Tag: democracy

Imperialist War only Helps the Rich to Get Richer

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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!

Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.11.24), just touching on the outcome of the Trump election victory. Of course, there’s more to say, but at least opposition is in print early, especially in a city where our Palestine stall is often challenged by Trump-supporters eager to shout at us about the most bizarre conspiracy theories as well as overt Islamaphobia and pro-genocidal slogans. But not everything fits inside 600 words, and anyway, words aren’t enough. We need to organise to Dump Trump!

Not my headline, but “Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision”.

So what should we do about Trump?

According to the group he has around him and the people he’s carefully placing into office, Trump’s second term as President of the wealthiest and most militarily powerful empire the human world has ever known, is about to change everything.

Everything that is, except the maintenance of Capitalism: the economic, political and social system based upon private ownership of wealth. Trump will amplify the individual, corporate and national competition for power and control of the means of production and markets in pursuit of profit.

Trump, a billionaire in cahoots with billionaires, is not about to redistribute wealth and make everyone richer. He didn’t the last time round.

Between 2017 and 2020 the USA lost 2.6million jobs. Three million more people lost access to any health insurance to total of 28 million impoverished human beings. Profits rose by 68%, nearly doubling, whilst wages increased by 8%, bumped-up mostly by manager’s salary-hikes at the expense of the low minimum wage. Home ownership increased by 2% making the property-owning middle classes feel better off, house prices rising by 27%. Rents for the poor more than doubled. His was a government of the rich for the rich and will be so again.

Trump’s 2024 election manifesto represented him as the bringer of system change. Not the eradication of poverty and exploitation – instead there shall be yet more billionaires and wealth accumulated into the non-taxable bank accounts of the 1%.

Trump’s “right-wing populist nationalist movement” (as defined by himself) will protect and work for the domination of the American White Man. They will, indeed, benefit.

Trump’s America will be racist and misogynist, supported by an ideological cadre in government and on the streets. That means scapegoating, gaslighting and flagrant misinformation as government standards.

1.5million migrants forcibly deported inside his first year of office, families torn apart, hundreds of thousands in internment camps, will cause enormous economic turmoil. These are the people who reap the harvests, pack the goods, serve at table, and cook and clean in the homes of the middle classes. Irreplaceable.

Protectionism will wreak havoc. The big import tariffs on foreign goods will ensure a significant rise in inflation, job losses and a trade war

Trump’s promise to end all action on climate, withdrawing from international agreements and to “dig, dig, dig” for more oil and gas will condemn the world to climate catastrophe. Climate Change will accelerate, causing extremes of weather that his citizens will not escape and will suffer without the State taxes available to protect or re-home them.

Trump will support the complete eradication of the State of Palestine, whilst the promised end to the current war in Ukraine will only be a prelude to much larger wars to maintain global American supremacy.

In all, Trump represents civil war at home and war abroad. Trump’s far-Right Movement is heavily funded and reaching-out across Britain and Europe and beyond. It will be a totalitarian government, holding power over all houses and the judiciary, entrancing the people with false hope and mythology in the face of deepening global crisis.

Trump must not have it his own way. And he won’t. The USA is a federal system of local governments, the blue “sanctuary states” committed to upholding the quest for equal rights and eradication of poverty.

America is not a United State. A third of all those entitled to vote, did not vote at all, the Democrats offering little or nothing. In every State there is resistance, particularly at grass roots. The struggle for Women’s rights, Black Lives, workers rights and climate action will continue. And must do so here at home, lest we all fall for Trump’s lies.

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Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

With the far-Right Farage ramping-up white-British supremacy at the ReformUK Conference, and the fascist “Tommy Robinson” calling for street demonstrations across Britain this weekend, including in Torquay, Devon, my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.9.24) had to call for mass opposition to fascism and the rise of authoritarian governance. Strangely, it was edited to leave-out my call to get to get to London for the national demonstration on 26th October to Stand Up To Racism, but at least it was printed!

