COULROPHOBIA

Unions with members in the education sector published a joint statement on 27 May saying that schools should ‘only open when it is safe to do so’. According to this statement, the government, in pressing for a partial opening tomorrow, 1 June, was showing “a lack of understanding” about the potential spread of coronavirus in schools and outwards to parents, siblings, relatives and the wider community. The statement was signed by UNISON, AEP, GMB, NAHT, NASUWT, NEU, NSEAD, Prospect and Unite. You can read the full text of the statement via the link at the end of this posting.

Are the unions correct in saying that the government doesn’t ‘understand’ what it is doing? Can 261,184 confirmed Covid cases and 36,914 deaths overall by 25 May, the third-highest death per population in the world, be simply due to a failure of understanding? Certainly Johnson acts the bumbling clown, prompting in us ‘coulrophobia’, or fear of clowns, but does such clownish incompetence really provide a plausible explanation when the introduction of distancing restrictions were deliberately delayed, when track and trace was deliberately abandoned and when we are now deliberately rushing to be amongst the first wave of nations to relax restrictions when we have no right to be in that vanguard?

There is another, more sinister explanation for the government’s actions and inactions: it has real concerns that, following the Global Financial Crisis and with the next major crisis, global warming, approaching fast, capitalism won’t survive. Their real priority is that, when the pandemic eventually subsides, the bankers must be able to recover their loans, the landlords must be able to claim their rents and the owners of capital must be paid their dividends. This is the priority for which the government will, as it has boasted, do ‘everything necessary’. If that ‘everything necessary’ means killing you, me and a significant proportion of the entire working class, it’s prepared to do it.

So where does this leave school re-opening? Until trade unions are able simply to withdraw labour when their members are at risk in the workplace without fear of injunction, fine, sequestration and attack in the pages of the capitalist press, and until unions can call on solidarity action by other workers to back up such action, they will have to resort to such ’moderate’ actions as the joint statement issued this week. When they can re-assert their rightful power in the workplace, we will not only be on the road to overcoming our coulrophobia, we will be on the road to socialism.

Link:

Education unions agree statement on the safe reopening of schools

CAPITALISM’S STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE

The Guardian yesterday (14 May) quoted from the Daily Torygraph an internal report by HM Treasury officials leaked to that paper outlining the options for re-starting the economy after Covid-19. As readers will appreciate, it would be asking too much of me to read the odious Torygraph – reading the Guardian is bad enough – but here is the gist of the summary of the leaked document as the Guardian reported it.

• A forecast budget deficit for 2020-21 of £337 billion, up from pre-Covid forecast of £55 billion

• A possible intensification of the austerity programme, including an inevitable extension of the public sector pay freeze. As public sector pay is already depressed by years of pay
freeze, this would, however only save a paltry £6.5 billion over two years.

• “Broad based” tax rises, which is Treasury-speak for increasing VAT and National Insurance.

• Borrowing – but here the report is said to have warned of a “sovereign debt crisis”. Thus, despite record low interest rates and, thankfully, still with our own currency, borrowing is dismissed as a longer-term strategy.

• Cutting the state pension – but abandoning the triple lock would only generate modest savings. Not mentioned by the Guardian is the obvious strategy of ensuring that no state pensions need be paid. Encouraging an early return to work and opening schools before the Summer Break may well suffice to kill everyone currently receiving the state pension, but, if not, increasing the state pension retirement age to 75 should complete the job.

• Cutting welfare spending. Again, no mentioned was made of the obvious strategy of ensuring that poor people die in large numbers, thus saving most of the £130 billion previously spent on welfare.

Government strategy could be seen as already starting down the roads suggested by the last two strategies. Schools are to re-open in the teeth of opposition from NEU and other teaching unions while the mass media and, most shamefully of all, the BBC , seek to assure us all that this will be quite safe. In the private sector that may well be true, but not in most of the state sector. Funding that keeps the homeless off the streets is to be cut which will ensure that they will die within weeks. Return to work by low paid workers, i.e. those who cannot work at home using a PC, is being encouraged and, in effect, enforced. Many of these workers have no trade union to speak up for them, the result of policy by a succession of Tory and Labour governments.

Capitalism is threatened and these are desperate measures intended to shore it up. It can only survive if the current social relations on which it depends are maintained. Banks must be allowed to enforce their security. Landlords must be allowed to evict and sue their tenants. Creditors must be paid. Employees must work and obey their employer. The message from the government will be that, if these social relations are not maintained, there will be anarchy.

