Sent to the Shields Gazette, 22nd January 2005
Dear Sir,
Speaking at his inauguration on January 20th, President Bush declared that freedom overseas was a precondition for freedom in the USA. He certainly never elaborated on this theme and made no reference to the utter misery the US has, in the last few years, brought to Afghanistan and Iraq. He moreover, in his short speech, used the words “freedom” and “liberty” 42 times.
I can only presume these two words have taken on new meanings in the White House dictionary. History testifies that as soon as the US takes an interest in your country then you can say goodbye to freedom. Since 1945 the US has leant its support dictators and tyrannical regimes on every continent, from Pol Pot and Suharto to Saddam Hussein and Pinochet. Since 1945, this same defender of the global well-being toppled 40 governments and helped crush 30 populist movements, assassinated scores of prominent individuals and perverted elections in every corner of the globe, turning a blind eye to the most horrendous affronts to the democratic process. During this same period the US has armed terrorists, trained right-wing guerrilla movements in the art of torture and financed armies intent on overthrowing democratically elected governments.
Perhaps Bush was telling the truth, considering the growing restrictions on personal freedom in the USA – ie the Patriot Act. If freedom is not allowed to thrive overseas, then why should it be allowed to exist in the USA?
22/01/2005
20/01/2005
Prince Harry
Sent to the Shields Gazette, 20/01/05
Dear Sir,
With the "Prince Harry the Nazi" story still making the news, what is noticeably absent from the debate about whether Harry was right, wrong or silly to wear a Nazi uniform, is that pertaining to the very existence of the Royal Family. It is taken for granted that we have one, we need one, they have always been there etc.
In truth, the sole purpose of this parasitical and unscrupulous family is to serve as a repository for ‘history’ and ‘tradition’, which of course provides the glaring iniquities of capitalism with some form of moral authority.
Honestly considered, the contribution made to society by Harry and his greedy and insensitive clan is zilch. Each one is happy to consume in a day as much resources and commodities as 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, debating their transgressions, negligent of the immense global suffering of our own class?
What real loss to society would there be if the entire House of Windsor was abolished overnight? None. Though I would certainly not oppose the abolition of the monarchy, I would hardly find much to celebrate. For we would simply exist in a republic as wage slaves, every aspect of our lives still subordinated to the worst excesses of the profit system.
One thing is certain, however. If the injustices that plague our world were given one tenth the media coverage afforded royal gaffes, then the case for world socialism would have been well publicised and our ranks greatly swollen, and real injustice would at last be nearer a solution.
With the "Prince Harry the Nazi" story still making the news, what is noticeably absent from the debate about whether Harry was right, wrong or silly to wear a Nazi uniform, is that pertaining to the very existence of the Royal Family. It is taken for granted that we have one, we need one, they have always been there etc.
In truth, the sole purpose of this parasitical and unscrupulous family is to serve as a repository for ‘history’ and ‘tradition’, which of course provides the glaring iniquities of capitalism with some form of moral authority.
Honestly considered, the contribution made to society by Harry and his greedy and insensitive clan is zilch. Each one is happy to consume in a day as much resources and commodities as 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, debating their transgressions, negligent of the immense global suffering of our own class?
What real loss to society would there be if the entire House of Windsor was abolished overnight? None. Though I would certainly not oppose the abolition of the monarchy, I would hardly find much to celebrate. For we would simply exist in a republic as wage slaves, every aspect of our lives still subordinated to the worst excesses of the profit system.
One thing is certain, however. If the injustices that plague our world were given one tenth the media coverage afforded royal gaffes, then the case for world socialism would have been well publicised and our ranks greatly swollen, and real injustice would at last be nearer a solution.
Yours,
John B
19/01/2005
Tsunami and early warning systems
Sent to the Shields Gazette, 19/1/05
Dear Sir,
The head of the UN's cultural and scientific agency has said an Indian Ocean early warning system, similar to one used by countries bordering the Pacific Ocean to warn of tsunamis would cost $30 million. Considering the number of lives this could save, the cost is a pittance, more so when one realises the cost is equivalent to about two and half hours worth of US occupation of Iraq.
Whilst the world’s governments will heed calls for such an early warning system that can warn of natural disaster which we have no control over, they are deaf when it comes to those blaring in our ears, the man-made early warning systems. For instance, did we not also have fair warning of the devastation in Iraq? Did not President Bush telegraph his message to the world, over a year in advance, that Iraq would be invaded with a US military tsunami? Over one hundred thousand have been killed in Iraq since the US led invasion and now we are getting warnings that the US is just about ready to attack Iran.
Early warning systems have been sounding for decades. It was known in the mid 70s there were 400 chronically malnourished on the planet and there was a promise to eradicate hunger within 10 years. That figure now stands at 870 million. We know that today 17,000 children will die from hunger and many more from hunger related disease, and that this figure will be repeated tomorrow and the next day, and a year from now. The world is aware of the Aids epidemic in Africa, of increasing deaths from malaria, of the diseases facing the 2.4 billion with poor sanitary access, and we know that such problems will be with us in years to come.
These are not new problems. They have existed for so long that the statistics seem hackneyed and you feel something of a prat quoting them repeatedly. The point is, these early warning systems are ringing non-stop. Capitalism’s problems are hitting the human race with the force of a dozen tsunamis a day, killing millions.
And the reason governments fail to respond to the countless deaths caused by the very system they tenaciously defend is because it is unprofitable to do so. The victims, in the main, don’t constitute much of a market. For instance, it is more profitable to destroy thousands of tons of food than to give it to the starving. It makes more sense to have vacant buildings remain unoccupied than to allocate them free to the homeless.
The only early warning system that can prevent non-natural human disaster is one that frees production, science and technology from the artificial constraints of profit, using them for the benefit of humanity, allowing all people to have free access to the benefits of civilisation; a system that can allocate resources and the necessities of life where and when needed, as quickly as possible, and not on the prior estimate of cost. Such a system, world socialism, is the only system that can realistically address the myriad problems facing the human race, heading of disaster in advance.
Yours,
John B
Dear Sir,
The head of the UN's cultural and scientific agency has said an Indian Ocean early warning system, similar to one used by countries bordering the Pacific Ocean to warn of tsunamis would cost $30 million. Considering the number of lives this could save, the cost is a pittance, more so when one realises the cost is equivalent to about two and half hours worth of US occupation of Iraq.
Whilst the world’s governments will heed calls for such an early warning system that can warn of natural disaster which we have no control over, they are deaf when it comes to those blaring in our ears, the man-made early warning systems. For instance, did we not also have fair warning of the devastation in Iraq? Did not President Bush telegraph his message to the world, over a year in advance, that Iraq would be invaded with a US military tsunami? Over one hundred thousand have been killed in Iraq since the US led invasion and now we are getting warnings that the US is just about ready to attack Iran.
Early warning systems have been sounding for decades. It was known in the mid 70s there were 400 chronically malnourished on the planet and there was a promise to eradicate hunger within 10 years. That figure now stands at 870 million. We know that today 17,000 children will die from hunger and many more from hunger related disease, and that this figure will be repeated tomorrow and the next day, and a year from now. The world is aware of the Aids epidemic in Africa, of increasing deaths from malaria, of the diseases facing the 2.4 billion with poor sanitary access, and we know that such problems will be with us in years to come.
These are not new problems. They have existed for so long that the statistics seem hackneyed and you feel something of a prat quoting them repeatedly. The point is, these early warning systems are ringing non-stop. Capitalism’s problems are hitting the human race with the force of a dozen tsunamis a day, killing millions.
And the reason governments fail to respond to the countless deaths caused by the very system they tenaciously defend is because it is unprofitable to do so. The victims, in the main, don’t constitute much of a market. For instance, it is more profitable to destroy thousands of tons of food than to give it to the starving. It makes more sense to have vacant buildings remain unoccupied than to allocate them free to the homeless.
The only early warning system that can prevent non-natural human disaster is one that frees production, science and technology from the artificial constraints of profit, using them for the benefit of humanity, allowing all people to have free access to the benefits of civilisation; a system that can allocate resources and the necessities of life where and when needed, as quickly as possible, and not on the prior estimate of cost. Such a system, world socialism, is the only system that can realistically address the myriad problems facing the human race, heading of disaster in advance.
Yours,
John B
11/01/2005
The Beauty Myth
I was born facially disfigured with neurofibromatosis (a kind of "spontaneous mutation" in my case, the affliction usually being congenital) and the condition it is believed that seriously deformed John Merrick, the Elephant Man. Being thus afflicted it was more or less evident that my trek through life was never going to be smooth and that I would meet with a fair bit of subconscious, inbred prejudice.The school career service in 1976 somehow failed to notice that I was different, even if most of the kids had, and negligently forgot to inform me that you can only get the job you want if your “face fits”. It was hardly their fault – they were on piece-time and the state-run conveyor belt that year had a large consignment of wage slaves to package for the sweat shops of the future. Neither did these experts on my future tell me how my disfigurement would impinge upon every aspect of my life, although I’d had a fair few hints by then, and how in capitalist society you are constantly judged by your appearance.
I know for a fact that I failed my first 13 interviews in late 1976 on my looks alone. In one instance I was talked out of entering the interview room—where I would be questioned by a panel, having been short-listed—by an assistant manager in the corridor. Even years later, when I gained a degree, I discovered that my access to a respectable job was barred on the grounds that I looked “intimidating”.
The first and only time I tried to enter a night club I was stopped by a doorman who said: “You’re not fucking getting in ‘ere with a face like that.” On another occasion a woman in a cafe asked if I would sit at another table and face the other way as I was putting her child off his meal. On several occasions during my post-school years I was stopped and searched by the police because I looked different. I could fill many pages with such instances – though many would be too painful and embarrassing to recount. It was enough to leave me with a feeling that my true vocation in life was to swing from the bell towers of Notre Dame cathedral screaming “sanctuary”. However, you learn to roll with the blows, and after each knock-down you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and proceed to the next encounter, angry of course, but in the growing awareness that it is society’s standards that are wrong.
