Marx’s Class Analysis is Still Correct! Workers have yet to Realise it!

Tensions between classes in the US are rising. Society is split between the 99 percent (ordinary working people, struggling to get by) and the 1 percent (the super rich getting richer every day). Statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. In the USA, which has no nobility, the working class are called the “middle” class. A Pew Research Center poll found two-thirds of its respondents thought the primary division in society was the strong conflict between rich and poor, 19 percent up on 2009.

Michael Schuman says in Time (March 2013) an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study found:

• the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the US in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973
• 74 percent of the gains in wealth in the US, between 1983 and 2010, went to the richest 5 percent while the bottom 60 percent experienced a decline.

Union membership in the US has continued to decline through the economic crisis, the global labor market having apparently rendered unions toothless throughout the developed world. But the world’s workers are getting more impatient with their prospects. They have common problems, but seem still reluctant to unite to resolve them. Even so, tens of thousands have taken to the streets of cities like Madrid and Athens, protesting against massive unemployment and austerity.

Marx’s trenchant criticism of capitalism—that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive—cannot no longer be easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. He wrote:

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

Yet since the deregulation big bang of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the political left has been unable to unite around a practical alternative strategy. Jacques Rancière, a political analyst at the University of Paris, says:

Virtually all progressive or leftist parties contributed at some point to the rise and reach of financial markets, and rolling back of welfare systems in order to prove they were capable of reform. I’d say the prospects of Labor or Socialists parties or governments anywhere significantly reconfiguring—much less turning over—current economic systems to be pretty faint.

Michael Schuman concluded that though Marx’s revolution has yet to successfully appear, Marx had correctly diagnosed both capitalism’s flaws and the outcome of those flaws, and that:

If policymakers don’t discover new methods of ensuring fair economic opportunity, the workers of the world may just unite. Marx may yet have his revenge.

Communist Party of Britain invitation to Workers, Trades Unionists and Socialists to Discuss Labour Party Policies

Ed Miliband has continued Labour’s efforts to win back credibility on the economy by echoing a statement from Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, that Labour cannot promise to reverse any coalition spending cuts.

Robert Griffiths, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain has invited workers, trades unionists, and socialists to discuss an open letter addressed to them regarding the policies being advocated by the Labour Party leadership.

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At the beginning of 2012, the Communist Party published the first edition of its Open Letter, rejecting the statements from Labour Party leaders on public spending cuts, public sector wages and pensions and on welfare benefits.

Those statements broadly confirmed the Labour leadership’s support for the rationale and approach of the Tory-led government towards these issues.

This wrong approach has not changed fundamentally. Arguing that the cuts should be a little less deep and a little more prolonged is still to accept the logic of the blue and orange Tories, City of London bankers and speculators and the EU. Nor is it an approach that has either cut the public spending deficit or stimulated a private sector-led economic recovery.

That is because it was designed to do neither.

The real intention of Tory strategy, dictated by the City and backed by the EU, is to prepare the public sector for wholesale privatisation. In that sense, the strategy has not failed. It is on course to deliver privatised services to big business, while also undermining trade unionism and cutting wage and pension bills and taxes on the wealthy. Regionalised pay is intended to accelerate the drive. The austerity and privatisation programme is working—for the ruling class.

The questions therefore remain:

• what is the labour movement going to do about this ruling class offensive?
• what are the trade unions going to do about the Labour Party leadership’s refusal to resist it?
• in its efforts to promote a broad, inclusive and intensive discussion in the labour movement, the Communist Party is issuing the following updated statement of its own views.

Below is the joint statement issued by 16 communist and workers’ parties in Europe in May 2012, which places Britain’s economic and financial crisis—and responses to it—in a wider international context. Please read and discuss these statements with friends, workmates, trade union colleagues and comrades. We urge you to raise these issues in your trade union and political organisations.

Comments received in response to the first edition of the Open Letter can now be found online at www.communist-party.org.uk. Further comments on this new edition can be sent to openletter@communist-party.org.uk.

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The Crisis of Political Representation in The British Labour Movement

The Communist Party rejects:

• the analysis peddled by the banks, hedge funds and Tory-led government that past levels of public expenditure were the main cause of the economic and financial crisis
• the remedy dictated by City of London financial institutions and the EU Commission and European Central Bank, namely, that massive public spending cuts and a savage attack on the wages and pensions of public sector workers are necessary to reduce the public sector financial deficit.

The policy of the Labour Party leadership to align itself with this analysis and these remedies is a betrayal of the millions of workers and their families who should be able to look to Labour for support and solidarity. Statements by Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and other Labour shadow ministers in support of deep cuts in public sector wages and pension entitlements, and in welfare benefits, represent a shameful capitulation to the banks, the Tory-led regime, the right-wing mass media and the EU.

The refusal of the Labour Party leadership to fight for policies to defend public services, jobs, wages and pensions and so revive economic growth highlights the extent to which the interests of the labour movement—which are also those of the people of Britain generally—go largely unrepresented in the House of Commons.

The leaders of Labour-affiliated trade unions know that their members need a Labour Party that defends their members’ interests. In addition to the widest possible mass movement, it should stand up for public services, oppose the whole rotten set-up in corrupt, big business Britain, and renounce an imperialist foreign policy that mires us in aggressive war, the mass slaughter of civilians, international kidnapping and torture and a new generation of nuclear weapons.

This raises the need for the affiliated unions to campaign in a more determined, planned and coordinated way to change the policies and, when, necessary the composition of the Labour Party leadership. The duty of the affiliated unions to fight for socialist and internationalist values in the Labour Party could not be clearer.

At the same time, this is part of an important, even bigger question:

• how can the labour movement best ensure that its collective views and interests are represented in the Westminster parliament?

This challenge must be faced by the whole movement, including those unions not affiliated to the Labour Party.

The Labour Party was founded by the trade union movement. It still receives the support of over one-third of voters. But this support is not guaranteed and could quickly disintegrate if the party’s right-wing course is maintained. The trade union movement, and its members locally, have a duty to intervene to reclaim the party as an essential voice and vehicle for the interests of working people. Affiliated unions should:

• step up the fight for a fundamental change of economic and social policy in the Labour Party in favour of public services, productive industry, wages, benefits, pensions, trade union rights, public ownership and progressive taxation
• respond to demands from their members and consider withholding financial donations to the Labour Party centrally until its leaders and MPs oppose cuts in public sector wages, pensions, services and benefits and express solidarity with workers taking action to defend them.

Affiliation fees should be maintained to step up the challenge to the Labour leadership’s current policies from inside the party as well as from outside. We believe that these kind of initiatives, combined with mass popular campaigning and action across Britain, are the most realistic and effective steps that can be taken towards achieving real representation of working people’s interests inside the Westminster parliament.

However, should the Labour Party continue on a right-wing course up to and during the next General Election, the trade union movement and the left will have a duty to consider what further steps may be necessary to ensure that the labour movement has its own mass party, one capable of winning elections, forming a government and enacting policies in the interests of workers and their families.

The perspective may need to change from one of the labour movement struggling to reclaim the Labour Party to that of re-establishing a mass party of labour. Affiliated trade unions may need to convene an all-Britain conference to discuss the crisis of political representation for workers and their families. The TUC will have to resume its historic responsibility and convene a special conference of all labour movement organisations to discuss the political representation of the labour movement in the House of Commons.

In the meantime, the labour movement must fully recognise the scale of the threat now being posed by the current ruling class offensive—fronted by the Tory-led regime—to working class rights and living standards. United mass, popular resistance still needs to be built to this government, based on a clear understanding of the class forces and interests that stand behind Tory policies.

In the Communist Party’s view, it is vital that the resistance to this offensive also projects a bold and unifying alternative economic and social strategy. This is where the People’s Charter can play an invaluable role, setting out the policies to rebuild Britain’s productive economy, enhance our public services, secure greater social justice and protect our environment. Pointing a way forward in the immediate battles will help create more favourable conditions in which to resolve the labour movement’s current crisis of political representation.

