ALB
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It seems that there are quite a few groups that have sprung up recently to campaign on this sort of issue. We met a disillusioned Labourite at our stall at Carshalton ecofair yesterday (yes, we were out this weekend campaigning too — for socialism} who was a supporter of this group:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RescueBritain/status/1554051060792233984
He was expecting to be expelled from the Labour Party.
Incidentally, he was not the only disillusioned Labourite we met. There must have been at least half a dozen.
In the circumstances (no majority desire or organisation for socialism) the only action that workers can take with any chance of some success is to press for higher wages to compensate for the rise in their cost of living.
Refusing to pay the increased gas bill is a gesture that won’t do any harm even if it won’t get anywhere, but to campaign for a “fair price of energy” is a misdirection of effort, even a red herring. It is a proposition worthy of King Canute’s advisers.
Nobody is dispaaging workers protesting against a reduction in their standard of living by having to spend more than usual on energy costs. That is wholely understandable and there wouldn’t be much hope of wider social change if workers were just to accept this sort of thing lying down.
What we are a dispataging is a reformist who is dispaaging socialism as a pointless pipe dream (which an earlier generation of reformists would not have done). We have to defend socialism when it is attacked. It’s not something we can accept lying down either.
True, not enough workers have accepted socialism over the whole period of 150 years since it first became a practical proposition for it to come into bring. That’s why we have still got capitalism where even the most militant workers are still demanding a “fair” wage and a “fair” price for this or that and denouncing “profiteering” but not profit-making.
As long as this is the case capitalism will continue and with it problems like the one both career politicians and militant reformists (and vanguardists?) like Don’t Pay promise to permanently fix.
It’s reformists, not Socialists, who are the dreamers, imagining that the problems wage workers and their dependents face can be solved within capitalism.
Good question, probably due to a new subscriber finding their way about.
There is also this thread:
Interesting how the unions have found ways round the Thatcher anti-union laws (maintained by the last Labour government). Strike ballots have been turned into a weapon to strengthen the negotiators’ hands and, now, coordinated same day strikes is being proposed to get round the ban on sympathetic strike action.
Not too keen, though, on the CWU demand for a “dignified” wage. That’s even worse than a “fair” wage since having to sell your ability to work for money to live is an indignity in itself.
Talking about pipe dreams, how about this?
“What we’re striking for
Don’t Pay is a grassroots movement demanding a fair price for energy for everyone. This is what we’re striking for….
How do we achieve a permanent solution to the energy crisis? A ‘Fair Price for Power’
These demands are to respond to the emergency we are in. However, we need a permanent solution.
The previous price cap was already unaffordable for many, for example, so we need to transform the energy sector to permanently make energy affordable.
To address this, a process within the Don’t Pay movement called ‘Fair price for power’ will begin this autumn, during which the movement will decide together in local groups what a fair price to pay for our energy is and how we can achieve and enforce that price by transforming the energy sector.”
(https://dontpay.uk/about/what-were-striking-for/)So, as a “permanent solution”, it’s capitalism and a “fair price for energy” or socialism and “no price for energy”.
Socialism being a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
Don’t Pay might have had some sort of a case if they said their demands were for some immediate relief within capitalism but that the permanent solution was socialism, but instead they are offering a supposed permanent solution within capitalism.
So, it’s Fair Price versus No Price. Which is the pipe dream? You decide.
Many of them probably don’t care and wouldn’t even pretend to if we didn’t have the vote. Some may care but that won’t make any difference as there is not much the politicians can do beyond giving a few handouts to ease people’s plight a little bit.
And they know this as the international price of oil and gas is not something they can control, at least not something they can reduce. In fact they caused it to rise by imposing sanctions on Russian oil and gas, knowing that this would increase the price. Politicians like the present and likely future prime minister have both openly admitted that this would inflict “pain” (their word)(*) on people and justified this as a price worth paying to back the NATO proxy war in Ukraine.
The most effective thing they could do to bring the cost of gas down would be to end the sanctions against Russia. But there’s a fat chance of that happening, showing that their priority is not people.
(*) see this for instance from a couple of days ago;
And this from February:
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/economic-cost-living-uk-ukraine-russia-invasion-liz-truss-1486881
I can’t find any information about where these actions will be taking place if you have more details.
Did find this news item:
Looks as if it is beginning to dawn on the media that people won’t be prepared to suffer pain for Ukraine. According to this article, people will become more concerned about their own immediate personal economic problem than about what’s going on in some far away place like Ukraine, and if politicians think otherwise they are seriously misjudging the situation.
Here’s the article:
https://amp.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-west-s-ukraine-response-about-to-fracture-/amp
Besides being a purveyor of antisemitic “tropes”, Truss is a first class hypocrite. She is known to want to move the UK embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and denounces her civil servants as antisemitic for advising against this (how her civil servants must hate her). On Ukraine she shouts that Russia must be seen to lose as not losing would set a precedent that state borders can be changed by force and so is a threat to the rights-based international order, etc, etc, blah blah blah. But when Israel changes its internally-recognised borders by annexing East Jerusalem, the Golan heights, parts of the West Bank, that’s ok. Israel has done everything Russia has.
It sounds like that statement was expressing, in the author’s own words, this view expressed by Marx in 1847 in “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality”.
“If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its “movement”, the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie. The terror in France could thus by its mighty hammer-blows only serve to spirit away, as it were, the ruins of feudalism from French soil. The timidly considerate bourgeoisie would not have accomplished this task in decades. The bloody action of the people thus only prepared the way for it.“
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm
Those French ecowarriors are behind the times if they want to get at “the leisure industry of the most privileged”. It’s no longer golf but cycling:
https://www.businessinsider.com/cycling-is-the-new-golf-2015-2?amp
That’s where, apparently, the contacts and deals are made these days. Wheeling and dealing as it were (apologies).
Is history about to repeat itself? It looks as if the Tories, like Labour a few years ago, is going to choose a Leader with a way-out economic policy which will fail.
Some long-standing Tory MPs will remember the “Barber Boom” of 1972-4:
“Barber’s first assault was on the tax system. In his speech accompanying the 1971 budget, he said of taxation in Britain ‘it too often stultifies enterprise. Too often it discourages the pursuit of profit. Too often it penalises savings on which the nation’s worth and the growth of the economy so largely depend.’ Comprehensive reform was required and so began a series of income tax cuts, an overhaul of the ‘purchase tax’ and the introduction of VAT.”
Older members and workers will remember how it ended with the 3-day week and shortages with Heath calling an election in 1974 on the question of “who rules—us or the miners?”. To which the voters replied “Not you, mate”. A Labour government took over and made an equal mess of things, ending in the Winter of Discontent of 1978/9 with rubbish piling up and bodies waiting to be buried.
Will it be “the Truss boom” followed by a doomed Labour government?
Thought I would check and in the UK too golf courses (and bowling greens) are exempt from hose-pipe bans — by law, on health and safety grounds (not sure what the danger to health and safety would be)
Where are the hosepipe bans and how do they affect golf irrigation?
Lucky that pétanque isn’t played on grass, otherwise the French eco-warriors would have to take on the working class as well as the “most privileged”.