The full Comment below:

It’s Time for Mass Action Against Racism and Fascism

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist and racist political ideology. The fascist movement organises for a centralised autocracy: militarism; forcible suppression of opposition; and a dictatorial leader of a militarised Party machine.

The fascist believes in strict social hierarchy, often portrayed in mystical terms of genetic and ancestral birthright, concocting the superiority of the land and so-called “Race” you are born into. Fascism demands a strong regimentation of society and the economy with no democratic say.

The most important ingredient of fascism is the mass movement. Fascism depends upon the building and mobilisation of street gangs and mobs ready to physically attack any and all opposition, and embed fear into the general culture and daily experience of working class communities, destroying trade unions.

Any political litmus test would show Britain to be at risk from fascist organisation, having become more deeply polarised over decades, the gap between rich and poor stretched to an extreme, the fear of “the other”, and the targeting of the non-compliant purposefully ramped-up by politicians seeking power.

The fear shuts working class people into our homes and shuts down open debate in workplaces and families.

This is why it is so vital that we do not shut up, that we do speak out, and that we show our collective opposition to racism, misogyny and authoritarianism on the streets. Right now, active anti-racism requires constant challenge to Islamaphobia and anti-semitism as well as championing the equal rights of people of colour alongside the politically identified “White” population.

We must be highly sensitised to the signs and symptoms of authoritarian governance and fascist organisation. Targeting all Muslims as “Islamist extremists” is a piece of propaganda nonsense easily exposed – the vast majority of adherents to any religion do not support the extreme-fundamentalist wing of their church. Scapegoating a tiny number of asylum-seekers as the enemy supposedly “invading” a nation of sixty-seven million people is a toxic distraction from the real causes of poverty.

The twentieth-century experiences of fascism proves the rule. Those organising for fascism first seek legitimacy and wear a mask of reason and justice, engaging with democracy in order to later smash it. They voice the growing anger against poverty and inequality in a pretence of challenge to the rich and powerful.

In fact, they only grow with the active funding and encouragement of sections of the super-rich ruling class, using the mob to smash any collective working class fight against exploitation and oppression.

And history shows that when faced with fascists on the one hand and working class socialists on the other, the property-owning comfortable middle classes will invariably side with fascism.

This is happening right now across Europe and the United States, and here in Britain.

Starmer’s meeting with Italy’s Premier Meloni last week is a signal of our political class courting the far-right. Macron’s imposition of a government of the far-right despite the Left winning the majority vote in the recent French election is another warning of the lurch of the ruling class towards fascism. The 30% vote for the fascist AfD across Eastern Germany a further example.

The drive to war, with the nationalism and militarism it transmits into civil society, is perhaps the greatest warning.

All this means we have to challenge the forces of fascism directly, nationally and internationally. Against war and racism, ultranationalism and oppression.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

Revolt Against Inequality

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Published in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) soon after the Communities Secretary, Michael Gove (a far-Right racist) made his Statement to the House of Commons redefining “extremism” to target Muslim organisations that are charitable and promote peace. The obvious whipping-up of racism in front of national elections all-but back-fired as various civil liberties organisations challenged the attack as “ideological”. Nevertheless the Tories were always only speaking to their core voter base, and whipping-up the far-right extremists into more street violence. Whether they are a central purpose or a sideline, the divisions created inside the working class have to be challenged and defeated, otherwise we all perish.

We live in the most extreme of societies. In a country of 67 million human beings, the UK hosts 177 billionaires, their mutual wealth growing by £35billion to almost £1trillion last year, their numbers swelling from profits made during the COVID epidemic. The richest 10 of them own as much as the poorest 5 million of us.

One billion is one-thousand-million. To count to one million, at a rate of one number each second without pause or sleep, would take 12 days. To count to one billion would take 32 years. 

There is no comparison between millionaires and billionaires. To own a billion pounds is to live an extreme existence, above and outside of society. And most UK billionaires are multi-billionaires. Jim Ratcliffe, of the steel company Ineos is worth £30billion, his company extracting billions in surpluses from the huge increases in charges for oil and gas. 