When you’re an ‘outsider’ you inwardly celebrate every success of your kind. You see a small victory in every encroachment the outsiders make into the ‘normal’ world. Your powers of empathy are heightened and you silently share in every triumph over a system in which external appearance is paramount. In a culture that encourages compliance with idealised criteria of beauty, people with disfigurements and deformities clearly present as a distinct group of people more likely than others to suffer psychological problems and social stigma as a result of their appearance. That they can rise above this, that they can wriggle free from the niche society has allocated them and make their mark says a lot and perhaps offers hope for the rest of society caught up in the beauty trap.
I (pictured some years and many ops ago) was thus delighted to read in the broadsheets of mid-March, that after 150 years of debate, a panel of judges had decided upon the sculpture that will grace the fourth and hitherto vacant, plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. The successful artwork is Marc Quinn's marble statue of Allison Lapper, naked as the day she was born, eight months pregnant and disfigured with a condition known as phocomelia, the outward appearance of which gives armless Allison the form of a victim of the 1960s maternity drug thalidomide.As could be imagined, the decision met with much criticism, largely from those campaigning for the plinth to be given to a statue of the late parasite of Buck House, the Queen Mum, The Daily Mail included. Others, including the Disability Rights Commission, welcomed the forthcoming statue as a blow against the culture of perfection. From what I have read of the criticism, the choice of Quinn's sculpture has been slated chiefly on the grounds that the work is ‘all message but no art’. Undoubtedly much of this disapproval is rooted in uneasiness with the subject matter, a popular held belief being that representations of disabled people should only be deemed satisfactory when the significance relates to charity.
Being interviewed in the Guardian (17th March), Alison was quite upbeat about her deformity, commenting that there was not a single thing about her body that she would change. "If you told me I could have any bit of plastic surgery that I wanted, I wouldn't take it because I'm just fine as I am, thank you very much.” It is an exceptional and brave outlook to hold in today’s world – but there again Alison is an exceptional woman. She works as an artist and lives the life of a single mum, looking after her 4-year-old son Parys.
In a video that accompanied one of her exhibitions, in which her own disability takes centre stage, she commented: “Why do I use myself? That's a good point. My body isn't this ugly…I had always assumed it was because I'd been told it was…You are disabled so therefore you are ugly. So now, I think I almost throw myself at the public, if you like, for want of a better word, then say, well actually, look again...I don't feel ugly, and I forget that people become quite shocked by my nudity and by what I'm doing, but then great ... if that's had an impact ... good.”
Though Alison has found significant success as an artist in her own right, consider when you last saw a disabled newsreader, a crippled Miss World hobbling onto the stage in an ill-fitting bikini, a facially disfigured Club 18-30 rep or a compeer at the Oscars fumbling as he passes the golden academy award to best supporting actor with his misshaped hands. You could think all night and not recall any such moments because, quite honestly, the general public would find them unsettling, having been conditioned to see them as inappropriate. Instead, we expect the above to look about as perfect as it is possible to look.
Being interviewed in the Guardian (17th March), Alison was quite upbeat about her deformity, commenting that there was not a single thing about her body that she would change. "If you told me I could have any bit of plastic surgery that I wanted, I wouldn't take it because I'm just fine as I am, thank you very much.” It is an exceptional and brave outlook to hold in today’s world – but there again Alison is an exceptional woman. She works as an artist and lives the life of a single mum, looking after her 4-year-old son Parys.
In a video that accompanied one of her exhibitions, in which her own disability takes centre stage, she commented: “Why do I use myself? That's a good point. My body isn't this ugly…I had always assumed it was because I'd been told it was…You are disabled so therefore you are ugly. So now, I think I almost throw myself at the public, if you like, for want of a better word, then say, well actually, look again...I don't feel ugly, and I forget that people become quite shocked by my nudity and by what I'm doing, but then great ... if that's had an impact ... good.”
Though Alison has found significant success as an artist in her own right, consider when you last saw a disabled newsreader, a crippled Miss World hobbling onto the stage in an ill-fitting bikini, a facially disfigured Club 18-30 rep or a compeer at the Oscars fumbling as he passes the golden academy award to best supporting actor with his misshaped hands. You could think all night and not recall any such moments because, quite honestly, the general public would find them unsettling, having been conditioned to see them as inappropriate. Instead, we expect the above to look about as perfect as it is possible to look.
Of course Alison, and certainly myself and others not cast in the generally accepted human mould, are not that unique. Indeed, ‘normal’ people everywhere feel less than perfect and intimidated by society’s notion of what is and what is not beautiful and feel their expectations and opportunities are limited because of their physical appearance.
Every day of our lives, everywhere we go—whether reading a newspaper, watching TV, looking at bill hoardings or the elongated adverts on buses as they pass—we are constantly inundated with idealistic images of how we should look. Our opinion of ourselves is under relentless attack from the advertising and media industries and our insecurities sharpened and thus easily exploited by those who seek to make a profit out of our fears, whether it be from dieticians and food and clothing manufacturers, the cosmetic industry or the plastic surgery fraternity.
We are conditioned to aspire towards quite impossible standards of beauty and are exposed daily to the myriad miracle products and procedures that exist to refashion us. We are weaned on the benefits of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants, manicures, Botox parties, face lifts, lip collagen injections for a fuller pout, vibration beauty therapy – the list is endless. Our email is bombarded with penis enhancement spam. We buy products that remove hair from our legs, nostrils and crotches, restore it to our heads and change it to any colour of the rainbow. Just pick up any glossy-paged Sunday supplement and try looking for someone who resembles, in outward appearance, yourself.
Women in particular are bombarded with images of what the ‘perfect woman’ ought to look like. She is a stunning blonde, a sensuous looking brunette or dark, mysterious and exotic looking, aged in her mid-twenties, tall and slender with two rows of gleaming white, film star teeth, devoid of any visible flaws and with her clothes hugging her body like a second skin.
I know women who have spent a small a fortune visiting beauticians, sometimes for complete makeovers - all to enhance their own self-esteem and the fancied image of themselves in the eyes of others. Every external inch of our bodies are shown to be inadequate and in need of improving, from our eyelashes to our toe nails. If a woman has a rounded, shapely, Rubenesque body—perfectly acceptable in the 1950s—she has too much cellulite. If her breasts don’t measure up they require liberal dollops of silicone and if her face shows the lines of maturity she is made to feel like a wizen-faced hag. Meanwhile, men enter the dressing room with trepidation, the member they once felt comfortable about now derisory.
Under constant attack from the media and advertising industry, women are left feeling happiness equates only with looking beautiful, whilst men can only find contentment in being affluent and powerful, there being no generic look to male success. In short, today’s beauty culture creates needless anxiety for people, women in particular, maintaining that if you don't look perfect, or make some effort to improve you appearance, there must be something wrong with you, that you lack self-respect and have “let yourself go”.
All of this needless anxiety, stress and concern with, what is after all truly superficial, represents a terrible waste of human energy. How much good is lost to society for the want of a little confidence and self-esteem is anyone’s guess. Again, we can only speculate how far the working class have been steered away from their historic mission by the obsession with such false needs.
What a wonderful tool of suppression the master class have at their disposal – our opinion of ourselves. What marvellous instruments of counter-revolution are the insecurities we have and which they know they can target. What better distraction from the really pressing issue in life – how to establish a world free of waste and want and war and to displace from power our ruling elites – than to deflect any outward thoughts the workers have inwards and on to themselves.There are many ways we can help shape the socialist society of the future in the here and now. One is to recognise that there are powerful forces at work night and day (the media and advertising industries, cosmetic companies and food manufacturers, for instance) with only one objective in mind – to profit by making us feel less than normal.
What a wonderful tool of suppression the master class have at their disposal – our opinion of ourselves. What marvellous instruments of counter-revolution are the insecurities we have and which they know they can target. What better distraction from the really pressing issue in life – how to establish a world free of waste and want and war and to displace from power our ruling elites – than to deflect any outward thoughts the workers have inwards and on to themselves.There are many ways we can help shape the socialist society of the future in the here and now. One is to recognise that there are powerful forces at work night and day (the media and advertising industries, cosmetic companies and food manufacturers, for instance) with only one objective in mind – to profit by making us feel less than normal.
If Alison Lapper and many like her can feel good about themselves and challenge some of the most basic assumptions society holds head on, why can’t we all? As the final battle with the master class is to be waged on the battlefield of ideas, what better way to limber up for that offensive than to gain confidence in ourselves as individuals by liberating our minds from false notions of what it is to be perfect? As a class, united by the same basic needs and desires, we stand as perfect as any revolutionary class before us, and as much in need of a philosophy of beauty dictated from on high as a medieval peasant was his oppressive religion.
06/01/2005
Aftermath of the Tsunami: Querying “American Values in Action”
Realising that upwards of 100,000 of the estimated 165,000 victims of the Tsunami disaster were Muslims, the US wasted no time in sending US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the scene of the devastation. There was much to gain from this mission at a time when the US has been accused of an anti-Muslim crusade in the wake of the devastation it has wrought on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Powell was keen to show the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims that the Bush administration is not islamophobic, even if its military machine did seem to have a penchant for the slaughter of Muslims. He said “We’d be doing it [participating in the relief effort] regardless of religion, but I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action.”
As for the US “values” Powell’s mission aimed to promote we need only mention Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay for starters before moving on to the myriad international treaties, on gun control, nuclear proliferation, the environment, human rights etc. that the Bush administration has flicked the proverbial V’s to since 2000.
While Powell bangs on about US aid, it is worth remembering that 40 per cent of US aid goes to Israel, a US military ally, a country in breach of numerous UN resolutions, and given in contravention of a Congress ruling that no foreign aid goes to a nuclear power.
