Fact of the Day

When people think of Monaco, wealth, fast cars and casinos come to mind. But few think about how this tiny city-state became a mecca for the rich. The mini country on France’s sun-kissed Mediterranean coast is home to about 38,000 people, and one in three are millionaires, according to WealthInsight. 
It has the highest per capita GDP in the world.

The Socialist Party V the Green Party

The Green Party’s policies for making things better are doomed to fail. The Greens have strong convictions, a sense of justice, and a need to care for the environment and the future. However, their policies fail to live up to their values—or even begin to meet the necessary conditions for bringing them about.

Green activists have a tactical choice to make. Either they opt for more regulation and legislation to try to protect the environment or they try for a radical social change to bring about a society in which the environment wouldn't need protecting. It's the same dilemma that the early socialist movement faced: reform or revolution? Trying to patch up present-day society or working to establish a new society as a preliminary to being able to do anything lasting and constructive? Experience has shown reformism is at best running fast to stay still, at worst it is only solving one problem at the expense of creating others. We are up against a well-entrenched economic and social system based on class and property and governed by coercive economic laws. Reforms, however well-meaning or determined, can never solve the environmental crisis - the most they can do is to palliate some aspect of it on a precarious temporary basis. They can certainly never turn capitalism into a democratic, ecological society. Socialists draw the conclusion that if the environment is to be safeguarded then capitalism must go.

The nature of the only social framework within which human beings could live in harmony with, not at the expense of, the rest of nature is easy enough to discern: it would have to be a society based on common ownership not property and a society in which the aim of production was to satisfy human needs, not to make and accumulate profits. Respecting ecological principles does not involve a "return to nature". The point is to establish a sustainable balance between our use of nature as a source, of wealth and nature's ability to keep on supplying us on a self-regulating basis because we allow it to recreate what we take from it. A non-exploitative and non-hierarchical society is a practical goal not an ideal, one which necessitates a social order based on the common ownership of natural resources.

What respecting the environment involves is the recognition that there is a balance of nature which can be upset by the choice of techniques of food, energy and industrial production. It involves choosing techniques in the light of this knowledge, including developed industrial techniques that can be integrated into a sustainable ecosystem. Change, involving upsetting a particular balance, is not at all ruled out nor is it necessarily undesirable in itself but, once again, it must be realised that change can upset the existing balance of nature and that steps must therefore be consciously taken to help a new, different balance to be found. Having said this, however, it is likely that, after an initial increase in food, energy and industrial production to help overcome the problems of world hunger, destitution and disease which socialism is bound to inherit from capitalism, production levels will become stabilised in socialism and be tied to population levels (which will also be stabilised). In other words, socialism will eventually become a society with a stable level of production, integrated into a stable relationship with the rest of nature; a particular balance with nature will be achieved and sustained.

The focus on fossil fuels has lulled us into thinking we can continue with the status quo so long as we switch to clean energy, but this is a dangerously simplistic assumption. If we want to stave off disaster, we need to confront its underlying cause. The only way to green the planet is to first make it the common heritage of all of us. Then we will be freed from the tyranny of market forces and money and in a position to consciously regulate our relationship with the rest of nature in an ecologically acceptable way. The Green Party may not like capitalism in its present form and want to ‘rebalance’ it, but they still see no alternative to capitalism as a system of production for profit based on wage-labour and are resigned to working within it. It is true that the sort of capitalism they envisage would not be dominated by tax-dodging multinationals but one in which the profit-seeking enterprises would be small and eco-friendly. But there is no more chance of an eco-friendly capitalism than there is of going back to small-scale capitalism. Transforming the capitalist economy so that ‘it works for the common good’ is precisely what cannot be done. Capitalism is a class-divided society driven by the imperative for those who own and control the means of wealth production to make a profit. It can only function as a profit system in the interest of those who live off profits.

Derek Wall, once put it rather well:

‘A Green government will be controlled by the economy rather than being in control. On coming to office through coalition or more absolute electoral success, it would be met by an instant collapse of sterling as 'hot money' and entrepreneurial capital went elsewhere. The exchange rate would fall and industrialists would move their factories to countries with more relaxed environmental controls and workplace regulation. Sources of finance would dry up as unemployment rocketed, slashing the revenue from taxation and pushing up the social security bills. The money for ecological reconstruction – the building of railways, the closing of motorways and construction of a proper sewage system – would run out’ (Getting There, 1990).

A sustainable productive system as one that respects the laws of ecology can only be instituted if production for the market is completely abolished through the establishment of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and replaced by production solely for use. The relations between productive units — and between local communities — then cease to be commercial ones and become simple relations between suppliers and users of useful products without the intervention of money, buying and selling, trade or barter.

Contesting World-Views

The UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants will take place at UN headquarters in New York on September 19 with a follow-up “Leaders Summit” hosted by Obama, a day later.

“If global leaders adopt a resolution with some nice language – but so lacking in concrete commitments it fails to make any real difference to the lives of those fleeing war and conflict – they are merely fiddling while Rome burns,” Richard Bennett, Head of Amnesty’s Office at the United Nations, told IPS. Revealing a process in which member states stripped back meaningful promises to vague re-affirmations of shared responsibility, Bennett said, “there’s this enormous crisis, and these diplomats sit in New York discussing words which may or may not even be implemented… there’s a huge gap between their rhetoric and the reality.” Criticising those states “who are continuing to put up borders and walls,” Bennett said, “there is no trigger mechanism; there are no concrete, objective criteria for deciding how a country meets its fair share… It’s a kind of ad-hoc approach, based on largesse, of whether a country offers resettlement places or money or not.” States, said Bennett, are “reluctant to set targets when it comes to taking and supporting refugees because there is a toxic narrative about migration and refugees which affects national politics. Another concern we have about the outcome document of the summit is that it moves in the direction of securitisation – of seeing the movement of people as a security issue, and not that refugees will make societies more diverse and actually stronger.”

