THE CONFLICT OVER KASHMIR

In recent weeks, the eyes of the world have once again turned to Kashmir and the ongoing antagonism between India and Pakistan over who should control it. Though the two countries have three times gone to war (1945,1961 and 1971) without much western interest, this time round the sabre-rattling is attracting wider attention, not least because it could very rapidly result in a nuclear exchange with the loss of an estimated 25 million lives.

The Kashmir situation is a hangover from the age of Empire and British colonialism, when India was ruled by Britain and Kashmir was a principality ruled on behalf of Britain by the repressive Hindu Dogras dynasty.

For the British, the Kashmir region was a strategic asset, of paramount geo-political significance. It could serve as a listening post for the tracking of Soviet-Sino ambitions in the region and be militarily important should Russia or China decide to attack. Indeed, even the US now views Kashmir as part of their on-going plan to circle China with their military bases.

In 1947, however, Britain’s rule of India was coming to an end and the region was being plunged into an orgy of religious bloodshed. As had been the case with some 580 other Indian principalities and states, Hari Singh, Kashmir’s maharajah, was given the choice either to join India or Pakistan or of remaining independent. Although the majority of the people of Kashmir were Moslem, he chose to surrender the territory to India. The ‘official’ initial intention of Lord Mountbatten - the British governor-general – was that a plebiscite of the Kashmiri people be held. This has never happened, in spite of numerous UN resolutions on the issue,

One common view is that Lord Mountbatten, was really the architect of the handover, believing India to be far more capable than Pakistan of repulsing any Soviet and Chinese advances in the subcontinent, acting as a proxy army on behalf of western interests in the area.

Whilst Islamabad insists Kashmir should belong to Pakistan, citing UN resolutions on the issue and pointing to the Moslem majority in Kashmir, India is insistent that under the terms of the 1972 Simla Agreement both countries decided to settle the dispute through bilateral negotiations and minus UN Interference. And Whist India insists that the accession of Kashmir to India in 1947 is complete and that Kashmir is an integral part of India, Pakistan contests that the region is in fact disputed territory and that it has the right to provide moral and diplomatic support for an indigenous freedom struggle there.

At one stage of the recent crisis, one and a half million soldiers face each other across their respective borders and there were regular artillery exchanges. Though tensions are still relatively high, the situation is not considered as threatening as it was weeks ago, when western governments were asking their nationals to return home. Since then, both countries have been involved in diplomatic talks with the US, Britain and Russia. None of which, however, has helped remove India forces from the Kashmir border or lessened the likelihood that renegade anti-Musharraf groups in Pakistan could take matters into their own hands. Analysts in Washington still maintain that any terrorist attack from Pakistan’s militants could easily result in a swift Indian nuclear response. And as Musharraf may sue for peace, he is mindful that he needs the support of the army and its hawkish generals, many of who see the Kashmir cause as a religious duty.

For Britain’s part, whilst Blair is playing his trite role as global peace-maker, this can only be considered an act of hypocrisy. It has been after all a Labour government these past two years that has helped up the anti there. In 2000 alone, the peace-loving Blair government granted India and Pakistan some 700 military export licences (just as Britain armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war). Moreover, India is currently under licence to build the British-designed Jaguar bomber – the type of bomber that could deliver atomic bombs to Islamabad and other Pakistani cities

In January this year, Tony Blair travelled to India on a “peace mission”, intent on lending the Kashmir crisis his diplomatic skills. He did just that, returning a week later with a £1 billion order for 66 Hawk fighters. Three weeks later the British High Commission there organised a party for British arms salesmen attending the Defexpo arms fair – dealers who openly acknowledged that they were hoping to cash in on the crisis. The same old excuse applied – “if we didn’t, somebody else would” (the kind of defence you could use for kicking Blair up the arse)

The US and Britain may well be critical of either side in this conflict threatening the use of the ‘first strike’, but George W Bush has already intimated that he would use the ‘first strike’ option against seven countries in four different scenarios, with British Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon suggesting Britain would do similar.

Although the US has resisted selling arms to India and Pakistan, it must be remembered that both India and Pakistan’s nuclear programme was initiated by the US “Atoms for Peace” programme, that India’s first nuclear device was produced in plant built with US assistance and that Pakistan’s first research reactor came from the US.

So, While there is much evidence for the continuance of the war industry, the peace industry seems to be pretty limp. The United Nations, set up to prevent conflicts, is all but lame. The Security Council is yet to invoke Article 34, which calls for investigations of disputes “likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security.” The UN Charter further allows any country or even the Secretary General (Articles 35 and 99) to place any threat to global peace before the Security Council.

The impact of a nuclear exchange between two impoverished countries and the knock-on effect for the rest of the globe is unimaginable. The death toll would be in the tens of millions, with many more dying months and years later. Millions of acres of land would be uninhabitable and the fallout would contaminate many neighbouring countries for centuries. The humanitarian mission to treat the survivors would have to be the biggest rescue mission in history – perhaps as big as all previous rescue missions combined. That such a scenario is possible is a damning indictment of capitalism. We stepped out of the 20th Century – a century of bloodshed in the name of profit – into the 21st dragging every social ill behind us, with ten times as much global injustice abounding than existed 100 years previous. What a barbaric age we live in. Still, borders are to be fought over. Still gods to be avenged and, still, that age-old cursed prize – profit – to be sought in every stinking orifice. And were the mushroom clouds to start rising over Islamabad and New Delhi, western capitalists would still ponder how they could cash in on this hell, this hell of their making.

