs like Weekly Gripe claim without contest, that shows like Big Brother do not reflect any sense of reality at all, and ends the piece with “I think Television should rethink what is reality and what’s not.” I’d disagree wholeheartedly with that statement.

Ultimately, Big Brother is pointless and has no social benefit whatsoever. And so Big Brother is a perfect example of reality. The notion that a group of people are thrown together, forced to backstab each other in the hope that they will get ahead. Only one person can win the money, the rest are forgotten, greater social needs are ignored. The enemy of those people, is “Big Brother“, the government of the house. The contestants change themselves to what they think the public expect them to be. Similarly, we as good little workers speak like our employers expect us to speak, we question nothing, we dress as we are expected to dress in order to appeal to this abstract concept of “looking professional”. We are never ourselves when it comes to the incessant chase for money and reward. That, if the Neoliberal conception of human nature is to be believed, is reality at it’s finest. That fear of government, that selfish grab at money, is reality. Big Brother, is the perfect example of 21st Century reality. The World, financial markets, workplaces, are hundreds of thousands upon millions of little Big Brother type shows acting themselves out under the guise of “reality“. The selfishness and the greed institutionalised in shows like Big Brother, is a solid reflection of the institutionalised culture of greed and individualism that the Western World has been forced to adhere to under the manipulated language of “freedom” and “human nature“.

Contestants on Big Brother are not free. And it isn’t just the Government of the reality show that restricts their freedom. The carrot dangling at the end of the show; the money. The promise of “more”. The promise of “more” is a far bigger restriction on human freedom, than Government could ever be. Business is by it’s very nature; totalitarian. This promise of “more” is what drives people in a Neoliberalist system of economics. It assumes that human nature is inherently self interested, totally individual and greedy. I WANT AN IPHONE!!! Why? for what reason? You’ll only want a newer model in a year or two. Pointless, manipulative greed. It dismisses any notion that human nature, whilst having the potential to be self interested and greedy, also has the capacity to be loving, and giving, and needing support, and sensitive, and helpful, and every other trait that appears completely at odds with individualist selfishness. Collective responsibility is deemed “communist” at worst, and so ignored. An individual is a commodity in a Neoliberalist World. Unless you have a mind for business, or are the son of a rich couple, you’re deemed a commodity, to be bought and sold, and if you cannot produce the skills that the Market at this time demands, you’re useless, and worthless, and should not be given any support whatsoever. Collective responsibility for an individuals misgivings are being slowly eroded. The idea being that if everyone is responsible for themselves and themselves only, we will be forced to work hard enough to survive without any help or assistance whatsoever.

Neoliberalism places Government as the antagonist, at odds with human freedom because they take your money from you and redistribute it to the poor. It amazes me that it is only government that is seen as the antagonist. The place that I work at, gave us a worker’s manual. It stated that we must be “clean shaven or have a full beard, ‘designer stubble’ is not acceptable“, so businessmen think they have the right to tell me how my face should look. They then told us we should “have at least one bath or shower a day“. Why is that any of their business? And why aren’t those advocates of “freedom” up in arms about business tyranny and totalitarian principles that they are built on?

Their argument seems to be “if you don’t like it, go elsewhere“. Forgetting the fact that I, like most people, can’t afford to be out of work looking for a new job, If I were to go elsewhere, that new place would have the very same kind of limitations; it’s universal. Business, by it’s very nature, is totalitarian. And yet, Neoliberalism tells me that this is the ultimate in human freedom; being able to tell those people below you who make YOU the money that funds YOUR luxurious lifestyle, how to dress and how many times to wash. It then demands that I respect a person like my boss, despite the fact that I utterly despise him. What is the incentive for me to respect a man who pays me the very minimum allowed by law, whilst he himself drives home in a nice big luxurious car, financed by the staff who work for him, the very same staff whose names he hasn’t got the time to learn? He is a child of the Thatcher generation, and so assumes employee respect and subservience is his God given right. It isn’t.

