April Activities

 World Socialist Movement online meetings

Sundays at 19.30 (IST)
Weekly WSP (India) meeting

Sunday 3 April 11.00 GMT + 1 on Zoom
CENTRAL BRANCH MEETING
Anyone wishing to join in should contact:- spgb.cbs@worldsocialism.org to arrange an invite.

Friday 8 April 19.30 GMT +1

DID YOU SEE THE NEWS?

General current affairs discussion
Host: Dougie McLellan

Friday 15 April
No Meeting (Easter Holiday)

Friday 22 April
No Meeting

Saturday 23 April 10.00 to 17.30 GMT +1
Sunday 24 April 10.00 to 17. 30 GMT + 1 (if required)
SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN CONFERENCE (HYBRID)

Sunday 1 May 11.00 GMT + 1
VIRTUAL MAY DAY RALLY

SOCIALIST PARTY IN-PERSON MEETINGS

LONDON
Saturday 23 April 10am to 5.30pm
Sunday 24 April March 10am to 5.30 pm (if required)
ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Socialist Party Head Office, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN. Visitors Welcome. Can be followed on Discord (see above).

MANCHESTER

Saturday 9 April, 2pm

THE REAL WAY TO END AUSTERITY

Friends Meeting House, Mount Street, Central Manchester

Monday 2 May, from around 12.00
BURNLEY MAY DAY FESTIVAL
Towneley Park, Todmorden Road, Burnley, BB1 3RQ
The Socialist Party will have a stall at this event

Glasgow: Second Saturday of each month at The Atholl Arms Pub, 134 Renfrew St, G2 3AU Let’s get together for a beer and a blether. 2pm onwards. 2 minutes walk from Buchanan Street Bus Station. For further information call Paul Edwards on 07484 717893.

Yorkshire Discussion Group
If you live in the Yorkshire area and are interested in the Socialist Party case you are very welcome to attend our forums which currently alternate on a monthly basis either on Zoom or physical meetings in Leeds. For further information contact: fredi.edwards@hotmail.co.uk

Cardiff Street Stall
Capitol Shopping Centre
Queen Street (Newport Road end)
Every Saturday 1 – 3pm
Weather permitting

Humanity is my family, the world is my country

 

If Russia wants to occupy and run Britain, they may have it as far as the Socialist Party is concerned. Britain doesn’t belong to the British worker. Why should our fellow workers worry about preserving what belongs to others? If the others want it, let them fight for it.

The only thing that matters is the development of a consciousness of working-class solidarity, born of an appreciation of the common cause of working-class misery and its common remedy. Socialism is the answer to every question of working-class import, and— Socialism knows no frontier. It matters nothing that Britain may be peopled by Russians, or by any other nationality on the capitalist globe. That would make no difference to the movement of the working class towards the world-embracing cooperative commonwealth. The workers of all nations make common causes against the common or capitalist exploiter.  If an invasion is coming, let it come.

This impulse of social solidarity is the common inheritance of all mankind. But it has lent itself to exploitation. With the development of class rule, it was made subordinate to the class interests of the rulers. It becomes debased and perverted to definite anti-social ends. As soon as the people become a slave class “the land of their fathers” is theirs no more. Patriotism to them becomes a fraudulent thing. The “country” is that of their masters alone. Nevertheless, the instinct of loyalty to the community is too deep-seated to be eradicated so easily, and it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of the rulers against the people themselves. 

 Patriotism is usually defined as being devoted to the land of our fathers. But which is the land of our fathers? Our fathers came from many different parts of the world. The political division of the world in which we live in an artificial entity. The land has been wrested from other races. The nation they call “ours” is the result of conquest over original inhabitants, and over ourselves, by successive ruling classes. Unlike the free tribespeople, we are hirelings; we possess no country. Nationality covers no real entity other than that of common oppression, a unified government. It does not comprise any unity of race, for in no nation is there one pure race, or anything like it. It does not cover a unity of language, for scarcely a nation exists in which several distinct languages are not indigenous. Nor is it any fixed territory, for this changes from decade to decade, while the inhabitants of the transferred territory have to transfer their allegiance, their patriotism, to the new nation.

 Only the whole world can now be rightly called the land of our fathers. Only in the service of the people of the whole world, and not against those of any part of it, can social cooperation find its highest and complete expression. Marx did not call upon the workers of Germany alone to unite. He appealed to the toilers of the whole world to join hands; to a whole world of labour whose, the only loss could be its national-coloured chains.

