LENIN'S TOMB

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Poor value solidarity more than rich posted by lenin

A further looting of the 'stating the obvious' department of Truisms R Us:

In follow-up experiments, the researchers asked participants to imagine and write about a hypothetical interaction with someone who was extremely wealthy or extremely poor. This sort of storytelling is used routinely by psychologists when they wish to induce a temporary change in someone’s point of view.

In this case the change intended was to that of a higher or lower social class than the individual perceived he normally belonged to. The researchers then asked participants to indicate what percentage of a person’s income should be spent on charitable donations. They found that both real lower-class participants and those temporarily induced to rank themselves as lower class felt that a greater share of a person’s salary should be used to support charity.

Upper-class participants said 2.1% of incomes should be donated. Lower-class individuals felt that 5.6% was the appropriate slice. Upper-class participants who were induced to believe they were lower class suggested 3.1%. And lower-class individuals who had been “psychologically promoted” thought 3.3% was about right.

Labels: charity, class, poverty, ruling class, solidarity, working class

Friday, June 11, 2010

Chinese working class kicks back posted by lenin

The Chinese working class is on the move: there is a wave of strikes taking place across China, and they're winning. Workers at Honda have won a 30% pay increase in the latest strike affecting that company, while workers at FoxConn have reportedly been offered a 100% increase in 'basic pay' (with strings attached) after strikes and a string of employee suicides. The strike at FoxConn is particularly auspicious since that company has so far demonstrated considerable success in maintaining a divided, weakened, timid workforce. Across the country, a series of hard-fought strikes have pitted workers against the usual double act of management and cops (strikes are effectively legal, but the Chinese police force is hardly more pacific than the LAPD, and management frequently beat insubordinate workers) resulting in injuries but also some signal successes. The analysis of the China Labour Bulletin suggests two factors here:

1) As ever, the militancy of these workers is driven by hyperintensive rates of exploitation. In recent decades, much of the surplus value accumulated by capital in China has been the result of unpaid labour, accumulated wage arrears that are never paid off. Otherwise, wages are so low that workers have to perform dozens of extra hours of overtime per month in order simply to live.

2) Most of the strikes involve smaller groups of workers, in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. The absence of independent union organisation and the surveillance capacities of capital mean that workers find it very difficult to organise on a very large scale, which takes time, coordination and an apparatus of communication that those workers as yet lack. But two or three thousand workers in a single factory can much more feasibly halt production.

We have seen waves of strikes and direct action in China before but, Charlie Hore argues, these were mostly of a defensive character. Recent strikes have been offensive. The FT reports:

In fact, China has witnessed considerable industrial unrest in recent decades, much of it localised and attracting little publicity. The causes have tended to be unpaid wages or Dickensian working conditions. While the organisers of such strikes have often got into trouble, in many cases the authorities have taken a relatively relaxed attitude, provided the disputes remained small and non-violent, seeing them as a way of blowing off steam.
Mr Gilholm and other analysts, however, said the Honda strikes were a new development because they focused on wages rather than perceived abuses, meaning even well-run factories could become vulnerable to labour disputes.
“It is a new form of strike – a very symbolic event,” said Liu Cheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and an outside adviser in the drafting of the 2008 labour law. After wages had been held down for long periods, he said, “finally there is this explosion. It is because of workers’ growing awareness of labour rights, and more talk and debate about the subject.”

In the strike at the Honda plant in Foshan, notably, workers formed an organisation separately from the official union, with independently elected delegates to represent them vs management. They have also been using new technologies (which the Chinese working class has, after all, manufactured in bulk) to coordinate their actions. The success of those workers has inspired a series of similar actions within Honda, with workers in other plants demanding parity with Foshan. There is another factor that improves labour's bargaining power, and that is the labour shortages that have occurred in many areas as the Chinese government has battled recession by investing heavily in infrastructural projects. To attract workers, some cities have had to raise their minimum wage,which has led to workers in other cities demanding the same. These advantages are temporary - a sudden economic reversal could put workers on the back foot again. But they could produce a movement that will irreversibly alter the status of the Chinese working class.

The threat to capital, the Chinese state and the stock markets, is that a model of de facto independent trade unionism will start to be taken up and replicated among other Chinese workers, and will result in an increasing share of production going to the working class. More generally, it poses a potential long-term political threat to what has been one of the most advantageous states for capitalist investment and development in the world. The ability to appropriate basically free labour, to super-exploit migrant workers moving from the villages to the coastal slums, to accumulate some of the fattest profits in the world, has always depended on containing the expanding working class. For example, the migrant worker economy in China works much the same way as it does elsewhere. Millions of workers flee impoverished rural lives, where a basic safety net is being taken away, many of them relying on false identification papers to get a job. Once they've got a job, they often end up as part of a live-in work-force, sleeping in dormitories, eating collectively. They are a cheap labour force, producing for an export market. If they acquire political and economic rights - increase their class power in other words - their susceptibility to this kind of exploitation is greatly diminished. Foreign investors in the coastal 'boom' areas may, business papers warn, be frightened away by a period of industrial unrest. Since the CCP is not going to restore some mythical Maoist golden age, it will either have to break the strikes with repression, or find ways to accomodate the workers politically, offer some reforms without substantially threatening profits. Or it may lose control in the long run.