A clause on the detention of children was considered too controversial by some member states. Karen AbuZayd, Special Adviser on the summit, explained that the implementation of children’s right never to be detained had been extremely contentious for some states and amended to the principle “for children seldom, if ever, to be detained.”

At the preliminary talks Bennett said: “I didn’t really hear any countries give examples of actual refugee or migrant stories… for the states this seemed like an abstract, academic exercise.”

Meanwhile, “Global citizenship is already happening, and what we need to do is learn from those examples and scale them up,”  Professor Fernando Reimers, Ford Foundation Professor of Practice in International Education, explained. “All the barriers, all the boundaries we have invented to define our identities, are really in the end quite irrelevant.”

The idea of a global citizen, a person who identifies more strongly with a global community and with universal values than with a particular nation or place, is a useful, though by no means settled or straightforward, means of navigating an ever-more globalised world – in which unprecedented migration, the sovereignty of multinational corporations, international political interventions and the multi-actor conflicts they address – are increasingly normal parts of citizens’ existence.

Global citizenship is enshrined in such value systems as universal human rights, a history which Reimers traced during the seminar. The concept of global citizenship was formalised in the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s 2012 ‘Global Education First Initiative’, central to achieving Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Oh Joon, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Republic of Korea to the UN, global citizens identify more with the broad class of ‘humanity’ than with national peers, prioritising international cooperation and inclusion over national self-interests. All people must, Joon said, “think critically about our responsibilities both to our planet and ourselves. In many ways a paradigm shift is needed to guide our decisions.”

Jordanian Ambassador Sima Bahous, quoting Queen Rania, left the audience with a memorable call-to-action, saying: “whereas national citizenship is an accident of birth, global citizenship is an act of will… It requires that we take time to learn about the world beyond our borders – its merits, challenges and injustices – and our role and responsibility in it. It requires moral courage and a commitment to step up and make a difference.”

The rich are staying rich

 Ultra high net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) — defined as people who hold at least US$30 million in assets — are expected to hand US$16 trillion over to their descendants over the next three decades, financial research firm Wealth-X reported last year.

And much of that — US$3.9 trillion — is expected to be handed down in just the next decade by an estimated 14,000 UHNWIs, says "Preparing for Tomorrow: A Report on Family Wealth Transfers."

CIBC estimates that the Canadian Baby Boomers are set to inherit $750 billion over the next decade, in what's being called the "largest intergenerational wealth transfer in Canadian history over such a period of time." As many as 2.5 million Canadians over the age of 75 have a collective net worth of $900 billion or more. Most beneficiaries are aged anywhere from 50 to 75 years old.

For the rest of us, a Statistics Canada study from earlier this year found that income mobility, or the ability to move into a higher earning class, is proving more difficult for this generation than the last one.

 In other words: The rich are staying rich, and lower-income people are staying right where they are.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/13/wealth-transfer_n_11984540.html

2015 incomes rise to 1998 levels

The Census Bureau has released its annual report on household income in the U.S. and the economists and politician and media are cock-a-hoop about its findings. The poorest 10% of Americans have  seen their cumulative earnings rise by 7.9 per cent in 2015. Nearly a million fewer Americans were reported as living under the poverty threshold. Americans at nearly every income level, in nearly every part of the country, saw their incomes rise an average of 5.2 per cent, to a median of $56,500—a huge nationwide increase for a one-year period and the first time since 2007 that average household income rose at all. Non-Hispanic white, black, and Hispanic households, all made more in 2015 than in 2014. Young people and older people, women and men, immigrants and the native-born all saw their incomes rise. Major urban areas had an increase in income of 7.3 per cent.

But remove the rose-tinted glasses and the figures show average household incomes are still less than they were in 2007, after adjusting for inflation. And, in 2007, average household income was less than what it had been in 1999.

 So another way of looking at the report is that household income in 2015 was almost exactly the same as it was in 1998.

What progress!

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/good-news-were-as-rich-as-we-were-in-1998

The Age of Capitalocene

An interesting article by Paul Street on the environment that challenges the idea that we should describe this geological epoch as the Anthropocene – that human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature.  Susan George has introduced the term “geocide,” meaning “the collective action of a single species among millions of other species which is changing planet Earth to the point that it can become unrecognisable and unfit for life.”  It’s a hard to imagine a more terrible crime. Geocide is bigger than genocide.

Paul Street, however, asks is the culprit really Homo sapiens as a whole? 

He explains the analysis of the environmental historian and political economist Jason Moore who reminded Sasha Lilley during radio interview in 2015: “It was not humanity as a whole that created … large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzhen today. It was capital.” It is only during a relatively small slice of human history—roughly the last 500 years, give or take a century or so—that humanity has been socially and institutionally wired from the top down to wreck livable ecology. 

A compelling case has been made by Moore and other left environmentalists that it is more historically appropriate to understand humanity’s earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “the Capitalocene.” Capitalism has ruled the world since 1600 or thereabouts (by academic calculations), and only during this relatively brief period of history has human social organization developed the capacity and compulsion to transform earth systems. “Geocide” is a capitalist crime, not a transgression of humanity over its long and mostly non-capitalist history.

The argument leads to the conclusion that “Calls for capital to pay the ‘true costs’ of resource use ... are to be welcomed, because such calls directly contradict capital’s fundamental logic. To call for capital to pay its own way is to call for the abolition of capitalism.”

The full article is a provocative read and is available here.

War Babies

The charity, War Child, says urgent action is needed to protect displaced children. In 2015, nearly 100,000 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in 78 countries, almost triple the number seen the year before. The report warns that in the next 10 years on current trends at least 300,000 child refugees will end up separated from their families.

Recent research by Unicef says the next 10 years could see an enormous rise in the number of displaced children, with 63 million forced to leave their homes by 2025, more than double the current figure of 28 million.