The only universal bond of nationality or patriotism that exists for us today is, then, that of subjection to a single government. Patriotism in the worker is pride in the common yoke imposed by a politically unified ruling class. Yet it is this artificial entity that we are called upon to honour before life itself. This badge of political servitude is called an object worthy of supreme sacrifice. The workers are expected to abandon all vital interests and sacrifice all they hold dear for the preservation of an artificial nationality. The workers are duped by the ruling class into sacrificing themselves for the preservation of a politico-economic yoke of a particular form and colour. Many on the left wing have fallen headlong into this trap.

 

Patriotism and nationalism are artificial restrictions of men’s sympathy and mutual aid; obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and cooperation; as shackles that chain men and women to slavery; as incentives that set each against the other. 

Centi-Billionaires

The word “billionaire” didn’t even exist until 1844. Fifty years later, we got “multibillionaire.” And for the next 127 years, that was enough. 

But the newest additions to the English language is “centibillionaires,” people with $100 billion or more

 

How disappointing that Reich's answer is simply redistribution of wealth through taxation, rather than a fundamental change to how wealth is accrued. 

Sri Lanka's Dire Economy

 This month's issue of the Socialist Standard drew attention to the dire conditions being faced by Sri Lankan fellow workers suffering under an economic melt-down. It has seemingly grown worse.

Every day motorists line up at fuel pumps at the break of dawn and wait hours until they open. The military has posted soldiers at hundreds of gas stations on March 22 after complaints of stockpiling and inefficient distribution, and farmers and fishermen have joined a growing wave of protests. While Sri Lanka was in economic trouble even before COVID-19 with struggles to pay foreign debt and slow growth, the series of lockdowns dealt a major blow to the informal sector, which accounts for nearly 60% of the country's workforce. Job losses and reduced earnings increased poverty in the country of 22 million.

The share of the poor based on a daily income of $3.20 was estimated to have grown to 11.7% in 2020 - or by more than half a million people - from 9.2% a year before, according to the World Bank.

Central bank data shows that the government had identified 5 million families with "fragile financial status of low-income households" and provided them a 5,000 rupee allowance during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Economic crisis forces Sri Lankans to moonlight as prices soar (trust.org)

Farmworker Awareness Week

 

The farmworkers who feed us are on the frontlines of climate change, poverty, and the broken immigration system. They shouldn’t be treated as sacrificial or replaceable—especially when they’re nothing short of essential.

There are between 2.5 and 3 million agricultural workers in the United States. Migrant farmworkers account for an estimated 75 percent of these, and 50 percent of migrant farmworkers are undocumented. Many live in this country at risk of deportation, in substandard housing conditions, and in extreme poverty.

Because most farmworkers lack basic working protections and are paid “per piece”—that is, for how much they harvest—they’re often forced to choose between going without pay and working long hours through dangerous conditions. In recent years, they’ve had to work through heat waves, extreme drought, and even wildfires.

In 2021, the United States experienced the hottest summer on record, and some farmworkers died because of these unpredictable circumstances. Heat is now their leading cause of death on the job—in fact, farmworkers are 20 times more likely than other workers to die from heat-related illnesses.

The piece-rate wage forces workers to put in 10- or 12-hour workdays and still leaves many food-insecure and impoverished. And due to their immigration status, farmworkers are often unable to protest dangerous working conditions or poor wages, incentivizing employers to exploit them further.

Opinion | It's Farmworker Awareness Week. Here’s What Those Who Feed Us Deserve. | Ennedith Lopez (commondreams.org)

Grenfell - Ideology before Safety

 Brian Martin, the head of technical policy for building regulation, told the public inquiry that he found it hard to express how sorry he was as he could have potentially prevented the Grenfell Tower fire on a number of occasions.

But Martin also pointed to government policies deregulating the industry that left him as "a single point of failure" in an under-resourced department.

He attacked the policy of several governments which pushed for the deregulation of safety in the building industry.

From 2010 onwards the Coalition government had a policy of cutting red tape to allow more freedom for construction firms. This meant that instead of fire brigades or a building regulator having control over safety, companies and building owners were left to regulate themselves, with the main requirement being to ensure that building design and materials could not spread flames.

