Talking about a revolution!

Did you know there was a revolution going on? If you had been watching and reading the corporate media you might have got some inkling but hardly the full picture. But lets look at some of the examples; the Arab Spring; Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia; Occupy in the USA; Protests in Russia; in Greece with SYRIZA; and in Spain, Italy, Ireland and the UK; Massive student protests in Chile and Canada. Many of these protests have been ignored by the media but this is a real revolution, and it is happening before our eyes if we care to look for it.

There is a revolution going on!

Why is this happening? - it is because the mass of ordinary people globally are sick and tired of  poverty, unemployment, and the cosy neoliberal stitch-up between commercial interests and tame 'free' market fundamentalist politicians and economists, which is destroying our economies and the planet. In our own small way, as individuals, we are all part of this revolution, but we need to come together as part of a wider international movement which can throw-off the sham democracies we live in, and bring about real and lasting change.That change must include democratic control of our economies and decent housing, healthcare, jobs and education for all.

In the UK, we have the "let them eat cake" politics of David Cameron, his banker friends, and his rotten, discredited Coalition government. In the USA, we have a battle between Obama and Romney, the former is marginally less bad than the latter but both are corporate creatures, dependent on big money to get elected. In Europe, we have Merkel and the sterile dead end of austerity, designed to protect the banks at the expense of the European taxpayers. People have had enough!

It is time for radical democratic change,  and the only way that change can happen is for people to channel their anger and throw off their apathy with the 'system', take to the streets, protest, and vote for parties that can bring about that change. The people of Egypt have shown us the way. In the UK, the Green Party is the only mainstream party which opposes the neoliberal paradigm and has the policies to make the breakthrough that people want. But the Party can only do that if it maintains its radical edge, engages with and works with the wider movement, and campaigns hard for change. Simply seeking electoral success is not enough. To make that breakthrough, we need to demonstrate that we are serious about the changes people want, and we must be able to take them with us. In Romayne Phoenix and Will Duckworth I think we have two leadership candidates for the Green Party who can accomplish that task.


Footnote: I will give my detailed views about the Green Party leadership contest in a later post.

We must Occupy the economy

The roller coaster ride of the world economic crisis continues. Elections in Greece and France have shifted the political ground slightly to the left, with a Socialist majority in France, and the spectacular result obtained by SYRIZA in coming second in Greece with about 27% of the vote. But the Eurozone crisis stumbles on and the 'free' market fundamentalists, the architects of the broken economic system, are still in the driving seat. Banks are bust and, under the current system, there is nothing to look forward to apart from years of economic stagnation at best. Meanwhile in the UK, millions are being pushed below the breadline by the governments cuts in benefits, tax credits, and increases in rents.

In 1966, the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy wrote a book, with Paul Baran, called Monopoly Capital, in which he said that the natural tendency of monopoly capitalism was economic stagnation, as capitalists struggled to use the surpluses of capital accumulation, and that they could only achieve this by increases in spend on marketing and defence spending, and increasing debt. Was Sweezy right? Its certainly true that US defence spending in WWII ended the Great Depression, and that a mountain of debt has been used to keep capitalism going in the past 30 years or so.

So what do we do? The market fundamentalists have no answer. They are like the mad person who repeats the same actions over again in Einsteins famous quote:

"Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results"

Einstein: described the madness of market fundamentalists

 
So we need an economic alternative. But what is that alternative? Neoliberalism, over the past 30 years has put commercial interests above democratic sovereignty. This has happened globally through organisations like the WTO and the European Union. We need to reverse this process and re-assert democratic control of our economy. This economic change must put governments in charge, actively planning and managing economic development, allow local decision making and create a mixed economy based on  genuine sustainable development to deal with ecological crises and halt endless growth. In the longer term the only answer to the domination of private commercial interests is to put the economy in the hands of the 99%. How can we do all that?