The paradox of Neoliberalism, is that the ideology exists like a set of scales. For those at the top to keep rising, those at the bottom must keep falling. There is no way out of it. Neoliberalism then suggests that those who have rised, deserve even further praise, admiration and reward, whilst the inevitable pile of those who have failed, deserve nothing but a life of misery. It’s the reason stores like Primark insist on using cheap, exploitable labour. Profits become far more important that people, and no one stands up to complain, millions shop in Primark every year. Purely because the notion that human nature is greedy, offers people a justification for giving money to pretty Fascist organisations. And so whilst some may call it “freedom“, I simply call it “insecurity“. Suddenly values, morals, and humanity are fleeting, abstract thoughts that matter very little because everyone has been forced to be self interested and greedy, looking out for number one first. We’ve been given no choice. The freedom they gave us (Thatcher and Reagan) was “either be greedy, or be insecure, hungry, cold, and useless“. Human nature is not simply greedy, it is merely the case that greed is obviously amplified, when the system we live in offers endless rewards to such greed. When love, and compassion are not rewarded, and in some cases, punished, why would humanity exhibit such qualities above greed? Why is incentive offered to place the exchange of goods and capital, ahead of social injustice?
That isn’t freedom.

Within the Big Brother house, the choice is “be entertaining, controversial, and backstab everyone, or fail miserably“.

Neoliberalism also brings with it a terrible amount of institutionalised racism. Schools in poor black areas cannot readily afford new equipment, or top class teachers, or new text books because they simply lack funding, and so class division and lack of social mobility is perpetuated for another generation. Neoliberalist supporters fail to admit this flaw in their miserable ideology, and instead choose to blame the lack of ability, or work ethic, or discipline within poor black communities themselves as opposed to horrendous social injustice caused by their awful system. The USA healthcare system, that rich white folks do not want to see changed, is a supreme case of Neoliberal institutionalised racism at it’s worst. According to a study by University of Dayton, areas of predominantly uninsured minorities are subject to higher rates of “environmental toxins, including lead and asbestos“, the workers of the minority areas also “disproportionately work in jobs with higher physical and psycho-social health risks (i.e., migrant farm workers, fast food workers, garment industry workers). Minority communities are frequently the targets of institutions promoting unhealthy products, such as alcohol and tobacco. ” If it wasn’t for some form of social conscience exhibited by Government over the years, those minorities would doubtless become a Neoliberal dream, full of sweatshops and exploitation of the worst variety. Government needs to go further, and intervene in social misfortunes, where the Market simply perpetuates the problem.

Democratic values are seemingly undermined by the ideology of privatised-everything, cloaked by the narrow focus of “the market“.
Socialism, to me, is not simply an economic challenge to Capitalism. It is not simply a solution to inequality through the common ownership of production; it is a set of values, that start at the premise that people are far more important than private profit. The idea that you cater to the needs of civilisation first, and once that aim has been realised, you cater to the wants of civilisation. I do not believe in forcing people into jobs they hate purely so economists can say “look, isn’t the unemployment rate amazing”. For every well paid mining job the Thatcher government destroyed, another three McDonalds and Starbucks jobs were created, and was used as a sign of improving times. The Confederation of British Industry, the beacon of Neoliberalism, once suggested cutting University degrees down to what the economy needs. If it needs more Maths graduates, then they suggested emphasis should be put on Maths, and degrees such as Philosophy should be scraped. Where is the freedom in that? What if I want to study Philosophy? Freedom only appears to work, when haggered old grey haired right wingers decide it’s possible. Which speaks to another area of society’s Big Brother complex. Neoliberalism tends to want to press home the notion that markets should be left to their own devices, free from government interference. Yet, when markets fail, government interference is demanded by the markets. The banking crises was a magnificent example of the failure of Neoliberalism, and Socialism having to bail it out, to keep it going. The Capitalist structure, was crumbling, and Socialism had to bail it out. In the Big Brother house, contestants appear to hate their in-house Government, yet appeal to it rather hypocritically for help and advice, whenever they seem to be crumbling themselves. The American high tech industry has only survived as it is today, because of Pentagon subsidies over the years. Without those subsidies, America would not be the immense power it is today.

Big Brother is simply a reflection of the Neoliberalist society that has been forced onto the World over the past twenty five years. Thatcher’s generation forced Neoliberal principles onto my generation, and we don’t want it. You can keep it. And take Big Brother with you.

Viva La Revolucion!

I wonder, just how safe is the Capitalist structure (assuming we’ve actually ever lived in a Capitalist structured society….. because, well, we haven’t), when you get right down to a fundamental level?

Imagine a very rude boss, that you and I have. He talks to us like dirt. He does not know our names. He points when he wants our attention. He once told us, whilst the staff were working pretty damn hard, sweating, to make him money, that he was “losing faith in you lot tonight”. We’re also lugubriously aware constantly, that if the law allowed for it, he would pay us as small as possible whilst keeping as much as possible for himself. It is the reason we’re on minimum wage. That’s the nature of Capitalism.