The government at the time had an explicit policy of getting rid of 'red tape', including health and safety requirements.

 Brandon Lewis MP was responsible for fire safety in the years before Grenfell and he decided the fire safety industry should regulate itself, telling the inquiry he had ideological and practical concerns about increasing the role of government.

The inquiry has heard that from 2005 there were growing signs that the housing industry was using "cowboys" without formal qualifications to assess buildings.

The assessor who inspected Grenfell Tower was described as "professionally reckless" by an expert witness because he signed off the building's cladding as safe, without evidence.

Grenfell Tower: Official admits he could have prevented fire - BBC News

We Are Fighting For A New World

 

OUR ENEMY

Wherever it operates, capitalism cannot remain static. Competition between capitalist groups accelerates the need for each group to produce huge masses of commodities that can be profitably sold at competitive prices. Having secured these commodities there come the capitalists of each country the need to sell them. Competition for markets, fields of exploitation, and trade routes are rife and the rival competitors find that friction between themselves becomes ever more serious.

It is in this framework of exploitation and competition that Russia, with its growing industrial and agricultural capacity, finds itself thrown into conflict with America—the country most likely to endanger its future capitalist development.

America’s vast resources and advancement in war weapons, however, are sufficient, should war break out, to tax or even overcome the strength of Russia—if it were alone. The motive behind Russia’s attempted annexation of Ukraine now begins to show itself. It is gathering strength for a possible war not only against America but any other rival power such as the European Union.

 To take sides in the conflict between opposing spheres of capitalist interests is to give credibility to the system which generates the very conditions that create conflicts.

As socialism changes the basis of society, so it will bring in changed social relationships which will immediately be expressed and recognised in human harmony. Social ownership of the means of living entails a class-free society, a world of united people whose entire interests are entirely as one. So socialism will replace antagonism with cooperation; it will substitute abundance for scarcity and human welfare for minority dominance. 

The Socialist Party fights to end wars, not in order to go back to the old world of so-called ‘peace’, of economic recessions recurring military crises, of armament manufacturing, but in order that working people prevail against the war-makers, against the criminal ruling classes responsible for war.

We fight so there shall be no more war profiteers, no more spending of hundreds and thousands of millions on the weapons of destruction, while the sick and the aged are short of benefits for their barest needs of existence.

We fight for a world in which the skill of the workers and the wonders of the modern industry shall be used to provide in abundance all the needs of the people and fill every home with plenty; in which the people will own the wealth they produce, and all will have work and all will have leisure; in which want and poverty will become as forgotten memory as war.

We fight for a world in which peoples will live at peace, because the power of the Stock Exchange speculators, of the arms magnates and the fomenters of war, will have been broken and ended; in which oppression and domination will have been abolished and in its place the union of free peoples of world-building; in which everyone will be free and equal and will partake in the common advance of humanity.

The whole thing about nationalism is some accident of language, accent or local behaviour. The whole horror of nationalism is its resolve to maim and kill any other if such a person doesn't share its particular language, accent or local behaviour. Thus, politicians, generals and other functionaries of capitalism exploit fears to make themselves great. 

We are without nationalism, religion or racialism. We are socialists. We are in the process of becoming truly human. That is the appeal of socialism.  Every human being on the planet enjoys community. We all love to sing together. We all love to dance together. We are human.

We fight for a free socialist world. Join the Socialist Party and help win this new world, uniting fellow-workers in the struggle against fratricidal wars. 

 

Campaign against Russian dissent continues

 Amnesty International warned that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a "witch hunt" against critics of Moscow's deadly assault on Ukraine, hitting anti-war protesters with criminal charges over peaceful demonstrations and prosecuting activists for condemning the invasion on social media.

"The persecution of those opposed to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine goes far beyond previous efforts to stifle protesters and activists," Marie Struthers, Amnesty's director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement. "Those caught criticizing the war face an absurd number of arbitrary charges merely for speaking out. They are not only charged with 'discrediting' the armed forces, but also with slander, fraud, or accusations of 'terrorism.'"

Thousands of anti-war demonstrators have been arrested inside Russia since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, and rights groups have accused Moscow of brutalizing detained protesters in an effort to squash dissent. Amnesty noted Wednesday that a number of anti-war critics have been investigated and charged under a recently enacted law prohibiting the spread of "fake" information about Russia's military. Violations of the new law are punishable by fines or—if the "fake" information leads to "serious consequences"—up to 15 years in prison. Russia's parliament later expanded the law to criminalize the dissemination of "false" information about all Russian state bodies operating abroad.