Household appliance manufacturer, James Dyson has £23billion, the ultra-landlord Duke of Westminster £10billion – £9billion of it inherited without paying a penny in tax. Not to mention Charlie Boy, “Basher Bill” and the rest of “The Firm” living off our backs.

Together they make their money from exploiting the workers at home and abroad, extracting the surplus between the wages they pay us and the price they charge us for the goods produced by us. 

The three named here have wealth and power beyond our imagination through over-charging us for the essential heating, housing and hygiene we have to purchase. This is the case for all the 700 billionaires in the world, together owning more than nearly two-thirds of the World’s wealth. 700 versus 8,000,000,000 people – now that’s extreme!

You only get that rich through ruthless competition, destruction of challengers, the most extreme exploitation of the natural environment and mass of the world’s working class. Death and immiserisation on an industrial scale.

No-one needs the wealth of a billionaire. It is the most extreme travesty, producing a cruel lottery of birth that determines entitlement or poverty for life. 

The vast majority of us live our entire lives on a total income of a minuscule fraction of theirs to a point where the ruling class have no idea of our day to day experiences. Such extreme division is of no positive benefit to society, completely undermining democracy and human rights.

The Corporate executives – the Capitalist class – lobby and buy-off the politicians to do their bidding. The current outrage about the racist and misogynistic outbursts of Frank Hester, OBE, who donated £10million to the Tory Party is a single case in point. Hester is sole owner of a £1billion company granted £400million of NHS and prison contracts in the last 8 years. An extreme return on investment.

Yet, with typical hypocrisy, the UK government now seeks to label those who challenge such extremism as the real extremists. The new rules propose that anyone who challenges the current status quo is a potential threat to the Nation. We who expose the lies, who condemn the warmongering, who demand investment in social welfare – we are extremists allied with terrorists!

Are we extremists when we openly condemn the corruption that has seen at least £40billion of tax-payers money pocketed by private individuals through the COVID pandemic? Is it a threat to the Nation when we challenge the allocation of multi-billion contracts for the NHS to members of politician’s families?

Is it extreme to expose the multi-faceted scandal of record profits from fossil fuels whilst 12 million of us live in fuel poverty, 2 million of us are reliant on food banks, and 1 in 3 of our children suffer poor nutrition?  Are we supporting terrorism when we show that their industries endanger the future of all humanity by warming and polluting the Planet?

Even when they promise to “level-up” they prove themselves liars – less than 10% of infrastructure commitments met. The rich don’t want to spend our tax money on us. 

Is it extreme to challenge the enormous growth in the profits from sales of weapons to countries openly committing genocide, enforced migration and ethnic cleansing? 

The latest announcements by Sunak and Gove seeking to curtail democratic rights and workers’ voices are not policies promoting fairness and open society. And the Labour Opposition has supported the policy but argues it doesn’t go far enough!

 The real extremists are labelling all those opposing them as extremists! These are the policies of the real extremists in government,  seeking to maintain the corrupt privilege and power of their class by shutting down any and all challenge.

They have played the “race card” in front of the General Election, falsely labelling all Muslims as terrorists and promoting racism in an ideological offensive aimed at dividing the working class and distracting us from the real cause of our woes – the greed and violence of the ruling class.

This is class warfare. The ultimate aim of the ruling class is to atomise the working class, preventing any and all protest or collective action. We have to fight to stop them. Those truly in support of democracy, free speech, human rights and social justice must oppose this latest declaration of their supremacy over our rightful legitimacy of Faith and ethnicity, of skin colour, of gender identity, and of collective organisation including the trade union right to strike. If that labels us as extremists, so be it.

Free Julian Assange!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (20.2.24). I note they chose a title not including the name of Julian Assange, the subject of the piece, nor acknowledging the piece as exposing the general distrust of all politicians by Britain’s electorate. The issue is really about the death of investigative journalism, the Assange case being just one part of the long-term drive to shut-down all opposition to capitalism and imperialism.