At that point, I wondered, what is actually stopping me from replying to his “losing faith” comment, with “Okay, you fucking do it yourself” and walking out? Surely it would only take one great orator of the working man to say to a boss like that:

“It may seem to the controlled masses that we rely on people like you to pay our wages and to fund our rather feeble existence. But that isn’t the case. It is the opposite. You rely on people like us. The automatic assumption is that you own the place, and so you’re entitled to the highest share of the revenue. This is quite obviously a social creation of the propertied classes, and I have no idea why that social creation would be protected by law, as if it’s an objective truth. It isn’t. Because without us, making the money in the first place, you’d have nothing. The very reason you and your luxurious lifestyle is continuously funded, is because we work hard for a small chunk of money whilst you’re ‘losing faith’ in us, but driving home in your expensive car, that we’ve financed. Without the surplus value that we create, you’re nothing. We make you what you are. If you were to leave the building now, nothing would change. But if we were all to leave the building now, this place would be economically destroyed. So who is more important, right this moment?
So you either treat us with respect, and understand that we all rely on each other, or we can quickly become your worst fucking nightmare.”

What is there to stop that happening? The “owner” walks a very thin tightrope every time he displays a rude, obnoxious attitude. The worker does not seem to realise the power that he/she actually could yield. He instead, is distracted with promises of consumerist heaven. A brand new 30inch TV that he does not need!!! Or a lovely new car, faster than most, but can only actually stick to 30mph on most roads like every other car. That materialist distraction, that “I may lose my job if I rebel” is the only real reason (political oppression being another reason) that the landed classes have survived for so long.

Why is it a terrible idea that those of us who work the place, couldn’t run the place better than the guy at the top? Why can’t we be in control of the surplus that we have made? Why can’t we be trusted?

And whilst Marx, and Lenin, and Bakunin, and Depestre among others, considered a revolution of the workers to be imminent, i’d suggest that the majority of the workforce, with it’s infinite power, is so distracted with what shit they can own, a revolution of the workers is disastrously unlikely.

By the very fact that workers have such power, that they, collectively, could yield at any moment they so wished (what is stopping us?), it would suggest that Socialism is not dead (nor has it ever actually taken place), merely hidden away, and simply needs one great orator of the working man, to step forward and make the case for the Left, and the deal is done.

Pro-Capitalists saw the problem throughout the 20th Century, that working men could easily be persuaded to stand up for themselves in the face of their rather weak oppressors. It is how battles for Union rights were won; how minimum wage legislation was won (The Conservative Party….. including David Cameron, opposed Minimum wage…… those are the people like our boss, in my scenario); how the NHS was created. Capitalism saw, in the years proceeding the industrial revolution, that workers (both white and black) were sick of their conditions and awful treatment and pay, and so racism was used as a divisive wedge between white and black, so suddenly the rich white capitalist wasn’t the problem for the white working class man, he was angry at the black working class man for “stealing all our jobs”. Despite the fact, and rather ironically, that the white working class man had far more in common with the black working class man, than he ever did with the white rich guy who was fucking them both over.

Then came the Soviets. Capitalism painted the Soviets (and thus, Communism and Socialism) as evil. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union was far from Communist and actually run more as State Capitalism. But fear was used. Evil murderous bastards!!! The population decided it must be true. But conveniently ignored the amount of right winged terror cells the U.S was sponsoring throughout the Cold War period. And suddenly Socialism had the Soviet stigma attached to it, rather pathetically. All of a sudden, you speak like a Socialist, you ask why people are hungry, you question the legitimacy of a system built on desperation by the propertied classes, and you lose all credibility. Well fuck that. This is my reality. It isn’t anyone elses.
Capitalism has done a very good job at masking subjectivity behind a wall of false objectivity.

The Soviet Union died. So now where do we place the wedge? Ah yes. Immigrants. They’re taking all our homes, right? WRONG. The last survey in the UK showed that only 1.8% of social tenants are immigrants of the past five years have been given social housing. Over 85% are UK born. So where are all the houses? White Brits will never accept that their own “kind” are to blame. Like racism of early America, we in the UK should accept that we have far more in common with the Pakistani gentleman living next door to us, than we do with the rich white Brit who owns four or five homes, using only one to live in, whilst the others are used as holiday homes once a year, destroying local economies (Beadnell in Northumberland is a great example). But, that rich white Brit has far more right under the eyes of the law, and Capitalism, than the residents of that small locality have to live in peace and without fear of economic ruin.

