SPC Newsletter 1st July 2013

The Socialist Party of Canada

Secretary’s Report for July 1, 2013

Email Report

• WSPNZ minutes of GAC meeting for May received with thanks.

Good of The Movement

• Our journal, “Imagine” has been sent out to all members and supporters. Anyone who did not receive one, please let me know.

• Our July meeting will be held on Friday July 5^th. We will meet at The Robarts Library on St. George Street, Toronto, at 3pm for pamphleting and sales if you are able to get there at that time. We will meet later at 6:30 pm at the Second Cup coffee house (north side of Bloor Street, four stores east of Spadina Avenue. All welcome.

• The June meting of the GAC examined alternatives for the production of Imagine. No changes contemplated so far.

Finances

• Secretary’s expenses for June, $39.25 . Donation of $20 received with thanks.

Karl’s Quotes

• Why does a country like Canada welcome hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year when we have high unemployment? Marx comments on the relative surplus population thus, “ The creation of such a surplus population is inseparable from the development of labour productivity and is accelerated by it, the same development as is expressed in the decline of the profit rate. The more the capitalist mode of production is developed in a country, the more strikingly does the surplus population obtrude there. It is in turn a reason why the more or less complete subordination of labour to capital persists in several branches of production, and longer indeed than would seem to correspond at first sight to the general level of development; this is a result of the cheapness and quantity available or dismissed labourers and of the greater resistance that many branches of production, by their nature, oppose to the transformation of manual work into machine production. Furthermore, new branches of production open up, particularly in the field of luxury consumption, which precisely take this relative surplus population as their basis…” (Capital, Volume III, pp343/5). Thus the surplus population helps to subjugate labour to capital and is readily available for capital expansion. A growing population will, of course expand the economy on its own accord. It’s a win-win situation for the capitalist class and unemployment is of little consequence to it.

Food For Thought

• The collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh put the spotlight fully on the garment industry and rightly so after so many similar tragedies there. However, this type of profit seeking with such blatant disregard for workers’ lives has been going on for centuries and continues to this day. In 1991 in Hamlet, North Carolina, twenty-five people died in a fire at a poultry plant because of locked doors. Examples abound! Read on…

• On April 28, The Brampton-Mississauga and District Labour council unveiled a monument honouring workers killed or injured in the workplace. According to Ontario’ Workplace, Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), in 2012, 389 fatalities occurred. This included eighty Ontarians killed at work, 273 died from occupational diseases and thirty-six from work-related disabilities after years of suffering. Total injuries reported to WSIB for 2012 was 283, 323. Furthermore, since 2000 11,000 Canadians have died because their employers failed to keep their workplace safe. One SPC member went to see this impressive monument, but what would be more impressive would be a museum monument to the passing of capitalism and an end to lack of health and safety concerns!

• The federal government is in free-trade talks with the European Union and the Asia-Pacific Block. Although it will affect the lives of ordinary Canadians strongly, the Harper government, that always trumpets transparency, is keeping the details secret. This passes for democracy!

• The New York Times (May19, 2013) describes the New Delhi suburb of Ashok Nagar as a warren of dusty battered lanes, tangles of wires hanging between poorly constructed buildings, and sewage coursing through the alleyways. Not atypical of India, but this place is not supposed to even exist. This unauthorized colony of 200 000 people is a part of the five million in New Delhi living in spontaneous developments in the city. It seems you have to help yourself even living in an Asian economic tiger, and don’t wait for the rising tide to lift all boats!

• The New York Times (May 12 2013) gave a profile of Sohel Rana, owner of the collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh. He traveled by motorcycle accompanied by a gang of thugs. Mr. Rana The Times writes, is a product of the global garment industry in which large corporations search for cheap labour for high profits. Rana, involved in drugs, had five factories in the building, the bottom floor reserved for the pleasures of the local politicians. Now he has had his assets seized and has been arrested. It should be the capitalist system that allows, no, encourages, such a situation, that should be on trial.

• A recent article in The Canadian Jewish News focused on the German company, Topf and Sons, who made the crematorium furnaces for the concentration camps. The depression of the 1950s nearly bankrupted the company but was saved from insolvency by government contracts for their machinery of death. One sentence says it all, “By all accounts, they were neither fanatics/nazis nor rabid anti-semites, just heard-headed entrepreneurs eagerly cashing in on an unprecedented business opportunity.” How could any comment be a more damning indictment of capitalism?