Labour Party Shenanigans

Seemingly oblivious to the fact that the biggest cause of crime is poverty, Tony Blair, in early May announced his intention to deprive of child benefit and housing benefit the most impoverished families in Britain because their children are alleged "tearaways". Many impoverished families struggle to pay the smallest bills. Their housing benefit (average £43.60 per week) and child benefit (£15.50 for the oldest child) is a lifeline they can ill afford to lose. But under Blair's plans, this would be stopped if their children stray from the straight and narrow. The obvious corollary of this is that by pushing people into greater hardship you force them to commit crime simply to make ends meet. And who would blame them – is survival a crime? Whatever happened to New Labour's promise to slash crime and reduce child poverty? His latest proposal increases both.

Meanwhile the real criminals get away Scot-free. We speak of the master class, for whom Blair and his cronies act as an executive body - those who see to it that every aspect of our life is subordinated to their profit-hungry desires, whose system is the root cause of a thousand social ills that blight the existence of millions.

On a brighter note we are pleased to announce that David Blunkett Home Secretary extraordinaire, managed to extricate his head from Tony Blair’s bottom long enough to admit the Labour Party had made a another ‘blunder’. He was referring to Labour’s plans to extend the reach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which would have given a host of government departments, local councils and sundry quangos powers to demand, on their own authority, access to our email records, and telephone data. He also withdrew a draft order giving the same public bodies the authority to conduct surveillance against individuals to use informers.

Please don’t celebrate yet, though. Plans are underway to make our email and internet information accessible to the police and intelligence services of the European Union under a ‘common code’ on data retention.

Blair, it seems, is determined to make Britain the most repressive regime in the Western world.

REBELLION IN NEPAL – Deuba meets Dubya

In early May, at the White House in Washington DC, Deuba met Dubya. The Nepalese prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba met President George W Bush in the Oval Office to discuss how the US could help Nepalese security forces in their six year conflict with the country’s Maoist rebels.


Deuba, who also met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condleeza Rice, had every reason to come away smiling, commenting “…President Bush…is very much supportive of our campaign against terrorism and he has assured us he will help in many ways.” Bush promised him $21 million in military aid and doubled US development aid to Nepal to $38 million in 2003.


Defending the deal, one White House spokesman observed: “Nepal is an example, again, of a democracy and the US is committed to helping Nepal.”


Colin Powell had said pretty much the same when he was the first US Secretary of State to visit Nepal in January of this year. Thanking Dueba for his war against the ‘terrorists’ he said: “You have a Maoist insurgency that is trying to overthrow the government and that is really the kind of thing we are fighting throughout the world .”


Nepal has a population of 23 million, made up largely of impoverished subsistence farmers who lend the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) much support and who feel the rebels represent a voice that their government all but ignores. It is this grassroots resentment of the government that the Maoists have tried to tap into since 1996.


Although the guerrilla campaign is 6 years old, commencing when a Dr Baburam Bhattrai, went underground to begin the Maoist insurgency, much of the current wave unrest can be traced to that fateful night last June, when the crown prince murdered most of his family including the “liberal-minded” King Birendra. Birendra had been reluctant to use the army against the Maoists fearing the situation would escalate. This changed when his brother Gyanendra took the throne. The mourning over, the rebels launched an offensive that was cruelly repulsed by the army. Although the conflict has raged for 6 years, half of the deaths have occurred in the past year, since Gyanendra began relying on the army instead of the police


Rebel leader and one time university academic ‘Comrade’ Prachando (otherwise known as Pushpe Kamal Dahal) is a great admirer of Chairman Mao, modelling his insurrection on that carried out by Peru’s Shining Path movement and intent on establishing a “communist state” a “people’s republic” in Nepal and, indeed, holding out much hope for the alleged inherent revolutionary potential of his peasant fighters.


The unrest has destroyed the country’s tourist industry, a primary source of income. What few civil rights the Nepalese enjoyed have been suspended. Newspapers have been censored, thousands have been arrested and detained without trial, there have been widespread human rights abuses, and many disappearances, and political corruption is rampant. In the rebel controlled areas of the country, the Maoists have established their own courts and banks, press-ganged children as soldiers and targeted teachers. To sustain their activity, the rebels extract taxes from businesses, not only in the areas they control however, but right under the noses of the security forces in the capital.


Deuba flatly refuses to negotiate with the rebels who, in their anger, target with explosives, bridges and power stations and kill political opponents. Not so two years ago when Deuba was all for negotiations, even chairing the Consensus Seeking Committee – a body set up to seek a peaceful political solution and supported by the government – until it concluded that the uprising had its roots in grave societal inequality. A month ago the rebels were pressing for negotiations, negotiations turned down by Deuba who was far more responsive to US overtures, keen to expand their “war on terrorism”.


To label the rebels ‘terrorists’ and to announce a state of emergency has thus become a convenient way for the Nepalese rulers to avoid addressing the cause of the unrest. Supplying guns to aid the Royal Nepalese Army is much cheaper than trying to reform their corrupt and unworkable system or to address any of the grievances of the impoverished majority. The situation is also favourable to the US. Evidently since Bush’s “War on Terrorism” State of the Union Address of that same month, the US has been focusing increasingly on states and organisations with no connection at all to Al-Qaeda, spreading its tentacles and influence ever wider, and always on the pretext that this is part of the ’war on terror’ and blind to the fact that this is another conflict rooted in injustice and inequality.