Capitalism has took aim at the homeless too. They’re “lazy” so don’t deserve help, apparently. They should “help themselves” (because obviously, we’re all the same). Begging is the “lowest of the low“. And yet, it isn’t considered begging, to see Coca Cola adverts everywhere I go; TV, billboards, sponsoring sporting events, paying abominable sums of money for a sports star to advertise their drink (which actually works, to the shame of us lower classes), whilst trying to save money by dumping toxic waste in a public space in a poor area of India, is fine apparently. That’s perfectly fine. But asking for a few pound change, in order to actually stay alive, is low?

The working man, whether black, white, Asian, British, Spanish, Indian, whatever….. has far more to gain, and far more power, and strikes far more fear into the stone hearts of the propertied class, than they’d ever believe possible. If an insurrection were to occur in my lifetime, i’d fully support the workers.

From Columbus to Reagan

When Christopher Columbus landed on the other side of the Atlantic, in 1492, he encountered a culture of the native population which the West would soon utterly destroy. We came to believe those populations were beneath us, and so we were doing them a favour by Westernising their lands and wiping them out. The Tainos (The natives) were not at all barbaric, or backward, or primitive, as the Europeans first thought. They invented the Canoe, the hammock, their homes were far more spacious and luxurious than the tiny European homes back home. In fact, it could be argued, that given the horrendous religious turmoil that embodied Europe over the next century; the Tainos were far more advanced socially. Columbus commented “They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal”. And yet, we still felt the need to impose our will on those people. It then follows quite neatly, that the lands Columbus is famed for discovering (Latin America) would, in less than five hundred years, be the victim of quite horrific oppression from the Nation that celebrates Columbus day; The USA.

The word “Democracy” is quite a contentious one, when used in the Western sense. It is a by-word for Capitalism.
America was a blank slate in 1776. Direct, deliberative democracy could have been imposed, in a true people’s revolution. But, the “Revolutionaries” weren’t as revolutionary as one might first believe. Much like the Monarchy they wished to free themselves from, the revolutionaries still believed that only a specific class of person was capable of governing. They didn’t believe the general public should have much say in this new “democracy“. It explains the electoral college system. Alexander Hamilton declared the people were a “great beast” desperate to be tamed. One gets the sense that they believed those who were not of the propertied class did not have a right to have a complete say over the way their lives were ruled. James Madison goes one step further and says of Democracy, if elections were “open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure” echoing the beliefs of Cicero, and Cassius, in the old Roman Republic. It is arguably, why Julius Caesar was murdered…… for giving the people more of a democratic say. Therefore, the object of democracy over the past two thousand years, has been to give added protection to the wealthy few. The protect the minority, from the majority, and therefore has created a system where the minority, control the World.

It then becomes obvious, that when George Bush managed to steal the 2000 election, winning less votes than Al Gore, but winning more of the “elite” vote, the public just didn’t care. They didn’t rebel. They didn’t question the legitimacy of their “democracy“. Of course not. And the reason they didn’t care, was because the public are fully aware that an election in the U.S.A, or England, is simply voting in a different business man.

Over here in England, the 2010 election will be run on “spending cuts“. Cuts to public spending. Cuts, quite drastically, that do not need to happen so sharply. The question of curbing business excesses, or fairer trade agreements, or closing tax loopholes for the rich will not come up, purely because those important issues negatively affect the politicians, who happen to be of that particular elite class. And so spending cuts that negatively affect the poor, is going to be the main topic of discussion, because the poor do not have any say whatsoever in the way the Country is run, they have no power, so they can be manipulated.

The Ancient Greeks noted that true democracy was a Welfare State, using public funds to ensure the basic necessities to life for every citizen, not just the elite few. Modern Democracy is far different because it assumes that if the poor start gaining wealth through a better education system, or a stronger Welfare state that allows them the chance to advance, that the poor will start to influence democracy to suit their own needs, which in turn threatens the elites, which is exactly what Madison feared when he said “the property of landed proprietors would be insecure” if the poorer classes had more of a say.

It is in this line of thought, that allows modern politicians (particularly Conservatives and Republicans) to argue for “less government“. This is me, is quite the paradox. By handing power over, from the State, from elected officials accountable to the public, into the hands of the Private market, they are by definition eroding democracy. These private powers then suddenly have the wealth and the power to influence public policy, which in itself, is not democratic, because….. and this wont shock you……. that public policy has become more and more geared toward the interests of big business.

