Tag: capitalism

Interests of a Few Can’t be Allowed to Rule Us

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.1.26) raving mad about the billionaire jamboree in Switzerland courting Trump and his cronies. It’s deadly serious, this carve-up of the world and it’s people’s for the wealth and power of a tiny minority. It’s why I want a revolution!

The unedited version here, or enlarge the picture for the original.

Those of us seeking to further the interests of working class people should keep a close eye on what the ruling classes are doing. Once every year, the world’s billionaires and their toady hangers-on meet together, parking record numbers of private jets on the tarmac outside Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum. They’re there now.
Trump is attending, with the largest and richest-ever “Team USA” following-on as the Emperor’s entourage. The great pretender, Nigel Farage is also there, pretending to be part of the elite he derided only last year as a “gathering of the globalists”. He wants to offer his services.
Let’s breathe for a moment. In a world of nearly nine billion human beings, fewer than 60,000 people own and control most wealth in the world. 0.001% of the world’s population control three times as much wealth as the 4,000,000,000 bottom half of humanity.
They’re coming together at the Swiss Alps resort to discuss how to further carve-up the world’s wealth between themselves. Their deliberations have more power and impact on every one of us than all the fluff and nonsense of every parliament. The People’s democracies have very little influence upon the real decisions made inside the corporate boardrooms across the continents.
Fifteen of the world’s richest exploiters are American. Musk has a personal wealth of $682billion (a billion is a thousand million), Bezos only $260BN, nine of the ten richest making their money in the technology business. Clearly we pay far too much for tech.
But they have problems. The world’s economy is in a deep crisis of debt and inequality. The climate crisis is documented, with dire medium-term economic consequences. So the rich aren’t investing in anything that doesn’t make a short-term hefty profit. Most of that private accumulation comes from gambling on projected future prices in an era of catastrophe. The immediate task is to raise prices to us as high as possible whilst cutting the wage and welfare bills to the lowest.
And so the Bosses compete against each other for ownership of lands and workers. The big corporations have real power but this is no world conspiracy – they’re all in competition against each other, undermining all planning and subject to the anarchy of the Capitalist System. When they come together at Davos they smile and shake hands, laughing all the time with a knife ready behind their backs, doing deals and hostile takeovers. They hold their pet politicians in tow ready to change laws to keep their scams legal.
Posturing over regional influence, possession and wealth extraction, such as over Greenland, is happening alongside who can afford the $1BN to sit on Trump’s “Board of Peace” with war criminals Blair and Rubio. Carving-up the Middle East and carving-out the Palestinians, profiteering from genocide, is symbolic of the rabid clawing for power and resources. The certainties of global “rules-based order” has broken down and the Nations attached to the big corporations are preparing for “geoeconomic confrontation”. War!
This week they will headline a “Spirit of Dialogue” whilst bitterly negotiating their competing interests over Venezuela, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Taiwan, Iran and Greenland. Davos replaces the United Nations for a week. They will not let democracy stand in their way.
As a band of warring brothers, a giant corrupt cartel, the Capitalist’s common enemy is us. The Rich fear the potential power of the working class. The Mass Strike and revolution from below is their greatest foe.
The Big Bosses work together to keep us in our place. In this fevered era of instability they are turning away from democracy and towards autocracy, ready to allow military conflict and fascism to prevent revolt and protect their wealth and power.
The billionaires are living in a bubble, and they know it. The absurd scale of $trillions of cryptocurrency investment in Artificial Intelligence cannot be sustained and will crash, hurting a few of them but destroying entire social economies and hundreds of millions of our jobs and lives. Investment in arms manufacture and the military suck tax cash out of social welfare. The rent and mortgage rate increases – the cause of the international housing crisis – is mirroring the investment bubble that led to the global financial crash of 2008 for which we’re all still paying. Enforced austerity is intensifying discontent.
Workers’ real spending-power is lower today than it was in 2008. The spending-power of the average full-time worker is 25% less than in late 2021. Their corruption screwed us for decades. It’s gonna happen again, but worse.
The super-rich know all this. Their champagne-fuelled seminars in Davos may publicly play-down the scale of the global crisis, but in the back rooms the real wheeler-dealers are drawing-up the blueprints for a refreshed Bosses offensive, ever-intensifying the exploitation of the working classes, by force. They will continue the accelerating descent into war and barbarism. The super-rich must be stopped by the collective power of the international working class!