The ‘People’s War’ in Nepal is ostensibly a war of liberation, but it is led by people inspired by Mao Tse Tung, only hopeful of establishing a system of state capitalism in an economically backward country, a system the US is obviously going to welcome with open arms. Though we are on the side of impoverished workers everywhere, this is quite simply another instance of a ‘revolutionary’ group attempting to lead the masses from capitalism and down the road to capitalism under a different name

Media Musings

Through the media, the working class is constantly exposed to a significant flow of mind-numbing dribble and mis-information. Important issues of the day are distorted, totally ignored or relegated to the margins of page eleven or broadcast as minor news items on the TV. Sensationalism is used to increase market shares and sell adverts, which thus brings in profits. In this latter regards newspapers can be said not to be a vehicle for telling us what we need to know but rather a means of exposing us to advertisers. The market for a newspaper is advertisers - other business out to make a profit - and the product us! It would be no bold assertion to say that the editor of a daily tabloid is far more interested in the number of advertisers he attracts than the news he reports – though the latter pulls in the former. Thus the never ending hunt by tabloid hacks for the latest sex scandal to feed a readership hungry for insignificant gossip and trivia, a readership consequently bare to hundreds of adverts a day.

It is easy to despair at endless streams of workers leaving their newsagents in the morning clutching the Sun or the Daily Star, knowing the news they will be reading during their lunch break will be that regarding the love life of a soap star, instead of a piece on US foreign policy or the situation in Israel. A recent issue of The Sun carried a full page photograph of David Beckham’s injured foot and readers were asked to put their hand on the foot at 12.00 midday and pray for its speedy recovery because the English football team were so dependent upon it. Reportedly many workers did just that in the belief that a concerted countrywide focus on the injury would miraculously heal it. If things were that easy, they could have printed a photo of the Queen Mum and asked for readers to place their hands on it and pray for her resurrection.

The fact that so many workers are prepared to buy such newspapers each day reveals how big the task facing socialists is. All these workers need a real education they will never receive via the press or TV. The capitalist are wonderfully aware of this - an uneducated working class is hardly going to pose a threat to their interests; the real threat comes from a class conscious majority, hungry for useful information, who don’t give a shit about how many hamsters Freddy Starr eats or how many women Jack-the-lad from Coronation street has bedded.

Everyday, British people are subject to the media for an estimated 4 hours a day, either via newspapers, radio or TV, so it is important for the master class that they can control and manipulate the media for their own ends. Major media corporations in Britain are enjoying a growing monopoly. Just five companies account for 85% of all newspaper sales, with Murdoch’s News Corporation controlling over 60% of newspaper circulation. As well as this it also has vast shares in Twentieth Century Fox, Harper Collins publishers, BskyB and StarTV, which covers most of Asia and the Middle East, numerous newspapers and TV stations in Australia, Stream in Italy and Sky Perfect TV in Japan – giving it access to the minds of almost two-thirds of the global population. AOLTimeWarner – the world’s largest media company – owns CNN, 40% of US cable TV, 50 record labels, countless magazines, as well as being the world’s largest Internet Service Provider.

Needless to say, such media corporations and the likes of Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul, have interests that conflict with those of the workers. Thus it is in their interests that news and important issues we should know about are distorted and kept from us, or presented to us in such a way that we end up with tunnel and distorted vision, unable to make informed decisions or engage in intelligent discussion. Thus, the media is very much a part of the doctrinal system, reinforcing the basic social values that ensures the survival of capitalism – passivity and submissiveness to authority, the virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or illusory enemies, a suspicion of anything outlandish or threatening to the status quo and national pride etc.

Because people are misinformed, they are oblivious as to the real nature of the system that exploits them. This further makes it easy for the media to confuse the workers by hiding real power from view. The result is – and this is intentional – they blame governments, their allegiance to political parties often switching overnight because of a newspaper’s slanted coverage of certain policies and social conditions. A newspaper like The Sun can make all the difference to a political party’s electoral chances – Hence Tony Blair’s visit to Australia to prostrate himself in front of Rupert Murdoch in 1997, fully aware that the Sun can run post election headlines such as “It was the Sun that won it” (which followed one Tory election victory)” The fact that it is the capitalist system that is seriously faltering, creating problems governments just can’t cope with (because it is the system controlling them, not vice versa) would be too dangerous to print or report.

With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. The ‘information revolution’ has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this ‘revolution’ becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the ‘powers that be’ will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there is more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the masses would be accessing informative websites in their spare time?

Death of the Queen Mum

‘We will never see her like again’, was just one of the much quoted sentiments that politicians, newspaper editors and royalists mouthed, parrot fashion, when the Queen Mother died at the end of March. Newspapers published tens of thousands of column inches to commemorate her ‘service’ to the British public and TV stations ran no end of documentaries about the royal family, convinced the nation was’ united in mourning’.

Socialists undoubtedly found the whole episode nauseating and were relieved when the official ten days of mourning were over. For one thing, more pressing news – for instance the crisis in the Middle East – was marginalized and there was no call for a minute’s silence for the 400,000 children under the age of five who died from hunger and related diseases during this period.

For ten days we were asked to close down our critical faculties and mourn the passing of someone who had lived 101 years and 238 days of uninterrupted luxury. Make no mistake about it; the Queen Mum was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, into a family that owned 3 luxurious homes at a time when 99% of the British public lived in various degrees of poverty. At her death she had 80 staff taking care of her in 5 residences – a fact not wasted on a friend of the present writer who works in a care home, where the average shift sees 10 carers and domestics looking after 42 elderly people in various stages of mental and physical deterioration. Mourning the Queen Mum

thus became a time when we were asked to forget the aged of our own class who have endured lives of misery, only to end up forgotten in care homes or on the corridors of hospitals. Was her life worth more than any one of these?

As could have been anticipated, no mention was made to aspects of the Queen Mum’s life that royalists would wish we would forget. For instance that she supported white minority rule in Rhodesia, that she called coloured people ‘nig nogs’, that she opposed immigration or that she had physically challenged relatives put into mental institutions, later telling the public they had died. Her residence in Scotland was situated in 25,000 acres of luscious Scottish countryside and was valued at £20 million. It cost £500.000 a year to run and she stayed there only six weeks a year. No mention of this little extravagance in the press.