Labels: 'communism', 'socialism', capitalism, china, inequality, maoism, neoliberalism, poverty, ruling class, stalinism, working class

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Reinventing egalitarianism posted by lenin

Just a couple of election book recommendations, as this issue of equality is going to be vital in rebuilding the Left after New Labour's meltdown this Thursday. Getting a firm grasp on the topic is also going to be important in unmasking the pseudo-egalitarianism of the Cameronites. Notwithstanding some of Brown's last minute attempts to talk up his egalitarian credentials, it is reasonably well established that the New Labour project that he co-founded has been positively harmful to the cause of equality. It actively shifted the agenda on this question to the right, away from equality and toward a nebulous conception of fairness and social inclusion. This in turn has fed into Cameron's 'Big Society' agenda. (Actually, the story goes back further than that, as readers of my unreasonably inexpensive little book will discover).

Fortunately, there is an intellectual backlash against this trend underway. Two recent books make an explicit and compelling case for egalitarianism: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, which has been widely celebrated and even cited by David Cameron to the authors disdain; and Injustice by Danny Dorling. Each deals with different aspects of the argument. While Pickett and Wilkinson, experts in health and social epidemiology, deal with forensic statistical analysis of inequality and its baleful effects on various aspects of social well-being, Dorling, a geographer at Sheffield University, tackles the corrosive beliefs which support inequality, and which the powerful go to great efforts to reproduce through various institutions from education to the media.

So, while The Spirit Level makes the case for equality on the basis of the social advantages it brings, Injustice makes the case for equality as a demand for political justice. Not to lapse into caricature, I should stress that it is clear that Pickett and Wilkinson believe that inequality is inherently unjust aside from being disadvantageous, but that is not the focus of their treatise. Their main focus is to show that almost every aspect of our lives, including educational attainment, our susceptibility to imprisonment, mental and physical health problems, community relations, and everything that makes up for the quality of life, is related to inequality. The authors note that in the last 'epidemiological shift', the focus of healthcare moved toward seeing stress as a major factor in long-term and fatal illnesses. And stress, as an occupational hazard, is something that mostly affects the majority who are lowest in the hierarchy, and who have the least control over their work. So, there's a multi-dimensional account of inequality here - it isn't just about inequalities of wealth; it is also about status and power, especially power over one's own destiny. They attack politicians for attempting to decouple the symptoms of inequality from their cause, thus leading to moralistic, socially authoritarian drives to get people to change their behaviour. Whether it is an insistence that parents be more feckful, or the heart disease-prone get more exercise, policies built in such a basis have consistently failed in their objective. Only a materially more egalitarian society will produce the desired effects.

Dorling argues that there are five chief kinds of inegalitarian belief that are encouraged by the powerful, perhaps only really believed by the powerful, but which exert real social effects because of their role in shaping official doctrines and policy. Worse is that they come in a language that deliberately softens their edges, prettifies them, and neutralises their political charge. Thus, Dorling engages in a sustained attack on the intellectual bases for inequality, from the superstition that elitism is efficient to the claim that prejudice is natural. All of the arguments he discusses are ones that have become, in different ways, hegemonic, and all of them have been involved in one way or another in this election campaign. Moreover, the effects that such beliefs have are evident in the arrogant self-satisfaction of the rich, their contempt for the poor and unemployed, and their belief that any government interference with their wealth is a betrayal of the extraordinary few who make things work for the rest of us. Given that the rich don't believe they should be forced to pay for any of the recession for which they are chiefly responsible, from the proceeds of the growth that they did least to create and most to benefit from, making the case against public sector cuts and for a socialist response to the crisis requires a fundamental break from the ruling dogmas of the past generation.

Labels: class, elections, inequality, liberal democrats, neoliberalism, new labour, poverty, tories

Monday, April 27, 2009

SOAS sacks key union activist posted by lenin

Employers have a number of ways of getting back at successful strikers, and one of them is to target militant trade unionists. Recently, after a high-profile campaign by SOAS Justice for Cleaners, which was ultimately victorious in its demands for decent pay*, the SOAS Unison Branch Chair, Jose Stalin Bermudez, was suspended pending a disciplinary hearing. This was presumably good news to the management at my alma mater, Birkbeck College, where Bermudez was supporting the Living Wage campaign by cleaners there - a campaign that continues to this day, and which involves staff and students at Birkbeck.

