SPC Newsletter 1st June 2013

[Socialist Party Head Office]

                        The Socialist Party of Canada

Secretary’s Report for June 1, 2013

Email Report
–    WSPNZ GAC minutes for April received with thanks.
–    Communication from SPGB informing us of a new booklet – “The Alternative To Capitalism”, by Adam Buick and John Crump. Looks like an excellent and required read for all socialists and those looking for a well presented case for socialism.

Good of the Movement
–    The Spring Imagine has finally been finished and printed. SPC members will be receiving their copies right away. Please consider a donation to keep our journal going.
–    Two introductory packages sent out.
–    June is the next meeting of the General Administrative Committee. Please contact me if you have any items to bring forward.

Karl’s Quotes
–    As the capitalist mode of production develops in a country, the use of machinery and other techniques produce large scale production, but as more is spent on constant capital than variable capital, the tendency is for the rate of profit to fall but not the total profit. Several factors mitigate against this fall in profit, Marx mentions one here, “ The phenomenon arising from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, that the price of an individual commodity or a given portion of commodities falls with the growing productivity of labour, while the number of commodities rises; that the amount of profit on the individual commodity and the rate of profit on the sum of commodities falls, but the mass of profit on the total sum of commodities rises – this phenomenon simply appears on the surface as a fall in the amount of profit on the individual commodity, a number of commodities produced by the total social capital or the total fall in its price, and a growth in the mass of profit on the increased total capital of the individual capitalist.” (Capital volume III, p3e37). In other words, greater scale compensates for a lower rate of profit. Another reason why this crazy system must constantly expand and why it must be stopped.