For its part, the Communist Party will continue to develop its Marxist analysis, project an alternative economic and political strategy for the working class and its allies and strengthen non-sectarian left unity.

Statement authorised by the Communist Party political committee September 5, 2012.

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Statement of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Europe, May 1, 2012
For Maximum Opposition to the EU Treaties

The European Union and the ruling classes of the member states are determined to make working people pay a very heavy price for the deepening crisis of the system. We Communist and Workers’ parties of the member states of the European Union call on workers across the EU to resist and oppose the adoption of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union and the revised Treaty on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

These two treaties would make “Eurozone” member states and practically all other countries signing these agreements into permanent regimes of economic austerity involving deeper and deeper cuts in public expenditure, rises in indirect taxes, reductions in wages, sustained liberalisation of markets and privatisation of public enterprises, services and vital national assets.

The strategy is to have low wages, low public spending, mass poverty and workers having few rights. The treaties are designed to make these measures into a permanent feature of the EU that are impossible to reverse.

The impact of these treaties will not be confined to the member states of the Eurozone. They will provide the bench-mark for further attacks on workers’ rights and conditions across the whole of the EU. The ruling classes have declared open warfare on workers in a generalised offensive.

These treaties are designed to neutralise the potential of national working class formations to influence or change national economic and social policy. They, along with previous treaties, are about blocking any avenues for the working class to defend itself or to promote policies of social progress and a socialist alternative.

They will make austerity permanent by continuous external interference of EU institutions in the affairs of member states in relation to economic and social policy, in the interests of monopoly capitalism.

In this they have the active collaboration of the ruling class and its political representatives in each country. These treaties will further negate and deeply undermine national and sovereign rights. Any policies that the ruling classes across the European Union can deliver will inevitably make the people pay for this crisis of capitalism. Promoting the interests of the working class is only possible by confronting and breaking with this destructive system.

We, Communist and Workers’ Parties value and salute the mass response from the workers and other social strata affected by the measures and policies of big capital, in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy and call upon workers and their trade unions, and people’s mass organisations, to resist these renewed attacks and to mobilise and assert a working class response to the crisis of state monopoly capitalism.

In the immediate battles of today our parties will present the vision of Socialism as the answer to the crisis of the capitalist system.

Signed:

1. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
2. Workers’ Party of Belgium
3. Communist Party of Britain
4. Portuguese Communist Party
5. Communist Party of Finland
6. Communist Party in Denmark
7. Communist Party of Luxembourg
8. Communist Party of Ireland
9. Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
10. Communist Party of Greece
11. Party of Italian Communists
12. Communist Party of Malta
13. Communist Party of Poland
14. Communist Party of Spain
15. Communist Party of Sweden
16. German Communist Party

How It Will Be Done! The Struggle for Socialism

• A United Response
• Who Overspent?
• Leading the People
• Building Socialist Unity
• Democratic Choice

A United Response

The ferocious and intensifying attack by the rich men’s party on the people who actually do the work needs an united response—by us! Yet we remain in a deplorable state of hesitation, disunity and confusion. Plenty of organizations and people online on various lists, forums and Facebook grumble away together discontentedly, but with no sound, agreed analysis of what is going on, though that is what is needed. The difficulty is that it is hard to get unity when the government is supported by the millions of issues of propaganda printed daily by the capitalist media, and the almost identical, selective “news” presented by the TV channels.

Yet we have one daily newspaper in the UK that is consistently in favor of the interests of ordinary people, the Morning Star. This paper is not run by capitalists, but millions who are discontent with the mass media still choose capitalist newspapers with their anti-worker agenda instead of a newspaper that suits us in our struggle against bank induced austerity, and for decent jobs, pay, conditions and benefits when we are ill or have fallen into unemployment, situations that are far from unusual but can be disastrous for families in starkly capitalist countries like the USA, the model for Cameron’s party here in the UK.

The satisfaction of these demands is impossible in the present dire capitalist crisis, which will only be settled within the system when wages are forced down by mass unemployment and enforced suffering. That is the nature of the capitalist system.

We can be sure that as soon as people start reading the progressive daily paper, and thereby begin to co-ordinate their opinions and efforts that the police will find excuses for arresting those leading and co-ordinated the protests. Protesters will be described in the capitalist media as “rentacrowd”, “anarchists”, “conspirators”, “rioters” and “hooligans”, with the aim of painting the leading protestors as extremists or louts, and magistrates will issue them with punitive fines or terms of penal servitude, the basis for all this having been set by the heavy punishments imposed on youths even for trivial misdemeanors following the riots of August 2011. That when a government minister, Stephen Laws, who stole £40,000 in false expenses was let off then taken back into government!

Such happenings must anger us all the more, and stir us to greater protest until it becomes a mass protest that simply cannot be handled by the authorities in that unjust and bullying manner, and the ones incarcerated have to be released. Not being willing to act will yield the ground to the capitalist agents posing as a democratically elected government—the ConDems, the Conservative and Liberal Democratic coalition.

Who Overspent?

But although being that determined can beat back ConDem assaults against our persons, we need an alternative programme, and so far the Parliamentary opposition has not been adequately opposing the ConDems because New Labour has essentially the same outlook and motivation as the Tories and the Liberals. New Labour under its leader Ed Miliband remains the New Labour of Tony Blair, an alternative capitalist party. There is nothing socialist in the principle that only the private sector can run the economy, and that is the core of New Labour.

It was the Labour party when in power, that gave away to the bankers and their rich owners the contents of the British Treasury—money that the government took from us ostensibly to provide us with common services. Now the Treasury is empty because we have overspent. The TV stations are good at finding worthy but ignorant people, often pensioners and the unemployed with no means of overspending anything, to say on camera, no doubt for a modest incentive, "we have overspent, so we have to tighten our belts". We did not overspend, as the media propaganda has it, but it illustrates the power the capitalist media have over us, the confusion it generates, and the reason we need to read our own newspaper. That alone would help to get rid of the learned helplessness, apathy and inertia workers currently feel.

The government we elected to manage the country on our behalf gave to the rich the money we had put into the exchequer to give us health benefits, work and a pleasant environment to live in. The rich had gambled on junk stocks consisting of mortgage debt packaged for resale to permit the spreading among many buyers of the risk of lending money on inadequate security. So long as the housing boom continued, the value of a house would increase and eventually would equal and exceed the mortgage, leaving the debt secured and the bonds safe and yielding riches from mortgage repayments for decades into the future. The housing boom did not continue!

The banks that had devised the bonds and the greedy rich who had bought them were left broke, holding a load of nigh on worthless junk, and many banks were technically bankrupt. A run on any of them in that condition would have ended them. That is why national governments had to fill the void in the banks’ vaults by emptying the national treasuries. The greedy gamble of the rich was so bad and the banks so involved by their laying off individual risks with each other, just like bookies, that £trillions had to be given to banks in every western country to secure the ruling rich class from going bust! It was none of our business to bail them out. Governments elected to look after the interests of all of the people essentially protected the sole interest of the super rich one per cent, at the cost of the middle class and the poor worker.

With treasuries virtually empty, the national governments had to cut the services they were meant to supply via taxation, so civil servants and other public servants had to be cut. Ordinary people therefore were sold the lie that we had been overspending and a period of austerity—job losses especially from public services, and wage and benefit reductions—was needed to get us back on track. Meanwhile the rich are not even asked to pay back in taxes any of the £trillions they have ungratefully received from the taxpayer as a gift.

Leading the People

The economic leadership of working people in capitalism has always been the ones willing to step forward and lead the trades unions—activists and shop stewards. But these trades unionists realized they needed a political branch and set up the Labour Party, which remains to this day the party for most working people. Regrettably, though, the trades unions did not use the financial power they had over the Labour Party as the source of its funds to make it stick to its principles, particularly the important one of the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or Clause 4 as it was called.