The charge against Bermudez was that he had made a "death threat" to a colleague in 2007. The charge has not been substantiated, and was rejected by an earlier grievance hearing, but nonetheless Sharon Page of the SOAS directorate resuscitated the charge in order to justify his sacking. This was the same Sharon Page who had, in 2008, conceded that there was "no evidence or witness to substantiate" the claim that there was "any verbal threat" to the life or safety of the complainant. This was subsequently confirmed in correspondence from the Human Resources manager Charles Perry.

Following the initial decision to sack Bermudez, an appeal was launched. SOAS selected a panel to hear the appeal, rejecting the arguments from SOAS Unison, UCU, NUS and several members of the Academic Board for an independent review. That panel, under the direction of the HR advisor, affirmed the original decision. The basis of the decision was the perception of the complainant. But there was an independent witness, Pablo Grisales, who - instead of being given the opportunity to testify - was brought before three managers, who read to him a prepared statement and asked him to confirm it. He was given no chance to read the statement, or qualify it in any way. He was prevented from offering his own independent version of events. And the statement, never signed, became the official "witness statement".

Grisales subsequently attended the disciplinary hearing earlier this year, and supported Bermudez's recollection that there had been no threat of any kind. However, Sharon Page dismissed the evidence as a fabrication, declaring that "on the balance of probabilities" she would prefer to believe the managers' claim that Grisales had "verbally confirmed" the unsigned "witness statement". Further, the complainant's version of events was deemed "far more credible" than that of either Bermudez, the accused, or Grisales, the sole independent witness. This absurd judgment reeks of prejudice. In their statement on the decision, SOAS Unison and SOAS UCU, say: "To say that this borders on downright racism would be an understatement. Sharon Page made her decision to dismiss Stalin on her perception of the complainant's perception. One white manager's perception of a white complainant's perception of a black employee. No contest in SOAS."

*The SOAS Living Wage campaign successfully sought to raise cleaners' wages to the modest London Living Wage level of £7.45 per hour, set by the Greater London Assembly to account for the high costs of living in the city. This campaign continues at the other Bloomsbury colleges.

Labels: living wage, militancy, neoliberalism, poverty, soas, trade unions, union-busting

Monday, September 22, 2008

What's the matter with Sunderland? posted by lenin

Ingratitude, if Madeleine Bunting's apologia for New Labour is any guide, is what is the matter with Sunderland. The city has been ploughed with an avalanche of development cash. A school is to be rebuilt every year for the next fourteen years. Health centres, children's centres, business parks, new development zones with the marina (below right), fancy apartments and coffee shops... And the locals react by sputtering "you've done nothing for me", slagging off immigrants and voting Tory. There is some weird "disconnect" between Labour's actually loveable behaviour toward one of its most loyal constituencies and its dismal status in the popular perception. Working class Toryism, in the form of support for a set of sentiments including 'individual self-reliance' and 'community' and 'family values', is on the rise once more, a la 1979. The obvious conclusion is that the left must rally behind the government. Some version of this is likely to be the overall diagnosis of the soft left as Labour loses its so-called heartlands: regardless of all the disappointments and betrayals, despite the warmongering, privatization, pandering to employers and union-bashing, the real problem is the basic inability of the working class to recognise its true allies. The root problem is its affectless indifference and disloyalty, its susceptibility to racism and nationalism, and its gullibility as regards Tory propaganda.

So, what is the truth of the matter? What is the matter with Sunderland? What might Madeleine Bunting have found out had she not been relying upon the word of Chris Mullins MP? One of the most pressing issues facing working class areas in this country, without question, is housing. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, the government has been pressing for the complete privatization of housing stock. Sedgefield Borough Council, for example, having lost a vote in favour of transfer in 2005, has been trying to persuade residents yet again to go with privatization. What is causing the residents to doubt the word of council chiefs is that the company that would take over the houses - Gentoo, formerly the Sunderland Housing Group (eulogised here) - has a track record of failure. The company was awarded an £80m contract in 2002 to regenerate a poor estate called Doxford Park, some six years ago, and it has only recently begun work. Similarly, when thousands of council houses were transferred to the group in 2001, Gentoo/SHG invested millions in new private homes, and neglected to build the rented accomodation it was obliged to build. 6,200 council houses were demolished, sold off or left empty, but the company only built 111 new houses over the next four years. The number of people seeking a home rose from approximately 5,000 to over 19,000. Meanwhile, it did successfully build the private developments, including maritime housing and the Athanaeum - the sort of investment and development that Bunting lauds, albeit with a grudging admission that "critics say" it may not seem of much use to single mothers and those on incapacity benefit.