And where was the mention about her being the guardian of the captured German war documents that summarised the Royal visit to Nazi Germany in 1937, of her influence with successive British governments to prevent these documents coming to public light? Sending a copy of Mein Kampf to a friend, she commented: “Even a skip through gives a good idea of his obvious sincerity.”

Instead we were treated to tales of the royal family’s visit’s to London during the Blitz – negligent of the return trips to Windsor and the evening meal of swan – and let in on endearing little family secrets such as the Queen Mum doing Ali G impressions.

It is estimated the Queen Mum was ‘worth’ £60 million, yet still managed to sponge of her relatives and receive £650,000 from the civil list, while being £4 million overdrawn. The crown that lay on top of her coffin was encrusted with 2,500 diamonds, any one of which could have given the average pensioner years of relative luxury.

What socialists did find saddening was the number of our class who felt moved to tears by the event, who stood for up to ten hours to file past her coffin, who stood with solemn expressions as she was carried to her final resting place. We are saddened that so many allowed themselves to be duped by the confidence trick of letting royal spectacles stir us to a near hysterical and unashamed jingoistic emotionalism which runs counter to our true class interests.

While groups like Movement Against the Monarchy boasted about celebrating two royal deaths in two months by ‘getting pissed’, socialists took a more considered view. The morning after The Queen Mum departed, we all woke up to find we were still sadly members of the working class, and we would wake up tomorrow to find the same if the entire house of Windsor shuffled off its collective mortal coil overnight! Though we would certainly not boo the abolition of the monarchy, we would hardly find much to celebrate. For we would simply exist in a republic as wage slaves, every aspect of our life still subordinated to the worst excesses of the profit system.
The sole purpose of this parasitical and unscrupulous family is to serve as a repository for ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ which together with that other stronghold of anti-working class mythology – religion – provides the glaring iniquities of capitalism with some form of moral authority.

Honestly considered, the contribution made to society by the Queen Mother and her greedy and incestuous clan is zilch. Each one is happy to consume in a day as much resources and commodities than a 100 members of the working class, indeed 10000 times as much as a small African village. Yet we are encouraged to bow with suppliant’s before this bunch of indifferent, self-seeking leaches like imbeciles, crying and sobbing at their misfortune, negligent of the immense global suffering of our own class?

If the injustices that plague our world were given one tenth the media coverage the Queen Mum’s funeral did, then the case for world socialism would have been well publicised and our ranks greatly swollen

In this golden jubilee year – in which we have twice been brow beaten with royal sentimentality by the media (the death of princess Margaret also) – isn’t it time we snapped out of our hypnotic vulnerability to such garbage and threw the whole sorry spectacle back in our masters’ teeth?

New Labour - the continuing saga

In his new found role as St. Francis of Assisi, Tony Blair jetted off to Africa in February to lecture African workers about the new threat of global terrorism, about ‘self interest and mutual interest’ and how these two concepts were ‘dependent on each other’. At the same time he was in Africa the British press were reporting how Britain’s arms sales to Africa had quadrupled since 1999. Self interest? Mutual Interest? Well maybe for the arms manufacturers and the leaders of those African states that purchase the British weaponry that helps them quell internal dissent and wage war on their neighbours.

The Continuing Saga of New Labour It seems these interests are at the forefront of much of Blair’s thinking. A week after he returned from India in January – remember he travelled there to help them solve the Kashmir problem in a verbal manner – the British press were reporting of a new arms deal with India, which was worth £1 billion and inclusive of 60 Hawk jets.

Those with long memories and familiar with Labour’s love affair with the arms trade, will remember the Biafran war of the 1960s, when Britain’s share of arms sales to Nigeria during that conflict increased from 15-75%. St Francis of Assisi? Try Vlad the Impaler!

Poverty
While the Blair government is keen to point out how they are reducing poverty in Britain – something which tends to run counter to the statistics socialists are regularly fond of citing – we draw your attention to a newly published report by the Child Poverty Action Group (interestingly, an organisation set up by the Labour Party many years ago and which was supposed to exist for one year only). The last time such a report came out in 1996, Labour Party MPs used it to ridicule the Tories. This time round it asserts: “…around a quarter of our society was living in poverty in Britain in 1999-2000. The poverty encountered by Children is even greater than for society as a whole. Around a third of children were living in poverty in 1999-2000. Over 7.8 million people were living on the ‘safety net’ benefit of IncomeSupport/ Jobseeker’s Allowance in February 2001. By the mid-1990s the UK had child poverty rates higher than any other industrialised nation with the exception of the USA and Russia.”

When recession hits, as it did at the beginning of the 90’s one of its marked features is the number of home repossessions. In 1991, courts issued 134,000 home repossession orders. Eight years later, Blair safely in power and reassuring us the austerity of the Tory years was behind us, 137,000 families found their homes being taken from them because of mortgage arrears.

The report further adds strength to our argument that under Blair the wealth gap is widening in Britain. It reveals how the wealthiest 1 percent of the population in Britain own 25 percent of all wealth, with the bottom 50 per cent, some 28 million people, owning just 6 percent of Britain’s wealth.

Blair and Mittal Steal
When it comes to sucking up to the big money men, Labour takes some beating. Who could forget the fiasco surrounding the Bernie Ecclestone affair just prior to Labour’s 1997 election victory? In return for a £1 million gift to the Labour Party in January 1997, Blair saw to it that Ecclestone’s Formula One were exempt from the ban on tobacco advertising.

A year later, Blair was kowtowing to right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch (whose help he sought during the election), phoning the Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, on behalf of Murdoch, and trying to have any hurdles removed that might hinder Murdoch’s acquisition of Mediaset, the Italian media company.