Firstly, we need to nationalise the bust banks that are hoovering up resources which need to be spent on creating jobs. Its a scandal that the UK's bust banks have been bailed out but are still in private hands. This must end, some banks must fold, and we need banks to be broken up to provide finance to small businesses, and local and regional banks which can focus on reviving local economies;

Secondly, we need to take the creation of credit out of private hands and put it under democratic control. Debt creation is too great a power to be left in the hands of private enterprise - this is what caused the current crash;

Thirdly, we need to take control of the big utilities such the energy and water companies, and sectors which rely on massive public subsidy to continue such as the railways;

Fourth, we must institute a programme of investment in our economy to create jobs through green quantitative easing and a Green New Deal;

Finally, and most importantly, we must break the power of the corporations by mutualising the economy, providing the finance to set up co-operatives and giving employees the power to buy-out the companies they work for and control them. This latter measure is crucial in putting economic power into the hands of ordinary people. We need to create a new culture of doing business in which people work together to create successful mutuals which are focused on local communities. Co-operatives have a better success rate than companies and they don't outsource downsize, or export jobs overseas.

Its a little known fact but there was an expansion of mutuals in the USA during the last Great Depression and there are many successful co-operatives both in the USA and here. It is a sector that is already growing. 130 million (yes that is million) people in the USA are now involved in mutuals and if you want to find out more detail read this previous post. You should also take a look at Gar Alperovitz's excellent book 'America beyond Capitalism' which gives practical examples of how the 99% in America are taking control of their economy from the bottom up by creating co-operatives. This is economic democracy in action and something we should celebrate.

Think it can't happen? Well, we have to make it happen. Its likely that the failure of the global banking system is going to mean that states are going to have to take a much bigger role in managing the economy now that the failures of the market have been exposed, and that people are going to be much more willing to trust democratic control and planning after they have experienced the privations of neoliberal austerity. If we want to really cure the malaise of neoliberalism and avoid the stagnation of monopoly capitalism we need to participate in the most important occupation of all, we need to Occupy the economy.

Lost cities of the moderns?

You are probably going to think that this is an odd post but bear with me. Last week I watched an episode of 'Lost Cities of the Ancients' on BBC Four. 500 years ago and more the people of the remote Lambayeque Valley in the Andes in Peru, built 250 Pyramids. The programme told the story of three periods of pyramid building, each of which lasted over 100 years, ending in the 1500s. Archeologists think that the people of the valley believed that  they could appease the gods by building pyramids, and by having a priesthood which engaged in rituals to keep the gods happy. Unfortunately the first stage of this civilisation was swept away by a flood, and the people set fire to the pyramids because they had failed to appease the gods. They then started again and built more pyramids but an another ecological disaster struck, and again the new pyramids were burned. In the final phase, at a place called Tucame, they built 26 pyramids, and it was invasion of Peru by the Spanish which struck terror into the people of the valley, even though the Spaniards never actually came to the valley. The priesthood embarked on a series of desperate rituals including human sacrifice but this failed to drive the invaders away, and finally, having failed, the people burned the pyramids. After that, the civilisation disappeared.

The Pyramids of Tucame

Watching that programme made me think of neoliberalism and the current crisis of capitalism. Capitalism has only been around 200 years or so, about half the time of the civilisation of the Lambayeque Valley. In that time there have been a number of major crises and each time the priests of the 'free' market have decreed that the only solution is 'more of the same', more and more 'free' market. That is where we are now. As we are threatened by the ecological crisis of climate change, our leaders are repeating the mistakes of the past just like the Lambayeque people did, and the faith of our economic and political 'priesthood' in the market is driving our civilisation towards an ecological catastrophe. In the current economic crisis of capitalism, it is the poor, disabled, sick and unemployed, and working and middle classes who are the sacrificial victims of the market.

I just wonder if, in a hundred years time, our descendants will gaze upon the ruins of New York, Moscow and London, and wonder at the stupidity of the leaders who repeated the same mistakes over and over again and drove our civilisation to destruction.

Liam Byrne's approach to 'welfare' is reactionary nonsense

Let me start by telling you a story - once upon a time there was a party in the UK called The Labour Party. It arose from the trade unions and working class struggle. Its focus was social justice, and its agenda was about decent healthcare, jobs, housing, worker's rights, and education. After World War II, in 1945, The Labour Party won a spectacular election victory, and came into power with a mandate which produced what became known as the 'Welfare State', the NHS, better (council) housing and educational opportunities for all. It aimed to protect people from the vagaries of the market, and it succeeded. Millions of ordinary UK citizens, like me, were lucky enough to benefit from those changes.

