TERROR IN BRITAIN: WHAT DID THE PRIME MINISTER KNOW? by JOHN PILGER 31 May 2017

 by JOHN PILGER 31 May 2017

http://bit.ly/2rjZSik

The unsayable in Britain's general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.

Critical questions - such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist "assets" in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst - remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal "review".

The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years.

The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a "hardline Islamic state" in Libya and "is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida".

The "smoking gun" is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in "battle": first to remove Mu'ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.

Last year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a "terrorist watch list" and warned MI5 that his group was looking for a "political target" in Britain. Why wasn't he apprehended and the network around him prevented from planning and executing the atrocity on 22 May?

These questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the "lone wolf" spin in the wake of the 22 May attack - thus, the panicky, uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump's apology.

The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain's biggest weapons customer.

This imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism, asserting their independence from the imperial west and controlling their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest.

In 2011, according to Middle East Eye, the LIFG in Manchester were known as the "Manchester boys". Implacably opposed to Mu'ammar Gadaffi, they were considered high risk and a number were under Home Office control orders - house arrest - when anti-Gadaffi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from myriad tribal enmities.

Suddenly the control orders were lifted. "I was allowed to go, no questions asked," said one LIFG member. MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.

The overthrow of Gaddafi, who controlled Africa's largest oil reserves, had been long been planned in Washington and London. According to French intelligence, the LIFG made several assassination attempts on Gadaffi in the 1990s - bank-rolled by British intelligence. In March 2011, France, Britain and the US seized the opportunity of a "humanitarian intervention" and attacked Libya. They were joined by Nato under cover of a UN resolution to "protect civilians".

Last September, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry concluded that then Prime Minister David Cameron had taken the country to war against Gaddafi on a series of "erroneous assumptions" and that the attack "had led to the rise of Islamic State in North Africa". The Commons committee quoted what it called Barack Obama's "pithy" description of Cameron's role in Libya as a "shit show".

In fact, Obama was a leading actor in the "shit show", urged on by his warmongering Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and a media accusing Gaddafi of planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day," said Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

The massacre story was fabricated by Salafist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". The Commons committee reported, "The proposition that Mu'ammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence".

Britain, France and the United States effectively destroyed Libya as a modern state. According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties", of which more than a third hit civilian targets. They included fragmentation bombs and missiles with uranium warheads. The cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. Unicef, the UN children's organisation, reported a high proportion of the children killed "were under the age of ten".

More than "giving rise" to Islamic State - ISIS had already taken root in the ruins of Iraq following the Blair and Bush invasion in 2003 - these ultimate medievalists now had all of north Africa as a base. The attack also triggered a stampede of refugees fleeing to Europe.

Cameron was celebrated in Tripoli as a "liberator", or imagined he was. The crowds cheering him included those  secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS and inspired by Islamic State, such as the "Manchester boys".

To the Americans and British, Gadaffi's true crime was his iconoclastic independence and his plan to abandon the petrodollar, a pillar of American imperial power. He had audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would have happened, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".

The fallen dictator fled for his life. A Royal Air Force plane spotted his convoy, and in the rubble of Sirte, he was sodomised with a knife by a fanatic described in the news as "a rebel".

Having plundered Libya's $30 billion arsenal, the "rebels" advanced south, terrorising towns and villages. Crossing into sub-Saharan Mali, they destroyed that country's fragile stability. The ever-eager French sent planes and troops to their former colony "to fight al-Qaida", or the menace they had helped create.

On 14 October, 2011, President Obama announced he was sending special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops were sent to South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent was under way, largely unreported.

In London, one of the world's biggest arms fairs was staged by the British government.  The buzz in the stands was the "demonstration effect in Libya". The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry held a preview entitled "Middle East: A vast market for UK defence and security companies". The host was the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in cluster bombs, which were used extensively against civilian targets in Libya. The blurb for the bank's arms party lauded the "unprecedented opportunities for UK defence and security companies."

Last month, Prime Minister Theresa May was in Saudi Arabia, selling more of the £3 billion worth of British arms which the Saudis have used against Yemen. Based in control rooms in Riyadh, British military advisers assist the Saudi bombing raids, which have killed more than 10,000 civilians. There are now clear signs of famine. A Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from preventable disease, says Unicef.

The Manchester atrocity on 22 May was the product of such unrelenting state violence in faraway places, much of it British sponsored. The lives and names of the victims are almost never known to us.