Bear in mind that Gentoo/SHG is a Registered Social Landlord (RSL), exactly the kind of landlord that the government says we have least to fear from. An RSL is answerable to the Housing Corporation, and supposedly behaves better than other private landlords. If the Housing Corporation doesn't hold them accountable, then those co-responsible for sealing the deal should. In fact, the behaviour of Gentoo/SHG had been noted before by local Labour councillors Mike Tansey and Brynley Sidaway, and they did try to alert residents and fellow councillors to the problem. Both Sidaway and Tansey rejected stock transfer because the result, where the government had been able to impose its scheme, was a rise in rents and an increase in homelessness. However, by 2006, they had been driven out of the Labour Party for their pains. They became independents, and on the back of a successful campaign against stock transfer a lively local Respect group was built. What they had to say was important, and their actions benefited the people they represented. By contrast, Labour policy at both a local and national level pitted it against its traditional working class supporters. There is a clue right there: those elected Labour Party members who try to represent their constituents effectively have been punished and expelled.

It is important to understand the rationale behind the government's transfer policy. It wants to fund housing, but it is committed to a taxation structure that cannot raise the necessary funds without hitting the poor harder. So, either local authorities would have to borrow, thus breaking the government's fiscal rules, or they would have to neglect housing, thus destroying the working class voting base. By transferring homes to private housing groups like Gentoo/SHG, they can allow huge amounts of money to be borrowed for investment, because the costs will be formally borne by the social landlord. If the government were not so committed to a neoliberal policy mix, it could raise taxation on upper income brackets and on corporations, to fund such investment. The ugly side of this neoliberalism is a tendency to blame the poor for their plight. One of the government's recent proposals, dreamed up by Housing Minister Caroline Flint, was to compel unemployed recipients of council housing to sign degrading "commitment contracts" which compelled them to agree to actively seek work if they wanted to be allowed a council house - thus blaming the unemployed for their situation and forcing them to humiliate themselves in a lifeless labour market at pain of losing their home. Local Labour Party loyalists felt compelled to distance themselves from Flint's ideas. There is another clue: the government has been complacent about its core working class vote, assuming that they had nowhere else to go, and therefore has scapegoated working class people for its failures.

Another of the government's prominent policy agendas, so dear to its heart that it made this a central plank in the 2001 election despite over 80% public disapporval, is the private finance initiative. I have written enough about its obscene wastefulness here before. Once again, the rationale behind the policy is that it appears to provide something for nothing: money for investment without incurring debts or driving up taxes in the short-run. But the net result is almost invariably a poorer quality of service and a higher cost. For example, in Coventry, two hospitals were replaced by one hospital, with fewer beds and staff overall, and a final cost of £900m, 30 times higher than it would have been to simply renovate the two existing hospitals and keep the beds and staff. In Northumberland, four fire stations were closed and replaced with two under a £10m PFI scheme. One could go on at some length. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, local government functions including in health, education, road-building, street-lighting and waste management have all been outsourced to private companies under expensive PFI and PPP schemes.

Perhaps the most controversial application of the PFI model is in the national health service. Patricia Hewitt announced in 2006 that there would be big cutbacks in public spending on the NHS. She said that the reason was that generous government investment had not been spent on reforms but on salaries for greedy public servants. In fact, as Allyson Pollock pointed out, the government's market-driven reforms had created the crisis. The costs of this marketisation consumed between 6% and 14% of the NHS national budget, on a conservative estimate. As a result, thousands of NHS staff were shed in hospitals up and down the country. The impact has, predictably, been to alienate Labour's usual supporters. One of the main campaigners against the government's NHS cuts in Sunderland has been a well-known local nurse named Kathy Haq, who had been lauded in 1999 for embarking on an unpaid, voluntary mission to improve healthcare in Bangladesh and who had run a support network for victims of a doctor who had raped patients. Haq might have been exactly the sort of person whom New Labour would wish to win over: a devoted public servant and campaigner, who had worked for the NHS for forty years. But she joined Respect when it was launched in the area in 2006, and became the branch secretary. One reason is that City Hospitals Sunderland Foundation Trust ran up debts of over £5m and therefore made plans to shed 10% of its staff, particularly in the Sunderland Royal Hospital. Patients were also angered when local hospitals started to charge for parking, following the lead set by PFI hospitals across the country. Problems within the NHS have been a prominent theme in the local press. In fact, although Bunting refers to the Tory capture for the Ryhope constituency in a bye-election with a low turnout, she does not notice that a surprisingly large component of Labour's vote, perhaps more than a third, appears to have been redistributed over some years to an independent local campaigner and former journalist known as Patrick Lavelle, who made his name by campaigning on the NHS. Another clue, then: investment isn't the same thing as provision, and one cannot disaggregate the money supplied from the way it is spent and the policies underpinning it. If working class voters experience a decline in service, the fact that a large amount of money has been spent on producing the decline makes it even worse. The PFI was originally a Tory policy, but by adopting it, the government has handed the Tories one of their main propaganda planks: higher spending equals more bureaucracy and less efficiency.