And then when they seem to have control over our Governments, they spread, across the World, whilst the government call it “spreading freedom and democracy“. Yet, in places like Brazil, in 1964, America didn’t seem to have a problem supplying funds and training, in helping to actually overthrow the democratically elected President Goulart (who was supremely popular with the public), helping to install a new right winged regime that quickly put an end to Democracy, wiped out thousands of people, including singers, painters and anyone who showed any form of left wing mindset. The same pattern of overthrowing democratic regimes and placing harsh, violent, corrupt,yet pro-American dictators in place can be seen across the history of the 20th Century. Nicaragua, Iran, Guatemala and Chile to name a few. Reagan, within eight years, didn’t seem to bothered about the Right Winged bloodbath taking place in Central America. In fact, he was shipping millions of dollars in military aid to the offending governments. 20,000 dead (according to Amnesty Int.) in Nicaragua alone.

UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification, “the American training of the officer corps in counter-insurgency techniques was a key factor in the genocide…Entire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerillas protection.” Similarly, Reagan provided funds and training to Right winged terrorists in Colombia, which in turn gave Colombia the worst human rights record in the region. And yet, far from being labelled a war criminal, Reagan is hailed as a Conservative hero. By funding the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, he apparently created “freedom“. That “freedom” is a little wishful, given that whilst the U.S supported the right winged government of Somoza in Nicaragua, the Country had a two thirds malnutrition rate for children under five, whilst nine out of ten homes had unsafe drinking water, with the UN estimating that 60% of the population, under right winged rule, lived in dire poverty. If anything, it proves to me, that Reagan, and in fact, every President in the history of America has never been concerned with human rights, or horrendous suffering, and been more concerned with it’s own economic superiority. When you have to kill, and create an environment where genocide is taking place, one cannot seriously claim to have created “freedom” or “democracy“.

At the same time as evil dictators were being placed in charge of Latin American Countries by America; Britain’s equally as shameful Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher said “We support the United States’ aim to promote peaceful change, democracy and economic development”. One wonders what that “economic development” actually entailed given that after Reagan interfered with Guatemala, (according to the Inter-American development bank) by 1990 the per-capita income had fallen to below it’s 1971 levels. Is that economic development? No. Reagan should have spent his final years in prison.

Whilst James Madison quite openly admitted he didn’t want the poorer population to have much of a say in the democratic process; Ronald Reagan simply helped to destroy any poor people who might want a say in the democratic process. By freeing up the Country to the elites, he then labeled it “freedom” and “democracy“. It’s a strange old, American-owned World. From Columbus, to Obama, nothing much has changed. Democracy has not, and will never exist, without the public turning it’s attention away from it’s ridiculous obsession with consumerism, and onto what actually matters; the unjustifiable nature, of who controls the World.

We all need somebody

It is relatively easy to see someone struggling, and to say “we all have problems, deal with it“, to dismiss them as lazy. And yet, we all need somebody. Whether we find it difficult to express ourselves with words, or whether we just need a hug and to be told everything will be all right, or whether we need someone to turn to for emotional support, or whether we carry a knife on the street because we’re afraid of the night, or whether we have built up anger, or whether we just don’t have the detailed and incessant aspirations that those destined for success and great wealth seem to have. We appear to ignore those less fortunate, and to spew Western economic theory at them, as if it were binding to all mankind, when it isn’t. We are all different.

It is easy to view humanity as a great money making machine, spirituality is replaced by materialism, the passion of want, striking down the abundance of Community, to pursue our own individualistic goals regardless of the negative affect it may have on somebody somewhere. We work in jobs we hate, we judge people on the expense of their living , we look down at those who are trapped in a meticulous cycle of nothingness. And yet, in reality even those who deal drugs, are the same as all of us. Stuck in grip of Materialism, we are all looking to satisfy our own “wants” regardless of who it hurts. For the majority of us though, we are not directly involved in the exploitation of others, or the degrading of others, we simply wear the Primark clothes, we are not involved in the process, and so we just turn our heads and pretend it’s all happening in the distance, far from us.

It is assumed that the fetish for profit, is simply a force of human nature. But i’m inclined to believe otherwise. I think avarice and self importance and the proponents of this damaging way of thinking, are simply stuck in four walls of the society they we’re born into. We are taught to believe that we’re in life specifically for ourselves, that we’re self promoting monstrous beings, motivated by self interest, whose mind is geared toward the accumulation of as much material wealth as we can possibly get our hands on. If someone appears to be fighting against the flawed notion of individualism, they are merely attacked as being hippy, out of touch, socialist, they want to enslave you, they want to take away your property and give it to the lazy. It’s right winged hysteria at it’s worst. Hedonism is intrinsically woven together with the pursuit of individual wealth rather than the pursuit of the greater good for all. The Right have crafted a society which suits them, in which people must either conform or be labelled Communist, bleeding heart, or hippy. If we start to question why we are plainly dissatisfied with life, society tells us it’s because we don’t have enough materially. Perhaps a new bed will help, perhaps a new TV, perhaps a new car. And yet, when the happiness derived from “more” finally subsides, we’re back to feeling dissatisfied and disillusioned, shouldn’t we be questioning whether society’s notions of extreme wealth linked to happiness and righteousness, are perhaps misplaced?