US “values” have prompted successive White House administrations to support dictators and tyrannical regimes on every continent, from Pol Pot and Suharto to Saddam Hussein and Papa Doc Duvaliere. Between 1945 and 1999, this same defender of the global well-being toppled 40 governments and helped crush 30 populist movements, assassinated scores of prominent individuals and perverted elections in every corner of the globe. During this same period the US has armed terrorists, trained right-wing guerrilla movements in the art of torture and financed armies intent on overthrowing democratically elected governments. Some values!
When asked on US television whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children as a consequence of Western sanctions was acceptable, Madeleine Albright, Powell’s predecessor under President Clinton, replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it.”
It seems there are American “values” and “values”. Those Powell is charged with furthering are those of a corrupt elite operating in the interests of corporate America. He was certainly not sent to Indonesia on a show of hands of the US public. His attempt to seek political capital out of present US offers of help to the disaster region is thus opportunistic and utterly despicable, nay, nauseating.
Powell further commented in Indonesia: "I've been in war and I've been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I've never seen anything like this." This from the man who rose to prominence trying to cover up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when US forces slaughtered 500 Vietnamese women and children in the village of My Lai; part of a larger conflict that left 2 million dead, many from the use of napalm and agent orange! We can only assume that Powell is suffering from selective amnesia.
He added: “I cannot imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave.” Neither, it would seem, could he imagine the horror of the thousands trapped in Fallujah as US planes bombed it, napalmed it and American artillery shelled it from every angle, raising that city – once with a population 300,000 – to the ground. And we can only assume that Powell was oblivious to the fact that the 100,000 dead of Indonesia is matched by the 100,000 Iraqis killed since the US invasion of Iraq.
While he feels a surge of pride in the knowledge the US government has promised $350 million to the stricken areas, what is to be made of the fact that this is only a minute fraction of the amount spent on the US invasion and occupation of Iraq? Or, to put it another way, the world is meant to applaud the Bush administration for paying out $350 million in one hand to save Asia’s Moslems, while forking out $150 billion (http://costofwar.com/) with the other to kill their counterparts in the Middle East.
If you consider that we err in comparing the war in Iraq with the rescue mission in the Indian Ocean, then remember the reason for the invasion of Iraq. Bush and Blair both claimed that this was a humanitarian intervention, a rescue mission, aimed at restoring democracy and freeing the Iraqi people from years of oppression. On this count it stands as the most expensive humanitarian mission in history, considering the size of the Iraqi population, and what does this make of the people who opposed that invasion, the 35 million across the world who marched and protested at the Bush/Blair rescue mission to Iraq in February of 2003?
When Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief co-ordinator, criticised the initial US offer of $15 million in aid as “stingy”, Bush’s response was to claim Egeland was “very misguided and ill-informed”. Bush later had the figure raised to $35 million, with this figure later increased ten fold – a figure, incidentally now dwarfed by private donations in the US. All Egeland was saying was that in times of disaster Western governments do in fact appear parsimonious. Clearly Egeland was thinking of statistics compiled by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which reveal the amount of a country’s GDP given in overseas aid. Of the wealthiest countries in the world, none give more than 1% of their GDP in foreign development aid. Egeland was also aware that his own Norway had the best showing at 0.92% and that down at the bottom were the US of A with its "stingy" 0.14%.
Many radical commentators backed Egeland’s “stingy” claim, pointing out that the Bush administration would be spending far more on the president’s inaugural celebration on January 20th and how the Republican Convention in New York last year cost a staggering $166 million (inclusive of $70,000 for donuts and coffee for the press). We can perhaps better set the US aid promise in context by considering that the occupation of Iraq is costing the US an estimated $270 million per day, and that the Pentagon’s military budget is $1.5 billion per day – this spent with a view to killing people, not saving them. What else are guns and bombs, tanks and warships for? One F22 Raptor fighter costs $225 million. It does not carry food parcels and medicines but surface to air missiles and cannons. According to the US-based International Action Centre’s estimates, "for what the US is spending for less than one second of bombing and destruction, it could construct a system that could have prevented thousands of needless deaths [caused by the Tsunami]."
As in Britain, so to in the US have the general public humiliated their governments with their generosity. If we accept that the invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian step, that Bush and Blair were motivated solely by the plight of the suffering Iraqi people under Saddam, why did they not set up a charity and see how much the public would have donated to this mother of all rescue missions? Simple, because they realise that people, though often conned at election time, are just not that stupid, and that they couldn’t have collected enough to feed a regiment’s mascot goat.
The generosity shown towards the victims of the Tsunami disaster are not Bush administration “values”, which Powell seems to have been inferring in his damage limitation exercise in Indonesia, but rather the basic values of human beings in America, indeed, the world over. Unlike other animals, humans are endowed with the ability to sympathise and empathise with their fellow humans. Humans derive great pleasure from doing good, are at their best when faced with the worst and will go to extraordinary lengths to help alleviate the suffering of others. Across the US, as in other countries, there have been all manner of fundraising events, in all sections of society, inclusive of nursery schools, prisons, universities and impoverished communities. In some instances people have queued for over an hour to put money in a plastic collection bucket.
According to a survey by Independent Sector a US coalition of non-profit organisations, the percentage of volunteers in America is the largest of any country, almost 56%. The average hours volunteered per week by an individual is 3.5 hours. According to Charity America, donations to charity for 2002 were $241 billion, 76.3 per cent of this given by individuals.
If governments depended for their existence on us promoting our real values, they wouldn’t last a week. That is why they spend so much time trying to divide us as a class, lying to us, instilling in us false needs, a false consciousness, appealing to patriotism and the rest of the rot. When it comes to values, there are only class values, ours and theirs. That Powell had to go to Indonesia to try to hijack any US initiated relief effort, before it was credited to the workers of the US, shows perhaps that they fear not only class solidarity across the world but the very values that have come to the surface in recent weeks.
15/12/2004
Open Letter To The Workers
Fellow Workers,
The world we live in at the beginning of the 21st Century is one that is fraught with contradiction. Some 800 million of our fellow humans are chronically malnourished and at least 1.2 billion will, on any one day, go without food. At the same time, the governments of the world order the destruction of vast mountains of food to keep prices high, stockpile food until it rots and pay farmers to take land out of production because the laws of supply and demand insist that overproduction is bad for the market.
Some 600 million of our fellow humans are homeless, sleeping rough on the streets of the world's cities, yet there is no shortage of vacant buildings—countless millions of acres of empty living space in the major cities of the world—and certainly no shortage of building materials or skilled builders and craftsmen presently out of work. Again, we find that the market not only dictates who does and does not eat, but who does and does not sleep comfortably.
Well over 1 billion of our fellow humans have no access to clean water, while its growing scarcity is calculated to spark many wars across the globe this coming century. Meanwhile, the technology exists to desalinate millions of gallons each day and to set up treatment plants capable of cleaning the dirtiest water. However, there is not much profit in selling something which covers five-sixth's of the planet, so the investment never comes.
While millions of children die each year of curable diseases and while we still await breakthroughs in medical science that can cure the presently incurable, we find there are literally thousands of scientists around the world employed in weapon's programmes—paid by their respective governments to devise new methods of murder, including germ warfare.
The list is as endless as it is insane. At every turn we find evidence of how capitalism destroys us physically and mentally, retarding real human development. At every turn we come smack up against the iron law of our age—"can't pay, can't have." At every turn we find capitalism running wild like a rabid dog, infecting all it comes into contact with.
Credit where credit is due. Capitalism has enabled us to carry out some pretty fantastic technological and scientific feats. Advances in warfare sparked a race for rocket technology that has enabled us explore the furthest limits of the solar system. The search for oil and other resources has allowed us to plumb the deepest oceans and map out the ocean beds. We can split the atom, map the human genome, and perform the most amazing organ transplants. Nothing, it seems, is beyond us. Our productive powers are fantastic. Our capabilities are awe-inspiring. Sadly, however, and in spite of the technology at our disposal, because of the never-ending battle for profits, we have entered the 21st Century dragging with us every social ill that plagued the previous century. War, hunger, poverty, disease, and homelessness are still making the headlines, and each of these problems is, to a lesser or greater degree, rooted in the way we continue to organise ourselves for production. The terrible irony is that we are already capable of solving the major problems that face us. Indeed, we have been capable of solving them for quite some time—though obviously never within the context of capitalism.
Over 20 years ago, the World Health Organisation revealed that the technology existed to feed a world population twelve times its (then) size. Five years ago the UN reported that Africa could easily feed a population six times its current size if western farming technology was introduced. Science and technology are in fact so advanced as to enable us to solve all these problems. However, the requirements of profit everywhere act as a stumbling block not only to the full use of the productive forces, but also to the full and unhindered use of science and technology in the service of humanity.
Socialists long ago realised that the problems we face are in fact social problems, not natural ones or the vengeance of gods—social problems because they have their roots in the way our world is organised for production, that is production for profit, not need. If you think seriously about it, you'll be hard pressed to find any aspect of our lives that is not subordinated to the requirements of profit. This is the case the world over. We are all of us at the mercy of the anarchic laws of capitalism.
What is to be done?
If this is the case, then what can we do about it? Socialists, real socialists, believe the only way forward lies in abolishing the money/wages/profit system that we know as capitalism and establishing a world socialist society or, in other words, a world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. Only then can we gain real control over our world and reassert control over our own destiny. Only then can we produce without polluting our world and only then can we enjoy a world in which there is no waste or want or war.
Since 1904, the Socialist Party has been advocating the establishment of such a world system: a global system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by and in the interests of all people.
We advocate a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders, states or governments, armies, police, force or coercion. A world devoid of money or wages, exchange, buying or selling. A world in which people give freely of their abilities and take according to their own self-defined needs from the stockpile of wealth. A global system in which each person has a free and democratic say in how their world is run.
