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This Saturday, 7 December, there will be an insert in the<i> i </i> paper on sale in the south of England and Wales of 160,000 copies of a Party statement on the general election, with a cut-off reply form for more information, as we successfully did during the Euroelections in May. If anyone here wants to buy that paper that day, it’s only £1.20.
It looks as if the Tories are on course to win. One reason might be that Johnson is promising something he can deliver, i.e. the formal withdrawal of the UK from the EU (even though trade negotiations will continue) while Corbyn is promising what many voters judge to be pie in the sky (as it is under capitalism).
Another factor may be resentment amongst some that they were asked a question (as doesn’t happen all that often) only to find that attempts have been made to ignore or reverse their answer. In other words, such voters are now not so much concerned about the question (which they didn’t really want or ask to be asked) or even about the consequences of their answer as that their vote is being ignored. Lesson for the ruling class: don’t bring the people into your quarrels.
Despite the cold, South Wales comrades held two stalls in different parts of the Cardiff Central constituency yesterday for nearly two hours. They met someone who had already voted for us by post. However, this might be as unrepresentative as the other person who told us that she too had voted, switching from Tory to Labour, as she was one of those Waspi women who had been swindled out of an expected earlier State pension.
Andy Thomas was interviewed this morning by BBC South East for their news if anyone out there can get on that on their TV.
Kent comrades also report more coverage in the local printed press.
What about the opposite but unlikely outcome of a Labour win? I don’t want to sound like a Trot tactician but, as we know that they would fail in less than two years and end up being forced by the economic laws of capitalism to put profits before their promises to meet people’s needs and improve their lot, that should make a few more turn to socialism. On the other hand past failures of Labour governments has led many more to turn to outfits like the National Front.
Our election address for Folkestone and Hythe will be delivered to Royal Mail at 10 am on Friday tor them to deliver to the 56,500 households in the constituency as from then.
That’s the way to go about it. Mass demonstrations plus the vote. Not violence or “direct action” alone.
Further demonstration of our contention that, when a mass movement gets off the ground and the opportunity to vote exists, the movement will use the ballot box. The same can be expected to apply to the movement for socialism, leaving anarchists, ultraleftists and other anti-parliamentarists on the sidelines shouting “don’t vote” as workers pass them by on the way to the polling stations.
“Bloomberg bid to topple Trump in battle of the billionaires” (headline in today’s Times. US politics neatly summed up.
The results of the current local council elections there as the only ones held under universal suffrage will be interesting and could be more effective than the turn to violence.
People here may recall that before this site was hacked and this forum became inaccessible there was an ongoing discussion about an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government on rebels in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, in April 2018.
The Western media, taking the cue from their governments, was saying that it was the Syrian government but, because on the face of it the government had no need to do this as it was winning the civil war and knew that the West would attack them if it did, people here were urging caution. The West did bomb Syria, in support of the rebels they had sponsored in a bid to bring about “regime change” and establish a pro-West government there. We issued this anti-war statement:
Later, after the government won control of the area, it allowed inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in to check what had happened. The OPCW eventually issued a report saying that chemical weapons (chlorine) had been used, so justifying after the fact the Western bombing.
It now emerges that this report was doctored, as explained in this article by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday:
The same scenario, then, as over the Weapons of Mass Destruction allegedly possessed by the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq that was used as a pretext for the Western capitalist powers to go to war there, and which were afterwards found not to have existed.
A mention in the Kent online newspaper:
And on Wikipedia here with a link to their entry on us.
The editorial in today’s Times talks about “Labour plans for socialist revolution” and says “Jeremy Corbyn’s election manifesto is a blueprint for a socialist revolution.”
Of course it is nothing of the kind. It is merely an attempt to put the clock back to the 1970s when there were council houses and nationalised utilities before Thatcher set out to undo all that the post-war Labour government had done. If Corbyn is a “socialist revolutionary” then so would Attlee and Harold Wilson have to have been too. But nobody called them that.
A real socialist revolution would see all productive resources transferred to the community so that they could be used, under democratic control, to directly satisfy people’s needs, both as individuals and as a community. There is nothing about that in Labour’s manifesto,
Someone on the BBC got it right when he described Labour’s manifesto as “radical reformism”. That’s more like it. Not that capitalism can be reformed to work in the interest of the many. All Labour governments, as government working within the framework of capitalism, have ended up imposing austerity through, for instance, “wage restraint” and “wage freezes”. We’ve seen the past and it doesn’t work.
“… capitalism is heading unavoidably, in purely economic terms, towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit – and, indeed, that the next, looming crisis will at some point see all fiat currencies collapse against precious metals,…”
How many times have we heard that before ! It might have been the view of Henryk Grossman but it wasn’t that of Karl Marx, who pointed out that “permanent crises do not exist” (Theories of Surplus Value. Part Two, p. 497). Grossman purely mathematical demonstration that capitalism would collapse were refuted at the time by Anton Pannekoek.
Capitalism goes through an endless sequence of boom/slump cycles (periods of expansion and contraction or stagnation) in which the periods of slump prepare the conditions for the next period of expansion. There is no such thing as a permanent slump. There is no reason to suppose that the capitalist economic system suffers from a fatal flaw that will lead towards its purely mechanical breakdown.
By coincidence the WSP (India) has just sent a chapter of a book they are preparing on “The Future of Capitalism” which has this to say on collapse theories:
“(1) A recession is an inbuilt consequence of capitalism.
(2) A recession can invigorate capitalism.
(3) Capitalism is not likely to collapse of its own accord any time.
(4) If collapse theories were true, all socialists would need to do is to sit back with folded hands.
(5) Even if capitalism did collapse, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that socialism would follow.
(6) Inauguration of Socialism is the task of the working class and can only come about by the actions of a class conscious majority understanding and wanting socialism.
(7) Collapse theories therefore undermine the real work of socialists, just as do time and energy spent on reforms and alternative systems within capitalism such as cooperatives, fair trade, communes etc.”After the Liberals’ “pledge” (what is the difference between a pledge and a promise — a political pledge is just a worthless piece of paper) to “build an economy that works for everyone, not just the richest”, Corbyn pledges, in the foreword to their manifesto published today, that
“Labour will rewrite the rules of the economy, so that it works for everyone.”
But that’s precisely what the experience of all the reformist governments that there have been has shown cannot be done : the rules of the economy — the capitalist economy — cannot be “rewritten” to stop profits and profit-making having to have priority.
Where you have got class ownership of productive resources and production for sale with the aim of making a profit, definite economic laws come into operation which act with the force of laws of nature and impose themselves on governments, whatever governments may want to do (or have pledged).
Governments do not control the way the economy works; it’s the other way round. Governments have to conform to the imperative of allowing profit-making to continue unless they want to provoke an economic downturn. In the end, all governments are compelled to recognise and act on this. A Corbyn government (if it ever happens) would discover this is within a couple of years.
Capitalism simply cannot be reworked so that it works for everyone. It is a profit-making system that can only work in the interest of the few who live off profits.
The LibDems are not that nice. They are prepared to be nasty too. The non-entity who is their current leader is enough of a psychopath to be ready to press the nuclear button without hesitation. The good news is that she will never get the chance. The bad news is that someone else will.