This truth struggles to be heard, just as it struggled to be heard when the London Underground was bombed on July 7, 2005. Occasionally, a member of the public would break the silence, such as the east Londoner who walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We invaded Iraq. What did we expect? Go on, say it."

At a large media gathering I attended, many of the important guests uttered "Iraq" and "Blair" as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.

Yet, before he invaded Iraq, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that "the threat from al-Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq... The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly".

Just as Blair brought home to Britain the violence of his and George W Bush's blood-soaked "shit show", so David Cameron, supported by Theresa May, compounded his crime in Libya and its horrific aftermath, including those killed and maimed in Manchester Arena on 22 May.

The spin is back, not surprisingly. Salman Abedi acted alone. He was a petty criminal, no more. The extensive network revealed last week by the American leak has vanished. But the questions have not.

Why was Abedi able to travel freely through Europe to Libya and back to Manchester only days before he committed his terrible crime? Was Theresa May told by MI5 that the FBI had tracked him as part of an Islamic cell planning to attack a "political target" in Britain?

In the current election campaign, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made a guarded reference to a "war on terror that has failed". As he knows, it was never a war on terror but a war of conquest and subjugation. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Iran is said to be next. Before there is another Manchester, who will have the courage to say that?

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

Recommended reading: Liberalism: A Counter-History, by Domenico Losurdo. Translated by Gregory Elliott

Liberalism: A Counter-History

by Domenico LosurdoTranslated by Gregory Elliott

“A brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions.” – Financial Times

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. 

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, book review, Monthly Review

The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World

by Samir Amin

$19.00

Samir Amin’s ambitious new book argues that the ongoing American project to dominate the world through military force has its roots in European liberalism, but has developed certain features of liberal ideology in a new and uniquely dangerous form. Where European political culture since the French Revolution has given a central place to values of equality, the American state has developed to serve the interests of capital alone, and is now exporting this model throughout the world. American imperialism, Amin argues, will be far more barbaric than earlier forms, pillaging natural resources and destroying the lives of the poor.

The Liberal Virus examines the ways in which the American model is being imposed on the world, and outlines its economic and political consequences. It shows how both citizenship and class consciousness are diluted in “low-intensity democracy” and argues instead for democratization as an ongoing process—of fundamental importance for human progress—rather than a fixed constitutional formula designed to support the logic of capital accumulation.

In a panoramic overview, Amin examines the objectives and outcomes of American policy in the different regions of the world. He concludes by outlining the challenges faced by those resisting the American project today: redefining European liberalism on the basis of a new compromise between capital and labor, re-establishing solidarity among the people of the South, and reconstructing an internationalism that serves the interests of regions that are currently divided against each other.

Amin is both a real-world social scientist and a revolutionary socialist.

—Review of Radical Political Economy

Contents

1. The Liberal Vision of Society
2. The Ideological and Para-Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism
3. The Consequences: Really Existing Globalized Liberalism
4. The Origins of Liberalism
5. The Challenge of Liberalism Today

NOTES

INDEX

Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His numerous works include Accumulation on a World Scale, Unequal Development, and Specters of Capitalism.

Communist Party of Turkey's 12th Congress declares 2017 as the year of socialism

The Communist Party of Turkey's (TKP) 12th Congress was held in İstanbul on May 27-28 with the slogan, 'to empower the socialist alternative'. The Congress unanimously approved six basic documents, and declared 2017 as 'the year of socialism'. The Congress has also announced that TKP will hold a 'festival of socialism' during the anniversary of the Great October Revolution

The Communist Party of Turkey’s (TKP) 12th Congress-Turkey Conference was held in İstanbul on May 27-28 under the slogan, “to empower the socialist alternative”.

link:

http://bit.ly/2rpOXFU

Many important resolutions were taken during the conference sessions, in which 383 delegates from all party organisations participated, including 14 delegates from abroad.

The conference started with the opening speech of Kemal Okuyan, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey.

Party member poet Nihat Behram’s salutation message was also read during the conference. Nihat Behram has donated the revenues of his book to TKP. Communist poet’s bookmarks the 50th year of his poetry.

‘THE YEAR OF SOCIALISM’

Many delegates took part in discussions and made contributions during the 2-day countrywide conference of TKP. The delegates unanimously approved such documents as “The Preface of the Party Programme”, “On the Party and Party life”, “Our Road is the Road of Revolution at the 100th Year of the Great October Socialist Revolution”, “Theses of 2017 on Imperialism Regarding Russia and China”, “Theses on the Party History”, “The Political and Organizational Goals, June 2017-June 2018”.   