The Labour Party has been controlled hitherto by trades unionists closest in ideology to the ruling class, those who were careeristic and opportunistic in outlook and willing to compromise with capital to maintain what they perceived as an advantageous position in the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the Labour party abandoned any pretense of socialism, but despite that, being able still to rely on the support of leading trades unionists who had grown indifferent to the question of socialism. Yet a concerted movement and campaign within the trades unions for a firm line on the Labour Party would be immensely beneficial to the effectiveness of working people in countering the pressing powers of wealth and the undemocratic European Community.

Now New Labour is all things to all men, including many working people who mistakenly believe it is still what it was. So long as that is the case, activists ought to do their utmost to bring it back into the fold, via trades union pressure and demands from the membership.

Here we have to convince substantial numbers of workers who believe themselves to be middle class and natural Tory voters—white collar workers like office workers, technicians, scientists, foremen and charge hands, or lower management generally, and small business people like small sole proprietorships! They wrongly identify themselves with the capitalist class even though they do not have enough capital to live off without working—they must work to live, yet deny that they are working class. Their interests are those of workers, not those of monopolists and financiers, yet they wilfully support the parties and policies of their class enemy, thereby giving their enemies the rope to hang them.

Of course, the capitalist media try to encourage readers and viewers to support the free-and-easy Labour Party of unprincipled political opportunists. With a capitalist Labour Party as well as a capitalist party, the UK has got closer to the American system of two alternating rich man’s parties, and no alternative policies. It is a system that holds no fears for the ruling rich class. What the rich do not want is the Labour Party to respond to trades union pressure and adopt anew the socialist principles it once has, at least in name.

So the media keep up their pressure for the Labour Party to stay in the “political center” of a scale that is constantly redefined as excluding the “extreme left”, meaning anyone on the left, socialist, communists, anarchist, or any other leftist view, eventually even liberal! So the political center creeps continuously to the right. The assumption of the media seems to be that voters have fixed political views, and parties have to change their policies to attract a greater spread of voters. So they all go for a broad enough spread to encompass the center, and end up overlapping substantially leaving little choice in practice.

Building Socialist Unity

1. Political Struggle. The working class must not be diverted from the political struggle and instead be persuaded to settle for an endless economic war against the employers and their governments which leaves the employers wealth and power intact. To do so simply leaves working people at the capitalist’s mercy. The capitalist class simply regroup for another bash at the people—to restrict their conditions and freedom at a later date. That is not to say that an economic battle does not accomplish the political war. It does! After all, peoples’ immediate concerns are their economic welfare, but the political angle comes with the realization and acceptance that the capitalists and capitalism must be replaced by socialism if the class war is to end with the victory of the general good. For exploitation to be ended, capitalism must be ended. That is the object of the political struggle.

2. Eschewing Capitalist Media. Given that the capitalists control the mass media, the mass of the working class is too confused to be relied upon to spontaneously find the correct reply to the attacks made upon it by the government of the rich. It is too easy for the mass media to pick on easy scapegoats in society and direct reactionary elements among the workers who are seeking easy targets, to put the blame onto them rather than the class enemy. Easy scapegoats must be easily recognized, so racialism is the first preferred distraction used by the media, currently black and Moslem immigrants. Events will not spontaneously take the right course. It is too easy to blame an accessible scapegoat when the real enemy is well hidden and protected by the state.

   People need principled leadership, and a principled party to do it, and the practical leadership of that party will be publicized and explained through the socialist newspaper. Wealth can always be converted into weapons for use against the workers whether by hand or by brain—the rich have the advantage in the age of capital. But the working people have the power through their co-ordinated ability to stop working and bring the economy to a halt, hitting the rich where they feel it most—in their wallets. Whatever the rich try to do, with the working people sufficiently determined and united, synchronized rolling strikes or a steadfast general strike can stop it. Building that degree of unity in the face of the capitalist media is essential, and is the reason why every socialist should eschew financing capitalist propaganda while the socialist news organ is undersubscribed and underfunded… and therefore of limited effect.

3. Socialist consciousness. Equally, spontaneity implies and requires a widespread socialist consciousness and politico-economic understanding that takes a lot of practical experience and considerable devotion to Marxist study to gain. As most people will not have that sort of understanding without a proper journal to provide it, to imagine ordinary people will spontaneously do the right thing is likely to be a serious error, denigrating also the efforts of those who have tried to decipher the political signs. Moreover, it yields to those elements who will use any local crisis as an opportunity to get the reputation as a leader without adequate preparation, or to police agents provocateurs who use such situations to lead people astray and into traps.

   Marxism offers the proper framework for interpreting the crises and opportunities that arise in the struggle against capitalist exploitation. No two situations are alike, so Marxism is no crystal ball, at least in the sense of giving high definition answers, but it suggests the conditions and limits for successful action, and so is an essential guide to it. The active working class leader needs both theory and practice—often called praxis—understanding of both Marxist theory and practical experience in class struggle.

4. Marxism. Those who press for a purely spontaneous rising against the oppression of the ruling class base their stance on the importance within capitalism of the economic struggle for fair wages and, decent conditions, and jobs. One might call these people “economicists” because they restrict the class struggle to one bounded by capitalist economics and social conditions. The “economicists” assume the capitalist system and cannot transcend it.

   Many active workers in trades unions, including too many of their leaders, are “economicists”, but more than economics is needed if the class struggle is to go further and have some prospects of ending in an ultimate victory for the class of working people. Indeed, some do go further, seek to inform themselves of Marxism despite the widespread disdain for it propagated by capitalist politicians, academics and media, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So they prepared themselves better for the full scale assault we are now experiencing.

   Marxism preceded the Soviet Union and cannot rationally be rubbished by reference to the failings of its leaders. Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains sound, as the events of the financial collapse since 2007 prove, and capitalism’s reason for demeaning Marxism is not that the capitalists want to relieve simple people of a mistaken attitude, but because they know it remains sound and so is dangerous for them. By wrecking the belief workers’ leaders had in Marxism, capitalist agents are seeking to assist capitalism, not to educate the people.

   A worker conscious of economic unfairness and injustice under capitalism has two choices, a capitalist or a socialist ideology. To belittle socialist ideology—Marxism—is to strengthen capitalism. It explains why our society spends so much money and effort on mocking trades unions, working people’s practical workplace organizations, and socialism and communism, and their theoretical outlook, Marxism.

5. New Labour. For the same reason the Labour party, which began as an umbrella organization for left wing groups some of which were Marxist, by degrees expelled the Marxists until, under the leadership of Tony Blair, it got rid of all pretense of socialism and established itself as another capitalist party—New Labour, though “Not Labour” would have been more appropriate. This party, however, still has the loyalty of many workers, despite its record, and still has the loyalty and uncritical financial support of significant leaders of large trades unions. It is, though, the party of the “economicists”, having ditched “Clause 4” as an objective, as we saw, this being the clause which required the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. So now New Labour, at best, stands for modest social reforms within an eternally present capitalism, thereby necessarily helping capitalism to remain stable and profitable. Reform, needless to say, leaves the economic system itself unaltered, so New Labour is never going to change society for the better.

   It is not socialist, but it remains the focus of working class aspirations because working class understanding is moulded by the capitalist media. Moreover, it still has good socialists in its ranks, and conceivably, if the trades unions that fund New Labour used their financial power to change the rules and the selection of parliamentary candidates, the Labour party could be reborn as a class party capable of fighting back against the ConDem assault on us. Class conscious workers therefore must use their influence in the trades unions to move Labour towards the left.

   

   Fortunately, besides the Labour Party, a variety of smaller left wing parties and campaign groups exist, but unfortunately they tend to be sectarian and particular, and so resistant to campaigning in unison. The natural principled party of the left is the Communist Party, but over a long period of time in the 1970s and 1980s, the party was infiltrated and destroyed from within, disbanding itself in 1991. Its successor, the CPB, remains small but with the important role of supporting and expanding the newspaper of the working people, the Morning Star, and promoting a socialist stand in the trades unions. It recognizes the centrality in the history of British socialism and working class thinking of the Labour Party, which it wishes also to return to its foundational principles and away from class collaboration and delusions of managing capitalism for the capitalists.

