ALB
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Just noticed that the IWGB is calling for a second referendum with the option to stay in, at least in the single market. They see this as a way of protecting workers’ rights in the UK, especially those of workers from other EU countries (who they seek to represent):
iwgb.org.uk/post/5bfcf93d5df02/iwgb-joins-call-for-a
Workers don’t need to get involved in deciding the trading arrangements of the capitalist class, even though here the IWGB are wrong for the right reason.
It seems to becoming more and more likely that the political representatives of the capitalist class in parliament and government are going to have to opt for a referendum as the way of settling the differences over trading arrangements between the various section of the capitalist class they represent.
While, from a socialist point of view, a referendum on this issue would be irrelevant (trading arrangements are a concern of the capitalist class only) and even dangerous (it will unleash yet more xenophobia), from a democratic point of view you can’t argue that the result of one referendum cannot be overturned by another referendum. Of course it can and there would be nothing undemocratic about it. In fact, this possibility is written into the democratic rulebook of our party and has happened on a number of occasions.
It’s absurd to claim, as in the unattributed quote, that “humans are not carnivores”. It is not even clear what this means since humans have always eaten meat. All existing stone-age tribes eat meat as the archeological evidence shows that those that haven’t survived did so too. In fact how could the Eskimos, Laplanders and others living within the Arctic Circle survive without eating meat (in fact it was reading an article in the papers yesterday about the Sami and their reindeer in Norway that prompted me to intervene, against my better judgement, is this pointless debate)? Even those Andaman Islanders who dealt with that missionary must be meat-eaters. They won’t have bows and arrows just to shoot coconuts down from trees.
Biologically humans are omnivores with what they eat (or don’t eat) being culturally determined. Some can even choose not to eat meat.
Yes, we reviewed it in the September 2017 Socialist Standard
FRANCE YELLOW VESTS PROTEST: MACRON PROMISES WAGE RISE
The minimum wage will be increased by 7% – and the cost of this increase will be met by the government rather than employers.
Actually, Macron did not promise a wage rise. That’s what I thought he said when I was listening to him, as did those commenting on French international TV immediately afterwards. But what he actually said, and meant, was that those on the minimum wage would get an extra €100 a month (a Euro is worth about 90p and rising due to the Brexit farce), not that the wage itself would be increased.
What he meant was that the French equivalent of “tax credits”, as a monthly state payment to those on low wages (a subsidy to employers to allow them to go on paying low wages) would go up by €100. That’s the meaning of the increase being “met by the government rather than employers”. A gradual rise in this over the next 3 or 4 years was already planned. So, what the gilets jaunes have achieved here is to get the rise brought forward (and increased a bit). Something but not as impressive as a rise in the minimum wage by 7%. That would have been rather impressive as in France when the minimum wage goes up so, under trade union agreements, in order to maintain differentials do the wages of many other workers.
One of the other measures announced by Macron will amount to a wage increase for many workers: exonerating overtime payments from tax and social security contributions (as had been the case in the past). Which, again, won’t affect employers.
In fact Macron went out of his way not to add to the costs of employers. The only tax increase announced was on the ‘digital giants’ Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (known as GAFA in France).
So, in so far as the protests were about money, the protesters did get some crumbs even a bit of baguette. I imagine that, with the christmas/new year break coming, the movement will now wind down.
Ironically, capitalism being what it is, making cutting CO2 emissions profitable is more likely to succeed (as Alan has just pointed out) than appealing to politicians in charge of governments to do what they can’t (undermine their competitivity of their exports by unilaterally increasing energy costs).
As an article from the Socialist Standard of February 1989 (yes, we were on to it then too) by D.A.T. from New Zealand pointed out:
Measurements made by the Department of Scientific and Industrial research since the early seventies show the concentrations of carbon-dioxide to be 325 ppm in 1973 and 350 ppm in 1988. Average global temperatures have been recorded from the year 1880 and figures show that the highest were in 1987 and the five hottest years have been since 1980. The United States is now taking the greenhouse effect very seriously as it stands to be a big loser if world temperatures rise as some predict. Other nations may benefit in the short term. At worst, if the use of fossil fuels for energy continue on the existing scale, the average global temperature will rise at a catastrophic 0.8 degrees centigrade per decade.
The worldwide capitalist system will be unable to deal effectively with this problem. The warning signs have been with us for years, and many experts and environmentalists have been pointing out the dangers. Damage which will have an effect many decades later is being done now.
Alternatives to environmentally destructive industrial processes exist, they are generally more expensive and this would reduce the competitiveness of a nation or company which chose to adopt them unilaterally. Action will only be taken if damage begins seriously to impair the smooth functioning of the profit system — or if anti-pollution measures and products become profitable in themselves. Either way, capitalism’s air will remain unfit to breathe.
Plus ça change. That was thirty years ago. In the meantime, despite all the demonstrations and appeals to governments, things have got worse. Thirty wasted years. The only good thing is that the average global temperature did not rise by 0.8 degrees centigrade per decade (i.e. by 2.4 degrees) over the period, but that was more by accident than by design.
“We must collectively do whatever’s necessary non-violently, to persuade politicians and business leaders to relinquish their complacency and denial,” the open letter stated, which was signed by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, among others.
There are still appealing to “politicians and business leaders (!)” to do something that economic conditions, not complacency or denial, mean they can’t do — politicians because they can’t undermine the competitivity of their exports by taking unilateral action, business leaders because they would have to sacrifice profits (unless they switch to investing in selling renewables technology, sea defences, carbon capture equipment, etc).
Basically what they are doing is appealing to politicians to put the longer-term overall general capitalist interest before short-term national capitalist interests, while what they should be doing is campaigning for “system change” to socialism as a world of common ownership and democratic control by and in the interest of the whole world’s population.