Sunderland is one of the poorest places in England. Mainly as a result of the destruction of its extraction and manufacturing industries, it has suffered a declining population, particularly among working age males, and this trend is projected to continue at least until 2023. That means a smaller tax base for the city, especially as those who remain are likely to be those with the least resources. More than fifty percent of its children live in low income families, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, which is well above the national average. Even official unemployment is almost double the national average according to the Office for National Statistics, while a total of 31% of the working age population is estimated to be out of work. Large numbers of people are kept on long term incapacity benefit to conceal the real rate of unemployment, albeit incapacity among older males in former mining areas is in fact quite widespread. The government has a number of solutions for the industrial hinterlands, but among them is not a revival of the manufacturing base or of the unions that can maintain decent incomes. One of the few big manufacturers in Sunderland is the Nissan car plant, which was built in 1986. The plant is symbolic of a supposedly 'new' high-tech economy vaunted by neoliberals of all stripes. But Nissan has repeatedly threatened to close the plant or slash thousands of jobs, and has repeatedly been bailed out with millions in government grants. And while it does employ thousands of local people, who are unionised, it is hardly a substitute for the massive industries of the past. The government is committed to a City-based growth policy with a strong pound, and as a consequence has seen well over a million manufacturing jobs lost on its watch. As has been widely noticed by now, this is one reason why the UK economy is particularly exposed to the chaos in the financial markets, and why it stands least prepared to withstand a crash.

Under New Labour, the remaining mining pits in Sunderland were allowed to disappear, with nothing to replace them. Today, the biggest employer in Sunderland is the government, while the services industry is the biggest sector of employment in the city. The council has sought to rejuvenate the economy by gentrifying it, making it into a more tourist-friendly zone, and building up a financial services industry, which is today almost as big as the manufacturing sector. All of these factors make Sunderland particularly susceptible to the toxic situation that we now face: public sector pay cuts, cuts in spending, a crisis in the financial sector, and higher food and energy prices. In addition, while Bunting mentions a disproportionately high rate of single motherhood and incapacity in Sunderland, she does not mention the government's policies of rolling back single mother benefits and incapacity benefits. These, in addition to a vindictive plan to force the long-term unemployed to do 'community service' as if they were criminals, are poison for a local Labour Party seeking to gather votes. Further, in a city with life expectancy well below than the national average, the government's plans to raise the retirement age and privatise the pension system - while demanding that people save money they don't have to invest in a pension scheme that floats on the oh-so-reliable stock market - is asking for trouble. To that should be added a recent rise in pensioner poverty, when a fifth of pensioners already lived on less than £5,000 a year.

Sunderland is supposedly an example of where the government has genuinely tried to help the poor, yet is losing support from voters who fail to recognise New Labour's loyalty to them, while imprudently flirting with the Tories. In truth, while New Labour has delivered some very mild reforms, there could hardly be a more dramatic example of its policies failing the working class on the one hand, and punishing them on the other. The story of Sunderland is typical in this respect. There remains one question: will Sunderland go Tory, and if so, will it be for the reasons Bunting suggests? Sunderland still has a majority Labour council, and will probably return a Labour MP even on a relatively low turnout. The worst wipeouts for the government will be in the south-east, while the polls show the Tories making least headway in core Labour areas. Further, there is nothing to support the claim that once heartland Labour constituencies are won over to right-wing sentiments, and Bunting offers no evidence for this assertion. There is certainly nothing comparable to 1979, when Thatcher won on a platform of aggressively right-wing and anti-union policies. David Cameron is successfully appropriating the centrist language and sentiments of New Labour, even positioning themselves to the 'left' of the government on some questions. In Wales and Scotland, where there are centre-left and sometimes radical left alternatives, the Tories are not reviving at anywhere near the rate that they have been in England. And while the Tories are likely to be the beneficiaries of government unpopularity in England, the process of party identity breaking down is advancing rapidly for both Labour and Conservative parties. What is the matter with Sunderland is what is the matter with the UK as a whole. The system is failing, the neoliberal solution doesn't work, parliament is increasingly impervious to our needs, and we're facing a crisis in which we find elected officials happy to pour money into the City, but extremely reluctant at best to do anything which alters the fundamentally unfair distribution of wealth and power in the society.

Labels: benefits, gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, poverty, sunderland, the guardian, welfare

Friday, September 19, 2008

Class hatred posted by lenin

Labels: 'chav', class politics, new labour, poverty, working class

Monday, August 18, 2008

American depression posted by lenin

The latest statistics suggest that unemployment in the US has risen to 5.7%. But that is the official, joke figure. At the height of the Clinton boom in 1997, unemployment was estimated by the Council on International and Public Affairs to be around 11.4% - more than double the official figure at the time. Almost ten years later, in early 2007 and before the housing crisis started to hammer the stock market, the official US unemployment rate was 4.5%, but the real figure was closer to 13%, nearly three times the official figure. So, when you hear that today it is around 5.7%, you have to think that the real figure is close to 15%, which is about 23 million people.