The Conference that was held with the slogan, “to empower the socialist alternative”, declared the existing working period as “the year of Socialism”, and decided to hold a grand “Festival of Socialism” during the anniversary of the October Revolution.

Apart from various documents and the report on the political and organisational goals, which were approved by the Congress delegation, some political resolutions were also put on the agenda.

TKP’s 12th Congress-Turkey Conference ended with the closing speech by Kemal Okuyan.

POLITICAL RESOLUTIONS OF TKP’s 12th CONGRESS

The Communist Party of Turkey’s 12th Congress approved and declared seven political resolutions.

The first resolution, “On the anniversary of the June Resistance”, echoes the fourth anniversary of Turkey’s mass anti-governmental protests and rallies in 2013, which attracted millions of people across the country, particularly in İstanbul’s iconic Taksim Square. 8 people were murdered by the police force of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) during the protests.

Indicating to the secularist position of the patriotic people in June 2013, TKP has declared that the people could not fit in the counterrevolution of AKP. TKP enthusiastically commemorates the fourth anniversary of the June Resistance in 2013, and bows respectfully before the memory of the people who lost their lives.

TKP’s 12th Congress has pointed out to the importance of the June Resistance and the role of the Party: “This mass movement, sustained by millions of compatriots for months, was a unique action in the history of our country. The Communist Party of Turkey took its part in the front lines of the resistance during the months of summer in 2013, made significant contributions in respect of militant struggles and also made critical interventions in the political character of the movement.”

TKP has also underlined the liberal and liquidationist attacks within the left: “The June Resistance could not gain continuity as a dynamic of the mass struggle because of insufficiencies in this very second aspect. It is not a coincidence that after 2013, a liberal political restoration and liquidation of the left was intended. The hegemonic powers tried to take revenge of the resistance by not only imposing nefarious policies of pressure but also intercepting the left.”

Following this political resolution, TKP has promised to bring the AKP power to account for all the crimes committed against Turkey’s people.

‘LOOTERS WILL BE BROUGHT TO ACCOUNT’

The second political resolution of the Congress, “On ‘the power of the rich’”, states: “A capitalist dictatorship reigns in Turkey. The capitalist dictatorship is run by deputy politicians in the name of bosses.”

For the struggle against ‘the power of the rich’, TKP has declared: “12th Congress of the Communist Party of Turkey emphasises that this is a robbery that deprives our working people, who are getting poorer day by day, of all their rights. It represents the gravest attack against the dignity of our people. Our Congress declares that the working class will bring this humiliation to account.”

The third political resolution underlines the Party’s solidarity with the glass workers, whose strike was banned by the AKP government under the pretext of “a threat to national security”.

Announcing that the working class will not yield, this resolution has also described the recent situation of the working people in Turkey: “It has been a custom for the AKP government, which does not hesitate to attack the most fundamental rights of the working class, to ban strikes and to justify it with concerns of national security. Recently they also intended to ban the strike of the metal workers, which was frustrated with the actual struggle of workers. Now our sister and brother workers are defending their labour against the ban on strike declared in facilities of Şişecam [Turkey’s biggest glassware enterprise]. The unyielding glass workers are leading this resistance not only for their own rights but also on the name of our people as a whole.”

Upon the Congress resolution, TKP has declared that it will continue with all might its solidarity with the workers’ resistance and called all pro-labour forces to be part of the resistance.

‘ON THE POLICIES OF THE STATE OF EMERGENCY’

TKP’s 12th Congress has also pointed out to the unlawful implementations of the government that sacked tens of thousands of labourers during the existing long-termed state of emergency in Turkey. TKP, therefore, has declared that Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça should be set free. The two educators in question were sacked by the government, started a hunger strike for over 2 months for their right to work, and finally were arrested by the government.

TKP has clearly pointed out: “Finally, the arrest of Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça, the education workers who chose to resist with the hunger strike for their right to work, with fabricated reasons has blatantly shown the inhumane and labour-enemy character of the reactionary capitalist government. The Communist Party of Turkey categorically protests that and demands the liberation of Gülmen and Özakça and immediate restitution of their jobs.”