Now, The Labour Party is a hollowed out shell, filled with middle class career politicians and MPs who have been parachuted onto the green benches of parliament, because they are Ed and Tony's cronies, replacing most of the working class antecedents who once filled many of those places. It is a party in thrall to the market, a centre-right party promoting the most reactionary kind of right-wing populism. The last Labour government, which preferred to be called  'New Labour', eagerly adopted the 'benefit scrounger' stance promoted by right-wing propaganda sheets such as the Daily Mail, and Minister James Purnell introduced measures to bash benefit claimants and the unemployed.

Step forward in 2012, Liam Byrne, the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to give us Labour's latest welfare vision. Byrne talks about William Beveridge whose report, published in 1942, paved the way for the Welfare State. Beveridge proposed measures, which I outlined above, to fight the five - "Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". This was to be achieved by the concept of 'Social Security', in which ordinary people paid National Insurance so that when they became ill or unemployed they could rightly claim benefits from the state.  Those 'benefits' were not 'something for nothing', they were entitlements which people paid for. It was a great system and it worked, especially in the context of governments which aimed to create full employment, as Byrne concedes in his article.

But what Byrne goes on to say is pure 'free' market orthodoxy and a continuation of New Labour's 'benefit scroungers' stance, which is all about blaming the victims of the market for their pitiful situation. It is reactionary nonsense. Those unfortunate enough to be unemployed in an economy where the 'free' market has failed to create anything like full employment are to continue to be battered and forced into some kind of workfare programme, which is simply unwaged-slavery, where people are forced to work for corporations for nothing. I have no doubt that a decent bloke like Beveridge would be horrified by the way in which the concept of Social Security has been deliberately twisted and undermined by neoliberal parties like Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Tories, and the shameful way in which the unemployed, disabled and poor are now treated. But what is most shameful is the fact that the Labour Party has helped to destroy what it created, kicking people when they are down, so that the corporations and the rich can benefit from unwaged-slavery and tax cuts.

Cheshire West Against the Cuts: J30

On Thursday June 30th striking public sector workers and their supporters came together for a rally at the Town Hall in Chester. We had a  turnout of about 350 people and some very good speeches from trade unionists and CWAC supporters. All in all a very good day for the fightback against Cameron's class war government's attempt to make us pay for the failures of financial capitalism.



There is a lot more work to do but we are building resistance in an area which is hardly renowned for left or trade union activism. Long may it continue.

We are the economy

One of the things that I find utterly baffling and amusing, in a very darkly comic way, is the BBC's analysis of 'our' economy. I listen to Radio 4 because it is supposed to be a serious news station, with journalists who allegedly offer us a realistic analysis of the world we live in. I mean people like; Robert Peston, Stephanie Flanders and Nick Robinson. The problem I have with these people is that their analysis is fairly useless if you really want to understand the world we live in.

What we get offered is an 'orthodox' economic analysis. Just think -  "Middle Ages" and "Catholic Church" . Because that is really what it is like. If you think further you might even get to "Spanish Inquisition". Keep listening  to this stuff and you hear things like - blah IMF, blah blah, default, blah Euro, blah blah Mervyn King, blah blah the markets, etc etc - remember Bart Simpson and his teacher Ms Krabappel? That is what happens to me when I listen to this stuff. Is it because I am thick - or is it because I am hearing total bollox?

I'd like to argue it is the latter, and I'd like to argue that the BBC is little more than a propaganda station for the UK government, and the market. In fact, I'd like to argue that I know more about economics than Stephanie Flanders and  Robert Peston. Is that because I am a bighead? No, its because I am a worker. Remember them? Well, you probably are one if you are reading this.

All you need to know about economics is that all the wealth in the world is created by working people. By wealth I don't mean suitcases full of cash. What I mean is houses, cars, and iPods. I also mean services like teaching, passports, probation, and emptying the bins. This is stuff that we do. Without us, none of these things would happen. We are the world economy. Fuck the markets, they are irrelevant. We don't need them, but they need us, because they prey upon our labour like parasites. They contribute nothing that is socially or economically useful.