Not necessarily! There is an alternative: working class power and socialism.

Solidarity with socialists in Labour

Writing in the Guardian G2 today, actor Julie Hesmondhalgh expressed the disappointment many Labour members feel at the departure of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. She felt that his time as leader was a missed opportunity; and while she encouraged Corbynistas to stay and work within the Labour Party, she nevertheless conceded that this work will now all be about getting the Tories out rather than creating an “amazing socialist utopia”.

Despair amongst the left in the Labour Party is understandable, but one consequence of Jeremy Corbyn’s brief time as leader has been a recognition by many within the Labour Party that they have more in common with members of socialist parties to the left of Labour, especially the Communist Party, than with their own right wing. In the 2017 general election, and again in 2019, when the right wing of their own party was actively conspiring to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, the support they received campaigning on the doorstep from card carrying communists and in the pages of the Morning Star, the only national newspaper to give Jeremy Corbyn unwavering support, will not have gone unnoticed.

As communists, we never believed that a Corbyn-led majority Labour government would result in the “amazing socialist utopia” which Julie envisaged. This will take a social revolution, not a fleeting parliamentary majority, and a wider social base than the Labour Party can presently provide. The bonds of solidarity and respect we have established with socialists within the Labour Party are nevertheless real ones which must not be allowed to wither on the vine now the right wing is back in control of Labour. It is not for the Communist Party to lure members from Labour, but for those Labour members who want to do more in the coming years than simply campaign to get the Tories out, we are here to welcome you.

AFTER COVID-19

In a month or two

• retailers and home mortgage borrowers won’t be able to service their loans from the banks
• private landlords won’t be able to service their loans from banks as their tenants are unable to pay their rent.

As a result property prices will collapse, rendering banks insolvent as much of their lending that isn’t dependent on vanishing future profits is secured on property. While central banks will continue to pump huge amounts of liquidity into the banking system, liquidity is not the same thing as solvency. Banks will inevitably go bust, necessitating governments to rescue them again, as it did in 2007-8, and, as they did post 2007, seek to re-balance the economy with a further round of ‘austerity’ for workers.

My speculation? No, it’s effectively what Larry Summers, the celebrated economist and former director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, was saying today on Bloomberg.

Summers predictably declined to predict how all this would all turn out. The aim for communists surely has to be to socialism. We allow banks this time to go bust while securing continuance of their money transmission and their other, essential i.e. non-speculative activities – something the Vickers Report should have ensured but which it failed to do. We close down tax havens. We appropriate the appropriators.

Meanwhile, the immediate need when Covid-19 has been brought under some control will be to hold the UK government to account. Why is our death rate heading to be the highest of any developed nation? Why were Johnson and Prince Charles tested when others were left to die? Why was the warning from the SARS outbreak ignored? Why has the government been closing hospitals and A&E, including the threatened closure in our area of Epsom and St Helier Hospital? Why has the NHS been used as a bargaining counter in trade negotiations with the USA? Why did the government fail to protect NHS staff with PPI?

We need more than just whistle blowing for the NHS every Thursday at 7 pm. We need immediate accountability post Covid-19, then to start building a better world.

THE REAL NIGHTMARE

The first thing on our minds when we now wake up in the middle of the night isn’t, of course, Covid-19 or even the health of our Prime Minister, it is relief that we have not been nuked as we slept by the dastardly Chinese or Russians. What better opportunity could they have than now when we are all being ravaged by a virus? We can, however, turn over and go back to sleep, content in the knowledge that Dominic Raab (or Keir Starmer, if he has mysteriously become Prime Minister in the middle of the night) is willing to push the Red Button and avenge us posthumously, even at the personal cost of becoming a genocidal mass murderer .

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, one of our four nuclear missile-armed submarines has been at sea. The far-sighted people at the Admiralty have even taken Covid-19 into account. If only others in government had been so far sighted! Crews are now held in quarantine ahead of the deployment, so that, it is hoped, none of them develop the symptoms while at sea. As a further precaution, the crew currently at sea are thought not to have been told about the pandemic. This is so that they are not distracted by a fellow submariner with a cough from the business in hand: targeting their rockets on China, Russia and North Korea and the potential need to re-program them quickly to hit Iran (France and Israel, although nuclear armed, are presumably exempt).

CND has calculated that replacing Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system will cost at least £205 billion. See https://cnduk.org/resources/205-billion-cost-trident/ . Money well spent for a good night’s sleep!