‘UNITED STRUGGLE OF THE PEOPLES OF THE REGION FOR SOCIALISM’

12th Congress of the Communist Party of Turkey has taken a fifth political resolution regarding the foreign affairs of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). TKP has particularly indicated to the notorious role of AKP in Syria, Cyprus and the Middle East:

“The foreign policy of AKP against the neighbouring countries as being totally irrelevant to the historical values of our people. AKP government is primarily liable of the current war and the bloodshed in Syria. AKP government initiates provocation against Greece and tries to antagonise our people, whenever it needs to manipulate the domestic or foreign political agenda. AKP government prefers to keep the Cyprus issue unsolved to be able to blackmail all the people of the Island. AKP government has been threatening the peoples of the regions and involving military activity implicitly and explicitly at times in the Middle East at others in the Black Sea. Those policies are amongst the primary reasons of the lost lives of thousands of immigrants, wars and bloodshed in our region.”

TKP has shown its fraternal solidarity with the neighbouring peoples in the region, emphasising that peace and justice could be achieved only with the struggle for socialism.

‘THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION WILL NOT SURRENDER’

The sixth political resolution of TKP’s 12th Congress has pointed out to the imperialist-led intervention in Venezuela: “Venezuela is being a scene of a nefarious scenario of counter-revolution by imperialism and its collaborators. The purpose of the provocation of the right-wing opposition, the smear campaigns waged by international bourgeois media, and the violent counter-revolutionary actions, which caused lives of tens of people, is to drag the Bolivarian government into chaos and pay the way for counter-revolution.”

In addition to its message of solidarity with the people of Venezuela, TKP has also stated its support to the Venezuelan Communists: “The Communist Party of Turkey salutes enthusiastically the strategic preference and policies of the Communist Party of Venezuela to deepen the revolution to protect it and, through the Communist Party of Venezuela, conveys its message of solidarity with the people of Venezuela.”

‘WE SALUTE SOCIALIST CUBA’

The seventh political resolution of TKP’s 12th Congress has saluted Socialist Cuba, which has been targeted by imperialism, particularly the US imperialism, for long decades.

Declaring its solidarity with Cuba, TKP has underlined that the Cuban people have proved repeatedly that they would never retreat from the gains of socialism and the merits of patriotism.

In conclusion, TKP has shown solidarity with the Cuban people and their vanguard the Communist Party of Cuba, saluting Raul Castro as the comrade and leader of Cuban socialism.

Held with a slogan to empower the socialist alternative in Turkey and reinforced the decisive stance of TKP, 12th Congress of the Communist of Turkey received so many greetings and solidarity messages from the communist and workers’ parties around the whole world.

Basic income – too basic, not radical enough by Michael Roberts

Basic income – too basic, not radical enough

link: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/basic-income-too-basic-not-radical-enough/

The idea of a basic income has gained much popularity recently and not just among leftists but also with right-wing pro-capital proponents.  Basic income boils down to making a monthly payment by a government to every citizen of an amount that meets ‘basic necessities’ whether that person is unemployed or not or whatever the circumstance. As Daniel Raventós, defines it in his recent book: “Basic Income is an income paid by the state to each full member or accredited resident of a society, regardless of whether or not he or she wishes to engage in paid employment, or is rich or poor or, in other words, independently of any other sources of income that person might have, and irrespective of cohabitation arrangements in the domestic sphere” (Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom).

He lists various things in its favour: that it would abolish poverty, enable us to better balance our lives between voluntary, domestic and paid work, empower women, and “offer workers a resistance fund to maintain strikes that are presently difficult to sustain because of the salary cuts they involve”.

And recent books such as Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams and Postcapitalism by Paul Mason have also brought this issue to prominence. These writers reckon that the demand for a universal basic income by labour should be part of the struggle in a move to ‘post-capitalism’ and should be a key demand to protect workers from a capitalist world increasingly dominated by robots and automation where human beings will become mostly unemployed.

But ‘basic income’ is also popular among some right-wing economists and politicians.  Why? Because paying each person a ‘basic’ income rather than wages and social benefits is seen as a way of ‘saving money’, reducing the size of the state and public services – in other words lowering the value of labour power and raising the rate of surplus value (in Marxist terms).  It would be a ‘wage subsidy’ to employers with those workers who get no top-up in income from social benefits under pressure to accept wages no higher than the ‘basic income’ which would be much lower than their average salary. As Raventos has noted, (in the American Journal of Economic Issues June 1996 with Catherine Kavanagh), “by partially separating income from work, the incentive of workers to fight against wage reductions is considerably reduced, thus making labour markets more flexible. This allows wages, and hence labor costs, to adjust more readily to changing economic conditions”.