• The tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq was marked by seventeen car bombs exploding, killing sixty people and wounding one hundred and ninety. Iraq is torn apart by Sunni Muslims revolting against the Shiites in power. Youth unemployment has reached appalling heights and western consumer goods are scarce to none. During the decade the Americans were there, 4,484 of their soldiers were killed and 32,200 were wounded in a mission that cost between $3 and $4 trillion dollars, to say nothing of the Iraqi death and wounded toll and the destruction to the country. Imagine what could have been done for both countries with proper use of that amount of social wealth. So much for capitalist achievements and its priorities.

• A report by the Norwegian Refugee Councils Displacement Monitoring Centre claims that in 2012 32 million people were forced to flee their homes because of floods, storms, and earthquakes, almost twice as many as in 2011. Gordon Mc Bean, the director of research at Western University’s Centre for Environment and Sustainability in London, Ontario commented on the report, “ 32 Million people, that is the human cost of climate change. The impact of climate change isn’t small, that’s what these numbers say.” No part of this world is immune from floods – India, Nigeria, The Philippines, Russia, Spain, China, Pakistan, and the US that led to 775,000 people fleeing their homes. Nor will things improve any time soon. According to the report, “Climate change is expected to influence the frequency and intensity of weather extremes over the coming decades.”

• Nor will the world’s capitalist class and politicians, who attempt to administer capitalism’s day-to-day functioning, do anything to solve the problem when global warming promises rich profits. An article in The Toronto Star, May 4^th. focused on interest in agriculture in Greenland. Potatoes, thyme, tomatoes, green peppers and strawberries are being grown there. In Southern Greenland hay is now being grown. Sheep farms have increased in size, and supermarkets sell locally grown vegetables. Greenland’s government set up a commission to study how climate change can help farmers increase production and replace expensive imported foods. Throughout the Arctic, the thawing of the ice sheets has seen a boost in oil and mining exploration. This is a much more sought after development by the profit makers, natural disasters be damned. If the owners and controllers of production will do nothing about global warming, then, of course, it is up to the world’s working class to act politically to put an end to the capitalist system.

• Why capitalism will never be able to be green – “When an American replaces the battery in a car, likely as not the old battery will be shipped to Mexico rather than to a modern US recycling plant. The reason? Its lead emissions standards are one tenth as stringent as US standards.” (Toronto star, June 1, 2013). By the numbers – the number of tractor trailers that the dead batteries would have filled in 2011 = 17, 952; estimated increase in dead batteries to Mexico, 2004-2011 = 525%; lead smelting and refining plants in the US forty years ago = 154, today = 14; tons of lead emitted into the air by a single Mexican plant = 6 or 33 times expected for a cleaner plant in US. Capital beats all, don’t it?

• And here’s another piece of environmental information that beggars belief – The world’s economy is being powered by China, and China is being powered by coal, a nineteenth century technology despite ads from Big Coal that tout the cleanliness of coal! (ever seen a miner?). In China, coal accounts for 70% of its energy production, about as much coal as is used by all other countries combined. As a result, ten billion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted annually; Beijing recorded one thousand micrograms of fine particle pollution in January – more than forty times the level deemed safe by The World Health Organization; 1.3 million square kilometers are regularly blanketed in China enveloping 600 million people: 750,000 people die from air pollution each year. Yet the capitalist system cries ‘we must expand there’!

• The shenanigans of Toronto mayor – Another Day, Another Scandal – Ford are, for the most part, unworthy of comment by socialists and are best left for the tabloid press to deal with. An exception, though, is his dismissal from the Executive Committee of councilors who challenged him to be honest about his alleged substance abuse. Ford fired one councilor and demoted another, clearly indicating that democracy within capitalism is a sham and the only real democracy is an administration of things by the peoples’ representatives who are recallable, socialism.

• On June 10^th. it was announced that the executive hired to fix ehealth Ontario, after a spending scandal, is leaving with a golden handshake of over $400,000. Another reason why patients can’t get beds, why hospitals are struggling for cash, why nurses are being let go. Somehow, money must be found to pay the thousands of chiefs in the system.

• A June 1^st. article in The Toronto Star bemoaned the fact that, with the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, many locals are being left jobless. The military occupation has been ‘good’ for the Afghan workforce, providing thousands of jobs for interpreters, mechanics etc. Now they face an uncertain future that offers unemployment, under-employment or work for considerable less money. If war is the only measure to provide a reasonable measure of prosperity, then those looking around for another job should be looking for another economic system!

For socialism, John.