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Imperialist War only Helps the Rich to Get Richer

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.3.25), attempting to steer clear of censorship by not mentioning Ukraine or Gaza whilst opposing imperialist war (my original, printed below, did the mention but didn’t get away with it). The pro-war liberals and socialists appear to be confused by the Trump demand for Peace, as if you can’t oppose Trump and Putin and Imperialism. Choosing sides means being with the international working class always, with the bosses never, and consistently against Imperialism as the most powerful form of Capitalism. I haven’t got away with writing that yet!

The original:

The times they are a’changing.
The accelerating shift towards the domination of far-Right political leadership is happening because the global system of Capitalism is in crisis. Regions are scrabbling for resources. Competition is acute.
At such times, as in the 1910’s and the 1930’s, the vulnerable sections of the world’s ruling class turn away from the pleasantries of democracy and towards totalitarian control. Authoritarianism is growing everywhere seeking to make popular the politics of the far-Right.
At best, and only during times of relative prosperity, parliamentary democracy offers a chimera of popular suffrage – the ‘right to vote” symbolising a symbolic engagement of every citizen with the real forces of the Boss Class that rule over our lives and futures. In truth we have little say.
The “mixed-economy” of the 1950’s and ‘60’s allowed the social infrastructure to be rebuilt from the ruins of the Second World War, State taxes claiming 95% of each £ for the highest earners, raising the cash for social (council) housing, health, education, care of children and the elderly and vulnerable, and our nationally owned utilities.
But once the certainty of a working class healthy and educated enough to meet modern employment needs was established, the Capitalists decided to reclaim their profit rates by reducing the amount of tax they pay, at least by half, and organise to get most of the rest back in State-paid allowances to their private businesses. They returned to laissez-faire neo-liberal free-market economics.
The working classes are left to pay for our own services. Today, the super-rich and billionaires pay hardly anything into the common purse whilst getting subsidised by us. They are insatiable and in no way satisfied by the enormous increase in their private wealth and power since the 1970’s.
Most of the huge transnational corporate monopolies are now simply too big to fail, receiving routine tax-bail-outs whilst increasing levels of unrepayable debt.
They are too vulnerable to global tensions to spend their hoards of money. There’s little or no investment from the billions of billions in profits into maintaining the social infrastructure that their businesses need society to provide. If the bosses had to pay for the welfare of their workforce they’d make little profit. Instead, with the global growth of the working class, they don’t need a full pool of locally educated and healthy workers when they can trawl the world for cheap and able labour.
So our Western infrastructure is crumbling, the USA and UK being some of the worst examples. The Capitalists want sure-fired short-term high-yield returns on any investments they make. Public health, public housing, public education (just about anything publicly owned) doesn’t make big profits.
Many essential services and utilities aren’t profitable except through a one-time asset-stripping robbery. Transition of energy supplies to renewables doesn’t make the scale of profits from oil.
So what does make big short term profit apart from fossil fuels (oh, and mind-numbing drugs to manage the alienation of wage-slavery)? War.
A bullet or bomb can only explode once and has to be replaced. There’s no multi-use for munitions. The price of munitions is determined by the market – the more wars, the more demand, the higher the profit. The military-industrial complex cherry-picks for high-return investment, leaving the tax-payer to pay for the true costs of militarisation. High-tech, big bangs and nuclear capabilities make the biggest killing.
As an aside, the destruction of huge areas of infrastructure, let’s say Gaza or the Donbas region of Ukraine, the higher the value of the land and real-estate for fresh private investment. The decaying old infrastructure, now collapsed, can be purloined, owned and rebuilt with high profit margins. The prime land is worth investing in again.
Little wonder there is now a drive to war. It’s not so much about freedom for the People as freedom for the corporations to rejuvenate their portfolios and profit margins. They need to free-up the congested and aging markets to kick-start a fresh round of exploitation of people and natural resources. Wars kick-start a fresh round of plunder of people and natural resources.
Even then, it is the tax-payer who is expected to make the investment in building a new military, not the billionaires. Ruling classes and their tame politicians identify enemies, whip-up nationalism, glory in militarism, start the looting of land, minerals and the cheap labour of the battered survivors.
Politicians make a song and dance about security and justice, whipping-up fear and racism in their drive for compliance, whilst mostly it’s about competition between corporate states for market domination. That’s the definition of imperialism.
War is built-in to the Capitalist System. And always it’s the working class who are conscripted, either through financial imperative or legal requirement, to fight and be shot or die, whilst the profiteers rake-in the cash from wholesale destruction. We pay the price.
Be cautious of any enthusiasm for rearmament. In the immediate, the billions spent on war come at the price of cuts to the essential services we all need. Wars destroy our social infrastructure. Wars come at terrible cost to the survivors, our quality of life shattered, our memories polluted with images of horror, our relationships distorted, all supposedly in the name of our national interest.
The workers of the world never benefit from war. We must invest in Peace. Welfare not Warfare!