Months ago, the shit hit the proverbial fan again, when it was revealed that George Bush was not the only high level politician to be hit with the Enron splatter, but that the Labour Party also found themselves pebble-dashed. It was revealed Enron (an energy multinational, now bankrupt) had sponsored several Labour Party Conferences after their 1997 victory, that the Labour Party tailored its energy policies to enable Enron build a gas-fired power plant on Teeside and that Labour smoothed the way for Enron to buy Wessex water four years ago without having referred the buyout to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

Now come revelations of Blair’s links to steal magnate Lakshmi Mittal. It transpires that Blair wrote a the letter to the Romanian prime minister: “I am delighted by the news that you are to sign the contract for the privatisation of your biggest steel plant with the LNM group…I am particularly pleased that it is a British company [Mittal’s] which is your partner.”

The link, which Blair claimed oblivion of? Mittal had made a £125,000 donation to the Labour Party, his wife Usha giving a £50,000 donation to the local party of former European minister Keith Vaz. The story continues! Just one month before Blair signed the letter, he had attended a big thank-you bash laid on for Labour Party donors (the big guys, that is). And who should be there? Mittal!

It later emerged that LNM’s parent company is registered in a tax haven; that Mittal gets round paying tax in Britain by means of a nifty little loophole the Labour Party conveniently neglected to plug; that his LNM plant in Southern Ireland closed with the loss of 400 jobs and almost £40 million in debts, and that Mittal is one of the brains behind a US campaign to slap a 40 per cent tariff on steal imports, which could well impinge on jobs in the British steal industry. All of which you can be forgiven for, if you sponsor the Labour Party. Thinking of pulling off something big and want to get away with it? A Jewel’s heist, Big Business tax evasion? Simply send a donation to the Labour Party care of 10 Downing Street.

Book Review - The People of the Abyss

Centenary Edition
Jack London
Pluto Press
£10.99 paperback
192 pages

Those vaguely familiar with Jack London (pictured above) know him as a skilled writer, basing many of his stories on experiences from his rich, colourful and often dangerous life. Few remember him as the skilled political commentator and social critic who exposed many of the injustices of his day. The People of the Abyss is Jack London the investigative reporter relating an impassioned account of the degradation and squalor endured by the people of the East End of London in 1902, and this year marks the centenary of his visit to this part of London.


Living in the East End doss houses, London posed as a stranded American sailor, down on his luck. He mingled with the poorest of the poor, worked alongside them, ate with them, drank with them and slept amongst them in the workhouses. His observations are documented in full in People of the Abyss, and this is no work of fiction. This is the London in the days when the SPGB was about to be formed, and reading London’s account of the privation endured by millions of his fellow workers, one can’t help but ask why the clamour for an end to capitalism was not being screamed from every rooftop. He attempts an answer himself:


“Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be fed and housed as a pig is fed and housed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.” (p.162).


And who could blame them? For many in the East End of London in 1902, the daily struggle to live absorbed all their energies. Their life expectancy was 30 years; 55% of children died before the age of 5. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished men and women yearned only the public houses and alcohol in a pathetic attempt to “express their gregariousness” and because intoxication finally “brings the oblivion that nothing else can bring” (160). This is the England “where a constant army of 8 million lives on the border of starvation.” (155); where hundreds of thousands of families inhabit one room, and where “children take turn about in sitting up and drive the rats away from the sleepers (148); where the lucky go insane and the courageous commit suicide. And all of this when Britain had the largest empire ever know and milked the world.


The SPGB were not alone in the formative years of the 20th Century in pointing out the world of potential abundance we live in. Lamenting the widespread starvation of the day, the ‘hunger wail’ that echoed across the British Isles, London comments:
“And this in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300 and boots and shoes for 1000….and who dares to say that it is not mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?” (160)


The people of the Abyss is a masterly recording of the lives of the masses in 1902, and a poignant indictment on the capitalist system, and London is to be commended. However he affords us no panacea to the ills of the system he lambastes, but rather finishes with a lengthy note about how the system is being mismanaged, before ending:


“There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man’s producing powers an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of Civilisation live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear and protect them from the elements than the savage Inuit in a frigid climate who lives today as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago.” (p.170)


The people of the Abyss deserves to be read, for a Century after this book was written it is still possible to record the same, in spite of all the scientific and technological breakthroughs that have occurred since 1902 and which should be benefiting humanity.

Another American Cenury?

George Bush’s State of the Union address at the end of January was little short of a declaration of war on the world; an assertion that US interests are now paramount and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

Bush boldly announced that the ‘ war on terror’ was ‘only beginning’ and announced an enormous hike in military spending. This year’s military budget is up $36 bn to $379 bn and next year the US war machine will receive an extra $48 bn, with a further $120 bn promised over the next five years, bringing the total spent on the military by 2007 to $ 2 trillion. To get some estimate of this level of spending it is worth noting that this year’s increase alone is higher than the joint military spending of Europe, and larger than China’s existing military budget. Though just how such an awe inspiring arsenal of state of the arts weaponry is to stop September 11th type attacks on the USA is yet to be explained.

America has at last declared that the ’war on terror’ has replaced the threat of the ‘international communist conspiracy’ and found in this the pretext to set the agenda for the coming century. The Bush administration has embedded its flag in what it believes is the moral high ground. From now on it is a war of good against evil - evil being anyone standing directly in the way of the US and its aspirations of global domination, with the ‘war on terrorism’ allowing it to intervene anywhere and whenever and to deem who it likes a terrorist. Clearly this new ‘war’ will involve countless military interventions with no regard whatsoever for international sensibilities.