Hannah Stoddart, director of advocacy and communications for War Child, says, the needs of displaced children go beyond the basics of food and water. “Children who have fled violence are suffering extreme trauma … There is acute long-term damage when children are not supported through trauma, or are out of school. I’ve just come back from Za’atari [camp] in Jordan where many Syrian refugees have no source of income and often pull their children out of school to engage in illegal forms of child labour. There are zero opportunities for higher education and it’s really sad to see when the young girls have so much ambition.” Stoddart pointed out that the projected increase is related to the changing nature of hostilities. “The intensity and the protracted nature of the conflict means there are higher concentrations of people fleeing conflicts that seem to know no end. Syria is an illustration. It is intense, brutal and has been ongoing for six years. If there isn’t a dramatic change then people will flee, children will flee and families will be separated as they seize any opportunity for a better life.”

Only 5% of humanitarian funding is dedicated to child protection and education. Schooling was the least funded sector in almost a third of countries affected by conflict in 2015, with 73% and 85% of funding needs unmet in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo respectively in 2015.

Emily Garin, Unicef’s policy specialist, explained,“We believe children should be the primary focus. The real tragedy is that children have been suffering because of conflicts not of their making, and that this is not new. There are children born into refugee camps in northern Kenya who are second- and third-generation Somali refugees. We hope we can turn outrage over individual child cases into care for the bigger issue.”

Remember the Prague Spring?

Czech Republic president, Miloš Zeman, has unleashed a rhetorical fusillade against Muslim incomers of such intensity that it makes the anti-Islamic sentiments of Robert Fico, the Slovakian prime minister, and even Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister – who is holding a referendum next month aimed at establishing public opposition to accepting migrants – seem mild in comparison. Zeman has warned that the Czech Republic – home to only 3,500 Muslims out of a population of 10.5 million, according to official figures – could be targeted in a jihadi attack and urged Czechs to arm themselves against what he referred to as a possible “super-Holocaust”. He has commented “You might say that Islamic migration is composed of peaceful people. Let me give you one example. The attitude of Islam – I do not speak about jihadists, I speak about Islam – towards women, half of the population. As you know, in the Qur’an, women is something like the inferior part of mankind.”

In 1968 the Soviet invasion and the return of oppressive government measures triggered the flight of tens of thousands of people, eleven thousand of whom went to Canada. Austria was again a stopover for refugees placed in other countries.

Short memories when it comes to welcoming other vulnerable asylum seekers fleeing repression and the threat of death, eh?

Socialism - Re-Greening the UK

More than one in 10 of the UK’s wildlife species are threatened with extinction and the numbers of the nation’s most endangered creatures have plummeted by two-thirds since 1970, according to a major report. The abundance of all wildlife has also fallen, with one in six animals, birds, fish and plants having been lost, the State of Nature report, comprehensive scientific report, compiled by more than 50 conservation organisations, found.

Together with historical deforestation and industrialisation, these trends have left the UK “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, with most of the country having gone past the threshold at which “ecosystems may no longer reliably meet society’s needs”. The UK has lost significantly more nature over the long term than the global average, the report said, with the UK the 29th lowest out of 218 countries.

There has been the destructive impact of intensive farming, urbanisation and climate change on habitats from farmland and hills to rivers and the coast. It found that the fall in wildlife over the last four decades cannot be blamed on past harm, but has continued in recent years. 56% of species declined between 1970 and 2013, and 53% between 2002 and 2013.

“It wasn’t just all back in 70s and 80s, it is still happening now,” said Mark Eaton, at RSPB and the lead author of the report. “We are getting ever more efficient in our farming. In a way it is something to be celebrated, how good our farming science and technology is, but it does squeeze nature out.” There were good examples of wildlife and habitat recovery, but such projects were too few to turn the tide, with public funding for biodiversity having fallen by 32% from 2008 to 2015. “The ability to do it is within our grasp, it is just about resources and the willingness,” he said. The report said environmental stewardship schemes carried out by some farmers were beneficial but remained at a small scale: “At present, the hoped-for widespread recovery of farmland wildlife is yet to be seen.”

Insects and other invertebrates, which make up 97% of all animal species, are particularly struggling, with 59% in decline since 1970. These provide vital services such as pollination and keep soils healthy, said Eaton: “The work they do for us is just immense. If they were to disappear, I think we’d see environmental breakdown very quickly. They are about the most important things out there.”

About 75% of the UK’s landscape is classed as agricultural, with 40% consisting of arable fields and grasslands. The report found “agricultural change was by far the most significant driver of declines”, as a result of switching from spring to autumn sowing, which reduces food and habitat for many species, intensification of grazing, increased use of pesticides and fertilisers and loss of marginal habitats, such as ponds and hedgerows.

For the farming industry, the NFU vice-president, Guy Smith, said “we need to remember farming is here to provide one of the fundamental staples to life: food. If we undermine British farming’s competitiveness or its ability to produce food, we risk exporting food production out of Britain and increasing Britain’s reliance on imports to feed itself.”

People are right to be concerned about what is happening to the environment. There really is a serious environmental crisis. Damage to the environment is a major threat to the stability of human life on this planet, and moreover, this is directly attributable to human activity. The issue is not whether it exists but what to do about it. Sustainability is no longer enough. Too much damage has already been done. We need to restore the ecosystem. Creating a viable future for humanity requires all of us to cooperate and collaborate. If we choose to, we can generate abundance for all.

The ecological contradictions of capitalism make sustainable, or ‘green’ capitalism an impossible dream. Most Greens are in favour of some form of capitalism, generally, small-scale capitalism involving small firms serving local markets - “small is beautiful”. But small is not necessarily beautiful – all previous class societies to capitalism were based on small-scale production and none of them were at all beautiful. Could we, by adopting proper socialist arrangements, produce, transform nature, reap benefits from science and technology and have growth in needs satisfaction and in life quality: all without bringing on an ecological crisis? Socialists unequivocally say ‘yes‘: greens are frequently equivocal, vague or just confused.” The Green Party is not against the market and is not against profit-making. It imagines that, by firm government action, these can be tamed and prevented from harming the environment. This is an illusion. You can’t impose other priorities on the profit system than making profits. That’s why a Green government would fail. If the environmental crisis is to be solved, this system must go.