Of course, many we come into contact with agree that such a world would be a beautiful place to live in, but that “human nature” will always be a barrier to its establishment, because humans are “by nature” greedy, selfish and aggressive. It quickly becomes apparent that what they are describing is not human nature as such, but various traits of human behaviour exhibited under particular circumstances. Socialists maintain that human behaviour is determined by the kind of system people are conditioned to live in—that it is not our consciousness that determines our social existence, the way we behave, but that our social existence determines our consciousness. Nobody is born a racist or a patriot, a bigot or with a belief in gods. Nobody is born a murderer, a robber or a rapist, and our alleged greed for money is no more a function of the natural human thought process than were slavery or witch burning.
In general, the ideas the common people hold have been acquired second-hand, passed down from the ruling class above us. This is because the class which owns and controls the productive process, also controls the intellectual life process in general. Any anti-social behaviour is likewise determined by our position in the relations of production and in general by our social circumstances at any given time, ie. when we are poor, depressed, lonely, angry and frustrated.
In most cases, those who produce the world’s wealth (some 95 percent of the world's population) have had that second-rate education that makes free-thought preclusive—an upbringing that conditions us to accept without question the ideas of our betters and superiors. Indeed, the education system is so geared as to perpetuate the rule of an elite, insofar as it never encourages children to question and take issue with the status quo. Children may well cite that 8 times 8 equals 64, but how many will ask about the cause of wars or query the destruction of food?
Socialists hold that because we can adapt our behaviour, the desire to cooperate should not be viewed as irrational. We hold that humans are, “by nature”, cooperative and that we work best when faced with the worst and that our humanity shines through when the odds are stacked against us. There are millions of cases of people donating their blood and organs to complete strangers, sacrificing their lives for others, of people giving countless hours of their free time to charitable work—all of this without financial incentive. There is even the case of a man throwing himself on top of a grenade to protect children in a school yard. He died to protect children, none of which were his own, and in the instant knowledge that his action was suicidal.
Today, world capitalism threatens the human race with extinction. The reason this obnoxious system survives is because we have been conditioned to accept it, not born to perpetuate it. Rest assured, no gene inclines us to defend the profit system.
Again, many we come into contact with tell us that socialism has already been tried and has failed. They then point to the former Soviet Union, to China, Cuba and a dozen other states that claimed to have established “socialism”. What they fail to grasp is that socialism has existed nowhere, and that what existed - being passed off as socialism—was in fact state capitalism, not socialism or communism (which mean the same thing). A cursory glance at the affairs of these countries reveals they never abolished the wages system. The rulers exploited their workers and outlawed dissent. They produced when only viable to do so, maintained commodity production, traded according to the dictates of international capital and, like every other capitalist state, were prepared to go to war to defend their economic interests. Moreover, in all of these countries, it was believed that socialism could be established by force, that socialism could exist in one country. The Leninists who carried out the Bolshevik Revolution maintained that the revolution could only be carried out by a vanguard, that the masses were too ignorant to understand the case for change.
Since 1904, our movement has maintained that socialism, like capitalism, can only exist on a global scale, and that it will only come about when a majority of the world's people want it and are prepared to organise for it peacefully and democratically, in their own interests and without leaders. No vanguard, no party can establish socialism—the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”.
Who are the workers?
But who is the “working class”? Agreeing with Marx, we believe that there are two classes in society—the working class and the capitalist class, each one determined by its position in the relations of production. The capitalist class own and control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, living like parasites off profits, rent and interest. The working class, other than possessions we have purchased with our own sweat, own little more than our ability to sell our physical and mental abilities to the highest bidder. There is no “middle class” and view the working class as being inclusive of tradesmen, land workers, doctors, lawyers and teachers—anyone, indeed, who must sell their mental and physical energies to survive.
This class, the working class—not the capitalist class—runs the world and it's important to grasp this fact. It is we who fish the oceans and tend the forests and till the land and plantations. It is we who build the cities and railroads, the bridges and roads, the docks and airports. It is we who staff the hospitals and schools, who empty the bins and go down the sewers. It is we, the working class, who produce everything society needs from a pin to an oil-rig, who provide all of its services. If we can do all of this off our own bats, then surely we can continue to do so without a profit-greedy minority watching over us and, more, in our own interests.
The ruling class, the capitalists and their executive, the governments of the world, have no monopoly on our skills and abilities. These belong to us. Moreover, it is we who are responsible for the inventions that have benefited humanity and the improvements in productive techniques. Most inventions and improvements are the result of those who do the actual work thinking up easier and faster ways of completing a task, the result of ideas being passed down from generation to generation, each one improving the techniques of the previous. If those who work have given the world so much, in the past say 2000 years, then how much more are we capable of providing in a world devoid of the artificial constraints of profit, in a world devoid of oppression and coercion?
Capitalism must be abolished
It is easy to cite the advances of capitalism over previous economic systems. Many people believe that capitalism, though not perfect, is the only system possible. One thing is certain, though—if we follow the capitalist trajectory, we’re in for some pretty troublesome times. Capitalism has undoubtedly raised the productive potential of humanity. It is now quite possible to provide a comfortable standard of living for every human on the planet. But, to reiterate, capitalism now stands as a barrier to the full and improved use of the world’s productive and distributive forces. In a world of potential abundance, the unceasing quest for profit imposes on our global society widespread artificial scarcity. Hundreds of millions of humans are consigned to a life of abject poverty, whilst the majority live lives filled with uncertainty.
Our ability to imagine has brought us so very far, from the days when our ancestors chipped away at flint to produce the first tools, to the landing of someone on the moon, the setting up of the world wide web, and the mapping out of the human genome. Is it really such a huge leap of the imagination to now envisage a social system that can take over from the present capitalist order of things? Is it just too daring to imagine humans consigning poverty, disease, hunger and war to some pre-historic age?
Do we really need leaders deciding our lives for us? Do we really need governments administering our lives when what is really needed is the administration of the things we need to live in peace and security? Must every decision made by our elites be first of all weighed on the scales of profit, tilted always in their favour? A growing number think not and have mobilised to confront what they perceive to be the major problems of contemporary capitalism.
In recent years there has been a world-wide backlash against neoliberal globalisation, corporate power and the iniquities of modern-day capitalism. Everywhere where the world’s ruling elite have assembled to decide their next step they have been met with protests and demonstrations that have attracted hundreds of thousands. Demonstrations at Seattle, Gothenburg, Prague and Genoa, for instance, have fuelled the ongoing debate on the nature of modern day capitalism. Thousands of articles have been written on the subject and hundreds of books have been published that explore the alternatives offered by the anti-globalisation movement.
What is now clear is that the anti-globalisation movement, however well meaning, does not seek to replace capitalism with any real alternative social system. At best it attracts a myriad of groups, all pursuing their own agenda. Some call for greater corporate responsibility. Some demand the reform of international institutions. Others call for the expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions. All, however, fail to address the root cause of the problems of capitalism.
One thing is certain: capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the world’s suffering billions, because reform does not address the basic contradiction between profit and need. The world’s leaders cannot be depended upon because they can only ever act as the executive of corporate capitalism. The expansion of democracy, while welcome, serves little function if all candidates at election time can only offer variations on the same set of policies.
Capitalism must be abolished, if we as a species are to thrive, if the planet is to survive. No amount of reform, however great, will work. Change must be global and irreversible. It must involve all of us. We need to erase borders and frontiers; to abolish states and governments and false concepts of nationalism. We need to abolish our money systems, and with it buying, selling and exchange. And in place of this we need to establish a different global social system - a society in which there is common ownership and true democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources. A society where the everyday things we need to live in comfort are produced and distributed freely and for no other reason than that they are needed. Socialism.
It is now no utopian fantasy to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. That much is assured. We certainly have the science, the technology and the know-how. All that is missing is the will—the global desire for change that can make that next great historical advance possible; a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny; a belief that it is possible to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to fashion a world in our own interests. And how soon this happens depends upon us all—each and every one of us.
The world we live in at the beginning of the 21st Century is one that is fraught with contradiction. Some 800 million of our fellow humans are chronically malnourished and at least 1.2 billion will, on any one day, go without food. At the same time, the governments of the world order the destruction of vast mountains of food to keep prices high, stockpile food until it rots and pay farmers to take land out of production because the laws of supply and demand insist that overproduction is bad for the market.
Some 600 million of our fellow humans are homeless, sleeping rough on the streets of the world's cities, yet there is no shortage of vacant buildings—countless millions of acres of empty living space in the major cities of the world—and certainly no shortage of building materials or skilled builders and craftsmen presently out of work. Again, we find that the market not only dictates who does and does not eat, but who does and does not sleep comfortably.
Well over 1 billion of our fellow humans have no access to clean water, while its growing scarcity is calculated to spark many wars across the globe this coming century. Meanwhile, the technology exists to desalinate millions of gallons each day and to set up treatment plants capable of cleaning the dirtiest water. However, there is not much profit in selling something which covers five-sixth's of the planet, so the investment never comes.
While millions of children die each year of curable diseases and while we still await breakthroughs in medical science that can cure the presently incurable, we find there are literally thousands of scientists around the world employed in weapon's programmes—paid by their respective governments to devise new methods of murder, including germ warfare.
The list is as endless as it is insane. At every turn we find evidence of how capitalism destroys us physically and mentally, retarding real human development. At every turn we come smack up against the iron law of our age—"can't pay, can't have." At every turn we find capitalism running wild like a rabid dog, infecting all it comes into contact with.