   The main point about the CPB is that it is guided by Marxism—it has principles and a method of applying them. The New Labour Party now has none, having abandoned them to fulfil the ambitions of careerists like Kinnock, Blair and Brown whose only principle was winning elections at any price, even abandoning socialism and selling the UK to Rupert Murdoch.

6. The Working Class. Emphatically “economicism” is a result of capitalist media spreading confusion and negative propaganda about socialism among the working people. It is a tactic that has succeeded remarkably well. It has turned the working class against its own interests at a time when exploitation by an egregiously greedy capitalist class was hurting more than for eighty years. As noted, working people even blame themselves for overspending when it was the bankers and their rich clients who had done it. The perpetual money making machine they thought they had inevitably failed, proving their greed and stupidity, but still nothing has been done to curtail it.

   Offered inadequately secured loans by the banks, people accepted them in all innocence, believing the propaganda from co-conspirator with Tony Blair to destroy the Labour party, Gordon Brown, that “boom and bust” had ended, and that bankers knew what they were doing. They did not, and Gordon Brown gave away the contents of the national exchequer to save the greedy rich and their bankers from suffering catastrophic losses. The governments of most major capitalists countries followed Brown’s lead.

   We suffer today because the national treasuries are empty, and services we need, provided traditionally by public and civil servants cannot be provided, unless the government cuts staff to cut costs, and borrows money to pay the wages of those who remain in post, and the benefits of those cast out of work. Who does the government borrow from? Who else but the banks! They have been given all our taxation money, and they are now lending it back at interest! We are having to pay interest to borrow our own money. Meanwhile, the beneficiaries are not even taxed, but the workers and middle class have to economize, “tighten their belts” and suffer unemployment not seen in a lifetime. We are most definitely not “all in it together”.

Democratic Choice

Democracy is meant to be a system where candidates have principles to let voters choose a representative whom they consider represents them. They have clear choices. The same should apply even in a party system. Parties should be formed to offer a set of policies implementing principles that the voters can choose from. When party leaders change their policies to make their candidates more electable, they are abandoning some of their principles, so that others who voted for those very principles are now being tricked or have no party to represent them.

An example is what happened at the end of the 18 years of Tory rule under Thatcher and Major. People were sick of Thatcherite Toryism, and wanted the distinct change they thought Labour would offer. But under Blair Labour had become New Labour, the face of which was the cloying charm of the sociopathic Blair himself, and his compact with the media devil, Murdoch. The ultra right wing media baron, Murdoch would never have entered into any compact with a socialist, and many of the leading Labour party activists knew Blair had changed his spots. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to “sell out” even before he took power. Blair was voted in only to apply with his co-conspirators, Brown and Mandelson, another thirteen years of Thatcherism, made possible by his pact with the devil, and the demoralization of the Tories and their own disunity.

It demonstrates how important it is to have an alternative socialist newspaper, and how it ought to be used to clear the confusion spread among voters by the capitalist media. Working people need not be helpless in the face of the austerity assault of the government. Otherwise we have little alternative to the incessant beat of capitalist propaganda, and no prospect of rebutting by socialist principles what is presented as unarguable norms of capitalist economics.

Nor will there be much prospect of moving people from their apathy into the consistent activity needed to bring down the system we live under of lies, injustice and unfairness. Only when a significant portion of the employed public and those left unemployed to keep wages down get their information from a daily newspaper committed to the interests of ordinary people and the poor will there be any chance of them acting sufficiently coherently to make a difference. Then people will be able to organize their efforts in unison, to unite their thinking ideologically, rather than being distracted one way and another by divisive issues like the intolerance and racism spread by the capitalist media. And whereas the capitalist media deliberately ignore or misrepresent working class protests, the socialist newspaper reports them and publicizes them to maximize awareness and response.

In the UK, the Morning Star is that newspaper—in the USA, the People’s World. There are many single issue organizations with news sheets, albeit not daily, and perhaps websites, and they help in raising awareness, but it is piecemeal. A political theory to unite the single issues and offer a consistent explanation is vital. That is Marxism, and the vehicle for presenting that view is the revolutionary newspaper, allowing people to see how single issues have a common explanation in the class struggle.

People: Let this be the Final Crisis

Capitalist society in England stood at a parting of the ways. The crisis was far more than commercial and industrial—it was a profound social crisis, a turning point in social development. The times were apocalyptic. All social values were being re-valued. Society was racked by the civil strife of the “two nations”. The air was full of doubts and questionings and suffused with the…

…deep wrath of the whole working class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long as time goes by—a time almost within the power of man to predict—must break out into a Revolution, in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.

Condition of the Working Class in England, 17

This startling sense of imminent social upheaval, this feeling that we stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only, was not the exceptional apprehension of the great revolutionary. It is to be found running through the literature of the period. It was the theme of all serious thought and utterance on social affairs. It runs through the pages of Disraeli, Carlyle, Kingsley, Gaskell (who was prophesying revolution as early as 1833), John Stuart Mill:

I cannot think that the working class will be permanently contented with the condition of labouring for wages as their ultimate state… It is not to be expected that the division of the human race into hereditary classes, employers and employed, can be permanently maintained).

And it was symptomatic that The Times of London found it necessary to thunder editorially:

War to the palaces, peace to the cottages—that is a battle-cry of terror which may come to resound throughout our country. Let the wealthy beware!

----oOo----

It seems that as long as the people who do the work in our society will not learn from history they are doomed to repeat it. This is not a description of the present crisis but one of England in the 1840s, edited lightly from Allen Hutt, The Final Crisis, (1935). At least two similar major periods of economic crisis, paid for by the people who are employed in unemployment or wage cuts, have interverned between the 1840s and today—four crises in 170 years, yet those who suffer to pay their price simply accept the lies of the rich, and continue being exploited. Isn’t it time that people who have to work for a living—us!—pulled the rug from beneath the idle fat cats who purport to rule us? To do so we first need to recognize that we are being made fools of, and then to do what The Times saw as a likelihood:

Let the wealthy beware!

Basic Arguments for Socialism by Tony Benn, former UK Minister

Tony Benn, who was a cabinet minister under Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and represents the now disappointly small socialist wing of the Labour Party, has written in his diaries (published 1988):

As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government (1). Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes [by trades unions] is minuscule (2). This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the IMF secured cuts in our public expenditure (3). These lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact (4). If the British (or American) people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum.

In the present crisis these words mean more than ever:

1. We have given £1 trillion (£1 million million) to banks (mainly) and various industrial groups and scammers
2. The government and press blame trades unionists and workers defending their work and conditions for “living beyond our means”, and all those with low IQs accept it!
3. The money magicked out of the treasury into bankers' coffers is to be replaced, not by taxing bankers and their wealthy chums, but by laying off public servants and cutting benefits for the poor
4. Our so called democracy is smoke and mirrors, intended to pull the wool over the eyes of simpletons. Regrettably, we have a lot of them, mainly yes-men in comfortable jobs, but many who think politicians and the media cannot tell a lie!
5. Both Britain and the USA have a two party system but with only one policy between them—lining the pockets of the rich and powerful, and blaming working people for being idle!

Benn himself had to fight to get a seat in the British House of Commons after he inherited—at his father's death and the previous death in action of his elder brother—the peerage his father had been awarded earlier for his public service. The constitutional point about this is that peers (Lords) were confined to the feudal House of Peers and were, for constitutional reasons, not allowed to stand in the commons. But nor were they allowed to renunciate their peerage to do so. Already an MP for ten years, Benn had tried to introduce renunciation bills to allow those, like himself, who did not wish to inherit a title, they personally had not earned, to renunciate their inheritance. Both houses refused them.

Benn had his parliamentary seat removed, and a by-election was arranged, for which Benn sought and received selection by his local constituency party. Benn then won with a vastly increased majority, but was not allowed to take his seat. Two senior judges were appointed to test Benn's case which was based on some precedent, but mainly on the fact that, in a modern democracy, a properly elected candidate ought to be able to take a seat if constituents had vote for him. The judges found Benn's case inadequate and his losing opponent was given the seat. There was such a public outcry that the government of the day had to introduce a bill allowing a peer to renounce his peerage and take up a legitimately elected seat in the commons. So Benn returned, convinced that the system was designed to maintain the status quo, but that concerted public action could change things.