Capitalism by focusing on the short term is unlikely to take the longer term, and hence the environment, into account.  Capitalists and corporations will seek to distort the facts of the matter so they can carry on as usual. Capitalists are ideologically blinkered against climate change since it exposes the dangers of capitalism as an environmental threat. Consider the fact that this has been on the international agenda for 30 years and nothing substantial has been achieved; emissions have increased over this period (and were only halted as an effect of the global recession). Additionally, note that the government has publicly stated that the environment must come second to the economy – but isn’t that what got us into this mess? The agenda of all Green groups of tough regulation is a sham. If regulation worked, wouldn’t big corporations be paying their taxes? The legal systems which govern these matters end up as the preserve of well-paid lawyers of whom the corporations have more than the governments. Ultimately the issue of the environment is an issue of power: who has the power to determine what happens to this planet? Only in a society where we have the power to determine what can and cannot be done will we be able to stop this headlong rush to environmental devastation. That means a world of common ownership and democratic control. Anything else which anyone offers is merely using an Elastoplast to seal a volcano. Only socialism can deliver on the environment.

Why does pollution and environmental destruction occur? A small amount is due to ignorance or miscalculation. A small amount is unavoidable given present technology and population. But the immense majority is due to the economic network. People destroy the environment because it is in their economic interests to do so. We say that the ecologically-unbalanced behaviour that humans at present engage in is due to the socio-economic system under which we live, namely the profit system, or capitalism. We call for a change of social system. Our politics does possess a human-centred approach: we want a socialist society primarily because it will be good for human beings. It will also be good for the biosphere but, then, what is good for the biosphere is also good for humans. Unless humans take into account the good of the biosphere things will be bad for them too. The Earth must come first for, without the planet's life-sustaining ecosystems, all human aspirations and goals are doomed.

Cameron and Libya

According to Parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, which has a majority of Conservative, the result of the French, British and US intervention in Libya was “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of Isil [Islamic State] in north Africa”.

The report concluded that David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. The failures led to the country becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war. It adds that “David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy.”

The report finds: “If the primary object of the coalition intervention was the urgent need to protect civilians in Benghazi, then this objective was achieved in March 2011 in less than 24 hours. This meant that a limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change by military means.”

The report says: “We have seen no evidence that the UK government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya…It could not verify the actual threat to civilians posed by the Gaddafi regime; it selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi’s rhetoric at face value; and it failed to identify the militant Islamist extremist element in the rebellion. UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”

The report says it is difficult to disagree with Obama’s assessment that the war was “a shitshow”.

Libya is currently mired in political and economic chaos with competing factions fighting for control of the key oil terminals and no nationwide support for the UN-recognised government based in Tripoli. Tens of thousands of refugees are entering Libya with impunity from the rest of Africa and sailing to Europe on perilous journeys.

India's problems

A substantial number of India’s population suffers from chronic hunger. According to a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IRPRI), one-sixth of India’s population is undernourished, while 190 million people go to bed hungry daily. A total of 30% children below the age of 5 years are underweight. India alone accounts for around 30% of neo-natal deaths internationally. Globally, more people die of hunger than Aids, malaria, as well as tuberculosis put together. Internationally, 45% children pass away due to insufficient nutrition. As many as 64% of the world’s poorest live in India, China, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Congo.

One may be tempted to conclude that the culprit is insufficient food production. However, this is not true. In India’s case, around 40 percent of fruits and vegetables and about 20 percent of grains get destroyed because of insufficient infrastructure. Food never reaches consumers. Such wastage has other ramifications as well. It results not only in hunger but it also releases millions of tons of methane gas from garbage dumps—further polluting our environment. Billions of gallons of freshwater, which was used to cultivate that wasted food are also lost.

 If you seek a rational system of production and distribution contact:

The World Socialist Party (India): 257 Baghajatin ‘E’ Block (East), Kolkata – 700086,

Tel: 2425-0208,

E-mail: wspindia@hotmail.com

Website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org/

UK Poverty

Nearly half of working families are cutting back on food or clothing to pay rent or mortgage. Shelter and pollsters YouGov found that the equivalent of 3.7 million families say they have cut back on buying essential food or clothing to pay their mortgage or rent.

Rising house prices and rents caused by a shortage of affordable homes mean the average household now spends 29 per cent of its monthly income on housing costs. Those locked out of the housing market who privately rent fare even worse, spending 43 per cent of their salaries.

A total of 44 per cent of households surveyed said they had had cut back on those items. Around one in 5 – 19 per cent – said they had had to cut back on buying children’s clothing, while around one in 10 – 9 per cent – said they had skipped meals.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said, “These figures are an acute reminder of the tough choices that working families are having to make to keep a roof over their children’s heads. Any one of us could hit a bump along life’s road, but with housing now taking up the lion’s share of people’s pay-packets, any drop in income can all too quickly leave families at risk of losing their home.

CEOs - psychopathic

 Around one in five corporate bosses are psychopaths - a proportion similar to that among prisoners - according to research conducted by forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks at Bond University.

Characteristics such as an inability to empathise, superficiality and insincerity are all associated with the condition. 

He found 21 per cent of 261 corporated professionals had clinically significant psychopathic traits. Mr Brookes says that figure "shared similarities to what we would find in a prison population".

A type of “successful psychopath” who may be inclined to unethical or illegal practices has been allowed into the top ranks of companies because of the way firms hire, according to Mr Brooks.