Credit where credit is due. Capitalism has enabled us to carry out some pretty fantastic technological and scientific feats. Advances in warfare sparked a race for rocket technology that has enabled us explore the furthest limits of the solar system. The search for oil and other resources has allowed us to plumb the deepest oceans and map out the ocean beds. We can split the atom, map the human genome, and perform the most amazing organ transplants. Nothing, it seems, is beyond us. Our productive powers are fantastic. Our capabilities are awe-inspiring. Sadly, however, and in spite of the technology at our disposal, because of the never-ending battle for profits, we have entered the 21st Century dragging with us every social ill that plagued the previous century. War, hunger, poverty, disease, and homelessness are still making the headlines, and each of these problems is, to a lesser or greater degree, rooted in the way we continue to organise ourselves for production. The terrible irony is that we are already capable of solving the major problems that face us. Indeed, we have been capable of solving them for quite some time—though obviously never within the context of capitalism.
Over 20 years ago, the World Health Organisation revealed that the technology existed to feed a world population twelve times its (then) size. Five years ago the UN reported that Africa could easily feed a population six times its current size if western farming technology was introduced. Science and technology are in fact so advanced as to enable us to solve all these problems. However, the requirements of profit everywhere act as a stumbling block not only to the full use of the productive forces, but also to the full and unhindered use of science and technology in the service of humanity.
Socialists long ago realised that the problems we face are in fact social problems, not natural ones or the vengeance of gods—social problems because they have their roots in the way our world is organised for production, that is production for profit, not need. If you think seriously about it, you'll be hard pressed to find any aspect of our lives that is not subordinated to the requirements of profit. This is the case the world over. We are all of us at the mercy of the anarchic laws of capitalism.
What is to be done?
If this is the case, then what can we do about it? Socialists, real socialists, believe the only way forward lies in abolishing the money/wages/profit system that we know as capitalism and establishing a world socialist society or, in other words, a world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. Only then can we gain real control over our world and reassert control over our own destiny. Only then can we produce without polluting our world and only then can we enjoy a world in which there is no waste or want or war.
Since 1904, the Socialist Party has been advocating the establishment of such a world system: a global system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by and in the interests of all people.
We advocate a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders, states or governments, armies, police, force or coercion. A world devoid of money or wages, exchange, buying or selling. A world in which people give freely of their abilities and take according to their own self-defined needs from the stockpile of wealth. A global system in which each person has a free and democratic say in how their world is run.
Of course, many we come into contact with agree that such a world would be a beautiful place to live in, but that “human nature” will always be a barrier to its establishment, because humans are “by nature” greedy, selfish and aggressive. It quickly becomes apparent that what they are describing is not human nature as such, but various traits of human behaviour exhibited under particular circumstances. Socialists maintain that human behaviour is determined by the kind of system people are conditioned to live in—that it is not our consciousness that determines our social existence, the way we behave, but that our social existence determines our consciousness. Nobody is born a racist or a patriot, a bigot or with a belief in gods. Nobody is born a murderer, a robber or a rapist, and our alleged greed for money is no more a function of the natural human thought process than were slavery or witch burning.
In general, the ideas the common people hold have been acquired second-hand, passed down from the ruling class above us. This is because the class which owns and controls the productive process, also controls the intellectual life process in general. Any anti-social behaviour is likewise determined by our position in the relations of production and in general by our social circumstances at any given time, ie. when we are poor, depressed, lonely, angry and frustrated.
In most cases, those who produce the world’s wealth (some 95 percent of the world's population) have had that second-rate education that makes free-thought preclusive—an upbringing that conditions us to accept without question the ideas of our betters and superiors. Indeed, the education system is so geared as to perpetuate the rule of an elite, insofar as it never encourages children to question and take issue with the status quo. Children may well cite that 8 times 8 equals 64, but how many will ask about the cause of wars or query the destruction of food?
Socialists hold that because we can adapt our behaviour, the desire to cooperate should not be viewed as irrational. We hold that humans are, “by nature”, cooperative and that we work best when faced with the worst and that our humanity shines through when the odds are stacked against us. There are millions of cases of people donating their blood and organs to complete strangers, sacrificing their lives for others, of people giving countless hours of their free time to charitable work—all of this without financial incentive. There is even the case of a man throwing himself on top of a grenade to protect children in a school yard. He died to protect children, none of which were his own, and in the instant knowledge that his action was suicidal.
Today, world capitalism threatens the human race with extinction. The reason this obnoxious system survives is because we have been conditioned to accept it, not born to perpetuate it. Rest assured, no gene inclines us to defend the profit system.
Again, many we come into contact with tell us that socialism has already been tried and has failed. They then point to the former Soviet Union, to China, Cuba and a dozen other states that claimed to have established “socialism”. What they fail to grasp is that socialism has existed nowhere, and that what existed - being passed off as socialism—was in fact state capitalism, not socialism or communism (which mean the same thing). A cursory glance at the affairs of these countries reveals they never abolished the wages system. The rulers exploited their workers and outlawed dissent. They produced when only viable to do so, maintained commodity production, traded according to the dictates of international capital and, like every other capitalist state, were prepared to go to war to defend their economic interests. Moreover, in all of these countries, it was believed that socialism could be established by force, that socialism could exist in one country. The Leninists who carried out the Bolshevik Revolution maintained that the revolution could only be carried out by a vanguard, that the masses were too ignorant to understand the case for change.
Since 1904, our movement has maintained that socialism, like capitalism, can only exist on a global scale, and that it will only come about when a majority of the world's people want it and are prepared to organise for it peacefully and democratically, in their own interests and without leaders. No vanguard, no party can establish socialism—the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”.
Who are the workers?
But who is the “working class”? Agreeing with Marx, we believe that there are two classes in society—the working class and the capitalist class, each one determined by its position in the relations of production. The capitalist class own and control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, living like parasites off profits, rent and interest. The working class, other than possessions we have purchased with our own sweat, own little more than our ability to sell our physical and mental abilities to the highest bidder. There is no “middle class” and view the working class as being inclusive of tradesmen, land workers, doctors, lawyers and teachers—anyone, indeed, who must sell their mental and physical energies to survive.
This class, the working class—not the capitalist class—runs the world and it's important to grasp this fact. It is we who fish the oceans and tend the forests and till the land and plantations. It is we who build the cities and railroads, the bridges and roads, the docks and airports. It is we who staff the hospitals and schools, who empty the bins and go down the sewers. It is we, the working class, who produce everything society needs from a pin to an oil-rig, who provide all of its services. If we can do all of this off our own bats, then surely we can continue to do so without a profit-greedy minority watching over us and, more, in our own interests.
The ruling class, the capitalists and their executive, the governments of the world, have no monopoly on our skills and abilities. These belong to us. Moreover, it is we who are responsible for the inventions that have benefited humanity and the improvements in productive techniques. Most inventions and improvements are the result of those who do the actual work thinking up easier and faster ways of completing a task, the result of ideas being passed down from generation to generation, each one improving the techniques of the previous. If those who work have given the world so much, in the past say 2000 years, then how much more are we capable of providing in a world devoid of the artificial constraints of profit, in a world devoid of oppression and coercion?
Capitalism must be abolished
It is easy to cite the advances of capitalism over previous economic systems. Many people believe that capitalism, though not perfect, is the only system possible. One thing is certain, though—if we follow the capitalist trajectory, we’re in for some pretty troublesome times. Capitalism has undoubtedly raised the productive potential of humanity. It is now quite possible to provide a comfortable standard of living for every human on the planet. But, to reiterate, capitalism now stands as a barrier to the full and improved use of the world’s productive and distributive forces. In a world of potential abundance, the unceasing quest for profit imposes on our global society widespread artificial scarcity. Hundreds of millions of humans are consigned to a life of abject poverty, whilst the majority live lives filled with uncertainty.
Our ability to imagine has brought us so very far, from the days when our ancestors chipped away at flint to produce the first tools, to the landing of someone on the moon, the setting up of the world wide web, and the mapping out of the human genome. Is it really such a huge leap of the imagination to now envisage a social system that can take over from the present capitalist order of things? Is it just too daring to imagine humans consigning poverty, disease, hunger and war to some pre-historic age?
Do we really need leaders deciding our lives for us? Do we really need governments administering our lives when what is really needed is the administration of the things we need to live in peace and security? Must every decision made by our elites be first of all weighed on the scales of profit, tilted always in their favour? A growing number think not and have mobilised to confront what they perceive to be the major problems of contemporary capitalism.
In recent years there has been a world-wide backlash against neoliberal globalisation, corporate power and the iniquities of modern-day capitalism. Everywhere where the world’s ruling elite have assembled to decide their next step they have been met with protests and demonstrations that have attracted hundreds of thousands. Demonstrations at Seattle, Gothenburg, Prague and Genoa, for instance, have fuelled the ongoing debate on the nature of modern day capitalism. Thousands of articles have been written on the subject and hundreds of books have been published that explore the alternatives offered by the anti-globalisation movement.
What is now clear is that the anti-globalisation movement, however well meaning, does not seek to replace capitalism with any real alternative social system. At best it attracts a myriad of groups, all pursuing their own agenda. Some call for greater corporate responsibility. Some demand the reform of international institutions. Others call for the expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions. All, however, fail to address the root cause of the problems of capitalism.
One thing is certain: capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the world’s suffering billions, because reform does not address the basic contradiction between profit and need. The world’s leaders cannot be depended upon because they can only ever act as the executive of corporate capitalism. The expansion of democracy, while welcome, serves little function if all candidates at election time can only offer variations on the same set of policies.
Capitalism must be abolished, if we as a species are to thrive, if the planet is to survive. No amount of reform, however great, will work. Change must be global and irreversible. It must involve all of us. We need to erase borders and frontiers; to abolish states and governments and false concepts of nationalism. We need to abolish our money systems, and with it buying, selling and exchange. And in place of this we need to establish a different global social system - a society in which there is common ownership and true democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources. A society where the everyday things we need to live in comfort are produced and distributed freely and for no other reason than that they are needed. Socialism.
It is now no utopian fantasy to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. That much is assured. We certainly have the science, the technology and the know-how. All that is missing is the will—the global desire for change that can make that next great historical advance possible; a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny; a belief that it is possible to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to fashion a world in our own interests. And how soon this happens depends upon us all—each and every one of us.