Benn's call for a new Chartist agitation has been answered in the UK, where there is a charter movement, but unfortunately not strong enough, not least because the non-democratic media tell us nothing about it. Needless to say, the odious sociopathic crook, Tony Blair, partner in murderous crime of the pathetic G W Bush, gets every chance to defend his get-rich-quick policies such as the PFI, as it is called, which has driven large hospitals into bankruptcy and has doubtless put many other public enterprises into the red, all the better for greedy corporations to privatize them.

Benn elsewhere pointed out that the Labour party of 1935 proposed in its election manifesto to nationalize the banks. The crisis then was similar to the one we are experiencing now. The present one is, if anything, worse. Why then is there no demand by the Labour Party to nationalize our banks instead of putting our taxes directly into the share dividends of people rich enough to go without their unearned incomes for years, and still be rich?

There are millions times more people who are poor or only moderately well off, yet so many of them are deluded into thinking they are among the rich. The 1% is richer than most people can imagine, let alone sensibly defend as being in their own best interests. Support a people's charter. You'll probably find there is a charter group near you. If not, draw one up and get your friends and fellow workers to support it. If we do nothing look around the world at what our ruling classes are willing to do to others. Think you'll be any different when push comes to shove? Don't delude yourselves.

Houston, a Glimpse into America’s More Caring Future?

The 2011 Kinder Houston Area Survey took in a representative sample of 750 Harris County residents—including 240 respondents contacted by cell phone. The University of Houston administered the survey. Survey author, Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Institute and professor of sociology, said:

Houston is where America’s four major ethnic communities—Anglos, Asians, blacks and Latinos—meet in more equal numbers than almost anywhere else in the country. The challenges and opportunities of creating a more unified and inclusive multiethnic society will be seen here first.

As a city at the forefront of the country’s demographic revolution, Klineberg thought that Houston offers a glimpse into America’s future, and the survey’s assessment of the city may offer important lessons for strengthening the rest of the country:

• create policies that moderate the inequalities
• nurture a far more educated workforce
• develop cities into environmentally and aesthetically appealing destinations
• empower all members of a multiethnic society.

Though Texas is a red state traditionally wanting less government, a majority of Houstonians today (52 percent) said that government has a responsibility to help reduce the inequalities between rich and poor in America (up from 45 percent in 2009). This year 48 percent said that “government should do more to solve our country’s problems” (up from 36 percent in 1996). 72 percent of respondents thought most poor people in the US today are poor because of circumstances they can’t control (up from 68 percent in 2007, and 52 percent in 1999). Although 86 percent agreed “if you work hard in this city, eventually you will succeed”, 67 percent also think “people who work hard and live by the rules are not getting a fair break these days”.

Respondents are a bit more upbeat in their personal economic outlooks—26 percent (up from 20 percent in 2010) report improving personal financial conditions—but remain pessimistic about the long term national prospects—only 31 percent (down from 43 percent in 2007) believe that young people will eventually have a higher standard of living than adult Americans today:

Houstonians feel that the bleeding has stopped, but a robust recovery is not yet on the horizon.

Stephen Klineberg

78 percent disagreed with the statement “A high school education is enough to get a good job”. The percent of people who spontaneously mentioned education when asked to name the biggest problem facing people in Houston jumped to 7.6 percent this year from just 1.7 percent in 2009 and 2 percent in 2010:

There’s a new awareness that this is now a high tech, knowledge based economy and there aren’t many good jobs for people without a college education. Education is more important than ever. Long gone are the days when you could get a job out of high school, work hard and make enough money until you retire. The resources of the knowledge economy are not found in factories, they are situated between the ears of the best and brightest, who can live anywhere.

Klineberg

Public support for new initiatives to improve the quality of life in Houston has remained firm or grown stronger across the 30 years of the survey. Area residents support measures to enhance the city’s green spaces and bayous, revitalize and preserve urban centers and improve air and water quality.

Though most respondents (52 percent) said they would prefer to live in a single family residential area, a large minority (45 percent) would choose an area with a mix of homes, shops and restaurants. In 2010, 41 percent said they’d prefer a smaller home within walking distance of shops and workplaces, rather than a single family home with a big yard “where you would need to drive almost everywhere you want to go”.

Asked how they would feel if a close relative of theirs wanted to marry a non-Anglo, 8 percent of the Anglo respondents this year said they would disapprove, down from 13 percent in 2002 and 23 percent in 1995. Among the Anglo respondents under the age of 30, 93 percent said they would approve of such intermarriage, compared with 69 percent of those 60 or older. Seventy percent of Anglos under 30, but only 35 percent in the older group, said that the increasing immigration into this country today mostly strengthens American culture. 73 percent of the younger respondents, compared with 52 percent of those 60 or older, said they are in favor of granting illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship if they speak English and have no criminal record.

So, older Houstonians’ attitudes toward diversity, which will continue growing rapidly, are in conflict with younger Anglos more comfortable with the demographic trends.

Is the Wagon Rolling Against the Robbing Rich?

Amid the recent fiscal carnage in Washington several studies of the US have been published concerning the situation of the average American. First, IMF economists analyzed the US public deficit and debt levels, and their relation to the demands aging Baby Boomers will place on the government’s Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs, while the birth rate lags at a record low:

The United States is facing an untenable fiscal situation due to the combination of high fiscal deficits, an aging population and rapid growth in government provided healthcare benefits.

IMF study, An Analysis of US Fiscal and Generational Imbalances:
Who Will Pay and How?

To “go a long way in returning the United States to a fiscally sustainable path”, the US government must cut the entitlement programs and especially healthcare—among the most expensive in the world—that face rapidly rising costs in coming years. Americans will have to pay more taxes and the government will have to cut spending on Baby Boomers—those Americans between about 45 and 65—and their immediate heirs.

To eliminate all current deficits and long term shortfalls on social plans for the current generation “would require all taxes to go up and all transfers to be cut immediately and permanently by 35 percent”, and “delay in the adjustment makes it more costly”.

Unless currently living Americans pay more in net taxes or unless government spending on current generations is curtailed, future Americans will face net tax rates that are about 21.5 percentage points… higher than those facing current newborn Americans.

Of course, the IMF is an arm of US foreign policy, or rather, an arm of the international policies of the US uber rich class who rule the world for the sole purpose of making themselves richer than their already obscene levels of riches. The IMF always makes the people pay whenever the rulers of any country get its finances in a twist by their greedy machinations. The ruling clique in the US are among the main beneficiaries usually. It is time they paid! Normally, they pay least, often nothing!

But the average Yankee seems amazingly placid, or gets worked up over the wrong enemy, all too often supporting the greedy manipulators because they are all too easy to fool. Often, they seem to think that they are themselves among the uber rich, but less than a single percent of the population are. That one percent have gotten three times richer in real terms over the last 30 years, while the average Yankee has got poorer once inflation is accounted for.

Not surprisingly, more Americans say that their financial situation is worse not better in recent years. For the first time since 1972, 31.5 percent of Americans are “not at all” satisfied with their financial situation compared with 23.4 percent who are “pretty well” satisfied (General Social Survey, NORC, University of Chicago).

Americans are also more insecure about employment. A record 16.4 percent thought it “likely” (fairly or very) that they would lose their job or be laid off. As few as 52.2 percent thought it “not at all likely” that they would lose their job or be laid off, easily the lowest confidence ever recorded by the GSS. Those who thought their standard of living was “much better” or “somewhat better” than their parents declined.

The General Social Survey—which NORC has conducted for forty years based on 2,044 interviews—is a biennial survey that gathers data on contemporary American society to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes.

On top of these, American “happiness” has been measured and took some blows, but some American stoicism shone through here. While only 28.8 percent of Americans, the lowest percentage since 1972, were “happy”, another 14.2 percent were “not too happy”. Happiness was hit mainly because of the economy and people’s own finances. Even so, 85.8 percent of Americans were “happy”.