Scott Lilienfeld, from Atkanta’s Emory University, has told Australian news site news.au: “Psychopaths are over-represented in certain occupations: politics, business, high-risk sport. The research on that is in the preliminary stages. “Being a psychopath might predispose someone to short-term success. They tend to be charming and flamboyant, which makes it easier to be successful in the short-run, although that may be purchased at expense of long-term failure.”

The Hungarian Refugee Crisis

Refugees fleeing from Hungary

Mass population movements and migrations are certainly nothing new. Those who embark on those often dangerous journeys do so out of necessity rather than choice.

On 2 October, Hungary is due to hold a referendum on the EU relocation plan, which involves Hungary offering sanctuary to 1,294 asylum seekers. Orbán’s government has urged citizens to reject the plan because it says “forced settlement endangers our culture and traditions”. Lydia Gall, of Human Rights Watch, dismissed the government’s booklet on the referendum as “government sponsored xenophobic anti-refugee propaganda rubbish”. She explained that the booklet contains distorted facts about Europe’s refugee crisis, portraying asylum seekers and migrants as dangerous to Europe’s future. It links migration to increased terrorism and refers to non-existent ‘no-go’ areas in European cities with large migrant populations, including London, Paris and Berlin, where authorities have allegedly lost control and where law and order is absent.” Gall added: “Sixty years ago, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians obtained sanctuary from persecution in other parts of Europe and North America. If the Hungarian government reminded itself and Hungarians about that history, it might help create a more positive and welcoming attitude towards those from Syria and elsewhere seeking safety in Hungary today.” 

So let us remind ourselves of that event. The exodus started on the 28th of October 1956, and continued until June 1957. Resettlement of refugees from Austria started as early as 7 November 1956.

After the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 approximately 200,000 (about 2% of the Hungarian population at the time) fled Hungary mostly to Austria but some to Yugoslavia as refugees from the Soviet repression. Many of the Hungarians crossed the borders with the help of smugglers, and many arrived without ID papers - but it did not tarnish their image or impede their acceptance as refugees. In one weekend (November 4-6,) some 10,000 Hungarians entered Austria. 180,000 were resettled from Austria (a population of 7 million) and Yugoslavia to 37 countries. 100,000 people resettled in the first 10 weeks. The United States and Canada each took in around 40,000, while the United Kingdom accepted 20,000 and Germany and Australia some 15,000 each. Two African and 12 Latin American countries also took in Hungarians. One Hungarian refugee to the UK was Joe Bugner, who arrived as a boy, became the British heavyweight champion and fought Muhammad Ali for the world title.

A UN spokesperson described the situation, “The Hungarians streaming into Austria at the present time arrive deprived of any means and in a state of exhaustion. They have to be cared for immediately, to be fed and clothed. The Austrian federal government, in cooperation with everyone willing to help, is undertaking all possible efforts to accommodate these unfortunate people as quickly as possible. But, in spite of all the desperate efforts on the part of the Austrian authorities and the Austrian people to cope with this difficult problem, Austria cannot do it alone. She necessarily depends on generous joint immediate help from other countries”.

Not all was perfect. The Austrian authorities were forced to improvise since no infrastructure existed to receive such a massive influx of persons. Red Cross officials tried to collect and group the refugees behind the border. The refugees, many totally exhausted and nearly frozen to death, were first taken to schools or restaurants. They were then transferred in larger groups to a refugee camp. Doctors detected a “camp psychosis” among the refugees, which manifested itself in passivity, depression, and latent aggressiveness. In mid-November 1956 around 100 internees held a hunger strike to protest against the way they were treated, and later that month disturbances there required police intervention to restore order. Austrian officials were of course less than pleased by these protests about conditions. Austria’s interior security officials were concerned about political activities. Among the refugees there were many political activists who hoped to continue promoting the ideals of the revolution. In February 1957 a directive by the Interior Ministry addressed the political and intelligence activities of the Hungarian refugees in Austria: “The Ministry of the Interior is, under no circumstances, willing to tolerate any activity by foreigners in Austria which aims to disturb the peaceful relations of the Republic with other states, or which aims to influence the internal political situation in other countries.” 

The real refugee crisis - Diplomatic hot air

The UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants takes place in New York next Monday. We already have the draft declaration – agreed upon by 193 member states in early August – that will be formally adopted at the UN Summit on Monday the 19th. Several figures from civil society have been carefully selected to speak at the opening plenary session and subsequent roundtables on various themes that will take place during the course of the day. But seven groups – six based in Africa – have been blocked from participating on the basis of member states’ objections. 

Some are looking to the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees that President Barack Obama will convene on the margins of the General Assembly the following day to deliver more tangible outcomes. But while there are relatively few unknowns associated with the UN summit, the leaders’ gathering on Tuesday, 20 September is one big unknown. The stated aims of the leaders’ summit are: to double the number of refugees who are resettled or admitted through other legal channels to third countries; to increase funding for humanitarian responses by 30 percent; and to increase the number of refugees in school and who are granted the legal right to work by one million each. Only states willing to make “new and significant” commitments have been invited to attend. The list of attendees has not been made public but it’s expected that between 30 and 35 countries will participate, including the co-facilitators, which are Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Sweden, and Jordan. US State Department officials have also been tight-lipped about what the new commitments will consist of.

“The indications we’ve had is that it’s been a struggle to get commitments,” said Julien Schopp, director of humanitarian action at Interaction, a US-based alliance of international NGOs that has been leading the call for the leaders’ summit to be more inclusive of civil society – a call that has largely gone unanswered. “We’ve seen it in the past three years from the World Humanitarian Summit to the London pledging conference on Syria – everyone arrives with something that looks good and sounds good, but when you look at delivery six months later, there’s not much,” said Schopp. If countries do make substantial new pledges, one major concern is: whose role will it be to ensure they are actually delivered on, particularly given that the event is being hosted by an outgoing US administration?