14/12/2004
Starvation
Sent to the Shields Gazette, 14/12/04
Dear Sir,
More than one billion children, that's half of the world's population of children, suffer from poverty, violent conflict and the scourge of AIDS, the United Nations Children's Fund has just reported (the report can be downloaded in PDF format at: http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_2005_(English).pdf)
Eight years after the promise to halve the number of the world's starving the figure is not budging. One child is dying from hunger according to the UN every 5 seconds. Its a startling figure. It means 17,280 child deaths every day from hunger. Where the two minute silence for this daily massacre? Indeed those two minutes, two minutes of inactivity, would see an extra 24 deaths added to the figure.
It is possible to read the figures on the world's hungry and to regard them in a very dispassionate way. There are many such lists of dead. Most of us cannot fail to be shocked at the number of 50 million who died in the Second World War. That number is horrendous but the numbers who die from lack of food are relentless - a holocaust that kills its victims every day of every year with no end in sight!
Unlike the casualties of the violence in New York back in 2001, the deaths from hunger are not the material of media drama. This is a silent outrage which is mostly ignored. It is of course impossible to take in the suffering of the millions of families who go into mourning every year over the death of a child because of starvation – over 800 million children since the FAO was set up in 1945, so I am informed. The total number is incalculable, but must approach 2 billion. Those who are better off are not uncaring but pre-occupied, pursuing their own daily struggles. We are driven by an economic individualism that provides us with little freedom to act effectively as a community.
The reason there are so many hungry is that under capitalism they do not constitute a market. The system Bair, Bush and their ilk defend says: "can't pay, can't have". Neither is it sound business sense giving millions of tons of food away free. It is far more logical to destroy tens of millions of tons of food each year and to pay farmers to take land out of production to keep prices high. It makes more sense for the West to have poor countries producing cash crops such as coffee and cocoa to pay off their debts than to produce food for their own people.
It is not so many years ago that The Gazette ran a lead story (I still have the clipping) about the cost to the EU of destroying their fruit and vegetable surplus of 3 million tons. It was £56 million. Of course it had to be destroyed. Were it allowed on to the market then the price of food would have come down and profits would have been hammered and that just would not do.
Were a child on South Tyneside to die of hunger, The Gazette would run the story on the front page. Parents, school teachers and social workers would be called to account. 17,000 die and the story is buried away on the inside page of the tabloids and, furthermore, totally devoid of any analysis.
Pop bands might well get together and re-release "Do they know it's Christmas?" in the hope that charitable donations will address the problem of hunger in Africa. But clearly it does not as the figures for global hunger have increased about 40 million since the record was first released in the 80s. I can only ask of those buying the record: "Do they know it's Capitalism?"
Yours,
John B
More than one billion children, that's half of the world's population of children, suffer from poverty, violent conflict and the scourge of AIDS, the United Nations Children's Fund has just reported (the report can be downloaded in PDF format at: http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_2005_(English).pdf)
Eight years after the promise to halve the number of the world's starving the figure is not budging. One child is dying from hunger according to the UN every 5 seconds. Its a startling figure. It means 17,280 child deaths every day from hunger. Where the two minute silence for this daily massacre? Indeed those two minutes, two minutes of inactivity, would see an extra 24 deaths added to the figure.
It is possible to read the figures on the world's hungry and to regard them in a very dispassionate way. There are many such lists of dead. Most of us cannot fail to be shocked at the number of 50 million who died in the Second World War. That number is horrendous but the numbers who die from lack of food are relentless - a holocaust that kills its victims every day of every year with no end in sight!
Unlike the casualties of the violence in New York back in 2001, the deaths from hunger are not the material of media drama. This is a silent outrage which is mostly ignored. It is of course impossible to take in the suffering of the millions of families who go into mourning every year over the death of a child because of starvation – over 800 million children since the FAO was set up in 1945, so I am informed. The total number is incalculable, but must approach 2 billion. Those who are better off are not uncaring but pre-occupied, pursuing their own daily struggles. We are driven by an economic individualism that provides us with little freedom to act effectively as a community.
The reason there are so many hungry is that under capitalism they do not constitute a market. The system Bair, Bush and their ilk defend says: "can't pay, can't have". Neither is it sound business sense giving millions of tons of food away free. It is far more logical to destroy tens of millions of tons of food each year and to pay farmers to take land out of production to keep prices high. It makes more sense for the West to have poor countries producing cash crops such as coffee and cocoa to pay off their debts than to produce food for their own people.
It is not so many years ago that The Gazette ran a lead story (I still have the clipping) about the cost to the EU of destroying their fruit and vegetable surplus of 3 million tons. It was £56 million. Of course it had to be destroyed. Were it allowed on to the market then the price of food would have come down and profits would have been hammered and that just would not do.
Were a child on South Tyneside to die of hunger, The Gazette would run the story on the front page. Parents, school teachers and social workers would be called to account. 17,000 die and the story is buried away on the inside page of the tabloids and, furthermore, totally devoid of any analysis.
Pop bands might well get together and re-release "Do they know it's Christmas?" in the hope that charitable donations will address the problem of hunger in Africa. But clearly it does not as the figures for global hunger have increased about 40 million since the record was first released in the 80s. I can only ask of those buying the record: "Do they know it's Capitalism?"
Yours,
John B
09/11/2004
Bush the moralist?
Sent to The Shields Gazette, 9/11/04
Dear Sir,
DS (8th November) says she favoured Bush in the US elections because of his moral stances.
I can only assume Miss S has been living on Mars these past four years.
Since becoming President, Bush has broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history. He has had the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission. and withdrawn the U.S. from the World Court of Law.
He has refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby has refused to abide by the Geneva Convention. He has appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history. He is the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, preemptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation, doing so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community. he has cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in wartime.
On the environment, Bush's record is appalling. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In his first three years, the Bush administration initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of his country's air, water, public lands and wildlife.
Turning to women, Bush has dismantled efforts to ensure equal pay for equal work. He eliminated the Equal Pay Initiative, a program designed to expand federal enforcement against discriminatory practices that threaten equal pay for women and minorities. To make matters worse, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has weakened enforcement of the laws against job discrimination and even abandoned pending sex discrimination suits without notice or explanation. according to the National Women’s Law Center. Furthermore, Bush tried to close Department of Labor Offices charged with protecting women in the workplace
As governor of Texas he set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history. He still adamantly supports execution and has removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in U.S. history.
Bush a moralist? His administration has been the most corrupt, secretive and unnaccountable in US history. If there is anything missing from the Bush administration, it is most definitely morality. He presides over the most inhumane, uncaring, self-centred administration ever. Indeed, I believe he could even have given Hitler a few pointers.
DS (8th November) says she favoured Bush in the US elections because of his moral stances.
I can only assume Miss S has been living on Mars these past four years.
Since becoming President, Bush has broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history. He has had the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission. and withdrawn the U.S. from the World Court of Law.
He has refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby has refused to abide by the Geneva Convention. He has appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history. He is the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, preemptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation, doing so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community. he has cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in wartime.
On the environment, Bush's record is appalling. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In his first three years, the Bush administration initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of his country's air, water, public lands and wildlife.
Turning to women, Bush has dismantled efforts to ensure equal pay for equal work. He eliminated the Equal Pay Initiative, a program designed to expand federal enforcement against discriminatory practices that threaten equal pay for women and minorities. To make matters worse, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has weakened enforcement of the laws against job discrimination and even abandoned pending sex discrimination suits without notice or explanation. according to the National Women’s Law Center. Furthermore, Bush tried to close Department of Labor Offices charged with protecting women in the workplace
As governor of Texas he set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history. He still adamantly supports execution and has removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in U.S. history.
Bush a moralist? His administration has been the most corrupt, secretive and unnaccountable in US history. If there is anything missing from the Bush administration, it is most definitely morality. He presides over the most inhumane, uncaring, self-centred administration ever. Indeed, I believe he could even have given Hitler a few pointers.
Yours,
JB
08/11/2004
Joe Hill
Almost 85 years ago, on November 19th, 1915, Joe Hill, a rootless, unasuming migratory worker and memberof the IWW was executed by a five man firing squad in the prison yard of Utah State Penitentiary for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City grocer and his son in January 1914. Though the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence was used to convict Hill, his guilt still remains a matter of controversy,, though should not really concern us here.
The facts themselves are pretty much straight forward. On the night of January 10th, 1915, one John Morrison, a former policeman, and his two sons, Aveling and Merlin, were closing their store when two men wearing red bandanas forced their way in shouting:"we've got you now." The commotion that followed resulted in the deaths of Morrison and his son Aveling and the wounding of one of the intruders, shot incidentally, by Aveling.
Five miles away and two hours later, Joe Hill turned up at the office of Dr FN McHugh, bleeding from a bullet wound in the chest. Hill informed the doctor before being treated and driven to the Eselius household (home of known IWW activists) that he had sustained the injury in an argument over a woman.
McHugh then informed the police of the visit and agreed to take part in Hill's capture.Three days later, McHugh turned up at the Eselius household to check on Hill's wound, drugging him in the process. Once Hill was drowsy, the police burst in, shot him in the hand and arrested him.
Although Hill's trial was a long way off, the police and press had already found him guilty of the murders. Only 10 days after his arrest, the Mormon-controlled press began a series of articles vilifying Hill, lambasting his songs as 'inflamatory' and 'sacriligous' and mounting a panic campaign about the IWW menace to Salt Lake City, a campaign that would continue right up to the trial date five months later and right on through it.
From the offset, the trial itself made a mockery of the US judicial system. None of the witnesses, including Merlin Morrison, only yards away when the incident took place, identified Hill as the assassin.No evidence suggested Hill had ever met Morrison or had a grievance against him.The gun McHugh claimed to have saw at his surgery (the handle of the same only) was never recovered and the slug that allegedly passed through Hill's body whilst in the store was never found.