Not all aspects of happiness fell during the downturn. 97 percent of marriages were judged to be “happy” (very or pretty), and 86.0 percent of Americans claim to be “very satisfied” or “moderately satisfied” with their work, a steady average since 1972.

If anything, it suggests that the average American lives in a cocoon. They are concerned for themselves and their immediate family, and are satisfied that they are not being repossessed like the family over the street, and still have a job to hang on to. Despite the hugely vaunted Christianity of the Christian nation, the average American is indifferent to his neighbour, as long as he’s all right.

The motto is not “Do unto others as you would be done by”, it is “I’m all right, Bud, You look after yourself”.

Fortunately, recent proposed cuts in public services have been firmly rebutted by encouraging united strength and purpose. Is the US sleeping Leviathan waking up? Let’s hope so, then you smug financiers, corporate bosses, bankers and bought men will have to watch out! Once enough of the people stop being taken in by the great Washington Repucrat-Demoblican farce, then the wagon of unity may be rolling, and the callous and greedy exploiters of the rest of us will be crushed by its irresistible momentum.

Education not Poverty—Reclaiming What is Ours!

In the 2007, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study test, students from Singapore took first or second place in all science categories. The United States ranked 11th.

The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

Barack Obama

Mark Roth, a former science editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks why do pupils, in a nation that is world leader in scientific research lag, behind other countries in science. Excuses range from poverty, poor training of teachers, disdainful attitudes to education and knowledge, the shockingly poor scientific illiteracy of American adults to the convenience of paying to import scientists and mathematicians from abroad where standards are higher. It is is actually cheaper for corporations to hire foreign scientists that for have to pay taxes to improve the US education service.

Meanwhile, the huge gap between students in affluent and poor school districts is reflected in racial disparities in scores. Affluent white kids in the US do as well as white kids in Europe. In the European Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, American students as a whole scored 502 in 2009, slightly above the industrialized nation average of 500. Arthur Eisenkraft, a science education expert at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, said economic differences play a part in the discrepancy:

We’ve always known there are high correlations between poverty and how kids do in school.

The downside is particularly noticeable in large urban school districts like Pittsburgh. Only two of the 17 big city school districts that participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress science tests, in 2009, had more than a third of their students scoring in the proficient range. Eight of the districts had more than half of their students below the basic level. Alan J Friedman, a science education consultant, emphasized that those who are below basic in science at the eighth grade level most probably will be freezing themselves out of a whole lifetime of advancement opportunities.

Part of the reason for the fall in test scores from the elementary school to middle school is attitude—and is shared by parents as well as kids. In Asian countries, doing well in science is considered to be by application, hard work, but Americans think it is whether you have a natural gift for a subject, aptitude, natural ability—you just don’t want to do it! Students say, “I’m no good at science, and that’s just how it is”. Being a “celebrity” seems a lot more fun!

Besides the need for effort, school pupils need to know how to analyze problems and work out the answers to them. But many teachers who teach science are poorly trained in it themselves. Many have not done science in college. It becomes particularly critical if the content is controversial, as in teaching evolution in biology classes. Lack of the proper training in science and evolution leaves teachers without the confidence to face up to aggressive Christian kids challenging them, especially when they have equally aggressive and sometimes influential parents coming into the school to complain. Many parents love Jesus so much that they love guns, and high school shootings have become popular recently.

The lack of scientific literacy in America is compounded by the determination of many US Christians no keep on sabotaging science on the grounds that all the answers necessary are in Genesis. All Genesis answers is what is in it, and whatever regard people have for it, it is not science.

Ultimately America, and much of the west—the UK is going the same way—needs proper regulation of corporate greed. If people are to work hard, they need rewards that seem proportionate—decent wages, apprenticeships and training schemes, and sposorship of education—but corporate America could not care less than it does about American society. If they could get people to work for nothing they would, and when industry is fully robotized, that will be the real situation.

But who then would be able to buy anything? Without money at the base of society, at consumer level, society collapses, and discontent rises. Intelligent young people already see it, experience it, and feel that education is pointless when the prospect of any work for most is negligible. Already there are places where hundreds of people compete for each job that becomes available. They wonder whether it is lucky or clever to take any such job, if offered, because they will have to work for peanuts under a perpetual threat of being fired. Why bother? It is easier and more lucrative to be a thief. Already vast swathes of the inner cities are dying or dead, because industries have moved to cheap labor countries, or to another state in the Union that will offer the biggest incentives—bribes.

Social responsibility has to be made an important factor in corporate decisions. It can be done by strictly enforced legislation. And should the corporate bosses decide to move abroad, then they should do it with the knowledge that their products will be heavily taxed if they are imported to the USA, and Americans domiciled abroad whose businesses have been moved from the USA, should be taxed as if they still lived in the USA. It is time the country was taking back what it has allowed a small body of people to take away—the nation’s jobs and wages.

How Incentives Destroy Co-operation and Will Destroy Society

Human societies depend upon each of us helping our neighbors, and not exploiting them, and about 80 percent of us are willing to participate fairly in joint projects of mutual benefit. The other 20 percent are skivers, people who will try to get the benefits with as little effort as they can get away with. The skiving free loaders are not popular with the others who pull their weight, and usually sanctions or punishments are applied to those who try to exploit other people’s mutual effort for their own gain. It is called norm enforcement, the norm being that everyone should pull their weight, and those who do not are deviants from the norm.

Data like these are not difficult to get by testing in controlled situations. If my neighbor and I could each build a house on our acre plot in six months, but by co-operating we could do a better job making use of our complementary skills and finish the two houses in eight months, then we have a clear benefit from co-operating. If the houses still took six months each and were no better, we might as well build our own, and we only have ourselves to blame for anything that goes wrong. The act of co-operating must itself have a benefit or there is no point in it. So setting up a test in which people can share a sum of money they have been given with other participants to get a benefit from the pooled resource mimics my neighbor and I helping each other build a house, as long as it is likely that by sharing we can all be better off.

In such tests, Professor Stephan Meier, Assistant Professor in Management at Columbia Business School, and co-worker, Andreas Fuster, PhD candidate, Harvard University Department of Economics, discovered that when people were given private incentives, norm enforcement became less effective. The incentives seemed to take the edge off the hard feeling towards the skivers.

1. Participants were asked to contribute to a common pool of cash to be divided equally among them all at the end of each of six rounds, whether or not all participants contributed. No kind of norm enforcement was used. People gave only small amounts to begin with, and gave less in each round.
   
2. By adding an incentive to contribute (a lottery ticket), with no opportunity to enforce norms, people contributed more gladly, including free riders.
   
3. Norm enforcement was introduced to the first test, in the shape of a fine on free riders at the end of each round. Those who were fined, most of them, increased their contributions in subsequent rounds.
   
4. Adding the lottery ticket incentive made contributors scale back their punishment of free riders by almost half, and free riders were less likely to make larger contributions in subsequent rounds whether or not they were punished. The result tended towards the previous test without incentives.
   

Fuster says:

Individual incentives can really change the structure of how we deal with one another, what the norms are, and how we enforce norms. If social forces in an organization are important, managers need to be attuned to norm enforcement and peer effects. They should understand that adding monetary incentives can dramatically change this dynamic and lead to a net negative effect.

The point is that the lottery ticket became the aim of participating, there being nothing to be gained by sharing through the common pool. Free riding therefore became irrelevant. Everyone would give just enough to get a lottery ticket, whether a free rider or not.

On the face of it the experiments are flawed. There is no co-operative gain to be made by contributing to the common fund. The pool needs to be enhanced in some way to make it more like human co-operation. Even so, it is easy to see that a separate incentive can draw attention from the whole point of a co-operative venture—the advantages of co-operating—by distracting attention from the primary objective.

It is the reason, for example, why sports can be so easily disrupted by gambling. Whatever is to be gained from illegal betting can make sportsmen actually want to sabotage the supposedly co-operative team objective, and lose for their personal gain.