It is a long list of vague commitments to address the root causes of large movements of refugees and migrants: to respect their rights; combat xenophobia and exploitation; strengthen search-and-rescue efforts; address funding gaps etc. etc. It does all this while recognising the often antithetical rights of individual nations to manage and control their own borders and “to take measures to prevent irregular border crossings”.

Observers to the drafting negotiations note that the original text was watered down over successive meetings. “Mostly, it’s ‘we’ll consider doing this’,” Josephine Liebl, a humanitarian policy adviser with Oxfam who sat through many of the July negotiations in New York, told IRIN. “The original text was more decisive.”

At the last minute, the US and several other member states balked at a commitment to end child detention, agreeing only to refer to it as “a measure of last resort” and to “work towards the ending of this practice”. There are other, more glaring, omissions: in particular a commitment to resettle 10 percent of the global refugee population annually (equivalent to about 2.1 million people in 2015). UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had called for this in his recommendations for the summit’s outcomes, but the declaration states only an intention to “expand the number and range of legal pathways” for refugees to be admitted to third countries.

 Also missing is a Global Compact on Responsibility-Sharing for Refugees that was supposed to be one of the summit’s key outcomes. The “global compact” was expected to set out a roadmap for implementing some of the key commitments made in the declaration, but early drafts were disappointingly lacking in concrete detail on the mechanisms that would compel states to act. Rather than address these weaknesses, the compact was dropped and replaced with a Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework – to be used as the basis for responses to large movements of refugees. The “framework” is to form the starting point for developing a global compact for adoption in 2018. Member states, particularly from Africa and Latin America, justified postponing the compact for two years by arguing that it should conform to the same timeframe as a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, also slated for adoption in 2018. Civil society groups, who were unhappy with the draft version of the compact, have had to settle for the hope that the two-year process will deliver something stronger.

German Poverty

Child poverty has grown even as Germany has become richer, according to a study. Germany does not lack the bare necessities. Food, shelter, winter clothing, medication, and schooling are generally available. The Bertelsmann Foundation reveals that almost 2 million German children live in families who have received welfare for at least five years. One in five children in eastern Germany are poor. In Berlin, every third child grows up poor.

Children whose parents depend on basic state support, known as Hartz IV, are also considered to be poor. Frequently lacking access to fresh produce, poor children are often insufficiently nourished and at risk of illness. The study also found that children from poor homes are often socially isolated. Their families cannot afford school excursions, sports activities or music lessons. Poor children often do not have their own bedrooms and, consequently, no place to retreat or do their homework.

All of this leads to educational disadvantages. "Their entire educational background encompasses more problems than children whose families have secure incomes," said Annette Stein, who works on family policy at the Bertelsmann Foundation. "The longer children live in poverty, the higher the risk of being influenced negatively by their lot in life."

The number of olde 5.6 million residents over 55 were living in poverty or affected by social marginalization. This is a stark increase - nearly 25 percent - from a decade ago, when the number stood at 4.5 million Germans living on meager means has increased 25 percent in ten years, another report says. At 20.7 percent, the rate of poverty among the elderly in Germany is just under the EU average of 20.9 percent. But it is far above that in neighboring Netherlands, which has just 11.9 percent of its elderly population in dire financial straits. According to the latest figures from the German Labor Ministry, the number of retirees still holding down minor employment has increased by 22 percent since 2010 to 943,000. Ten years ago this was less than 700,000. A particularly large increase has been reported among pensioners aged 75 and over. By the end of 2015, just under 176,000 seniors in this age group were working in a so-called "mini-job" - or part-time job paying 450 euros ($504) monthly. This is a sharp increase, amounting to more than twice as many as in 2005. Left party politician Matthias Birkwald said those affected are "not working for fun, but because the pension is not enough to live on."

"Poverty is spreading all over Germany," said Sabine Zimmerman, a member of parliament with the opposition Left party. 

Haves and Have-Nots (2)

“We should be afraid”

The world’s top ten corporations have a combined revenue that is greater than the combined income of the 180 “poorest” countries out of the world’s total 195 sovereign states. Walmart, Apple and Shell alone are now richer than Russia, Belgium and Sweden. The value of the top 10 corporations was $2.85tn (£215tn), beating the $2.80tn worth of the bottom 180 countries, which include Ireland, Indonesia, Israel, Colombia, Greece, South Africa, Iraq and Vietnam.

Sixty-nine of the world’s 100 top economic entities are now corporations instead of countries – a rise from last year’s figure of 63. Out of the top 200 entities in the world, 153 were found to be corporations.

Walmart ranks as the 10th largest, followed by China’s electricity monopoly State Grid at number 14, China National Petroleum at 15 and Chinese oil firm Sinopec Group at 16. Apple ranked 26th behind the 18th-placed Royal Dutch Shell, with Exxon Mobil at 21, Volkswagen at 22 and Toyota at 23. Walmart, the biggest corporate entity in the world, is valued at over $482 billion, which makes it wealthier than Spain, Australia, and the Netherlands, individually.

“The vast wealth and power of corporations is at the heart of so many of the world’s problems – like inequality and climate change,” said Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now. “The drive for short-term profits today seems to trump basic human rights for millions of people on the planet. These figures show the problem is getting worse,” he added. “The U.K. government has facilitated this rise in corporate power through tax structures, trade deals, and even aid programs that help big business.” 

"Today, of the 100 wealthiest economic entities in the world, 69 are now corporations and only 31 countries," wrote Global Justice Now campaigns and policy officer Aisha Dodwell. "This is up from 63 to 37 a year ago. At this rate, within a generation we will be living in a world entirely dominated by giant corporations." Dodwell continued: "As multinationals increasingly dominate areas traditionally considered the primary domain of the state, we should be afraid.While they privatize everything from education and health to border controls and prisons, they stash their profits away in secret offshore accounts. And while they have unrivaled access to decision makers they avoid democratic processes by setting up secret courts enabling them to bypass all judicial systems applicable to people. Meanwhile their raison d'etre of perpetual growth in a finite world is causing environmental destruction and driving climate change. From Sports Direct's slave-like working conditions to BP's oil spill devastating people’s homes, stories of corporations violating rights are all too often seen in our daily papers.  Of course, the battle against corporate power has many fronts and the UN treaty is only one part of it," Dodwell observed. "At the same time, we need to continue to develop alternative ways to produce and distribute the goods and services we need. We need to undermine the notion that only massive corporations can make the economy and society 'work.' The alternative is that we continue to rush towards the dystopian vision of unchallenged corporate power," Dodwell wrote. "We cannot allow this to happen. We must fight back."