There are now bogeymen under every rock and the world needs protecting from them. Bush identified an ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union Address, pointing to the threat the world faced from North Korea, Iraq and Iran. Vice president Dick Cheney would later remark that the US is considering military action against 50 countries and that this ongoing conflict could last 50 years.

Bush’s advisor Richard Perle commented: “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there…if we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

All of this has naturally left political analysts wondering just who will be next. Somalia, with untapped oil deposits off its coast and with whom the US has a score to settle following the botched ‘Restore Hope’ operation of a decade ago, which left thousands of innocents dead, or Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria or Libya? All harbour bogeymen whose existence sullies the notion of western cultural supremacy. Any could be the next target for a war machine drunk with its recent victory in Afghanistan. And what a victory! – Usama bin Laden still not caught (the entire campaign was about catching him), 5 thousand civilians dead and 7 million facing starvation in refugee camps.

A key element in the US game plan for global hegemony is clearly control of the Caspian’s rich oil reserves – estimated to be able to produce 3.3 million gallons of crude oil per day and 4850 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year. Hence US military manoeuvring in the states surrounding Afghanistan and thus the attaching of the ’bogeyman’ label to any state perceived as standing in the way of these profits.

Already Kyrgistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are under US military domination and there are US military tent cities in 13 states surrounding Afghanistan, with the map of US bases mirroring the route of a projected oil pipeline favoured by the US and which takes oil through Iran to the Indian ocean. To save the cost and inconvenience of laying a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is far easier to simply topple the Tehran regime, install a US proxy government and run Caspian oil directly through Iran. And who is to stop the US? The UN may object, but who is the UN? The best place from which to launch an attack upon Iran is Iraq, so both states now feature high on the US hit list.

Iran and Iraq are both perceived as the regional powers who challenge US strategic ambitions between Europe and East Asia. And invasions of these two countries would well fit the ongoing US strategy of asserting itself into strategic areas of the world, setting up is bases and installing US geopolitical influence in these regions. US interventions in recent years in Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan have allowed the US to leave behind its bases in these regions and to better oversee the activities of its corporate elite. With US economic power now being challenged by Europe and the East Asian bloc, military bases become a useful counterweight to the threat posed its corporate elite by its competitors and US control over Iran and Iraq gives the US control over extant oil supplies between Europe and East Asia.

Iraq has long been high up on the list of US targets, a fact perhaps best portrayed recently by the pathetic and futile US attempts to link the anthrax scare in the US to Saddam Hussein. The Guardian’s February 14th front page headline “ US targets Saddam” was not reporting anything new. The story had been doing the rounds in the Russian press for some time with Russian military intelligence suggesting a full scale attack on Iraq would begin in September. But now sources close to Bush say the CIA is already in Saudi Arabia and Northern Iraq preparing for a joint operation with Kurdish forces and that the third Iraqi war may commence in May with the mobilisation of 200,000 US troops from bases in Kuwait.

Undoubtedly the pretext for the US invasion of Iraq will be Iraq’s refusal to agree to terms laid down by a US lead weapons inspectorate into the country, hence Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union Address that Iraq “continues to flaunt its hostility towards the US” and that “this is a regime that has something to hide from the civilised world.”

The above may sound like so much scare-mongering, but when it is considered the US now accounts for 40 per cent of global military spending, that it spends more on its war machine than the next 19 states, that in the past year it has discarded numerous international treaties, including those pertaining to weapons control, that the space taken up by its military hardware covers an area the size of Sweden, that it has served notice on all countries opposing the notion of US hegemony that their days are numbered, we can’t but conclude that warfare will be as much a part of life in this century as the one we have just emerged from. And what do we make of Bush’s words in that most eloquent of addresses: “Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘let’s roll’”? And what better way to distract domestic attention from the corruption of US politics – wonderfully exhibited in the Enron scandal – than to commence a war on the enemies of US freedoms?

We have every reason to be fearful for the future of humanity. War is competition for profits (either via trade routes, mineral wealth, resources or areas of influence) writ large, and to safeguard its future profits, its control of world resources the world’s greatest and largest military power is accumulating an unimaginable array of weaponry, rolling up its sleeves and marching forward to stamp underfoot all it perceives as being a threat to its interests.

So when will you join with us? When a million Iranians lie smouldering? When North Korea resembles a Stone Age society? Or when cruise missiles are heading towards Beijing? We owe it to the millions about to die in the name of profit to act now. They cannot, their fate is sealed.

Economic Meltdown in Argentina (just capitalism functioning normally)

Argentina, the one time darling of the IMF, held up as an example of how a country should stringently adhere to structural adjustment programmes, is presently standing as a shining example of how the capitalist system can not be made to work in the interest of the majority. Economists are mostly in agreement that the cause of economic meltdown in Argentina and the consequent protests and rioting were the result of three distinctive and converging economic crises.


When Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo pegged the Argentinean peso to the dollar ten years ago – on a one to one basis – he envisaged that this would end hyperinflation. Three years ago, when Brazil devalued its real, foreign investors and speculators discovered their dollars brought them bigger returns in Brazil than in Argentina. This seriously began to upset Argentina’s foreign investments and exports, as buyers of Argentina products found they could get the same next door and far cheaper.


Argentina is now in debt to the tune of $132 billion – attributable largely to far-reaching borrowing carried out during the second term of the Carlos Menem government, prior to the election of President Fernando de la Rue. The effect of the domestic and foreign borrowing was to send domestic interest rates spiralling upwards. As the debt increased, so did the interest rates, which had a knock on effect for many businesses reliant upon credit.


In the 1990s, Menem further introduced mass privatisation. This resulted in many workers being made redundant, they being surplus to requirements now that profit was higher up the agenda for the utilities and, moreover, the cost of basic services (electricity, gas, telephones) began to rise.