Hill had maintained that he had been shot whilst his hands were raised above his head and this seemed to fit with the evidence presented to the court, that the hole in his coat was four inches lower than the bullet hole in his back.As no money had been stolen during the incident, no motive could be established and no concern was given to the fact that 12 other men had been arrested before Hill in relation to the crime or to the report that that same evening another four men had suffered bullet wounds in Salt Lake City.
Hill's obstinacy and refusal to answer questions during the trial did not help his case.Feeling under no obligation to explain his injury in detail, other than maintaining it was the result of a feud over a woman, he insisted upon the principle that he was innocent until proven guilty.
Moreover, Hill fired his defence team, citing their incompetence in cross-examining witnesses and failing to object to leading questions from the District Attorney. Only days before the jury found Hill guilty did a leading labour lawyer, O N Hilton step in, but to little avail. The death sentence was passed.
During his 22 months in prison, Hill kept himself busy writing articles, poems and the songs that had already made him a popular figure.Outside, the campaign to free Hill involved workers the world over, attracted tens of thousands of letters, petitons and resolutions. And whilst the IWW were only too happy to fully back the campaign, Hill objected to his lawyer: "I cannot expect my friends to starve themselves in order to save my life."
The labour movement was not alone in backing the Hill campaign, for it went on to involve the Committee of Californian Women, Virginia Snow Stephen, the daughter of the president of the Mormons (who was later thrown out of the faculty of he University for her pains) and the Swedish minister to the US. The acting US Secretary of State urged a reprieve and twice President Wilson asked Governor William Spry of Utah to reconsider the case.
Spry was having none of it, the stay of executions and appeals to the parole board seemingly a gesture to popular protest. Spry was himself a leading Mormon and had vowed at the time his political clique ousted the right-wing anti-Mormon American Party in 1913 "to sweep out lawless elements, whether they be corrupt businessmen or IWW agitators." The same Spry who had broken a srike by Western Federation of Mineworkers and allowed the Utah Copper Company to import strikebreakers and to hire an army of gunmen to guard them.
The facts themselves are pretty much straight forward. On the night of January 10th, 1915, one John Morrison, a former policeman, and his two sons, Aveling and Merlin, were closing their store when two men wearing red bandanas forced their way in shouting:"we've got you now." The commotion that followed resulted in the deaths of Morrison and his son Aveling and the wounding of one of the intruders, shot incidentally, by Aveling.
Five miles away and two hours later, Joe Hill turned up at the office of Dr FN McHugh, bleeding from a bullet wound in the chest. Hill informed the doctor before being treated and driven to the Eselius household (home of known IWW activists) that he had sustained the injury in an argument over a woman.
McHugh then informed the police of the visit and agreed to take part in Hill's capture.Three days later, McHugh turned up at the Eselius household to check on Hill's wound, drugging him in the process. Once Hill was drowsy, the police burst in, shot him in the hand and arrested him.
Although Hill's trial was a long way off, the police and press had already found him guilty of the murders. Only 10 days after his arrest, the Mormon-controlled press began a series of articles vilifying Hill, lambasting his songs as 'inflamatory' and 'sacriligous' and mounting a panic campaign about the IWW menace to Salt Lake City, a campaign that would continue right up to the trial date five months later and right on through it.
From the offset, the trial itself made a mockery of the US judicial system. None of the witnesses, including Merlin Morrison, only yards away when the incident took place, identified Hill as the assassin.No evidence suggested Hill had ever met Morrison or had a grievance against him.The gun McHugh claimed to have saw at his surgery (the handle of the same only) was never recovered and the slug that allegedly passed through Hill's body whilst in the store was never found.
Hill had maintained that he had been shot whilst his hands were raised above his head and this seemed to fit with the evidence presented to the court, that the hole in his coat was four inches lower than the bullet hole in his back.As no money had been stolen during the incident, no motive could be established and no concern was given to the fact that 12 other men had been arrested before Hill in relation to the crime or to the report that that same evening another four men had suffered bullet wounds in Salt Lake City.
Hill's obstinacy and refusal to answer questions during the trial did not help his case.Feeling under no obligation to explain his injury in detail, other than maintaining it was the result of a feud over a woman, he insisted upon the principle that he was innocent until proven guilty.
Moreover, Hill fired his defence team, citing their incompetence in cross-examining witnesses and failing to object to leading questions from the District Attorney. Only days before the jury found Hill guilty did a leading labour lawyer, O N Hilton step in, but to little avail. The death sentence was passed.
During his 22 months in prison, Hill kept himself busy writing articles, poems and the songs that had already made him a popular figure.Outside, the campaign to free Hill involved workers the world over, attracted tens of thousands of letters, petitons and resolutions. And whilst the IWW were only too happy to fully back the campaign, Hill objected to his lawyer: "I cannot expect my friends to starve themselves in order to save my life."
The labour movement was not alone in backing the Hill campaign, for it went on to involve the Committee of Californian Women, Virginia Snow Stephen, the daughter of the president of the Mormons (who was later thrown out of the faculty of he University for her pains) and the Swedish minister to the US. The acting US Secretary of State urged a reprieve and twice President Wilson asked Governor William Spry of Utah to reconsider the case.
Spry was having none of it, the stay of executions and appeals to the parole board seemingly a gesture to popular protest. Spry was himself a leading Mormon and had vowed at the time his political clique ousted the right-wing anti-Mormon American Party in 1913 "to sweep out lawless elements, whether they be corrupt businessmen or IWW agitators." The same Spry who had broken a srike by Western Federation of Mineworkers and allowed the Utah Copper Company to import strikebreakers and to hire an army of gunmen to guard them.
Spry was all too aware that it was the IWW that had upset Utah's ruling elite by organising workers in the employ of the Utah Construction Company in which the Mormon community had hefty financial interests. In June of 1913, the Wobs had organised a strike among 1500 workers on the UTC's Denver Rio Grande railroad. The company hired scab labour but trainmen helped keep them at bay by demanding IWW membership. Eventually the company was forced to yield, prompting one official to retort: 'before the end of the year, every single IWW will be run out of the state.' With police cooperation, gunmen were deputised, IWW meetings violently broken up and their speakers arrested and jailed on charges of 'inciting to riot.'
Len De Caux, in The Living Spirit of the Wobblies (1978), summed up the mood of the times in Utah, describing how 'an employer-based clerical-rightist regime dominated politics, press and courts. It blamed the IWW both for stirring up workers against bosses and for its radical irreverence towards established convention.'
Hill's lawyer commented: 'the main thing the state had on Hill was that he was an IWW and therefore sure to be guilty. Hill tried to keep the IWW out of it [the trial]...but the press fastened it upon him.'
Hill was never a leader or an organiser as such for the IWW. He was largely uneducated and never drank or smoke and was not known to the police prior to his arrest. He was however an activist and the author of many a song that the community he lived in at the time of his arrest would have found nauseating. In his three years as an activist for the IWW he had taken part in the 1910 San Pedro dock workers' strike, the San Diego Free Speech campaign, the abortive 'revolution' in Tia Juana intended to make California into a commune and fought alongside the rebels in the Mexican Revolution of 1911. This was enough to ensure his guilt, regardless of the evidence presented at his trial.
The death sentence hanging over him, Hill remained cheerful and calm until the end, embarrassed by the campaign to save him. Just before his death he wrote a brief letter to leading IWW organiser Big Bill Haywood: "Goodbye, Bill, I die a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning. Organise!"
As was customary in Utah, condemned prisoners were given a chance to choose their method of execution. Hill chose the firing squad. Legend has it that strapped into his chair, Hill even denied his executioners the chance of giving the order to fire, shouting the command himself.
30,000 people attended his funeral in Chicago, after which his ashes were placed into small envelopes and scattered to the winds in every state of the union and all over the world on May Day 1916.
Of his funeral, the Desert Evening News reported: "No creed or religion found a place at the service. There were no prayers and no hymns, but there was a mighty chorus of voices singing songs written by Hill.." A reporter on the same paper asked: "What kind of man is this, whose death is celebrated with songs of revolt and who has at his bier more mourners than any prince or potentate?"
The answer was simple. There was nothing 'great' about Hill. He was a man of simple tastes, a member of the working class with an ingrained hatred of the system that impoverished the lives of his fellows, but with a unique ability to condense the arguments against injustice into songs with memorable tunes. Moreover, he stood as a symbol of the lengths the master class would go to silence those bent on helping win the world for the workers.
For 85 years workers the world over have sang the songs of Hill, whether it be Casey Jones the Union Scab, The Preacher and the Slave or Dump the Bosses of your Back. As his anniversary approaches, we have every reason to believe the same will be echoed until the last nail has been belted into the coffin we bury capitalism in.
Len De Caux, in The Living Spirit of the Wobblies (1978), summed up the mood of the times in Utah, describing how 'an employer-based clerical-rightist regime dominated politics, press and courts. It blamed the IWW both for stirring up workers against bosses and for its radical irreverence towards established convention.'
Hill's lawyer commented: 'the main thing the state had on Hill was that he was an IWW and therefore sure to be guilty. Hill tried to keep the IWW out of it [the trial]...but the press fastened it upon him.'
Hill was never a leader or an organiser as such for the IWW. He was largely uneducated and never drank or smoke and was not known to the police prior to his arrest. He was however an activist and the author of many a song that the community he lived in at the time of his arrest would have found nauseating. In his three years as an activist for the IWW he had taken part in the 1910 San Pedro dock workers' strike, the San Diego Free Speech campaign, the abortive 'revolution' in Tia Juana intended to make California into a commune and fought alongside the rebels in the Mexican Revolution of 1911. This was enough to ensure his guilt, regardless of the evidence presented at his trial.