The official poverty rate in America is 11-12%. About 40% of Americans fall below the federal poverty level at some point in a given ten year period. But that is the official figure, an 'absolute' poverty threshold based on an absolute minimum income that would be required to meet the basic material needs. At present, it is set at $10,400 (£5,570) for a single person. Most anti-poverty campaigns use a relative measure, and for good reason. Poverty is a matter of social justice, not of charity - it has to be considered in light of the society's capacity to produce wealth, which is why one doesn't expect Sudan to meet the same criteria as the United States. The UNDP estimated that relative poverty, defined as 50% of median income, was 17% in the US, as of 2006. Today, amid record foreclosures (17% of all homes for sale in the US are repossessed) and as the credit crunch bites, even the absolute poverty figures will be soaring. Bear in mind that the trend has been for deep poverty to rise most significantly. Even in periods of growth, a third of US jobs pay low wages, and almost 1.5m workers receive less than the minimum wage (again, by official statistics that are certain to be an underestimate). The use of soup kitchens - corporate America's preferred response to poverty - has been rising for some years. In 2003, 31 million Americans didn't know where their next meal was coming from. Given the spate of news items detailing a recent rise in demand on the food lines and the disproportionate impact of food price rises on the poor, you can judge for yourself how much that figure must rise by. As you would expect, all of this has been taking place against a background of soaring inequality, so that during the Katrina crisis it was disclosed that the total number of millionaires in America had reached 8.9 million.

I just raise all this because, as the recession bites, there is some predictably callow commentary from American opinionators, generally of the variety that it isn't all that bad and the country is full of whiners. And, of course, for said opinionators, it probably isn't all that bad. For those who have little to complain about it, all this talk of depression probably does look like whining. One cannot help but recall the infamous Newsweek frontpage bemoaning "The Whine of '99: 'Everyone's Getting Rich But Me!'" What will "The Whine of '09" look like, I wonder? "Everyone's Getting Fed But Me"?

Labels: poverty, recession, unemployment, us economy

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Waiting in the Food Line posted by lenin

Labels: america, american working class, economy, poverty, recession

Thursday, October 18, 2007

The mysteries of wealth creation. posted by lenin

The world makes no sense. More wealth is produced every year than each preceding year. More goods exist on the planet now than ever before. Bewildering new technologies such as iPhones and Newtons, along with the most advanced medicines, the most sophisticated forms of transport, cheaper and cheaper forms of cultivation and mining and extraction and renewal, and so on. (Of course, in addition to this, there are extremely developed and complex forms of confinement, restraint, protection, weaponry, poisoning, polluting, killing and so on and on. But let's leave all that aside for one second). Did you know that the total world GDP last year was, by the purchasing power parity method of measurement, $65.95 trillion? That's product, that's value-added, that doesn't even take into account the wealth already existing, right? Now, suppose I were to say, pretend last year never happened. You can live on what you had in 2006, can't you? You don't desperately need a new house or something? Okay, so forget your measly interests for a second: what could I do with all that money? I'd spruce up the blog for a start, put an airbrushed picture of myself in the top corner, add polls and paid celebrity endorsements, buy ads in the New York Times. What else? Get a house, maybe some form of transport, buy all the books I've ever wanted. Maybe a bear, and some acreages of wilderness for it to play in. Perhaps engage in a few teenage pursuits like Richard Branson. Shack up with the Osbournes, take Ozzy up the Khyber pass. And I'd still not have spent more than a tiny fraction of it.

You know, with 6 billion people on the planet, $65.95 trillion amounts to $10,099.16 each. (Alright, it's 6.6bn now, so make let's say it would be $9,992.42 each). Did you get that much of a pay rise last year? Did you even get a pay rise, or is the Iron Chancellor trying to cut yours as well? Where the hell is all this money going? Who is doing what with it, and why aren't we told? I mean, I don't know about you, but I figure I did my fair bloody share, and I want a cut of that moolah. Alright, suppose we get over the Politics of Envy (Pinochet knew what to do with those who got too envious). Let us turn to the Politics of Compassion. There are 3bn people on the planet living in absolute poverty: that's half the population of the world. Many of these live in dynamic capitalist economies like India and Indonesia. 80% of Indians live on less than $2 a day according to the World Bank (who are making sure it's kept that way). The same august institution says that half of Indonesians live on less than $2 a day. But these are two countries that have followed orders, privatised, deregulated and liberalised. Of course, Indonesia notoriously had to go through a process of genocide in order to get there. Not to mention centuries of benevolent governance at the hands of colonial powers in both countries, which did admittedly kill a few tens of millions of people. But all of this mass murder was a temporary stop-gap on the way prosperity, and anyway - what are the fascist metaphors people usually use in this circumstance? Eggs and omelettes? Wheat and chaff? Chas and Dave? What can have gone wrong? The highest proportions of such a state of poverty are in Africa. Zambia has 94.1% of its population living in absolute poverty. Nigeria - oil-rich multinational-friendly Nigeria - has 92.4% of its population living in absolute poverty. And, as well as this, there are tens of millions of people living on below $2 a day in Russia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