Shouldn’t the very essence of “want” come after the entire species has the essential elements of “need” fulfilled? Why is liberty considered the right to extreme profit, whilst those who literally die of hunger are collateral; considered a necessary evil for the advancement of “want“? Why isn’t the fulfillment of essential “need” the building blocks of Liberty, the first post that cannot be past until all are equal. The cultivation of an individual’s “wants” should never infringe on the basics “needs” of anyone. The advancement of the culture of “want” is based primarily on playing games with the human characteristics of insecurity and inadequacy. Peace and compassion are not compatible with the World view that human nature is based solely and inherently on self importance and greed. When the World isn’t at war, it cannot be called Peace, whilst millions of people are left to die because the rest of us have an extreme abundance of “need” that we aren’t prepared to share, because sharing would lead to Communist sympathies?

I am inclined to believe that Humanity is not the personification of certain principles, based on greed. The prevailing message through history, whilst each culture has tried to prevent itself from imploding by insisting it is the height of human nature, is compassion.

Scientist Stephan Gould once said:
“History is made by warfare, lust for power, hatred, and xenophobia (with some other, more admirable motives thrown in here and there). We therefore assume that these obviously human traits define our essential nature. How often have we been told that ‘man’ is, by nature, aggressive and selfishly acquisitive?“
And he is correct. This is what we’re told. And yet, it just doesn’t add up. Would society be a detrimental mess, if we were to insist the contrary, that human nature is compassionate and cooperative? It would of course threaten great wealth, but why is that a problem? It is a problem only for those who have acquired great wealth, and who have succumb to the notion that we’re all ruthless monsters. If society truly were about the individual rather than the community, if a helping hand once in a while, a shoulder to lean on, a push in the right direction, were indeed detrimental, then the pillars of society would crumble. Whilst Humanity has the natural tendency to be horribly greedy and uncaring, it also has the overwhelmingly magnificent ability to be compassionate and genial. So why are we focusing on merely one aspect, the killer aspect? We have been conditioned to believe that cooperation, is simply illogical. We perpetuate the myth that human nature is greedy and that any attempt to block that greed, to promote cooperation, is a shot through the heart of our individual Liberties. And yet, we humans have the unique ability to sympathise, to support, and to empathise. We are all genetically connected, and so we are all part of one big family. We are not at odds with each other, adversaries in the great race for profit. We’re family.

I would argue that whilst greed and intense self reliance certainly pushes some to a position of unrivalled power (and thus gives them the power to push their way of thinking onto us all), you cannot force an entire populace to think the same way. When you try to ingrain into the minds of the compassionate, a sense of “me me me” you are the part of the problem, rather than the solution. You are the reason that it is cheaper to make a pill that works to give a middle aged white businessman an erection, than it is to make a pill to treat an African child with AIDs. We are not all greedy, the levels of difference between the extreme of pure selfishness to the extreme of pure altruism is so great from person to person, it is unfair to suggest that humanity on the whole is inherently greedy, whilst punishing and demonising those who do not possess the greedy gene. Charity merely exists in the World of the greedy; why can’t greed exist in the World of the Charity?
Greed is not human nature. Greed is merely a weapon in the search for power and acknowledgement. What if material greed were replaced, and power and acknowledgement were earned through the help given to those who cannot adequately help themselves? Is that some evil Communist notion? If it is, I’d be proud to wear the Communist label.

Human nature is not a choice. You cannot chose to have a specific nature, it just is. And so, if for example, a lady chooses to dedicate her live to helping others; resenting greed, rejecting the notion of incessant “want“; she is not rejecting human nature as such, she is merely acting on a personal trait of compassion and coexistence that is not based on “me me me“. We’d all say that lady is incredibly admirable. Yet, if tomorrow, we were all told by her, that society would now be based around that very same ideal of cooperation and compassion, we’d call her a Socialist. Evil. Trampling on our Rights. Rights that by the way, we invented, to act within the society…. that we created. Those economic rights are not universal and binding, enacted by nature. They are rights enacted by the wealthy few to protect themselves. I’m willing to believe there is more good in the World, more cooperation and compassion, than there is greed and selfishness. Greed is a choice, as is selflessness and cooperation. Neither, is human nature. Satisfying unnecessary “wants” becomes deleterious to satisfying the very necessary “needs” of those less fortunate.

Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in a fishing town hit by the tsunami in Sri Lanka wrote “The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims……… We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines“. To the majority of us, capitalisation on a disaster area seems so horribly immoral, to even suggest it is a trait of human nature, is an insult. It is therefore comforting to know that thousands of charities like Paddle4relief and Unitingtheworld are doing the real work, getting the help to the people who need it, and not thinking about profit to be made in the future.

Greed led to the economic crises we face today. Banks did not care about the obscene debts they were encouraging us all to live on. Greed led to the U.S supporting General Pinochet when it suited them, regardless of his disrespect for human life. Greed has lead to street gangs at war over turf and wealth. Greed has led to illegal wars. Greed has led to the biggest scandal in my estimation the World has ever known – extreme yet unnecessary poverty. Greed led to the MPs expense scandal currently gripping the UK. Greed is so incredibly puerile and useless, it has not had the effect promised to us by successive Governments over the past twenty five years. It has merely created a generation who know no different, and so presume that it’s the only way through life. I reject wholeheartedly that particular notion.

We lose our spiritual connection to those around us, we lose our compassion for each other, we become a line on a map, or a skin colour, or a race, rather than an entire species who certainly need each other regardless of how much money we may have. We lose our philosophical ideas, our freedom to think above and beyond the realm of profit, because our only philosophy now is based solely on greed, and if you disagree, you’re an out of date Socialist with mental issues. We are led to believe that those who are not successful home owners are just lazy, and so don’t deserve our help. We are led to believe that the World is one big resource to be exploited by those who can afford it, regardless of the out come.

In the land of the “free”, The United States would not be the powerhouse it is today if it had relied solely on rugged individualism from it’s conception. The Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862 gave away much of the land brought by the California, Texas, Louisianna and Alaska purchases, which is the cornerstone of American success. Community was established when the Government took over lands that were filled with duelling and crime. Historian John Mack Farragher described the American frontiers as “a community experience…“. Big government in the USA then went on, extending social security to ten million more workers during President Eisenhower’s term. It spread to farmers, teachers and dentists among others. Under Eisenhower, the government financed the National highways system. Before that, under Truman, the government passed the G.I Bill of Rights, to provide aid to War veterans for homes and college. It benefited 8 million returning Soldiers, who now went to college and had their mortgages guaranteed; and America benefited economically over the next sixty five years. Anti-polio vaccines, National Institutes of Health and it’s Research and Development, National Defence Education Act, the Internet with it’s origins in the Defence Department, Medicare, integrated school system, Civil rights, and food Administration.
The point being that the strength of a Nation is not solely based on individualism, but on collective responsibility, cooperation, and sympathy. Where the markets fail to provide security and a sense of love and respect, the collectively elected Government, should step in. If it means they raise the highest rate on tax, by a little over 3%, to cope with the unbelievably disastrous equality gap, then all I have to say to the rich few is, tough.

How things change.

We consider those who become homeless to be lazy and primitive, rather than real people with real flaws that need an incredible amount of help to put right. Our hearts become stone and we see everyone else as mechanical money making stepping stones, to reach a goal of “more“. And yet, through it all, regardless of how ruthless we are, how greedy we are, the myth of individualism is so much so that we could not make it through life alone; and so in that sense, we are all that homeless man, we all need somebody.

The iconic red box

It doesn’t take a political genius to look a year a head and see a Britain painted Tory blue. It’s almost inevitable. The Government’s loss on the Commons Vote for the Gurkha’s was a big dent in the authority of the Prime Minister, but it could of course get worse very quickly.

The Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, in early 2009 announced plans to sell 30% of Royal Mail, opening the PLC to private investment, but ultimately leaving the Postal Service in Public hands. In 2006, the Postal market was opened up and Royal Mail quickly lost it’s monopoly, which meant that it’s losses increased from £10m in 2006, to £279m in 2007 whilst at the same time paying out obscene bonuses whilst thousands of post offices across the Country were closed down. It doesn’t help matters that billions of pounds of profit that Royal Mail has produced over the past twenty years, has been handed over to the Treasury, and so not reinvested in modernising the postal service. Short of any private investment, in order to keep up with the market, Royal Mail is doomed; it must modernise, the Government should not give in to backbench Labour MPs on this, unless those MPs offer a better option. Because perhaps selling such a huge stake in the business is the wrong move.