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.1.25). Damning Trump from the Left is made easy by his overt racism and denial of climate breakdown. But linking his true intent to that of other governments and especially our own is the vital task. What does Trump mean to Britain? How do we respond? His is a decaying Capitalism in crisis, taking us all down into its feverish hallucinations and bitter violence. Ours must be the struggle for socialist revolution.

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

There’s just so much happening, its enough to cause brain-freeze. There are periods in history where nothing appears to happen, and there are times of rapid change.

History repeats the pattern when the central power can no longer hold the reins. This year, governments are collapsing into inner conflict across most free-market capitalist countries.

The way forward is up-for-grabs: will it be corporate-led authoritarianism or socialism – collectively organised across the working class? More imprisonment of protesters and persecution of minorities? Top-down repression or bottom-up liberation?

The genocide in Gaza represents absolute repression: an overwhelming power of one side seeking to negate any possibility of self defence and self-determination for the other. Our challenge for a just and lasting ceasefire and reparations for Palestinians represent a wider call for worldwide social justice.

Trump and his maverick oligarchs represent extreme systemic inequality: the domination of the super-rich, society organised for the sole purpose of accumulating more wealth into the pockets of the ruling class.

Trump is no peacemaker, and neither is Starmer or Macron or Meloni or whoever is the Chancellor of Germany this week. Capitalism is based upon competition, on the international stage between alliances of countries seeking military and imperialist regional domination.

Trump is not seeking peace in the Middle East, just profits for his corporate interests based in America. He’s hardly interested in wars in Europe other than to see European countries pay for them.

Russia’s gangster-capitalist economy is of little threat to the USA. But State-Capitalist China is growing fast enough to overtake the USA and represents a threat to the wealth and power of Trump’s cohort. The new American President has pledged to build-up to war with China, ramping-up nuclear warheads and military spending at the expense of an already devastated social infrastructure at home.

What’s the alternative? Trump is not in power for the vast majority of US citizens – the working class. He’s there for his adopted class of the super-rich. He’s brazened in his approach. Opposition to Trump needs to be brazened in response.

Socialism is defined as social and economic planning organised to meet the needs of everyone, a social system where we all offer to the collective society what we can in terms of effort, labour and commitment in return for our individual needs to be provided for. A lifestyle of mutual cooperation not individual competition.

Majorities in this country still hold to socialist principles. The National Health Service is based on socialist ideals of paying into a common purse in order to receive health care whenever we need it. Services are falling apart because, over decades the Capitalists have encroached to privatise and make money out of our basic needs.

Most workers want and need cheap public transport services, coordinated and convenient – socialised. Most workers want well-funded universal education for our children. But the Capitalists have privatised it all, over-pricing and hollowing-out services for profit not need.

Public services have been defamed as if representing incompetence and bloated waste, when all the time that’s precisely what has been created by privatisation. The level of ideological propaganda and disinformation spewed-out by the Trumpists and their acolytes in the UK has overwhelmed fact and reason.

And so, Starmer as the leader of a Labour Party supposed to have socialist origins is instead pandering to Trumpism, raising military spending at the expense of welfare benefits and workers spending-power, and funding more privatisation for the domination of US corporations, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies.

We need fresh international socialist organisation championing the needs of the working class and campaigning across the UK and everywhere.

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Restore Nature – and the Climate – Now!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.6.24) remonstrating against the silence and denial of all parties standing at an election devoid of debate on the acute seriousness of climate change. I am beside myself with angst and anger at the sheer stupidity and ignorance of candidates so self-obsessed and party-disciplined as to refuse to see what’s happening all around. Don’t give me any lip about caring for the future if you’re not acting, right now, against climate collapse.