Fact: There are 540 billionaires in the United States with a combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. The wealthiest 1/10th of one percent hold about $20 trillion or a mind-boggling 22% of total U.S. personal wealth (up from 7% in 1980).....minimum net worth of about $25 million and average net worth of about $125 million. A 2% annual tax on this wealth would raise about $400 billion in year one and, if their wealth continues to grow at 6% compounded annually as it has done since 1980, about $12 trillion over the next 20 years.

Where did all this "wealth" come from? What are the legal and social roots of this "ownership"? Capiltalism seeks to place a monetary value on everything. By recognizing the full range of social, and relational value of our thoughts and actions, not just economic, we realize that wealth has a much broader meaning and we can break away from the mentality of corporate control. Somewhere in the  future workers will work for the necessities ( like shelter, food and security) instead of for wages. From the very onset of capitalism, the elite ruling class (originally the propertied class) have always stolen the profits that were, and continue to be, produced by labor (physical and mental.) Without labor, the factories, supermarkets, financial institutions, telecommunications, transportation, distribution, retail and all other types of profit-producing enterprises come to a halt ... a dead halt! Capital, without labor, produces nothing!  A massive amount of education needs to take place before there will be enough people, commitment and power to overturn capitalism.

The Haves and Have-Nots (1)

The richest one per cent in UK own 20 times more total wealth than the poorest fifth, making the country one of the most unequal in the developed world, according to Oxfam. 

In figures it means that around 634,000 people are worth 20 times as much as the poorest 13 million people.

10 per cent of the UK population own 54 per cent with the top one per cent owning 23 per cent, whilst the poorest 20 per cent share just 0.8 per cent of the country's wealth between them.

Oxfam’s report said: “The UK is one of the most unequal developed countries in the world. Three decades of high-level inequality have had a profound impact, leading many people to believe that they have little stake in society and to feel locked out of politics and economic opportunity…”

Rachael Orr, head of Oxfam's UK Programme, said: ”Inequality is a massive barrier to tackling poverty and has created an economy that clearly isn't working for everyone. The UK is one of the richest countries in the world, but it's a nation divided into the haves and have-nots. Whilst executive pay soars, one in five people live below the poverty line and struggle to pay their bills and put food on the table.”

UNIFORMITY (weekly poem)

UNIFORMITY

The Guardian, 7/9/16. ‘Police called after

school turns away pupils for wrong uniform’.

Make all the kids identical,

So they all think the same,

And each becomes a number in,

The big employment game.

School’s not for education but,

Exists for this job aim.

Ensure school uniform looks posh,

As image is today,

The raison d’être for everything,

And therefore holds great sway;

They want a class of Tweedledums,

Who’ll simply just obey.

It won’t be up to kids to think,

The bosses do that job;

Their task will be do the work,

And be a mindless blob;

Go to their bingo, watch TV,

And be a gormless slob.

The market system’s crept into,

All aspects of our life,

It’s profit ideology,

Is in a nutshell, rife;

Both in the workplace and at school,

It’s the main source of strife.

© Richard Layton

Bye-bye David Camoron

Cameron resigns as MP - Good Riddance 

Omnia sunt communia

Compiled from various Fully Automated Luxury Communism

All things are held in common

The world is in bad shape. Every reasonably intelligent, aware, objective person in the world knows that something is very, very wrong. In the next few decades, your job is likely to be automated out of existence. If things keep going at this pace, it will be great news for capitalism. You’ll join the floating global surplus population, used as a threat and cudgel against those “lucky” enough to still be working in one of the few increasingly low-paying roles requiring human input. Existing racial and geographical disparities in standards of living will intensify as high-skill, high-wage, low-control jobs become more rarified and centralized, while the global financial class shrinks and consolidates its power. National borders will continue to be used to control the flow of populations and place migrant workers into precarious jobs. The environment will continue to be the object of vicious extraction and the dumping ground for the pollution externalities of capitalist modes of production.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. The task of socialists is to fight against this enforcement of misery upon people. Socialists insist freedom is possible only under conditions of economic and political equality, which can be achieved only through ongoing practices of solidarity prompted by care for the well-being of others. Egalitarianism at the heart of socialism. Socialists basically seek a post-scarcity world, in which there would be no incentive for people to become a wage-slave or to follow a politician.

Marx talked about a future world where people are free to fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. Technological advances have freed mankind from drudgery and toil. Many now abandon revolutionary hopes based that, somehow, a crisis and accompanying misery will provide the spur for change. Instead, they believe we should be embracing the new possibilities of the cybernetic revolution where automation and robotics can provide luxury for all. A socialist future where employment (wage slavery) as we know it disappears, and humanity enjoys an era of unprecedented leisure. Although it is the familiar tactics to unionize and protect workers’ rights in the face of expansive and exploitative capitalism, we have yet to see how the trade unions can flourish alongside mass automation. Will they be able to compete and ensure workers with stable and secure livelihoods?

Due to propaganda and past failures of mis-labeled totalitarian states, communism is associated with mass poverty, penury and state repression - the opposite of luxury. The term luxury communism is simply a new title for Marx's ideal in which the abundance created by automation would provide for the free distribution of goods and relative freedom from labour. With half of today's jobs will become obsolete with automation within the next ten years or so, establishing common ownership could easily provide a post-scarcity economy in which everyone's basic needs could be provided for with the minimum of labour - allowing what Marx would call free time.