So, what happened to that $65.95 trillion from last year alone? Did it fall behind the sofa? Has someone wasted it on television phone polls? Well, remember I mentioned the Billionaire's Club last year? That is, aside from the richest 2% of adults in the world (about 83 million people) who owned more than half of the world's wealth, that 500 people who actually own billions? That was last year, and the statistics probably originated from longer ago (I think from 2000). This year, there are 946: 415 in America, 55 in Germany, 53 in Russia, 36 in India, and 29 in the UK. And it occurs to me that those chaps would be in an ideal position, due to their immense social power, to ensure that most of the newly created wealth goes to them, and as little as possible is redistributed (except when it's good for PR and capitalist morale). It's the same pattern in every country: look at the wealth distribution in selected countries. (Isn't it wierd that the bottom 20% of Australians have so little of the national wealth that they don't even register as a significant percentage share? Isn't it weirder still that some actually get a negative share such as in Germany and Sweden?). Now, we were talking about newly created wealth above, but what would the total global wealth look like if divided evenly among the world's inhabitants? I've tried to find some figures for total global wealth. What you can find is the occasional reference to total global household wealth, which isn't the same thing. And I suspect billions of dollars of wealth are concealed in off-shore trickery every year, so how can one reasonably expect to construct such figures? Total global wealth, including public and private wealth, all concealed wealth, and all wealth that is simply disposed of because it can't be sold, must be in the hundreds of trillions. And we aren't seeing more than an atom of it.

Well, I'm sick of it. Every year I get gipped. I get short-changed. I get a nice hot cup of fuck all. I wait for the cheque in the post, and all I get is another war. If this keeps happening, I'm going to start thinking it's being done on purpose.

Labels: alien parasites, billionaires, poverty, ruling class, wealth creation

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

1.3m UK kids in "severe poverty" posted by lenin

According to a new report by Save the Children, one of the wealthiest countries in the world has 1.3m children in "severe poverty", with one in ten families in such dire straits that basic needs like heating and food are not being met. This, of course, follows revelations that 3.8m children lived in relative poverty after a recent sharp rise. And then there was a UNICEF report which showed that among children in advanced capitalist countries, the UK is way down the list on education, health, poverty, and well-being.

Now, the government understands the basic causes of child poverty, and poverty in the population as a whole, and why it has been increasing, despite falls in the earlier years of this government. The government claims, quite often, to have a policy of full employment. In fact, it does not: it abandoned this after the 1987 election. Thus, despite the grand claims made about having reduced unemployment to under a million (based on benefit claimant counts), the reality is that the underlying rates of unemployment have remained strong, and the government doesn't intend to alter that. Unemployment is deliberately maintained in order to reduce the bargaining power of labour, supposedly an anti-inflation device. The highest rates of poverty, obviously enough, are among the unemployed. Thus, the lowest quintile of households by income, according to this report, relies mainly on benefits for income.

Even if the government doesn't have the imagination or political courage to pursue a full employment agenda, it does have other options. As the report also indicates, for example, while the benefits system redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor, the tax system is highly regressive: this is entirely because of indirect forms of taxation. The direct taxation system is moderately progressive. VAT is the worst form of taxation in this respect (not booze and fags as some people imagine). In terms of gross income, the lowest quintile pays over 10% of its income on VAT, with 1.4% on alcohol, 2.9% on tobacco, 2.9% on fuel, and 9.2% on other indirect taxes. A moderate policy such as cutting VAT altogether would have a sizeable effect on low income families, and thus on the well-being of their children. Of course, one has to raise taxes somehow, but why cut taxes on corporations and profits while freezing upper income tax and allowing the poor to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden? That is practically the definition of social injustice. One could save a great deal of money at any rate by scrapping military investments that are useless for ordinary people, but very good at threatening planetary obliteration. Money could be raised by increasing direct taxation on the highest earners, by restoring taxes on corporations and by abolishing the ceiling for National Insurance contributions (which as it presently stands, cuts a bigger proportion of wages for those on lower incomes than for those on higher incomes). Having saved money and brought in extra cash, one could even invest in the amenities and infrastructure that the poorest children need. All of these would be a start, at least.

But who on earth would actually propose such policies and carry them out?