Indeed, the danger is that the demand for a basic income would replace the demand for full employment or a job at a living wage.  For example, it has been worked out that, in the US, the current capitalist economy could afford only a national basic income of about $10,000 a year per adult. And that would replace everything else: the entire welfare state, including old age pensions disappears into that one $10,000 per adult payment.

The basic income demand is similar to the current idea among Keynesians and other leftist economists for increased public spending financed by ‘helicopter money’.  This policy means no fundamental reform of the economy but a just a cash handout to raise incomes and boost the capitalist economy.  Indeed, this is why the leftist Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis has viewed favourably the basic income idea.  A minimum equal income for everyone, Varoufakis tells us, is the most effective way to confront the deflationary trends that manifest capitalism’s inability to balance itself. Creating a minimum income that’s delinked from work, he argued, would increase effective demand without substantially increasing savings. The economy would grow again and would do so in a much more balanced way. The amount of the minimum income could become a simple, stand alone lever for the economic planners of the 21st century.

Here the basic income demand provides an answer to crises under capitalism without replacing the capitalist mode of production in the traditional Keynesian or post-Keynesian way, by ending ‘underconsumption’.  But what if underconsumption is not the cause of crises and there is a more fundamental contradiction within capitalism that a ‘basic income’ for all, gradually ratcheted up by government planners, cannot resolve?

Raventos retorts to this argument that “Some people complain that basic income won’t put an end to capitalism. Of course it won’t. Capitalism with a basic income would still be capitalism but a very different capitalism from the one we have now, just as the capitalism that came hot on the heels of the Second World War was substantially different from what came at the end of the seventies, the counter-reform we call neoliberalism. Capitalism is not one capitalism, just as “the market” is not just one market.”  

This answer opens up a whole bag of tricks by suggesting that we can have some form of non ‘neoliberal’, ‘fairer’ capitalism that would work for labour, as we apparently did for a brief decade or so after the second world war. But even if that were true, the ‘basic income’ demand stands little prospect of being adopted by pro-capitalist governments now in the middle of a Long Depression unless it actually reduced the value of labour power, not increased it.  And if a socialist worker government were to come to power in any major capitalist economy would the policy then be necessary when common ownership and planned production would be the agenda?  As one writer put it: “The call for basic income in order to soften the effects of automation is hence not a call for greater economic justice. Our economy stays as it is; we simply extend the circle of those who are entitled to receive public benefits. If we want economic justice, then our starting point needs to be more radical.”

In his book, Why the Future is Workless, Tim Dunlop says that “the approach we should be taking is not to find ways that we can compete with machines – that is a losing battle – but to find ways in which wealth can be distributed other than through wages. This will almost certainly involve something like a universal basic income.” But is that the approach that we should take?  Is it to find ways to ‘redistribute’ wealth “other than through wages” or is it to control the production of that wealth so that it can be allocated towards social need not profit?

I have discussed in detail in previous posts what the impact of robots and AI would be for labour under capitalism. And from that, we can see an ambiguity in the basic income demand. It both aims to provide a demand for labour to fight for under capitalism to improve workers conditions as jobs disappear through automation and also wants basic income as a way of paying people in a ‘post-capitalist’ world of workless humans where all production is done by robots (but still with private owners of robots?).

And when we think of this ambiguity, we can see that the issue is really a question of ownership of the technology, not the level of incomes for workless humans.  With common ownership, the fruits of robot production can be democratically planned, including hours of work  for all.  Also, under a planned economy with common ownership of the means of production (robots), it would be possible to extend free goods and services (like a national health service, education, transport and communications) to basic necessities and beyond. So people would work fewer hours and get more free goods and services, not just be compensated for the loss of work with a ‘basic income’.

In a post-capitalist world (what I prefer to call ‘socialism’ rather than mincing around with ‘post-capitalism’), the aim would be to remove (gradually or quickly) the law of value (prices and wages) and move to a world of abundance (free goods and services and low hours of toil).  Indeed, that is what robots and automation now offer as a technical possibility.

The basic income demand is just too basic. As a reform for labour, it is not as good as the demand for a job for all who need it at a living wage; or reducing the working week while maintaining wages; or providing decent pensions.  And under socialism, it would be redundant.

[VID: 30 min.] "Workers in power: Is class still relevant today?" - Joseph Choonara

100 years on from 1917: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?

Workers in power: Is class still relevant today? - Joseph Choonara

February 2017


A hundred years ago Russian workers and peasants overthrew their Tsar and went on to run society without bosses. They fought to create a socialist world based on human liberation and real democracy. 