Leaders are Protecting the Status Quo

It is in the nature of parliamentary democracy for politicians to argue over day-to-day promises. A couple of pence tax-deduction, more doctors, or so many new homes to be built are references to the continuing crisis of enforced austerity being experienced by the “working poor” (as at least seven million of us are so labelled).

The manifestos and “contracts with the people” all speak of reforming Capitalism when in reality, the entire economic and social system is in a depth of crisis that threatens all stability and, indeed, existence. The ruling class cannot and will not allow reform of their system that is so destructive. The demand to a speedy end to fossil-fuelled production actually represents the demand for the end of Capitalism.

So beneath the empty pledges of careerist individualists tied to the machinery of the Capitalist State lies a deeper ideological intent. The “masses” may be demanding real change, but the politicians are there to protect the status quo.

They insist there can be no real alternative to the current system of capitalism. Whilst the richest 1% become richer still, we, the working class, are expected to believe “there is no money”, “the exchequer is bare”, “it will take two parliamentary terms to turn things around”.

We are already required to vote on the basis that what we have is the best that can be hoped for, and anything better is so far away as to be pie in the sky. More of the same is all we should expect.

Except things are not going to stay the same. Their “stability and growth” is the real pie-in-the-sky. In truth, the next ten years will see such changes as to make today a halcyon dream. Real change is coming, courtesy of the natural environment.

Last week the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned of the deepening climate and ecological catastrophe affecting all nations across the world. He spoke of “planetary destruction” and stated that Governments across all wealthy nations have not kept their previous pledges. Global warming emissions from fossil fuel gases have risen to a new record level last year at a time when they must be halved by 2030 to avoid the worst climate effects.

“It’s we the Peoples versus the polluters and the profiteers,” he said. “Together, we can win. But it’s time for leaders to decide whose side they’re on.”

The speech was a rallying call by a UN leadership concerned that the climate crisis has slipped down the list of priorities. This “slippage”, bordering upon denial, was then proven at the June meeting of the powerful G7 group of countries, where world leaders including the UK Prime Minister repeated the same broken pledges, as if we should believe them this time.

In the real world, record breaking heatwaves were causing death and crop destruction from southern China, through India and North Africa to the southern states of America. 52C was recorded in Delhi, human beings were collapsing amidst water rationing of thirty million people, and monkeys and birds were seen falling from trees, dead from heat exhaustion.

Climatologists in the USA and Europe confirmed evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing, producing extreme and unpredictable weather patterns. In the UK, despite harvest failures this Spring, the mainstream parties in the election continue to cut their previous pledges on addressing the climate emergency.

Parties of the Right have published manifestos that deny the threat of climate change and call it all a conspiracy.

Working people are worried about the observable changing weather patterns and seasons. We want protections from the threats of flooded homes, transport disruption and high food prices. And our children are most concerned at the very obvious “6th Great Extinction” of insect and animal life taking place as a result of the pollution and heating of our oceans and lands.

Next weekend, against all the political denial and obfuscation, tens of thousands will be marching in London, calling-out to all political candidates to take this overarching issue seriously. ‘Restore Nature Now!” is our serious demand uniting conservationists, environmentalists, climate activists and trade unionists for immediate action to stop environmental destruction. Cut fossil fuel emissions and invest in the living environment!After all, why would anyone vote for extinction?

Election will Not Alter Class-based Society

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Comment this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.6.24). The rigged “balance” required of the media during an election period means I can’t get published what I’d really like to say: Farage’s Reform Party offers an embryonic fascist rally which threatens the entire working class, the Greens are a pro-Capitalist Party with a terrible anti-working class record in Europe and indeed, against trade unions when running local councils; Galloway is socially conservative with adherence to religious family values that opposes a women’s right to choose, gay marriage and trans-rights, his Workers’ Party inviting cross-class alliances with Farage and ex-UKIP  candidates. Starmer is more than ready to lead us into World War Three within the duration of the next Government term (for which the imperialist ruling classes already undertaking the preparations). And anyway, putting one’s faith in bourgoisie democracy and the election of a socialist pro-working class government has been thoroughly destroyed by the ruling class offensive against Corbyn (not to mention the various corporate-funded right-wing coups against socialist reformers across the globe). The Left, historically infiltrated by chancers, turn-coat careerists, renegades, police spies and agent-provocateurs, continues to fragment just when political unease and renewed strike action in our class offers a chance to build a coherent mass organisation. The rise and falls of mass movements: Black Lives Matter; Me Too!; Climate Strikes and now Freedom for Gaza each represent missed opportunities for decisive leadership for whole-system change, linking all the issues together into an anti-Capitalist offensive. It’s no longer any good to say you’re a “socialist” without saying you’re anti-Capitalist. It is Capitalism and its current development of Imperialism that links all these movements and issues. The Capitalists will not allow you to reform their System out of existence! The only way out of this is revolution, which may well be brewing elsewhere in the world for us to jump-on and build here. One mass strike is worth ten general elections!