 It is the modern version of "We Want Bread and Roses Too."

Luxury for all

Taken from various writings of advocates for Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC)

Fully automated luxury communism (FALC) [or as SOYMB might call it, Free Access Post-Scarcity Socialism (FAPPS)] aims to embrace automation to its fullest extent. This is the era to realise a post-work society, where machines do the work not for making profits for the privileged few but for the benefit of the majority of people. MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and James McAfee argue persuasively in their oft-cited Second Machine Age that the robots are just getting started. “Technology can create enormous bounty,” Brynjolfsson wrote. Robots, Artificial Intelligence, automation, etc. could basically make human labour redundant and instead of creating even further inequalities it could lead to a society where everyone lives in luxury and where machines produce everything. Fully Automated Luxury Communism rests on a highly optimistic vision of the potential of technology to meet our desires with a minimum of human labour.

“There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions,” says Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media. “In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.” He continues, “The demand would be a 10- or 12-hour working week, a guaranteed social wage, universally guaranteed housing, education, healthcare and so on,” he says. “There may be some work that will still need to be done by humans, like quality control, but it would be minimal.” Bastani says, “Take Uber. Huge company. Its idea is that by 2030 it will have this huge global network of driverless cars. That doesn’t need to be performed by a private company. Why would you have that? In London, we have Boris bikes. Why couldn’t we have something like Uber with driverless cars provided at a municipal level without a profit motive?” Bastani proclaims “Cartier for everyone, MontBlanc for the masses and Chloe for all”. Bastani says his conception of FALC is based on a modern reading of Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse. He adds “If we want something else, something better, we are going to have to come up with it ourselves.” Again a touch of the Marxist principle, the emancipation of the working class must be by the working class.”

Cybernetic technologies offer us both a bounty of productivity as well as welcome relief from myriad drudgery of repeatable tasks. Unfortunately, as our economy is currently configured, both of these seeming miracles are also big problems. How do we maintain market prices in a world with surplus productivity? And, even more to the point, how do we employ people when robots are taking all the jobs?

Capitalism is inherently predatory and destructive, yet nevertheless, capitalism is the most collective society that has ever existed on earth, in the sense that even the most banal product is the result of a massive network of interdependence. Rather than abandoning this globalized web in favour of some return to back-to-nature agrarian primitivism that will only be possible on the basis of a catastrophe, we need to make the planetary network an intelligent system that can act in the interests of the majority, instead of the tiny minority that profits under the current system. Rioters could be looting department stores for one hundred years and still they wouldn’t have taken back even half of what has been stolen from them at work. If capitalism were simply a way to meet material needs, it would make no sense that people work harder now that less labor is required for production. But capitalism isn’t just a way to meet material needs; it’s a social system based in alienated relationships. As long as the economy distributes access to resources according to wealth, advances in manufacturing technology will simply force workers to seek other livelihoods. The machine no longer needs us, but it still needs us to keep working. The battle-field of the socialists has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed. Demand the Future.

Capitalism will not automate itself out of existence. It will not eliminate the workforce, and it will not even try. What it will do is create a deskilled workforce, ever more dependent on capital for the ability to produce, and create a divided workforce, that does not share a common proletarian consciousness, thus diffusing its class power.  A system that directs production towards the creation of exchange value has many motivations to create control, since capture of scarce resources is at the heart of the formation of exchange value, however, it has no motivation to create general abundance. Only a workers society, where people produced and shared as equals would be interested in achieving abundance, since more wealth and less work would be enjoyed by all.

Capitalism’s technological apparatus does not free labour, it envelops human life and labour within it – invading and harassing. The tremendous wealth-producing power of technology can only truly reduce toil when the wage system is abolished, and when classes are eliminated. Only then could the innovation and determination of people be genuinely applied to using technology to reduce work and increase leisure, until then it is only a sci-fi mirage.

Work less to live more

Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries freeing themselves from slavery, were obliged to rent themselves out to factory owners during the Industrial Revolution.

Brynjolfsson doesn’t find the idea of machine-generated populist luxury outlandish. On the contrary. “A world of increasing abundance, even luxury, is not only possible but likely,” he says. “Many of things we consider necessities today – phone service, automobiles, Saturdays off – were luxuries in the past.” As the old-time Wobbly, Big Bill Haywood said, “Nothing’s too good for the working class”. Human societies are going to change beyond recognition, and from the conference table to the streets, our best chance at surviving that change starts when we have the courage to make impossible demands – to say: ‘We want more.’ Once we’re no longer conflating the idea of “work” with that of “employment,” we are free to create value in ways unrecognized by the current growth-based market economy. We can teach, farm, feed, care for and even entertain one another. By being employed most of the time, we also lose time with family and friends. And more than this we lose the ability to be and do things that make life valuable and worth living. Our lives are often too much tied up in the job we do that we have little time and energy to find alternative ways of living – in short, our capacity to realise our talents and potential is curtailed by the work we do. Being employed does not set us free, rather it hems us in and makes it more difficult to realise ourselves.

“Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance. Our desire is not to make poor those who to-day are rich, in order to put the poor in the place where the rich now are.” So said Sylvia Pankhurst.

Socialism is not, as some insist, about universally lowering living standards to the same level that we are currently forced to live at. It is about lifting our living standards to the highest levels achievable using whatever resources are available in a responsible and sustainable manner. We refuse to abandon the good things in life to those who have done nothing to assist in their production. We reject the crumbs from the rich man’s table. We demand the entire bakery and one day we will take it.

People are not therefore against the machines, but against those who use the machines to force us to work.

The concerns about the environment and the limited supply of resources do not necessarily make the promise of ‘luxury for all' utopian. Satisfaction of people’s real wants, not their manufactured consumerist desires, can be made sustainable. Most people today have a problem with imagining the world without compulsory work and competition.