Tomorrow, public sector workers will go on strike. Without them there is no economy. Without teachers, our children won't be taught, without civil servants, you won't get a passport.  Whether private or public sector workers - without workers, as Marx explained, we have nothing, no wealth and no prosperity. We don't need bankers, or hedge fund mangers. We don't need the free market. These people and their gambling casino are irrelevant. This is our economy and its about time we took control of it. Support the public sectors workers pensions strike tomorrow, and make that the beginning of a peaceful revolution to bring us to a position where our economy really does belong to us.

The Greeks MUST default on 'their' debt

I came across this post by Mark Hudson yesterday on a blog called Naked Capitalism. It's an excellent description of how the failures of financial capitalism, which culminated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and threatened to bring down the world economy, are being used by the capitalist class to roll back all the democratic gains made in the past century by ordinary people. This is, as Naomi Klein has described, an economic shock doctrine - use a crisis to impose cuts in living standards on the mass of the people which they would ordinarily never accept.

Its worth a brief recap of how we got here. Financial deregulation since the 1970's, combined with an aggressive free market doctrine known as neo-liberalism, which originated in the Chicago School, have lead to banks and financial institutions such as hedge funds becoming out of democratic control in Western countries. At the same time the standard of living of all except the wealthiest has come under attack. The lack of controls on financial capitalism has lead to a series of economic crashes since the 1980s, each one worst than the last. These include; the Asian crisis, the dotcom boom, and the latest and greatest crisis since the crash of the Great Depression, which began in the USA with the collapse of subprime mortgages in 2006.

The latest crisis resulted in the virtual collapse of banks worldwide which was only halted by state intervention. What began as a crisis for the financial sector lead directly to the current sovereign debt crisis which we are now in. This sovereign debt crisis, in which taxpayers are being asked, once again, to bail out the financial system is being used as a weapon to impose neoliberalism on people in Europe and the USA. This means an attack on welfare, pensions, wages, workers rights, and environmental regulation, and privatisation of public services and state assets. This is driven not by economics but ideology. The aim is not to find a solution to the crisis but to use the shock of the crisis to destroy the standard of living of the mass of the population in the West. Those who gain from this will be the capitalist class.

Nowhere is this revealed more starkly at the moment than in Greece. The bailout of Greece, imposed last year to the tune of €110 billion, failed. The important point is that this bailout was only ever in tended to protect French and German banks, and other bondholders, and not the Greek people. Also of great importance was the desire to protect the great European single-state project know as the Euro. Of course the Greeks should never have been in the Euro. Without their own currency and the ability to set interest rates they were always going to struggle economically. Of course it can be argued that successive Greek governments mismanaged the economy and that the Greeks were living beyond their means but that misses the essential point. This is really about a coup d'etat, about financial technocrats and finance capitalists taking control. It is a struggle between democracy and capitalism.

The only way forward for the Greeks (and the Irish for that matter) is to default on their debts and leave the Euro. The alternative is the end of Greek democracy and the wholesale privatisation of the country at knock down prices. Greece will become a sovereign state and democracy in name only. As Mark Hudson said in his post; this is the road to financial serfdom;

"This new road to neoserfdom is an asset grab. But to achieve it, the financial sector needs a political grab to replace democracy with financial technocrats. Their job is to pretend that there is no revolution at all, merely an increase in “efficiency,” “creating wealth” by debt-leveraging the economy to the point where the entire surplus is paid out as interest to the financial managers who are emerging as Western civilization’s new central planners".

Welcome to 19th century free market capitalism

In previous posts I have talked about how neo-liberal 'free' market capitalism is a project which aims to take us back to the 19th Century. Privatisation, de-regulation, outsourcing, and labour market flexibility are all products of neo-liberalism. They are all intended to weaken the rights of working people and their ability to defend their standard of living.