But none of this can be printed.

So instead, here’s the long version of the printable edition:

The candidates are about to be declared, the stage about to be set. General elections are theatres for Party activists.

People join together into political parties with reason. There are ideas that conjoin and ideas that splinter into opposition. It’s very difficult, for example, to believe in universal human rights whilst promoting racial superiority – is it okay that some people are born with more privileges and entitlements than others?

Some beliefs come together towards a whole and encompassing world view.  To act upon the our formed “way of seeing” we need to join together in sufficient numbers to have impact and change the direction of social organisation towards our preferred conditions. Hence parties.

On a very superficial level, that’s what putting a cross on a piece of paper at election day represents – a personal alliance with a world view.

The current drive towards politicians “independent” of any world view is probably a short-term proposition. A non-Party “independent” may be elected because they catch the majority view on a single issue but soon get into trouble when people disagree with other views they now espouse but were not in their manifesto. 

They may be elected as forthright and unbending on their stated goal, but find that, to achieve anything they will have to compromise into a coalition with others, watering down their mandate and starting to link together into a new political Party. 

The rise of the “Independents” is a necessary reaction to the general sense of “they’re all the same” which has swept into the consciousness of the electorate. The lack of faith in democracy as currently organised is prevalent across the Western world whilst still being fought for in the Global South. 

The point is, there are real differences in preferences for social organisation. There are Right and a Left wings of the political spectrum. Social organisation to share resources to ensure everyone’s needs and human rights are met is a world view and ambition that is the complete opposite of a belief in individual competition and personal enrichment at the expense of others. 

The best example is our National Health Service, loathed by Right-wingers as a construct of “socialism” because people pay into the common purse in order to get free health care at the point of need. The privatisation of the NHS is a right-wing strategy to turn our health service into a fee-paying, for-profit capitalist enterprise run by transnational pharmaceutical companies, not the State.

Any NHS charging essentially separates those who can afford to pay from those who can’t, into a society where your right to health care is based upon your personal income and inherited wealth. To accept charging in order to lower taxes is to accept individual competition as the social norm – a world view with wider implications.

It is difficult to ride on the back of two horses running in opposite directions. There are new parties seeking to go beyond, or bring together, Right and Left, despite the inherent conflict at the core of those ideologies. This may be an honest attempt to rebuild democracy away from the current two-party system which offers no real difference in policies or outcomes. But it’s a project doomed to failure.

A white-supremacist cannot be, at the same time, anti-racist and for a multi-cultural State. Someone who believes men should have power over women is unlikely to defend the rights of LGBTQ+. Warmongers don’t vote for Peace. Anyone who believes that the majority of Muslims are extremist “Islamists” is unlikely to believe in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Beliefs coalesce into world views.

The inescapable fact is that we live in a polarised society based upon class, the conditions we are born into determining much of how we see the world and what we believe. We are born into a System, not of our choosing or making, where social policy either benefits the wealthy elite or it benefits the working class and the poor. Either we raise taxes to pay for social need, which requires the rich to pay-up in full, or we collapse the State and engage with a dog-eat-dog system where those without are left to perish. 

History provides many examples of where this class conflict which produces trade union strikes, mass movements, protests and community campaigns, produce real social changes far more profound and more often than general elections. 

So the core question to candidates should be, are you for the People (the majority of whom are working class reliant upon day-to-day income) or the Rich ruling class few who extract and exploit in order to maintain their privileges? Everything else stems from this divide. Whatever the result, we’ll still have to fight for our rights.