Compass, the left wing think tank put forward a report outlining proposals to run Royal Mail in the same way that Network Rail is currently run, as a non-profit company, which benefits from public and private investment, much like the BBC. Network Rail is responsible for the railway lines, signals, lights and rail station safety. It is there purely for the public well being, not for profit. Any profit made, is reinvested in key infrastructure improvements and new technology, not huge pay packets and bonuses. Railtrack failed because it needed huge investment over a long period, which was detrimental to the private interests of shareholders searching for quick short term profit. And so Railtrack, the private company failed and became Network Rail, which happens to be stronger, and more reliable than it’s Private predecessor.

These plans have appeared to quell dissent among back bench Labour MPs, but this morning, Number 10 rejected Compass’ suggestions, and chose instead to stick to their original plans to part privatise the Royal Mail. And whilst the majority of the British Public certainly do not want to see Royal Mail in Private hands, I think we’d all agree that something needs to be done to modernise and bring the standard of the service Royal Mail offers, into the 21st Century. Royal Mail charges some of the lowest rates in Europe. It’s large losses come primarily down to it’s huge pensions deficit, which unless sorted, will keep the entire organisation in dire financial mess. And whilst the pensions issue may be sorted out via Privatisation, I cannot imagine the low prices would continue in Private hands. We’d all suffer.

The Government is likely to win a vote in commons, but only with backing from the Tories, who always welcome Privatisation of any form. It means further embarrassment for Gordon Brown; undermining his authority much deeper than already achieved, given that he cannot rely on the backbenchers in his own party to vote in line with the Government’s proposals, and that he, in essence, will be saved by the Tories. But this in itself creates problems for the wider Labour Party, and Royal Mail. The Communication Workers Union (The Post Office Union), can either now show support for Government plans to sell 30% of Royal Mail to private investment, despite the fact that they quite clearly do not like the idea, or they could oppose the Government through Labour Backbenchers, further undermining the Government, leading to a Tory victory in a General Election, and then deal with the fact that under a Conservative Government, there isn’t likely to be a publicly owned Postal Service come the end of the term in power, along with much less influence from the Union itself. The Union, if it wishes to keep Royal Mail in public hands (which I support), must offer a way forward other than just opposition for the sake of opposition to privatisation. It an iconic British service, based on people, not profit.

The Compass Report: Modernisation by Consent, quite rightly echoes my sentiments on Royal Mail Privatisation, by stating:
“The experience of the banking sector shows where this can lead.We don’t want to be back in a few years’ time with a campaign to halt the bonus culture of the new bosses of a privatised mail service. We don’t want to have to campaign against price increases and branch closures or against job losses and worsening terms and conditions for the postal workers onwhoma great service depends.We don’twant to have to demand awindfall tax on the excess profits of the newowners, only to be told that they are registered abroad and don’t have to pay any tax at all.”
Price increases, excessive bonus culture, profiteering at the expense of the general public, and branch closures are not the way of the Royal Mail we all love. There is much need for A model in which the future of the management and the Union is not focused purely on pay disputes and working conditions, but on working together to ensure investment in infrastructure and technology is guided correctly in line with the direction of the service, rather than lining the golden pockets of shareholders. I fear this argument is merely academic given the future of the service when placed in Conservative hands. However, if it is to remain a public service, if we are to put up an argument for future Conservative privatisation, the service must put an end to it’s pensions deficit, it must offer new investment opportunities, and it must prove that the Royal Mail is not a dying Socialist entity.

Sort the Pensions Deficit, and you’ve sorted the bulk of the financing problems of Royal Mail. One of the plans Mandelson has included in these privatisation proposals, is for the responsibility of the pension fund to move to taxpayers. Which is around £6bn. I cannot understand why the Government expects the public to support privatisation, to support the idea that a wealthy individual can profit, whilst the taxpayer loses. How have we been able to pay the huge deficits racked up by irresponsible PRIVATE banks, yet we cannot afford to pay the much needed £6bn into the pension pots of public service workers? By doing this, by paying off the massive pension deficit, the first step to reinventing the Royal Mail, preparing it for modernisation and much needed investment begins…without the need for any privatisation.

And although part Privatisation appears to be a quick and easy answer, it will only create more problems then it solves, leading, I fear, to full privatisation come the Tories grip on power, ending in a poor service for the majority and a great service for the wealthy few, owned by a faceless overly rich businessman. I cannot think of anything I like the sound of less.
We’d all miss the iconic red box.