The same is true of senior managers and board members who begin to give themselves bonuses from the company’s earnings. The drive to maximize bonuses distract from the corporate aims, and when shareholders will not sack managers and board members who are lining their own pockets at the expense of the shareholder, then the managers can run amuck.

That is what happened in our banks. Barclays’ shares for example sank by a half over several years when top managers in most banks lifted their own compensation, including bonuses, by obscene amounts, and shareholders let them get away with it. Needless to say, the holders of large blocks of shares, able to sway any shareholders’ meeting, are often themselves large banks and city institutions, so effectively they are in a scam to rob the ordinary small shareholder and the customers.

Politicians are the same. Their objective is supposed to be to represent the interests of the people who vote for them, but they are all too easily distracted by the wads of maney waved at them from corporate bosses. Tony Blair is getting his compensastion now for his sacrifice of pretending to be a Labour Party Prime Minister, when he was a Republican Quisling. The incentives of the rich soon make most career politics forget what they are there for.

Our societies used to take an extremely dim view of bribery, but no longer. Bribes are today incentives, and the law enforcers themselves are too ready to accept them. A cabal of superrich people have corrupted the western world beyond redemption. Western society is decadent and immoral. Democracy is superficial. We are run by this megarich class, which controls every party with its incentives, incentives to do as they want, and not what is good for society.

The often despised Arabs are showing more courage and awareness now than the once militant workers of the UK and France. Workers in the US have always been too easily fooled by their betters. Even after thirty years of declining real wages, longer hours and poorer conditions for those in work, and a labor pool of twenty or thirty million unemployed or part time workers, while the top thousand or so people have trebled their wealth, the average American is still beguiled by the moribund American dream, Republican crooks and pastors, and their own inability to comprehend what is going on. They are the ones without the incentives, but rather are offered carrots.

Carrots might be incentives for donkeys, but Americans ought to be more sophisticated than those famously uncomplaining beasts of burden. Its time they started to do what the Arabs have already begun. Get out in mass on to the streets, trash a few corporate HQs and banks, and threaten revolution. Social instability is one thing the rich do not like, and can do little about, except getting national guards to shoot citizens.

Then everyone will realize that the state is not theirs, and democracy is an illusion.

What Makes Working People Happier? Labor Unions!

In the UK the latest fraudster to head the government is keen to find out what makes us happy, while doing his utmost to make us unhappy by destroying the services we treasure like the National Health Service, free schooling, and a fairly neutral but certainly professional civil service. Maybe David Cameron wants to know what makes people happy so that he can all the more effectively make them miserable.

An associated project which he laughingly calls the “Big Society” while dramatically making society considerably smaller, for many of us at least, would be more appropriated called “Yet Another Big Lie” (YABL), Cameron doing his utmost, it seems, to out-Blair the Great Liar Himself, Tony Blair.

Social Psychologists know a lot about social happiness, but Cameron pretends no one knows anything about it, in an attempt to give himself kudos. One thing is certain, and that is that happiness is a relative emotion. It is popularly said that “money cannot bring you happiness, but it helps”, and that is about the gist of it.

People can be unhappy because they yearn for something, and may feel ecstatic to get it, but the pleasure quite quickly wears off, and lack of some new object or experience kicks in to make people again feel unhappy. Being wealthy removes a lot of the fears that the poor have to endure through lack of sufficient cash, but having it just leaves people open to a new desire and new unhappiness. The greedy rich simply set themselves new targets of wealth. If a media mogul owns two newspapers, he will not be happy till he has three and a TV station. Then he wants Three TV stations, and so on.

These very rich people will unquestionably be very unhappy that the ordinary Joe and Jane often want to organize into trades unions to try to safeguard the pay and conditions that they have. Good pay and conditions cost money to the corporation boss, so they are much happier, for a while, when the unions are weak, or in their pocket, or when their lackeys in Washington and London are bringing in anti-union laws. That has been the situiation recently in Wisconsin where Governor Walker suddenly realized he meant to campaign over union power, but conveniently forgot while he conned the voters, so he has just reminded himself and the electorate that he aims to trash the unions as much as he can.

University of Notre Dame political scientist, Benjamin Radcliff, calls it “a perennial ideological debate in American politics—whether labor unions are good or bad for society”. You don’t need to be a professor of poliutics to know that effective unions are good for the members and bad for the members’ employers.

Are they good for society, though? Well, if, ultimately, the unions disappeared and bargaining was entirely at the whim of the boss, most people would be far worse off, and bosses would be therefore better off, at least initially. Unfortunately for the bosses, and this is something that oddly doesn’t make many of them unhappy, when the people do not have much cash to spend, they cannot buy things and industry collapses. That ought to make the bosses very unhappy one would imagine, but too few of them are intelligent enough to realize. Only the intelligent bosses do realize this, and they are very unpopular in their own circles for being wishy washy liberals or even hard nosed socialists.

Anyway, the general upper crust view is that Joe and Jane get too much, and should have less, so that is the message of the right wing media and the right wing puppets called politicians. Most academics too go along with the popular orthodoxy, however insane it is, but not all. Some academics warned against the 2008 crash, not many, but a few, but the rest, the bosses and the politicos, ignored them as Weary Willys.

Now, according to a study co-authored by Radcliff, people who live in countries with strong labor unions were happier, regardless of whether or not they belonged to a labor union themselves. Data from several European countries as well as Japan, Australia and the US, showed that happiness in life meant happiness at work. And the dominating factor that made people happier at work was the security they felt through having a strong union to help them. Happiness relates to the density of unions in a given country. Denmark ranks near the top in both categories, but the US ranks near the bottom for happiness in all the countries studied.

Radcliff found there was a direct effect and an indirect effect of strong labor unions. Members have obvious benefits—job security, fair wages, benefits and decent hours. But for those who are not members, there is the “indirect effect”.

People who have unionized jobs like their jobs better. And that puts pressure on other employers to extend the same benefits and wages to compete with the union shops.

Not surprisngly, lower paid labor union members found more contentment through organized labor than union members on the highest salaries. It’s no coincidence that American workers have never been more dissatisfied with their jobs.

Clever employers, those interested in long term stability rather than short term greed, would encourage trades union membership. They might have to lose some excessive short term profits, but would enjoy the benefits of stability over the long term. As it is, they should look on the Middle East in fear, and wonder what they might be stirring up at home by their unshackled greed, unjust treatment of the ordinary person, and bogus democracy. That goes in the UK for Cameron’s Conservative and Liberal democratic (or ConDem) coalition. People will only put up with so much, notably when they can see that the system is blatantly unfair.

Radcliff specializes in comparative and American politics. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the study of politics and happiness, having published articles on it in scholarly journals including the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Forces, and the Journal of Politics. He is author of the book Happiness, Economics and Politics.

Tory Toff Cameron, British PM, Greets His Deputy, Liberal Toff, Nick Clegg

Cartoon by Chris Riddell from Guardian Newspapers and the Observer.

David Cameron is the British Prime Minister. He is a toff, a man with very rich parents who had a very expensive education, the best you can buy in the UK. The British Deputy Prime Minister is Nick Clegg. He is another toff from a banking family, and had a superior education, albeit not quite in the Cameron bracket.

Cameron is a Tory, the traditional conservative party of the UK, while Clegg is a Liberal Democrat, but the two have united in a coalition government against the New Labour Party created out of the traditional Labour party by the machinations of one odious opportunist, Tony Blair. The New Labour Party became unelectable because of the lies, spin, lack of principle, and the general careerism and dishonesty of most of Blair’s pick of grifters who stepped forward to be selected as a candidate for New Labour in the Blair and Brown years.

Clegg’s party pretended to have taken the mantle of the old Labour party in standing up for the ordinary worker and the middle classes, the old, the disabled, the deprived, and generally those struggling to manage in a world increasingly designed to favor the sharks and other financial raptors. But he welched on his promises, and joined David Cameron in the most vicious attack on the standards of anyone less than minted in almost a century.