Food For Thought
–    An official at the Toronto Zoo said in the recent TV program, Undercover Boss”, that species are dying off at the rate of one thousand a year. Think of the enormity of this and how desperately we need to do something about it.
–    Yoko Ono recently said that over one million people have been killed by Guns in the US since her husband, John Lennon was shot and killed. Gun control laws may not have an impact, even if an effective law could get past congress, because guns are so easily obtained illegally. Removing the causes of tension and conflict and the end to profiteering on gun sales would work but you need a socialist society for that.
–    There are nearly six unemployed Canadians for every job vacancy,
Statistics Canada reported. Furthermore, 1.2 million people are out of work. Ottawa says it will deal with the problem by focusing on job training. However, Erin Weir, an economist with the United Steel Workers’ union, said, “…even if a skills training policy somehow succeeded in filling every current vacancy, more than one million workers would remain unemployed.” Another reason to abolish employment and unemployment altogether.
–    Canada will not block the listing of asbestos as a dangerous substance this year at the Rotterdam conference as it has done the last three years. Good news you say? Yes, but the reason is that the Parti Quebecois government has refused to subsidize the industry making it unprofitable, not because the toxic product has been shipped abroad and handled by workers in the third world with no warning or protection condemning them to an early death. Cynical? You bet!  
–    The Bangladesh garment factory disaster – who’s to blame? A New York Times editorial claims the continuing disasters there is an indictment of global clothing brands yet every enterprise on the planet would love to be in a position where wages, safety laws, and collective bargaining (11 units in a population of 150 million people) are virtually non-existent. Surely it must be obvious that the system itself is to blame.
–    Paraguay is enjoying an economic boom with growth reaching thirteen per cent this year. Not surprisingly, not all the people are included. Thirty per cent of Paraguayans live in poverty just a short walk from the financial center. One grandmother, 60 years old, interviewed said she worked every day for $4 to look after her four grandchildren. Surely it must be obvious the system itself is wrong. (am I getting repetitive?).
–    Britain, like most countries these days, is up to its eyes in economic woes. Now David Cameron is talking about a “One nation, deficit reduction plan, from a one nation party”, and opposition leader, Ed Milibrand, used the phrase ‘one nation’ forty times in his conference speech last Fall. Even Nick Clegg used it when he told everyone to “Pull together as one nation”. The idea is to convince the working class that their interests are identical with those of the capitalist class, whether it is making products for them to sell at a profit in the market place or fighting wars to further the local capitalists’ commercial interests, as opposed to the interests of capitalists in other countries. The plain brutal fact is that the working class of any country has more in common with workers ten thousand miles away than with the capitalists in their own country. One may like certain things about the country one lives in, but it is folly to identify that with the country as a political identity that is a means whereby the few live well at the expense of the many. As for the term ‘one nation’, the arithmetic is a bit off because there are in fact two nations on this planet – those of the capitalist class and of the working class. The idea should be to abolish all concepts of nation and replace it with ‘a world for the workers’.
–    New Democratic MPP, Taras Natyshak, is enraged about the exploitation of interns, “It’s free labour. The longer we let this thing lie as a vague part in our employment laws, the longer it will be abused.” Unpaid internships are unregulated by the Employment Standards Act and no statistics are taken, therefore, it should come as no surprise that the practice is spreading. Employers attempt to justify it by claiming that it is job training and few interns complain, hoping they’ll get a job at the completion of their internship. The NDP wants the liberal government to clearly define internships and limit their length. Thus the NDP wants, in its reformist zeal, to decrease the extent of exploitation of these young people. The SPC wants a society where no exploitation of one human being by another exists.
–    On March 16th. Toronto Star reporter, John Upton, describes what it feels like in the morning when he opens the door of his apartment in New Delhi, “ Fog drenched clumps of soot, ozone molecules, and microscopic bundles of nitrogen oxides flow into my chest, where some become lodged. Some of these particles might give me lung cancer. Others will enter my bloodstream. The airborne detritus puts me in danger of bronchitis, asthma, a lung infection, even high blood pressure and dementia.” Yet New Delhi ranks in 12th. place on the list of the world’s most polluted cities. Ahwaz in Iran holds the coveted position as the world’s worst, the pollution being five times greater than that of New Delhi. In 2010, 3.2 million people died because of air pollution according to a study conducted by the British Medical Association journal, Lancet. In “People of The Abyss”, that Jack London wrote in 1902, that the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was being corroded by sulphur fumes and wonders what it does to one’s lungs. Have things changed that much? As long as capitalism exists conditions like these will not only exist but be much sought after by the manufacturers.
–    How and why do these jumped-up dictators like Syria’s Assad get their weaponry from? That’s easy to answer – the five nations in the world charged with the world’s security – France, China, Russia, GB, US, are making a packet for their capitalist class as the worst purveyors of arms in the world. The US shipped $8.7 billions worth of arms in 2012, just edging out Russia. China ranked third at $1.78 billion. Thank goodness for our security!
–    So much attention was naturally focused on the terrible events in Boston on April 18-20 that an equally bad event that occurred in Greece did not receive the attention it warranted. After months of pressing the owners of a strawberry plantation for pay, migrant workers from Bangladesh gathered in a field hoping to get paid. Instead they received gunfire from three foremen, wounding twenty-eight. The three have been arrested and face charges of attempted murder. Though they may get long prison sentences, no one can say ‘it won’t happen again’. It wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time members of the working class have been shot at for demanding their rights. The Peterloo massacre in England, Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg and Tiannanmen Square in Beijing are prime examples and these events will continue until we remove the cause – capitalism.
–    Forty-five million Americans now rely on food stamps to make ends meet. The cost of the program has risen from $33 billion in 2005 to $78 billion in 2011. This has made the capitalist class, who has to pay the taxes for such programs, nervous. It eats into profits. Need doesn’t come into it, money does.
–    King Carlos of Spain has been under fire for his lavish lifestyle in the face of Spain’s dire economic situation. Trips such as his expensive forays elephant hunting in Africa while fellow Spaniards starve have brought such criticism that he has been forced to hand over his $27 million, forty-one foot yacht, Fortuna (!). Poor boy, but at least he’ll save the cost of refueling it – $26, 400.
–    In the article “The Real Cost of T-shirts” (Toronto Star, 25/05/13), author, Hasnain Kazim, reveals that the cost of  a polo shirt sold by Mango stores in London is $46 while Mango pays just $4.45 to the producers in Rana Plaza, Bangladesh. Danish brand Jack’s sells shirts for $32.66 and pays $5.08 to the producer. Minimum monthly wage in Bangladesh is $38 per month. Hourly cost of making garments in Bangladesh is 32 cents, and in China, $1.44. That’s the reason China is outsourcing work to Bangladesh. Bangladesh will outsource work to the anthills of Africa were costs are two jars of honey per day for ten million workers ants! Some bloody system!
–    Who’s to blame for this sorry state of affairs in Bangaldesh?  The New York Times (26/05/13) comes up with the answer – we are because of our hunger for cheap clothing. Others have blamed the greedy clothing retailers. No one yet that I have seen has targeted the capitalist mode of production because the retailers are absolutely doing the right thing for maximizing profit. That’s what they are there for and their investors are quite happy with it.
–    The ‘World Section’ of “The Toronto Star” of April 27th.  2013, contained the encouraging news that many of the poor farmers in Guerrero State, Mexico, are waging a successful war against drug-fueled crime. Prior to January, this part of Mexico had one of the highest murder rates in the world, until residents declared they had had enough and organized into vigilante armies. They donned masks, picked up weapons, hunted down criminals and put them on trial before the community. They now claim that crime is down 95% showing what community action can do. Now they need to get rid of the other problem that creates the crime in the first place – capitalism.

For socialism, John

            

 

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