What a joke ! Fifty renowned reformists draw up “a bold new blueprint” proposing an impracticable reform to capitalism and we’re supposed to take them seriously. As if “huge levies” on the profits of capitalist firms wouldn’t lead to them cutting back on their investment in production, leading to an economic downturn during which the problems the “left-leaning” reformists set out to solve would get worse.
The time and energy that would be needed to get majority political support to implement this doomed plan would be better spent on working to win over a majority to socialism as a society based on common ownership and democratic control with production directly to meet people’s needs instead of, as now, for sale on a market with a view to profit.
Yeah, and it also causes reduced sperm counts, autism, nut allergy, and ….[fill in, to improve your chances of getting research funding and publicity for the results]
Seriously, this is not what this study found at all. It’s a study by building engineers about how buildings design could be changed if increased CO2 emissions lead to the amount of CO2 generally in the atmosphere rising to a level that affects human thinking ability. They didn’t carry out the research on the effect of CO2 on the brain.
There is such research and it has been known for ages. Because humans breathe out CO2 its levels in enclosed places where humans congregate such as offices, classrooms, submarines, etc rise to quite high levels (which would be reached in the general atmosphere only in the really, really worst-case scenario). In so far as this is a problem it is independent of global warming and could have been with by building design at any time in the last two hundred years or so. A few pot plants might help too.
We need to apply more critical thinking to what we read in the papers or hear on the media.
Here’s the view of David Graeber, the celebrity anarchist. While I think he might have a bit of a point about bread-and-butter struggles tending to be different today, due to “financialization”, compared with fifty years ago, he is clearly exaggerating when he sees these as revolutionary, even insurrectionary. They are no more revolutionary than traditional trade union action.
Anyway, here’s what he argues.
Yes but the initial reduced consumption of workers would effect the profits only of capitalists investing in the production of goods that workers buy.
Here’s a rough translation of an extract from a Socialist Standard subscriber/sympathiser from a French-speaking country currently in France:
“At the beginning I was suspicious about the gilets jaunes movement but now I strongly support it as there is a need to give it a perspective. This is more than ever the moment, especially if one wants a society rid of money. At the beginning it was a movement against the increase in the price of fuel and was supported by small employers (“petits patrons”) and so did have a flavour of poujadism, but in the end that quickly became minoritised as the movement passed from a vague spontaneous citizens’ movement into a struggle against the high cost of living and the anti-social policy of the government of Macron and Philippe, a movement which the workers’ movement has joined. That is why the extreme right should not be allowed to occupy the ground and more than ever why the need to get involved in the movement to give it a political and alternative perspective. This is also the sense of the struggle for socialism”.
Not that small lifestyle changes are going to do much to solve the problem. That’s shifting the blame and responsibility from capitalism on to us. Under capitalism if workers consume less what would happen is that a bigger proportion of what is produced would go to the capitalists as profits. No, the whole capitalist economic system of production for profit and capital accumulation, which is impeding the matter been dealt with effectively, has to go before anything lasting can be done.
Yes, sort of. The general theory is that employers have to pay workers enough to enable them to recreate and maintain their particular working skills. This reflects the cost of living as the cost of what workers need to buy to do this. If this is high as a result of taxes on what workers need to consume then wages will have to be higher too. If there is a direct tax on wages like income tax then, here too, employers will have to pay higher money wages as, if they didn’t, workers would not have enough money to spend on recreating and maintaining their working skills and so wouldn’t be able to work so well.
In other workers, in effect, taxes on what workers consume or on their wages get passed on to the employers. So, while workers may pay taxes, in the end taxation is a burden on the propertied classes (capitalists and landowners).
The position becomes complicated when there is an increase in a tax. Obviously, in the first instance, workers have to pay this and suffer a reduction in the amount of money they have to live on, but the increased taxes will exert an upward pressure on wages just through the operation of the law of supply and demand. Fortunately, this can be speeded up by trade union action. If the government takes steps to prevent this, pressure will built up over time and eventually there will be a wages explosion as in France in May-June 1968.
Also, the amount that workers need to recreate and maintain their working skills is not a rigid fixed amount. Apart from changing over time as new items of consumption come into being, it can vary up or down within a certain margin. Which is once again something that can be influenced by the struggle between workers and employers, i.e. it is determined by the balance of class forces in the context of the state of the labour market.
Looks as if the State got its act together this weekend and managed to contain the protests.
Meanwhile here is a list of the demands:
Looking through it you can see it is an amalgam of “leftwing” and “rightwing” demands. What struck me in particular was the demands to protect small businesses and self-employed artisans:
– Promote small businesses, villages and city centers. (Stop the construction of large commercial areas around big cities that kill small business + free parking in city centers).
– Same system of social security for all (including artisans and self-entrepreneurs). End of the RSI ( the social regime of the self-employed).
– Protect French industry: prohibit relocation. Protecting our industry is protecting our know-how and our jobs.
– Prohibition of charging retailers a fee when their customers use the credit card.
I think this used to be called “poujadism”.
Also noted this:
– That the causes of forced migration are treated.
– That asylum seekers are well treated. We owe them housing, security, food and education for the minors. Work with the UN to have host camps open in many countries around the world, pending the outcome of the asylum application.
– That the unsuccessful asylum seekers be returned to their country of origin.
– That a real integration policy be implemented. Living in France means becoming French (French language course, History of France course and civic education course with certification at the end of the course).
The protestors were reported as singing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. This was originally a (bourgeois) revolutionary song (“Aux Armes, Citoyens!”) but is intensely nationalistic. Imagine British protestors singing the national anthem — in fact they probably are on Tommy Robinson’s “Brexit betrayal” march in London at this very moment.