We didn't just get the eight hour day, the weekend, pensions, paid holidays and decent working conditions given to us - our parents and grandparents had to fight for them against capitalist employers who had no intention of reducing their profits for our benefit. We made these gains through organisation, in trade unions and political parties which made democratic gains through the ballot box.

The intention of neoliberalism is to roll back all the gains that working people made, and that would take us back to the 19th century. Neo-liberal politics has been dominant in the west for a generation - it started with Nixon in the USA and Thatcher in the UK. As ever, the Americans are ahead of us. In the USA there are 40 million poor people living in conditions that we in the UK would find shocking. Wages for working people have been static in the USA since the late 1970s, whilst those for the wealthiest have continued to grow ever greater. This isn't about some kind of entrepreneurship as they would like you to think, this is about the rich screwing the people who make them rich - workers.

Today, in the news we were given a glimpse of what '19th century - 21st' century Britain looks like. Romanian children were found labouring near Malvern, picking spring onions. The independent reported:

"The children were among 50 Romanian workers discovered picking spring onions in a field in the Kempsey area of Worcester by the Gangmaster's Licensing Authority (GLA). The seven children, aged between nine and 15, were being made to work from 7.30 in the morning until dusk, dressed in thin summer clothes, as temperatures dropped close to zero."

Of course the Independent, indignant, but missing the point as usual, complained about human trafficking. This isn't human trafficking - its capitalism, pure and simple - this is what capitalism is about. This is what happens when you let the market run without regulation. This is what will happen more and more frequently here and in Europe and America until we bring the market under democratic control. We did it in the past and we can do it again. But when we do it next time we must ensure there is no going back.

How our sham democracy works

So you think you live in a democracy? Well, you are right, you do. But it's not quite the democracy you probably think. I just pulled this definition off my Mac: - "control of an organization or group by the majority of its members " . To me, that is a satisfactory definition. You could substitute 'organisation' with 'country' and 'members' with electorate', and you would have a definition which fits the UK. The key word though is 'control'. In a democracy 'control' means that the will of the electorate can make change happen - including fundamental change.

So why is our democracy a sham? It works like this: You can vote, and you can make change happen but there are certain things that can't be changed, really important things like our economic system, which determines the kind of society we have. Why can't 'we' make those fundamental changes? Because the market, or call it big business or capitalism if you prefer, is in control. How does this work and how did it happen? If we look at recent history - in the past 40 years or so our politicians have ceded control to the market. It has happened through the capture of institutions. The European Union is a good example of this. European treaties contain clauses which dictate how our economy works. In effect they create a European constitution which binds us to the market through so called 'liberalisation'. It means that we have to follow a right wing ideological economic programme. 

This 'free' market programme is neoliberal and its one that is followed by almost all governments in the 'West'. It means that corporations can dodge taxes, trade unions get disempowered, environmental regulations are watered down and countries are run for the benefit of the 1%.

The USA is still the epitome of capitalism but its doesn't say in the constitution that the country has to be capitalist. Those kind of ideological-cum-economic statements have no place in a constitution. What has happened is that politicians have put commercial interests above our democratic rights. On a lower level it works in the UK like this. If a multinational wants to build a superstore in your town centre your local council can't stop it from happening. The citizens of that town can't take a democratic decision that they don't want it. The 'rights' of the multinational have been put above our democratic rights. Of course we can still vote, and we can still decide to do things like introduce gay marriage, but we can't run our economy in the way we choose.

Our politicians never asked us if we wanted this. If they had they know we would have rejected it. But the point is that many if not most of us are unaware of exactly what happened. Where people have kicked back, such as in the referendums in France and Ireland where European treaties were rejected, the politicians have fixed it so they got the result they wanted in the first place. It's not just the EU but all the major institutions such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank now adhere to this neoliberal ideology masquerading as economic policy. The plan is to ensure that a particularly nasty, laissez faire version of capitalism is completely dominant. Social and collective concerns are subsumed to the agenda of big business.

Despite this, our democracy is still worth something. We can put democratic rights back on top. But we can only do this if we first understand what's really happened, and have the will to re-capture our institutions from those who have 'stolen' them. At the very least we need to tame the markets and bring them back under democratic control. If we can't do this it's hardly worth voting at all.