Labels: british capitalism, britishness, inequality, poverty

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

The child-killing game. posted by lenin

One of Jeffrey Reiman's criticisms of the criminal justice system is that it doesn't punish behaviours that, on the standards it applies to other behaviours, should be punished. Specifically, those with harmful results that, while not part of a specific goal, are nevertheless entirely predictable, thus bringing the behaviour within the realm of intent. The decision by states to undertake policies that are sure to result in higher infant mortality, which rate reflects the "social, economic and environmental conditions" that the children are reared in, ought to be punishable. There is also the question of basic fairness: since everyone has the same right to life, it is an outrageous social crime when policy choices knowingly expose specific groups - black people, working class people - to an increased rate of death in the earliest years of life simply by virtue of their position. Obviously, this is as true internationally as it is domestically: if policies undertaken by powerful states, either through direct military force or through differently coercive institutions such as the IMF, result in needless, widepsread starvation, that stands as an indictment of the agents involved, and it makes their behaviour criminal.

Ernie Halfdram recently drew attention to some statistics on starvation and infant mortality. The rate of infant mortality was predictably arranged along the axes of oppression and exploitation (class, race, gender), while starvation was concentrated in such places as neoliberal India. Most alarming was the severe increase in infant mortality in the south-east of the United States, which has reached 17 per thousand live births among black people, a figure comparable to Vietnam and Albania (both now neoliberal states). No mere fluke, said the experts, this disturbing trend reflect cuts in welfare support and medicaid, and the consequent poor health and nutrition.

Now you can add the latest global figures published by Save the Children, which look at child mortality (deaths in the first five years of life). The most significant increase in child mortality is from 50 per thousand live births in 1990 to 125 per thousand live births in 2005 - in Iraq. The highest rates are concentrated in ten countries where the vast bulk of child mortality takes place each year. Sierra Leone: 282 (per 1,000 live births), Afghanistan: 257, Niger: 256, Liberia: 235, Somalia: 225, Mali: 218, Chad: 208, Democratic Republic of Congo: 205, Equatorial Guinea: 205, Rwanda: 203. The common factors here are unmissable: almost all have been put through an intensive period of destabilisation and calamity by wealthy nation-states competing over influence and resources; in nearly all cases, either these policies resulted in the collapse of the state (as in Iraq), or they took advantage of it (as in the DRC), or both (as in Somalia). Globally, so Gideon Polya avers, child mortality between 1950 and 2000 totalled 0.9 billion. The areas in which it was most concentrated are unsurprisingly in those areas that have suffered from both colonisation and postcolonial domination by states whose wealth has been accrued to a large extent simply by squeezing the subordinated societies dry. Its occurrence in the advanced capitalist societies would, axiomatically, have been concentrated among the working class, and particularly among migrant or minority communities.

These are the entirely predictable and knowing effects not only of specific policies, but also the largely unacknowledged holocaust of actually existing capitalism. All of the invading and welfare-cutting and unemployment and destabilisation has been the direct result of capital accumulation. According to the Black Book of Communism, states describing themselves as governed by marxist doctrine killed 100 million people in the 20th Century. Supposing (for some weird reason) that the figures are entirely correct, they include not only the repressive policies, but mostly the deaths resulting from famines in Russia and China. That is, mass deaths resulting from policies and social structures whose effects were predictable. Even if you accept that those societies represented some form of postcapitalist state, it is simply and uncontroverisally the case that on the same terms and the same logic, capitalism has killed many many more.

Labels: america, capitalism, infant mortality, neoliberalism, poverty

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Sponging rich bastards. posted by lenin

It's official: Tony Blair will leave office, having overseen the rise of the richest rich bastards that have ever raked it in on UK soil. The wealthiest 1,000 people in the UK have seen their wealth grow by 20% in the last year. Since these people are multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires (65 of the top 1,000 are billionaires), a growth at that rate involves the transfer of millions and billions of pounds to them. Unsurprisingly, many of these people (Mittal, Branson, the Hinduja brothers) have been close to New Labour.

The Telegraph reports today that: "The top one tenth of the top one per cent of earners now take home the same slice of total national income as they did in 1937. The gap between the super-high earners and the rest has widened to pre-war levels after decades of convergence." Much of the annual growth in the wealth of the very rich is accounted for by massive corporate bonuses for the top CEOs, particularly in the financial zone. At the same time there is a wave of sackings going on in that very same square mile: funny how that works.
This news emerges not long after the UN report suggesting that Britain was one of the worst places to grow up in, and shortly after it was revealed that 200,000 more children live in poverty this year. Only a few months ago, figures revealed that the cost of living is shooting up for ordinary people, while the government and the Bank of England have set out to restrain wage growth, despite the fact that most people's wages fall behind inflation growth.

Gordon Brown has decided to foreshadow his brief reign as Prime Minister with an attack on public sector pay, reneging on previous agreements with health workers. Strike action is very close, it seems. This Tuesday, Mayday, a quarter of a million civil servants will be on strike over job cuts, low pay and privatisation.

Labels: billionaires, capitalism, inequality, poverty, wages