Free Julian Assange!

It is always a turning point, an historic watershed, when the majority of the people of a country no longer believe or trust their Government. Yet here we are.

The general lack of support for Britain’s Political Class was best exemplified by last week’s by-elections where only a small minority bothered to vote at all, and those that did overwhelmingly trounced Sunak’s Government.

It goes far deeper than that. In such a polarised, class-based society it is hard to find any majority agreement. After all, social being determines social consciousness: those with wherewithal live in a completely different and separate Britain from those without, resulting in conflicting interests and beliefs.

Nevertheless, most people don’t believe government promises on future economic growth, the official statistics on wage increases, Britain’s social security, or, for that matter, much else. We don’t believe Them.

Most of us inside the bottom 80% of the nation’s income levels are too busy surviving to do much about our political thoughts and aspirations. But the working classes do keep one eye on the Big Picture. 

Most of us know that the Government has diverted most of our taxes into the private sector, the very businesses they have personal shares in – the corporations that lobby them and buy their allegiance. We know they make wars for money, the global military-industrial complex wedded to to fossil fuelled economies caring nothing for the lives of ordinary people. We have a sense of the depth of corruption inside our current system.

But to recognise that the State is not only acting against our interests but is destroying our right to dissent raises more fundamental questions of Freedom, Justice and Democracy. Have we lost all our rights and any element of agency? In response, the government seeks constantly to change and influence the popular narrative in their favour, by controlling the propaganda and information in the public domain.

Today heralds Julian Assange’s court hearing against extradition from the UK’s high-security Belmarsh prison to the USA on grounds of espionage. This relates to the leaked  publication of military information released in the USA by a serving soldier, Chelsea Manning, which the Australian journalist Julian Assange published as part of the Wikileaks papers in 2010.

The 391,000 secret State papers exposed government lies alongside illegal and inhuman military conduct, including assassinations, extradition, detention and torture throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003-8. The Iraq War was an illegal invasion for oil and corporate control.

Assange is suffering the effects of psychological torture after 14 years of incarceration. He should be released forthwith. It is the case, as a matter of human rights law, that no-one can be extradited to another country for political offences. This is because one country’s laws will differ from another – one nation’s rules for “media coverage” is another nation’s censorship. 

Espionage is therefore a political offence – one country’s freedom fighter is another country’s terrorist. For example, Britain’s anti-Nazi Underground guerrilla fighters in France during WW2 were defenders of democracy, not terrorists.

There has always been propaganda and censorship. It took years for the proof to emerge that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because the only journalists allowed into the war zone were government-approved and “embedded” within US/UK forces. Those “unauthorised” were “disappeared”.

Governments had learnt the hard way from the Vietnam War, when freelance journalists and photographers effectively exposed the most horrific massacres of civilians, children and women, on the orders of government officials. A relatively Free Press had huge influence over the ending of that war, the TV images raising huge protests and an international movement for Peace.

Now we see the majority of journalists in Gaza being systematically killed – more than 170 in 110 days. This also kills access to facts of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, and the many day-to-day truths of illegal invasion and occupation.

For public knowledge and agency to be assured, investigative journalists need protection from threats and censorship.

Censorship is also a tool of “free” trade. Apart from war, more journalists are killed for investigating illegal environmental destruction than any other single issue. Publication of the Truth can be a threat to corporate profits. 

Of course, for decades, the UK has had a more back-room approach to such censorship. Journalists and publications have been issued “D” notices to prevent publication, not only of “State Secrets” but also of facts that may embarrass Ministers or Princes. At the same time, with fewer than 8 billionaire media moguls controlling more the 80% of all public information, their editorial control suppresses most of any news that might hold them to account.

The indictment of Assange, if successful, will further criminalise journalistic activities, scaring journalists into subservience and restricting free speech to ensure the dominant politics of our national government will decide what can be published and what cannot. Such control represents dictatorship.

Anyone who wants to know the facts and cares for human suffrage needs to challenge censorship and support Assange.