The Russian Revolution was a truly momentous event. It transformed life in Russia and its empire, set off revolts that ended the First World War, and inspired millions across the globe. 

Women were at the forefront of these events, tearing up the deep-rooted oppression they faced. It was a workers’ revolution and a festival of the oppressed.

Ultimately it was defeated and replaced by Stalin’s dictatorship, but its achievements still inspire. 

On the centenary of these events, what we can learn from them today as we fight capitalism, war, oppression and climate change.

Reading Capital Today, by Michael Roberts, Blog of May 18, 2017

Reading Capital Today

by Michael Roberts, May 18, 2017

link: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/reading-capital-today/

As we approach the exact date of the publication of Marx’s Capital Volume One 150 years ago (14 September), a host of conferences and books are coming out in the small world of Marxist study on the relevance of Capital today.  The symposium that I am organising with King’s College London will be on 19-20 September, just around the corner from the British Library where Marx did the research for his opus magnum.  But already there have been conferences in Greece on Capital; a conference in New York at Hofstra University, and next week, York University, Toronto.  All have a large participation by leading Marxist scholars.

And the books are also coming out. The first is aptly entitled Reading Capital Today edited by Ingo Schmidt and Carl Fanelli from two Canadian universities and includes contributions from various activists and academics covering the issues of class struggle, internationalism and the Bolshevik revolution, imperialism, social reproduction and the environment. But I’ll only comment on the specifically economic subject: the labour theory of value.

Prabhat Patnaik is emeritus professor of economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Kerala, India.  In his chapter, Patnaik argues that Marx’s value theory is not meant to explain relative prices between commodities.  The real purpose is to show that commodities priced in money reflect the socially necessary labour time involved in the whole economy.  However, that is as far as I can agree with Patnaik’s interpretation of Marx’s theory.

Patnaik seems to accept that there are two systems, one of value and one of price and that Marx’s transformation of value into prices leads to the total surplus value in an economy being different than the total profit.  This is clearly wrong as the work of scholars like Carchedi, Freeman, Kliman and Moseley have shown.  He also seems to think that Marx’s theory depends solely on commodity money (gold) and does not work or apply to fiat money (notes and reserves not backed by gold) – again a wrong interpretation.

It is true, as Patnaik says, that Marx argued that a rise in wages does not lead to inflation of prices as such, but instead to a fall in the share going to profit (see Marx’s famous debate with Weston, a British trade unionist, in Value, Price and Profit).  But from this, Patnaik seems to conclude that the fundamental contradiction in capitalism revealed by Marx’s law of value is that rising wages will squeeze profits (a profit squeeze theory).  There is no mention of how Marx’s value theory leads onto his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  For Patnaik, Marx’s value theory appears to differ little from that of Ricardo (two systems of value and prices and the distribution of wages and profits as key to crises).  With this interpretation, Marx’s famous formula for the rate of profit (s/c+v) becomes irrelevant.

A more useful exercise for those interested in studying Capital today is to read the book itself.  And some great Marxist scholars have developed reading courses that can be followed to do so.  The most comprehensive is that by David Harvey, probably the most well-known scholar on Marxist economics in the world today – and one of our speakers at Capital.150 this September in London.   Indeed, David Harvey debated only this month with Patnaik on the latter’s current take on imperialism.

Harvey covers Volume One of Capital in detail here, as well as Volume Two and a recent set of lectures on his take on Capital today.  These lectures are compiled in written form in: A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010) and A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 (Verso, 2013).

Over the next few months, I shall try to critique Harvey’s and other scholars’ analysis as we head towards the Capital.150 symposium.  But you can see some of the differences that I and other scholars have already raised with Harvey’s views, particularly on the causes of crises here.

David Harvey’s contribution to understanding Marx’s great work has been invaluable.  But there are other readings that have also made an important contribution, if less well known.  For example, out in Los Angeles, Frieda Afary, a philosophy MA and librarian, has been conducting community-based readings of Capital throughout this year.

But perhaps, the most useful guide in reading Capital today is a new book by Joseph Choonara, A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (not published until July). Choonara takes the reader through each chapter of Volume One with some clarifying analysis and relevant comment to help.  Choonara says that “It is designed to be read in parallel with Capital itself, with each chapter of this book consulted either before or after digesting the relevant sections of Marx’s work.”  