Before returning to sleep with these reassuring thoughts in your head, don’t however dwell on the possibility that the USA might have sold us the systems with a disabling mechanism hidden within them. That would only give you feverish nightmares in which Mr Raab or Mr Starmer repeatedly stab at the Red Button and nothing happening while a ginger haired President sits in the White House and smirks.

A cure for self-isolation

The Centenary of the Communist Party in Britain isn’t the only notable centenary to be celebrated this year. 22 April 2020 is the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth (22 April, 1870, new style dates). To mark this event, and to help keep those of us who are not key workers usefully occupied, a group of comrades in Latvia calling themselves the Latvian Labour Frontline have laid down this challenge. In the month of April

• read/re-read Lenin’s works at a rate of 20-30 pages a day. That’s more than enough. Don’t cram and try to finish Lenin’s Collected Works in just a month!

• Post our daily reading report with the hashtag #Lenin150Challenge

If our reports could also contain• a photo of ourselves holding one of Lenin’s books.
• a proud sign saying “I have finished [name of the work]!”
• thoughts on what we have just read – for example: “I’ve just read Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Now I know I want to become an imperialist! ” (Yes, comrades, humour is allowed!)

that would be perfect!

But please don’t post individual quotes. They just go from one corner of the Internet to another and will be largely forgotten by your audience. If you really like a particular quote, just retell it in your own words.

If You don’t know where to start, try “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”. But the choice is yours. You don’t have to rely on your bookshelf. You will find all Lenin’s most significant works at

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/index.htm.

This isn’t going to get us out of the current problems besetting society, but it might help us deal with things later.

 

The Day After Tomorrow

Despite the obsequious coverage in the mass media, it self-evident that the government has bungled its response to the coronavirus pandemic. It failed, in part, because ministers didn’t follow WHO’s advice to “test, test, test” every suspected case when they had the opportunity. They didn’t isolate and quarantine. Perhaps influenced by Dominic Cummings, they appear initially to have thought “herd immunity” would protect the rich while letting the old and poor perish. They failed to contact trace. They now have a new plan, Suppress–Shield–Treat–Palliate, but this was agreed too late and has left the NHS wholly unprepared for the surge of severely and critically ill patients. My view? No – those of experts. See link below.

What happens when the pandemic is over? The Tories will want to return to ‘business as usual’, ring fence the rich and powerful and require workers – survivors from the NHS, social services and the “unskilled” (SIC) workers to pay for rebuilding the capital owned by the 1%, just as they did after the 2007-8 banking crisis. A helpful strategy to this end will be to start a generation war. Sir Max Hastings on BBC Radio 4 yesterday argued that his generation had benefitted from the previous one’s efforts to defeat Hitler, benefited from the post-war booming economy until 2007, extracted from taxpayers “free bus passes” and other perks and now expects succeeding generations to pay for the cost of protecting them from the ravages of the pandemic and restoring the economy.
It’s not the elderly per se who have benefitted most in the last 75 years, it’s the wealthy – the owners of capital. Sir Max is, however, partially right. After the pandemic is over, we must establish a steeply progressive inheritance tax that covers wealth secreted away in trusts and other avoidance measures and use the huge amounts this would release as a true inheritance and ‘thank you’ for younger people who enabled the older and wealthier amongst us to survive.

As Solomon Hughes writes in the Morning Star today, it won’t be easy, but we must resist with all our might the coming attempts to revert to “business as usual” after the pandemic. We must build a better society for all working people – a society that can avert or withstand the next crisis coming over the horizon, global warming. If we can also bring to account those responsible for undermining the NHS, creating the gig economy, destroying free college and university education, undermining trade unions and destroying social housing and social welfare, so much the better.

 

References
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30727-3/fulltext
https://morningstaronline.co.uk

Doing capitalism differently?

Professor Mariana Mazzucato is a heterodox economist at the UCL some way from Marxism but she shares with Marxists recognition of the importance of “value” in economic analysis. In neoclassical economics, the kind they currently teach in universities, a marginalist approach is adopted and value is synonymous with markets and market prices. For Marxists, value is the labour time consumed in producing a commodity, whether directly or through the consumption of other commodities in its manufacture.

Professor Mazzucato argues in an article in the Guardian today that neoclassical economics goes a long way to explaining the mess the world finds itself in today and the Covid-19 pandemic will provide an opportunity to abandon it and do capitalism differently . Since the 1980’s, she argues, it has resulted in: weakened institutions like the NHS that are needed to respond to crises; a loss of confidence in what governments can achieve; the destruction of the social safety net; and growing inequality.