Clegg, however, leads the junior arm of the coalition, and hence he is depicted as a doormat by Chris Riddell, having to endure the muck and mud of popular ire, and growing sense of betrayal by the Lib-Dems, because the attack on the people would have been impossible without Liberal help, and their full ire would have been directed against Cameron’s Tories.

As it is, the anger is growing, the pressure is mounting. Already students have wrecked the entrance of the Tory HQ on Millbank in London, knowing that good humored, quiet, and orderly demonstrations never get the demonstrators anywhere. They are ignored or subverted from their original aims.

Look at the orderly million strong demonstrations against the Iraq war. The antiwar feeling was rapidly extinguished and turned, by ceaseless military publicity and propaganda, into pro war sentimentality and “charities” like “Help The Heroes”, a way of keeping in the public eye the “heroism” of our soldiers killing peasant farmers, their wives, daughters and sons, in their own homes and homeland 4000 miles away.

All of this is meant to distract public attention from the way they have been robbed of trillions by the bankers and those who depend upon financial fiddling like Cameron and Clegg, not to mention the creepy Blair, so much admired, it seems, in the Land of the Free. Please take him and keep him, treating him to the same torture that he and Bush have meted out in the world, by Bush’s own admission, when the US eventually gets to prosecute war criminals instead of sheltering them.

Another Election: But US Voters Still Not Being Heard

A poll in Ohio shows independent voters are unhappy with the political system. Previous polls have already demonstrated a low level of trust, among independents especially. 70 percent of respondents reported low satisfaction with Ohio politics, with higher figures among independents than among Democrats or Republicans. Dr John Green, distinguished professor of political science at UA, said:

This unhappiness raises questions about the legitimacy of the political process.

Independent voters thought the political system has been unresponsive to the public, especially on the economy. Participants had a variety of views about the problem:

• we’re not being heard
• politicians were self-serving careerists
• politicians were arrogant and insulated from the problems of the public
• corruption was a common allegation, symbolized by the large sums of money raised and spent in campaigns
• politicians should “wear patches on their suits from their sponsors” like NASCAR drivers.
• people were alienated from the political process
• public officials were puppets of special interest groups.

In the US political system, the buck stops at the presidency, so Obama carried the can, not just for Tea Partyers, but because he had not done enough to address the problems of the average American. But views on Congress were also negative:

• it needed to be revamped
• anything would be better than the system we have now
• members of Congress did not respond to the needs of the public at large
• we just need new people in government
• parties were viewed as hell bent on their own agenda
• parties too far apart on every issue
• it takes years to get anything done
• parties needed to put America first
• parties needed to stay more to the Constitution
• a third or fourth political party was needed to keep the system honest
• a “common sense” party was needed to revive the economy and limit the size of government.

Some thought additional parties would not be “common sense” parties, but a base for lunatics, and would not be competitive. If any were a base for lunatics, it would have to be competitive to match the Republican Tea Partyists. Indeed, many independents were skeptical of the Tea Party agenda, but others were supportive. Many accepted that problems were partly their own fault for not being more involved in politics, but anger and distrust were strong motivations for political activity:

• the people need to exercise their power
• it is time for a revolution

There needed to be more free access and response from politicians:

• more and regular town hall meetings
• quick and thorough responses from contacted officeholders
• a greater presence of politicians in the community
• being a politician should not be seen as a job choice but a service to the country.

These lists of solutions offered are incoherent and inconsistent, illustrating the voter disunity, and failure to comprehend what is happening. It reflect the sense of being ignored by the government among independent voters. There is no way that Americans can solve the problem. They live in a society in which the ordinary people, workers and middle classes, refuse to accept they live in a class society in which the ruling class, the rich elite, control their system from top to bottom. As long as that is so, there can be no change unless the ruling class volunteer to give up some of their wealth and power in a redistribution for fairness and justice. It is not likely to happen. So, revolution is the only option, but that requires unity, and US workers are utterly divided and will remain so while the right wing media are so influential, and their target audience are so gullible.

It is Time We Removed Inequality

Robert H Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, wrote in the New York Times about the present financial crisis, comparing it with past times and using a new survey.

Incomes in the US rose at about the same rate, almost 3 percent a year, for all income levels in the three decades immediately after World War II. Prosperity extended across the whole population, irrespective of class. The country's infrastructure of highways, railroads, dams and bridges were well maintained, and new industries in communications, electronics and airlines were growing.

In the last three decades the economy has grown only slowly, infrastructure is decaying, and many people have trouble finding adequate work because industry is floundering.

Moreover the change in circumstances has not been evenly distributed. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent. The rich have been getting richer ever more quickly while the poor and the squeezed middle classes have remained static or lost out. The situation is plainly unfair and antisocial by any standard.

Societies must be founded on a sense of fairness and justice even if they are not unquestionably fair. The people of the US have been ready to tolerate a degree of unfairness in income and wealth distribution providing that they felt they had a chance of joining the wealthy by dint of personal effort, and proving that living standards generally improved because a large number of people were working in concert to build a better country. In short, providing that income was not distributed unfairly to a minority of the already rich while everyone else struggled.

Frank notes that the founder of modern capitalist theory, the Scot, Adam Smith, who wrote Wealth of Nations, the capitalist's bible, peppered it with trenchant moral analysis. He was, after all, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

Yet rising inequality has created enormous losses and few gains, even for its ostensible beneficiaries, the mega rich class, who now have reason to worry that social instability will ruin them, if it is allowed to develop further. In any case, increasing riches alone never improves overall happiness once people have sufficient not to feel insecure. All that happens is that they notice that others are just as well off, and they then want another increase. Everyone wants to keep up with the Joneses, but these people are already loaded!

Frank reveals that he and two co-workers have found that the US state counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress. Even after controlling for other factors, counties with the biggest increases in inequality had the largest increases in bankruptcy filings, and also reported the largest increases in divorce rates, divorce rates being reliable indicator of financial distress.

Families short on cash will try to make ends meet by moving to where housing is cheaper, usually farther from work. So, long commute times are another footprint of financial distress, and the counties where commute times had grown the most were those with the largest increases in inequality.

Even basic public services are no longer being properly maintained because of the persistent objection the rich have to paying their proportionate share of taxation. Rich and poor alike endure crumbling roads, weak bridges, an unreliable rail system, and insecure cargo containers, and many Americans live in the shadow of poorly maintained dams that could collapse at any moment. The right wing lobbyists and their academic parrots say nothing can be done, and most advocate policies like tax cuts for the wealthy that put the burden on the poorest in society.

There is no compelling evidence that greater inequality bolsters economic growth or enhances anyone’s well being. The rich remain a minority, though they hold a majority of the country's dollars. They can buy bigger mansions and host expensive parties, but it will not keep the majority employed and adequately compensated, and in any case the wealth of the rich is mainly invested abroad in places like China and India where the best rates of return can be had, and the exchange rate offer a hedge against losses. Then again the obscene bonuses wall street bankers and brokers pay themselves attract the most intelligent graduates, leaving vital sectors like industry, science, technology and engineering devoid of creative talent—and bang goes any competitive advantage we might expect to have in the future. Yet, any grifter can learn how to gamble in junk bonds but not how to succeed in science or engineering, or even in proper good stock picking.

No one dares to argue that rising inequality is required in the name of fairness. John Rawls in his theory of justice as fairness (A Theory of Justice) though inequality was only justifiable when the poor were nevertheless getting wealthier, albeit maybe not as quickly as the wealthy. So we should agree inequality is a bad thing, and do something about it.

In the UK, Professor Greg Philo suggested that the top 10% should pay a one off tax of 20% of their wealth. It caused some outcry, but surprisingly, a lot of wealthy people were willing to do it. They were the ones who realized it would be far worse if social unrest got so bad, especially if it were worldwide, as is the financial crisis, that all of their wealth might be threatened by social instability. They knew that the one off payment, though substantial, would repay itself if we got into a new ers of financial stability as a consequence. Their remaining investments would soon grow to pay back the lost 20%. Though the short sighted greedy rich would moan like hell until the benefits came through, everyone would end up happy.