The aim, unlike that of Harvey’s more comprehensive approach in his video lectures, is “instead to dwell on those areas that are the most vital to an overall understanding of the work and those that most often confuse, drawing on my own experience teaching Capital to left-wing audiences of students and workers over the past decade”.  For, in Choonara’s view, Marx attempted in Capital to see capitalism from the point of view of labour and aimed for a working-class audience.  Capital clearly does the former, but whether it achieved its aim of reaching working class readers is more doubtful.  Choonara’s guide can help here.

Choonara says that “Marx focuses on production in the first volume. The second deals with the circulation process, which is the way that capital passes through its various phases (production, but also purchase and sale). The third volume integrates both aspects of capitalism and so deals with the process as a whole, allowing Marx to explore some of the most complex aspects of the system.”  This is important, because the full story of capitalism as Marx sees it requires the reading of all three volumes (and what is often called the fourth – Theories of Surplus Value) as well as Marx’s earlier research notes compiled in what is called the Grundrisse.

This is important, Choonara comments, because “the interlinked nature of the project causes problems for those who just read volume one. This can potentially lead to a crude focus on production, in which issues related to the circulation of capital or questions such as finance and credit that are discussed mainly in volume three are overlooked. That said, it is helpful to see production as forming the foundation for circulation, and so Marx’s ordering of volumes makes sense.”  This contrasts with Harvey’s interpretation: “In this I take issue with David Harvey’s very influential reading of Capital, which tends to flatten down these different levels of analysis, treating them all as equally fundamental.” Choonara goes on: Harvey’s “idea is that production and circulation should be considered as having the same explanatory priority in the analysis of capitalism, whereas Marx clearly feels that production is in some sense more basic than circulation.”

Choonara is not afraid to take a view on what Marx means, particularly in the more difficult early chapters on value.  In particular, he varies from Patnaik’s view on Marx’s view of money: “there is nothing in this analysis that precludes the replacement of the money commodity with symbolic representations or electronically created credit (the form taken by most money today). To understand this requires going much further into Capital, and in particular the sections on finance and credit in the third volume.”  This follows from Marx’s endogenous theory of money, namely that “more or less money would circulate according to the needs of circulation …. Marx’s argument is that the amount of money simply reflects the total price that has to be circulated and the speed with which it circulates.”

Choonara’s reading also shows that Marx did not have some ‘iron law of wages’, as argued by the classical economists Ricardo and Malthus, leading to the view that it was impossible to raise the real wages of workers by their own efforts as wages were determined by the value of the means of subsistence and the effect of productivity and capital accumulation on that.

Choonara comments: “One peculiarity of the subsequent attacks on Marxist theory is that this iron law is often attributed to Marx himself. The vehemence of Marx’s attack (on the iron law) reflects the fact that if the “iron law” were correct, then struggles over wages, and indeed the formation of trade unions, would be pointless, leading the socialist movement into a dogmatic cul-de-sac by isolating it from the real movement of workers.”

Recently, the eminent Marxist professor Michael Lebowitz seems to claim Marx did fall into this fallacy.  Lebowitz implies that Marx’s accumulation theory that workers cannot raise their living standards through struggle as the gains from productivity growth will all go to capital.  In Lebowitz’s words, Marx accepts the ‘Ricardian default’.

Yes, for Marx, “the rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent variable; the rate of wages is the dependent, not the independent variable”. In other words, the pattern of accumulation tends to drive the shifts in wages, not the other way round.  But changes to wages, emerging out of accumulation, can still react back onto the patterns of accumulation (Choonara).

And that perceptive mainstream economist, William Baumol, long ago showed that for Marx “wages need not be equal to the value of labour power… and the omission of any fixed equilibrium was deliberate because Marx wanted to show that workers have the power to raise wages substantially even under capitalism”.  Indeed, they could do so and actually alter “the historical and social element that enters into the value of labour power”, which is not determined by the iron law of nature or ‘subsistence’.

Indeed, that is the lesson of the struggle to lower the working day so comprehensively described in Capital.  As Marx put it: “The Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class [ie the capitalists] succumbed to the political economy of the working class.”  This was a gain for the value of labour power that was permanent, as is the 8 hour day in the 20^th century – although only continual class struggle can preserve such gains.

There are many other useful commentaries by Choonara on aspects of Capital: on the nature of alienation, productive and unproductive labour, mental and material labour, complex and simple labour, on accumulation etc. But enough for now, for there will be more to follow over the coming months, as we consider the relevance of Capital, now 150 years old.