The death sentence hanging over him, Hill remained cheerful and calm until the end, embarrassed by the campaign to save him. Just before his death he wrote a brief letter to leading IWW organiser Big Bill Haywood: "Goodbye, Bill, I die a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning. Organise!"
As was customary in Utah, condemned prisoners were given a chance to choose their method of execution. Hill chose the firing squad. Legend has it that strapped into his chair, Hill even denied his executioners the chance of giving the order to fire, shouting the command himself.
30,000 people attended his funeral in Chicago, after which his ashes were placed into small envelopes and scattered to the winds in every state of the union and all over the world on May Day 1916.
Of his funeral, the Desert Evening News reported: "No creed or religion found a place at the service. There were no prayers and no hymns, but there was a mighty chorus of voices singing songs written by Hill.." A reporter on the same paper asked: "What kind of man is this, whose death is celebrated with songs of revolt and who has at his bier more mourners than any prince or potentate?"
The answer was simple. There was nothing 'great' about Hill. He was a man of simple tastes, a member of the working class with an ingrained hatred of the system that impoverished the lives of his fellows, but with a unique ability to condense the arguments against injustice into songs with memorable tunes. Moreover, he stood as a symbol of the lengths the master class would go to silence those bent on helping win the world for the workers.
For 85 years workers the world over have sang the songs of Hill, whether it be Casey Jones the Union Scab, The Preacher and the Slave or Dump the Bosses of your Back. As his anniversary approaches, we have every reason to believe the same will be echoed until the last nail has been belted into the coffin we bury capitalism in.
13/10/2004
US Elections
Sent to the Shields Gazette, 13/10/04
Dear Sir,
What difference will the victory of one candidate over another in the presidential election really make to the ordinary American? The short answer must be very little. In practice the election is little more than a public relations exercise where American people are given their ‘sixty seconds of democracy’ to select an emissary of the owning class to safeguard and, if possible, to expand its class interests over the next four years. Since the function will be to represent the owning class, the victor and his government will have to pursue policies that ‘stimulate’ profit regardless of the hardships this may cause the wider population. At the same time they must appear to represent the interest and welfare of the wider population. This profit imperative is not because the election is being held in America but because the world’s dominant economic system is the profit system (capitalism) and any election to government in society as presently constituted involves choosing one of the political parties that embrace the ideology of capitalism.
In the quest to preserve the pretence that the average American has a real stake, control of public opinion is crucial. So the media functions to peddle distortions and untruths that blur this reality, to keep public opinion placid and render ordinary working people isolated and ineffective, so leaving the interests of the ruling class unchallenged and supreme. The US media add credence to the myth that the Presidential election carries real choice by eagerly analysing every minute perceived difference between the candidates, bombarding the electorate with patriotic rhetoric and fine sounding ‘promises’ while enthusiastically expounding the lie that the candidates share a common interest with ordinary working people. Their propaganda is heavily loaded with corporate and business ideology and praise for the virtues of the ‘free-market system,’ designed to perpetuate the fallacy that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, indeed synonymous. Whether the American electorate will choose George W. Bush or John Kerry is at this stage difficult to determine. What is incontestable is that the outcome will not be of benefit to the America’s (or the world’s) wage and salary earning class over the next four years.
Yours,
JB
Dear Sir,
What difference will the victory of one candidate over another in the presidential election really make to the ordinary American? The short answer must be very little. In practice the election is little more than a public relations exercise where American people are given their ‘sixty seconds of democracy’ to select an emissary of the owning class to safeguard and, if possible, to expand its class interests over the next four years. Since the function will be to represent the owning class, the victor and his government will have to pursue policies that ‘stimulate’ profit regardless of the hardships this may cause the wider population. At the same time they must appear to represent the interest and welfare of the wider population. This profit imperative is not because the election is being held in America but because the world’s dominant economic system is the profit system (capitalism) and any election to government in society as presently constituted involves choosing one of the political parties that embrace the ideology of capitalism.
In the quest to preserve the pretence that the average American has a real stake, control of public opinion is crucial. So the media functions to peddle distortions and untruths that blur this reality, to keep public opinion placid and render ordinary working people isolated and ineffective, so leaving the interests of the ruling class unchallenged and supreme. The US media add credence to the myth that the Presidential election carries real choice by eagerly analysing every minute perceived difference between the candidates, bombarding the electorate with patriotic rhetoric and fine sounding ‘promises’ while enthusiastically expounding the lie that the candidates share a common interest with ordinary working people. Their propaganda is heavily loaded with corporate and business ideology and praise for the virtues of the ‘free-market system,’ designed to perpetuate the fallacy that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, indeed synonymous. Whether the American electorate will choose George W. Bush or John Kerry is at this stage difficult to determine. What is incontestable is that the outcome will not be of benefit to the America’s (or the world’s) wage and salary earning class over the next four years.
Yours,
JB
05/10/2004
Civilisation
Sent to the Shields Gazette, 5/10/04
Dear Sir,
Out with the branch stall recently, I was drawn into a debate with one punter who called me an enemy of civilisation becasue I believed in a society without prisons, police and armies. I wasn't offended, I was was flattered. He had unwittingly hit the nail right on the head. Socialists are indeed opponents of civilisation. We favour an uncivilised alternative to the detestable "law and order" of the present social system.
When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilisation he replied that it would be a good idea if they ever tried it. Civilisation as the vast majority refer to it is that period of history in which the tyranny of property has prevailed. To be civilised is to submit oneself to a structure of power based upon the ownership and control of property by a minority. Civilised morality is an ethic of reverence for those who possess. Civilised law and order prevail as long as propert is safe.
Civilisation is the killing and maiming of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the release of tens of thousands of bombs on Dresden and a single catastrophic bomb over Hiroshima. Civilisation is prison officers beating up inmates, police charging lines of pickets, batons raised. It is the sound of tractors ploughing millions of tons of vegetables and fruit into the ground because too much has been produced and the sound of the malnourished orphan crying beside his decomposing parents on some African wasteland. Civiliation is the stench of pollutants in the air and its corruptable taste in the food we eat.It echoes in every ill that plagues humanity.
Yes I am opposed to Western "ciilisation" and I'm for a world devoid of waste, want and war, where people commonly own and democratically controll the earth's natural and industrial resources and in which they will have free access to the benefits of civilisation. This, though, is not being civilised, but being utopian and indulging, I am told, in a futile battle against immutable reality.
Yours,
JBWhen Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilisation he replied that it would be a good idea if they ever tried it. Civilisation as the vast majority refer to it is that period of history in which the tyranny of property has prevailed. To be civilised is to submit oneself to a structure of power based upon the ownership and control of property by a minority. Civilised morality is an ethic of reverence for those who possess. Civilised law and order prevail as long as propert is safe.
Civilisation is the killing and maiming of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the release of tens of thousands of bombs on Dresden and a single catastrophic bomb over Hiroshima. Civilisation is prison officers beating up inmates, police charging lines of pickets, batons raised. It is the sound of tractors ploughing millions of tons of vegetables and fruit into the ground because too much has been produced and the sound of the malnourished orphan crying beside his decomposing parents on some African wasteland. Civiliation is the stench of pollutants in the air and its corruptable taste in the food we eat.It echoes in every ill that plagues humanity.
Yes I am opposed to Western "ciilisation" and I'm for a world devoid of waste, want and war, where people commonly own and democratically controll the earth's natural and industrial resources and in which they will have free access to the benefits of civilisation. This, though, is not being civilised, but being utopian and indulging, I am told, in a futile battle against immutable reality.
Yours,
The Socialist Party
15/09/2004
Palestinian nationalism
Sent to the Shields Gazette, 15/9/04
Dear Sir,
Many on the political ‘left’ will argue that Palestinian nationalism is somehow progressive and different to Israeli nationalism and should therefore be supported. As a socialist, I say that this is a dangerous poison that is being spread by the left and that no side engaged in such conflict can either speak for the working class as a whole or be an example to it.
John B
The Socialist Party
Dear Sir,
As I write, Palestinian and Israeli workers continue to butcher one another in a senseless round of tit-for-tat atrocities.
Many on the political ‘left’ will argue that Palestinian nationalism is somehow progressive and different to Israeli nationalism and should therefore be supported. As a socialist, I say that this is a dangerous poison that is being spread by the left and that no side engaged in such conflict can either speak for the working class as a whole or be an example to it.
History is replete with minorities in existing states using terrorist methods so that a new state may be formed or territory transferred from the “ownership” of one state to another. The working class of wage and salary earners is never in a position to benefit from this process; it is only in a position to suffer. The working class – by definition the class that does not possess any significant titles to land or private property, including capital – has quite literally nothing to gain from a situation where one group of rulers and owners is replaced by another group.
In the 19th century, when the modern capitalist system was expanding across the globe, “national liberation” struggles, typically led by a local growing capitalist class against the old autocratic empires, were part of the process which swept away the old political arrangements and opened the way forward for liberal democracy and the development of capitalist methods of production. It was often argued that it was in the interests of the working class during this time to take the side of the capitalists against the old autocracies like the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, etc. It was said that this process would open the way up for working class organisation and for the development of an advanced industrial system which is a prerequisite for a socialist society of abundance and free access to available wealth.
Since then, the capitalist system has become a world system. The alleged justification for the working class taking sides in 'national liberation' struggles has now gone if ever it existed and today all such struggles are just deadly battles between sections of the capitalist class, even though it is the workers – imbued with nationalist poison – that naturally enough end up doing the fighting and dying.
The goal of the socialist movement is not to assist in the creation of even more states and more nationalities, but to establish a real world community without frontiers where all states as they currently exist will be destroyed. In a socialist society, communities, towns and cities will have the opportunity to thrive – and people will no doubt feel an attachment to places that are real and tangible – but the 'imagined communities' that are nation states will be consigned to the history books where they belong.Yours,
John B
The Socialist Party
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