So, back in 1999, the Argentinean recession began, increasing in ferocity as domestic demand declined and companies began to close and unemployment increased and, because the government’s tax revenues began shrinking, Argentina’s burden of debt became all the more heavier.


In November all of Argentina’s economic woes came to a head when people, fearful their pesos would be devalued, began hurrying to the banks to exchange them for dollars whilst the one-to-one rate was still in existence. Cavallo, fearful the banks would be drained of money, issued a decree which limited withdrawals to $1000 per person per month. The effect of this was to create mistrust in the government and widespread uncertainty with people rioting and protesting on the streets, with looting reported in many cities.


One week before Christmas the riots had spread to Buenos Aries. The president declared a state of emergency and brought troops onto the streets. But his government offered no remedy for the economic crisis and this only brought larger numbers of protestors back on to the streets within 24 hours, the unemployed being joined by ‘middle class’ professionals – all taking part in the looting. When thousands of protestors congregated in Congress Square, banging pots and pans, the resignation of the president, his economic minister and the entire cabinet was almost immediate. De la Rua was determined to make one impassioned speech before he left, but with an angry crowd having none of it, he was instantly whisked to safety by a helicopter.


Tensions rose. People poured in from outlying districts, blockading motorways and erecting barricades, destroying banks and multinationals, looting supermarkets and fighting with almost 40,000 police who had been drafted into the city. When the violence had subdued, 26 had been killed.


Argentineans blame de la Rua for the crisis, citing the fact that he was the president when the crisis was deteriorating more alarmingly – as if he could control the economy! As the economy was controlling him, he had no option but to cut public spending to service debt repayments, though not as much as the IMF insisted. De la Rua, however, did enter office foolishly promising to kick-start the economy and end high level corruption. By early 2000 he had introduced £650 million worth of spending cuts and forced through eight unpopular austerity plans, which included a 13% cut in state workers’ wages. Just prior to the unrest, the government planned to further cut public spending from £34 billion to £27 billion in a further attempt to service the crushing loan repayments.


The current president is one Eduardo Duhalde, a former ‘left-wing’ senator and once upon a time investigated for the corruption his predecessor promised to stamp out. At present he plans to freeze the prices charged by foreign-owned utilities companies and put a tax on foreign owned oil companies. To protect the ‘middle class’ from currency devaluation he has offered to convert dollar loans under $100,000 into pesos, at the one-to-one rate – placing a hefty burden on banks, not borrowers - and he has further promised that cash will be set aside for the unemployed. All of which amounts to a timely game plan to placate the more volatile sections of Argentinean society.


Meanwhile, IMF top brass are in Argentina demanding, on behalf of the US and Europe, that the country does not default on its loan obligations. Outside markets are watching events carefully aware of the fact that economic crisis have tended in the past to lead to military coups and all their implications and are now mindful of granting further loans to the region.


There has been much analysis of recent events in Argentina. The general mood is that the IMF is to blame, that its structural austerity programmes are socially and politically unsustainable and that its rule book needs tearing up. What has not been said is that, like the Argentinean government, the IMF is simply a body trying to make capitalism work. And in this regard they cannot really be faulted, because as events in Argentina have revealed, capitalism is working perfectly well, for this is the only way it can work in an anarchic and chaotic manner, negligent and oblivious to the misery and suffering it creates. If a few get rich while millions lose out big style, then this is capitalism working as it only can work and as the workers – from their years of experience of living within the system - voted for it to work. If there is recession and boom and recession, then capitalism is working healthily. In Argentina, therefore, capitalism is functioning normally.

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A Happy New Year (2002)

A Happy New Year? It seems most of us uttered this hackneyed sentiment at the beginning of 2001 and, whilst meaning well, fully understood that for many 2001 would bring nothing but misery.

2001 will be famously remembered for one date – September 11th – when Islamic fundamentalist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade centre and the Pentagon and killed almost 4,000 workers. The consequences of that attack the world will perhaps feel, in one form or another, for years to come.

September 11th apart, 2001 was not really something to celebrate, so why celebrate 2002. For one thing, the year ended with the US and Britain still fighting an imperialist war in Afghanistan; with Israel provoking further unrest with the Palestinians; with Indian and Pakistani troops massing on their respective borders prepared to bomb one another into oblivion over a stretch of land known as Kashmir. The year ended with 4 million Afghan refugees facing an uncertain future; with the Argentinean economy in tatters and the country in a state of civil unrest; with 7,000 Africans dying each day from Aids; with the US talking up forthcoming bombing raids on Somalia and Iraq and with 40,000 infants dying every day from malnutrition. A taste of things to come perhaps

On a somewhat brighter side – from which many on the left gained comfort – there was massive anti-capitalist demonstrations, first in Quebec in April , then later in Gothenburg in June and Genoa in July – the latter involving 300,000. In November, an anti-war rally attracted 100,000 in London and there was a further anti-capitalist demo in Brussels as the year closed. Though undoubtedly well intentioned, it was abundantly evident that all of these demonstrations attracted chiefly those simply interested in reforming the system, treating the symptoms and not the cause. Whilst many workers are genuinely sickened at the atrocities perpetrated in the name of profit, the evidence suggests that the working class is some way from being not just a class in itself but a class for itself.

2002 looks to be no different from 2001 for one major reason - Capitalism is still very much on the agenda. This means that every aspect of our lives in 2002 will be subordinated to the worst exigencies of the profit system. Businesses will only run so long as they have the competitive edge on their rivals, wars will take place because the executives of the capitalist class realise this is simply an extension of the global search for raw materials, foreign markets and areas of influence. The state and their pals in the media will think of new laws to keep us in line and new ways of distorting facts and hoodwinking us, for the simple reason that our isolation and ignorance is an important component in maintaining the status quo. Our unwillingness to unite, our indifference to their excesses will be the victories they celebrate in 2002.