Am I Working Class? Mon. 15 May, Morning Star

MAY
2017

Monday 15TH  posted by Morning Star 

In the third in a series of Marxist Q&As, the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY examines the difference between economic and social class

---

ECONOMIC class is a role that people occupy, not a tag that attaches to individuals. But if you want a label, the simple answer is yes, if you work for a living (you receive a wage) and you don’t own or control capital.

If your employer gets more “value” from the work you do than you receive in wages, you’re working-class.

Even if you think you’ve got it cushy in your own job, collectively with other workers you produce more value than you get paid — Marx called the difference “surplus value.”

If you didn’t you’d all very quickly be sacked or the firm would go bust.

And let’s assume you’ve got a stocks and shares ISA — this still doesn’t make you a capitalist.

You still have to work and although your ISA money is invested in different types of capital, you have no direct control over how it is invested or how the profits are used and you probably couldn’t live off the interest.

Don’t be fooled either by the fact that you and your partner own the home you live in.

Yours isn’t an investment property (the fact that you rent out a room to pay the mortgage is irrelevant) and you don’t make a profit on it so it isn’t “capital.”

Even if you sold it, you’d have to buy somewhere else to live in and if you downsized it’s unlikely you’d be able to live off the balance.

It is important to distinguish economic class (people’s relationship to capital and the “means of production” — how goods, services and profit are produced) from the sociologist’s “social class” — a hierarchical division of people (at its crudest, “upper,” “middle” and “lower” class) according to their income, lifestyle or tastes.

That sociological division is the one usually taught in schools and universities and assumed in the media, for whom the term “working class” is reserved mainly for those who work by manual labour — making and handling things in factories, shops, etc. Or who correspond to the stereotypes presented on television.

It’s an approach which is subjective and confused (for example the “creative industries” are usually excluded).

Social class distinctions are also relative. Say you live in Surrey, the golf club prides itself on its exclusiveness, on the “class” of its members who see it as a place to network and do business as well as to relax.

But in other places golf is a game for everyone, not a sign of social status.

And these social distinctions change with time. Doctors and teachers no longer have the relatively privileged status that they once did.

Social class and economic class are often confused.

Social class can be a source of prejudice and discrimination.

For example research for the government’s Social Mobility Commission found that people from “working-class” backgrounds who get professional jobs are paid an average of £6,800 (17 per cent) less each year than colleagues from more affluent backgrounds.

Even when they have the same educational attainment, role and experience as their more privileged colleagues, those from poorer backgrounds are still paid an average of £2,242 (7 per cent) less. Women and ethnic minorities face additional earnings disadvantage.

Removing these social inequalities is obviously important, however it does not in itself pose a challenge to capitalism; indeed, the support given (or lip-service paid) by neoliberal politicians to improving social mobility suggests that it is seen as potentially enhancing “efficiency” (and labour competition) in key market sectors.

The “sociological” approach to class — the way it is presented in the media and popularly used — is often divisive, implying that “middle class” teachers (for example) do not have a common interest with other workers in building a better world. They do.

In economic terms, the working class constitutes all those who have to sell their labour power by hand and brain (the two cannot be separated) in order to subsist and who don’t exploit the labour of others.

There are grey areas of course. The boards and remuneration committees of Britain’s top companies would no doubt claim (if they understood the term) that their CEOs (who each “earn” an average of £5.5 million per annum, some 130 times more than their employees) do generate “surplus value.”

But their work is focused on profit and directly exploitative of their workers.

So the fact that you’re not a manual worker, directly producing or selling goods, doesn’t mean that you’re not working class.

You might be a teacher, a doctor, a civil servant or local government employee.

You might be one of the escalating number of people employed on a zero-hours contract or through an agency.

You might be genuinely self-employed with your own small business. But you still have to “sell” your labour and you’re not willingly exploiting other people.

And you don’t have to be in employment to be working class.

You could be unemployed for various reasons, including disability, but the chances are you’d still be dependent on others in work — if not directly (your family or friends), then (if you receive benefits) through other workers’ taxes. But you’d not be making a profit from their labour and you’d still be working class.

Today the working class, understood on these terms, constitutes upwards of 85 per cent of the population. Yes, you are working class.

[VID] President Trump's Budget Cuts to Food Stamps and Medicaid are bad for African Americans - Antonio Moore and Yvette Carnell

Published on 22 May 2017

Attorney Antonio Moore and Political Commentator Yvette Carnell discuss the Medicaid and Food Stamp cuts proposed by President Donald Trump. They also detail why it is important for African Americans to be aware of any and all changes to the programs.