"The ongoing criminalization of 'fake news' is as arbitrary and unlawful as the Kremlin's efforts to crush all forms of anti-war sentiment," said Struthers. "And by embarking on this unrelenting witch hunt, the Russian authorities show they are capable of bringing charges against absolutely anyone."

Struthers argued that "by gagging all anti-war sentiment, the Kremlin seeks to crush those who oppose the conflict—or at least create the impression that such resistance does not exist."

"This heinous campaign of repression against critics of the state who are bravely standing up against Russia's invasion of Ukraine must stop now," she added. "All charges brought against those who have expressed anti-war opinions must be urgently dropped, and all those detained must be immediately and unconditionally released."

In addition to punishing criticism of the war expressed online, Russian authorities have "sought to criminalize street art and graffiti," Amnesty said Wednesday.

"At least nine activists and street artists have been charged for writing graffiti that is 'motivated by hatred'—a crime that could see them imprisoned for up to three years," the group noted. "While Amnesty International accepts that the authorities can legitimately sanction graffiti," the group added, "we note with grave concern the imposition of particularly harsh penalties for political expression."

Russia Conducting 'Witch Hunt' Against War Critics, Says Amnesty (commondreams.org)

200-million strike in India

 

The two-day national level strike by workers given by 10 central trade unions and other supporting organizations in India drew a strong response by over 200 million (20 crore) workers on March 28 and 29, according to organizers. These workers included those from ports and mines, railways and transport, banking and insurance, refineries and telecom, public as well as private sector (including multinational companies). There was a significant presence of women in the strike, particularly those employed in various development schemes, often at very low wages.

The strike was in addition supported by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella organization of 40 farmers’ organizations that had spearheaded a massive and successful farmers’ protest movement last year.

This strike came at a time of increasing reports of the twin burdens of unemployment and inflation. Rates of urban unemployment have been at high levels, while the price of essential goods has been increasing. In the process, most worker households have faced increasing difficulties in making basic needs. Reports of workers being made to work for longer hours in more difficult conditions have appeared increasingly, resulting in several industrial and construction site accidents.

There are increasing apprehensions of workers losing jobs and rights in the course of policies of relentlessly increasing privatization under different names and schemes. Instead of striving to rapidly increase social security cover for unorganized sector workers who are largely deprived of this, the policies of the government are widely seen to be creating more uncertain and difficult conditions for workers. 

India--Massive Strike Of 200 Million Workers Draws Attention To Increasing Problems And Apprehensions Of Workers| Countercurrents

Socialist Sonnet No. 59

 

Fashioning the Future

 

Finely woven fabric of the nation

Was cloth of gold once, fit for a flag,

Now flagging, becoming threadbare, a rag

Running Into holes, an old creation

Increasingly shoddy and worn too thin

To help keep the poor from exposure. A darn

Here, a patch there, yet too few seem to learn

The whole weave is rotten. Time to begin

A new yarn that everyone can fashion

Into what then best suits their needs, with no

More make do and mend. Now’s the time to sew

Social material together with passion.

Emperors, however, seeking to impress,

Are all naked, no matter how they dress.

 

D. A.

 

 

War a Bonanza for Oil Corporations

 

A new analysis conducted by Oil Change International, Greenpeace USA, and Global Witness estimates that U.S. oil and gas corporations are poised to rake in windfall profits of up to $126 billion this year as they exploit Russia's deadly assault on Ukraine to raise prices at the pump.

"Under conservative estimates, we find the U.S. upstream oil and gas industry will collect a windfall of $37 to $126 billion in 2022 alone," the groups' report states. The higher-end profit estimate is dependent on oil prices spiking to $120 per barrel this summer and remaining elevated as the West moves to restrict Russian oil imports—a major opportunity for U.S. fossil fuel companies, particularly as the Biden administration looks to ramp up gas exports to Europe. If oil prices average $88 per barrel, the new analysis finds, the U.S. oil and gas industry would reap $37 billion in additional profits in 2022.

US Oil Companies Set to Reap Up to $126 Billion in Extra Profits Amid War on Ukraine (commondreams.org)