We will reach December 31st of 2002 and look back on a year in which millions died of starvation; in which millions were killed in a dozen conflicts; in which millions died from curable disease. On December 31st 2002 there will still be homelessness and crime and every other social ill you can imagine. Despite all the reforms of the previous 100 years, despite all of our scientific, technological and medical know-how, we will still find it easier to launch a $100 million space probe on a journey to the furthest galaxies than to feed and inoculate a starving, disease-ridden African village.

Israel Again

Recent US approval for Israeli attacks upon Gaza, Nablus and Ramallah at the beginning of December – in response to the Hamas suicide bombings – has all but ended speculation that US influence in the Middle East in the wake of September 11th would bring about peace.

Israel’s media spin-doctor Benjamin Netanyahu, no doubt inspired by the gung-ho rhetoric that bolsters President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ could confidently compare Yasser Arafat to Osama bin Laden. A Bush spokesperson was heard to impart to the world’s media: “ Israel has every right to defend itself and the president understands that.” And these statements appeared to be the go ahead for all and sundry to launch verbal attacks upon the people of Palestine, lumping them, no questions asked, in with the Taliban.

The usually moderate EU demanded Ariel Sharon use the iron fist treatment and the ever cautious Tony Blair, who weeks earlier castigated his foreign secretary Jack Straw for linking Islamic terrorism with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, duly expressed his sympathy for Israel.

The prevailing view from the West was that Israel’s retaliation be applauded. The domestic voice of caution was all but muted, with Sharon insisting Israelis learn lessons from the US in the wake of September 11th and refrain from criticisng his policies, and only the boldest of journalists were prepared to set the crisis in a historical context and to point out that if Israel’s attacks upon Yasser Arafat’s compound were a response to the Hamas suicide bombings, themselves a retaliation to Sharon’s state assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Haroud, then militant Palestinians would soon respond in kind.

This said, from within the Israeli government there has arisen the ‘voice of reason’. Sharon’s foreign minister Shimon Perez and his colleagues in the Labour Party boycotted a vote calling upon Arafat’s administration to be labelled ‘an entity supporting terrorism’ and have cautioned Sharon that the fall of Arafat would pave the way for the ascendancy of Palestinian extremists.

For Sharon’s part, we can only despair at his belligerent game plan. He is obsessed with the demonisation of Yasser Asrafat, keen to lay all of Israel’s problems at his feet. In a televised address to Israelis, he declared: “Arafat is responsible for everything that happens here.” And he remains keen to weaken and marginalize the Palestine Authority. However, experts agree that taking the Palestine Authority out of the equation makes it harder for Arafat to subdue the very militants he is charged with rooting out. Moreover, the PLO recognises Israel’s 1967 borders and its ‘right to exist’. Hamas does not, demanding the total destruction of the Jewish state. Neither can Hamas and the PLO be said to be on speaking terms. The former is an organisation of Islamic militants that came to prominence in 1987 as a rival to the PLO, even finding a sponsor in an Israeli state which hoped it would undermine the influence of the PLO, the latter a secular organisation and one that sprung directly from the frustration borne of a failed peace process.

Israel, the US and its allies appear reluctant to acknowledge the causes of the current intifada. The fact is that the Palestinian people are a second class People denied many of the rights of Israelis. Palestine seemingly exists as a number of impoverished ‘third world’ Bantustans inside of an advanced industrial nation whose inhabitants have a high standard of living. The hardship of the Palestinian people is perhaps unparalleled in the Middle East. Palestine’s GNP has fallen by 35% in the past year, unemployment is above 40% and the average income per head of the populations of Gaza and the West Bank is almost one-twelfth of that enjoyed by Israeli people. Palestinians have endured restriction on their movement – guaranteed under previous peace agreements – and arbitrary arrests. The violence witnessed by Palestinian youths on an almost daily basis has induced in many symptoms similar to those suffering Post traumatic stress disorder.

Perhaps Palestinians can be forgiven for having nurtured a hatred of Israel, for this is a hatred that has arisen out of their daily experiences and it stands as an indictment on the Israeli state that so many see no alternative but to resort to horrendous acts of suicide.

Israel of course does not act alone. Its policies are carried out with the full support of the world’s only superpower. It exists as a subsidiary to the US government, surviving as a military outpost of the US, armed to the teeth with weaponry its much larger neighbours can only dream of. Its mission to counter the emergence of any Middle Eastern radicalism that would threaten US control of the region’s oil, which is itself an important source of the control of the world economy.

The future certainly looks bleak for Palestinians. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’, his determination to suspect any Islamic state with September 11th - note his determination to link Somalia, Sudan and Iraq with those attacks on the US – has given new life to the cause of Israeli hawks, led by a president still waiting to find out if he is to be charged with war crimes for orchestrating the 1982 of the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Nonchalantly lobbing missiles at Arafat’s compounds, police stations and security posts, blind to caution, Sharon risks bringing about the demise of Arafat and the Palestine Authority and paving the way for the ascendancy of a more desperate foe in the shape of militant Islam, with whom no peace deal will be struck. With most Arabs finding a common empathy with the Palestinian people, should Sharon take one step to far, invading the West bank and Gaza and, imposing direct rule in response to a militant Islamic blowback, the resultant conflagration would blaze across the Middle East and burn for years.

As socialists, we are prepared for any scenario for we are aware of the lengths the defenders of capitalism will go to secure their interests. If the future of US oil interests in the region meant that Islamic fundamentalism had to be prodded in order to provoke a reaction to justify a massive US response, then Palestinian’s Islamic militants will be prodded. History is littered with the pretexts for war in the name of profit.