There was, however, no golden age prior to the 1980s, just a brief period after the War when the mere existence of the USSR required western capitalists to treat their workers a little better.

Professor Mazzucato believes capitalism can be reformed provided governments

• invest in and, if necessary, create institutions to prevent and manage future crises.
• co-ordinate research and development, steering them to “public health goals”.
• structure public-private partnerships to ensure “both citizens and the economy benefit”.
• attach conditions to bail outs of private business to ensure that the firms we save with public money become part of a new economy delivering lower carbon emissions and “investing in workers”.

A version of “soft capitalism” that incorporated these features would certainly be a great improvement on the current version, but it ain’t gonna happen. Capitalism is a system whose sole purpose is the accumulation of capital. Until it is itself overturned, all obstacles that impede this accumulation will be swept away. When the current crisis is over, public institutions like the NHS that restrict capital accumulation will continue to be under-funded and undermined; private sector R&D will continue to be driven by profit, not social need; public-private partnerships will continue to rip off workers; and, while there are still hydrocarbons left in the ground that can be extracted and burnt at a profit, CO2 levels will continue to rise. This is how capitalism works. The only solution is a social revolution that ends it.

The Coronavirus Pandemic: a view from Croydon

The coronavirus pandemic and its social consequences are moving so quickly that anything we write today is likely to be rendered obsolete tomorrow, especially when it is written from the narrow perspective and vantage point of Croydon and its local Communist Party branch. Nevertheless, here are a dozen recommendations that we might have been discussing at our AGM on Thursday had it not been postponed.

1. A government of national unity. It is unacceptable that someone as unsuitable, untrustworthy and clearly as out of his depth as the Fat Controller should be heading up a Tory government at a time of national crisis.

2. Full disclosure of the government’s modelling of the epidemic in England, Scotland and Wales so that it can be scrutinised by the wider medical and academic community. Remember how wrong were the government’s narrow pool of medical advisers over mad cow disease?

3. More comprehensive reporting and publication of the numbers of infections and deaths at the local level.

4. Responsibility for managing the epidemic in Northern Ireland to be transferred to the Republic. A single, unified strategy is called for in the island of Ireland. Covid-19 does not respect borders, least of all ones as porous at that between the North and the South of Ireland.

5. Compulsory requisitioning of private hospitals. It is simply unacceptable that the government should be further subsidising these parasitic institutions by hiring their facilities at commercial prices.

6. Nationalisation without compensation of UK retail banks, i.e. those behind the ring fence set up following the Vickers report, before they fail.  They should then be supervised by the Bank of England, which itself should be brought completely under government control. We must learn from the mistakes in the 2007-8 bail out of banks and not use public funds to protect bank shareholders and their over-paid senior management while leaving their customers to suffer. We can then ensure that banks support socially useful activities rather than prioritise building up their own reserves as they did following the 2008 financial crisis. If necessary, relevant parts of UK industry should also be taken over to preclude profiteering, co-ordinate manufacture of respiratory equipment and promote not-for-profit vaccine research and distribution.

7. The homeless should be taken off the streets immediately and properly housed. The acquisition of vacant properties and second homes could be undertaken to facilitate this.

8. Food banks should be run down as quickly as practicable and replaced with adequate levels of social payments. To this end, Universal Credit should be immediately transformed into a more generous and less restrictive system and workers on zero hours contracts and others in the gig economy brought within its ambit.

9. The government should disregard the bleating from Richard Branson and other UK airlines to bail them out. If they are failing, they should be put into administration and their fleets mothballed. The opportunity this would provide to formally abandon Heathrow expansion should be taken.

10. The wealth of UK citizens held abroad in tax havens should be re-patriated and further flight of capital abroad halted by the immediate imposition of capital controls. A comprehensive wealth tax should be imposed to help finance the crisis.

11. Evictions and mortgage foreclose on individual’s primary homes should be made illegal.

12. A mandatory role for trade unions in every workplace. This would ensure that exposure to infection by employees is related to social need and is fairly distributed. Employers cannot be trusted to carrry this out unchecked.

This list of recommendations isn’t comprehensive; nor does it necessarily represent current, official CP policy. In essence, a social revolution is called for – and that is CP policy. These recommendations are how we view things from Croydon. If you agree or disagree with any or all of them, let us know.