SPC Newsletter for 1st September 2014

The Socialist Party of Canada

Secretary’s Report for September 1, 2014

Email Report

– WSP New Zealand GAC meeting notes for July received with thanks.

– WSP India EC Notes received with thanks.

Good of the Movement

– Booklets received for Word on the Street from SPGB with thanks.

– Work continues on the Fall edition of Imagine. Last call for submissions, suggestions, changes.

Finances

– Secretary’s expenses for August, $26.07.

Karl’s Quotes

– On credit, Marx comments, " Apart from the joint -stock system – which is an abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself, and which destroys private industry to the same degree that it spreads and takes over new spheres of production – credit offers the individual capitalist, or the person who can pass as a capitalist, an absolute command over the capital and property of others, within certain limits, and, through this, command over other people’s labour. It is disposal over social capital, rather than his own, that gives him command over social labour. The actual capital that someone possesses, or is taken to possess by public opinion, now becomes simply the basis for a superstructure of credit. This is especially the case in wholesale trade, and the greater part of the social product passes through this. All standards of measurement, all explanatory reasons that were still more or less justified within the capitalist mode of production, now vanish. What the speculating trader risks is social property, not his own. Equally absurd now is the saying that the origin of capital is saving, since what this speculator demands is precisely that others should save for him. (As recently the whole of France saved up one and a half thousand million francs for the Panama swindlers – F.E.)". (Capital, Volume III, page 570) Note the term "social" here that shows that capital and what it produces is a social property, not individual and that it is the labour and product of us all that is expropriated, showing the capitalist system is based on theft.

Food For Thought

– Whenever one puts on the weather channel, they always show floods in many regions of the world. In one segment, for example, they occurred in England, India, Nova Scotia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ontario, Nevada, and Hawaii. This is clearly a consequence of the profit system that must be stopped immediately.

It has been widely reported that auditors for the city of Brampton, Ontario, claim that the mayor and her staff broke the city’s spending rules 265 times in three years and hit taxpayers with a bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal items. It must be demoralizing for many to realize they have elected dishonest people to office. Some may argue that there are honest politicians, which, of course, there are. But better still a society where such situations could not exist.

– On August 8, US forces launched a series of air strikes as the Middle East’s most violent Islamist group, the Islamic State, moved towards the autonomous Kurdish region. Does the US care about the Kurds? More to the point is that the region contains Iraq’s most stable oil-rich territory, showing, once again, that all wars have an economic basis. The real tragedy is the number of innocent lives lost in Iraq in the last ten years.

– The recovery from the recession still appears to be a rich man’s event. While profits are up and the wealth gap continues to grow apace, we get reports such as, "Children in Care : Total Rises 12% in four years" from Britain and, "City Faces ‘Epidemic’ of Child Poverty" in Canada. Child poverty in Toronto has reached epidemic levels with 29% of children – 149,000 – living in low- income families. Apparently, Toronto is tied with St John, New Brunswick for the highest child poverty rate – that’s in one of the richest cities in the world – another condemnation of the capitalist system.

– Statistics Canada reported that the economy created only 200 jobs last month, July. That is a far cry from the 15,000 that economists had forecast. Since the economy is so uncertain and the guys who have studied economics at university are unable to predict what will happen, why bother keeping it? Instead, how about a change in the ownership of the system to everyone to ensure security for all?

– An article in The Toronto Star of August 13 focused on the efforts of Dr. Margaret McKinnon, a psychologist and scientist in the field of post traumatic stress syndrome studies. Working with researchers at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto, McKinnon and her colleagues published their findings on line in the journal, " Clinical Psychological Science". McKinnon said she hopes her work will spur additional research and improved treatments for the development of PTSD, " If we know, following a traumatic event, who is likely to develop PTSD, we can intervene earlier and with more force to help ensure that diagnosis does not develop down the road." Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate the cause of PTSD – a society that causes trauma.

– In the fifth week of a strike at Bombardier Inc. in Thunder Bay, Ontario, eighteen striking workers headed to Toronto to hand out pamphlets that said, " Good Transit Should Support Good Jobs", and "Bombardier is Taking Workers Down the Wrong Track". The strike by 900 members of Unifor local 1075, who make rail cars, is against the employer’s demands for concessions on pensions and benefits. The union hoped to win support by picketing at several Toronto Transit stations and the Bombardier aerospace plant in Downsview. It’s not exactly clear if the strikers want other workers to come out in sympathy or not. What is clear is that the unions can only work effectively in a booming economy where manufacturers are intent on making profit while they can. Unfortunately for Unifor, we do not have a booming economy, quite the reverse. It would be better to advocate a society that is devoid of booms and slumps where we do not have to form unions to fight in an antagonistic system.

– An article in The Toronto Star of August 2, examined the problems affecting Indian tribes in the Amazon rain forest. The main threats to them are illegal fishing, hunting, logging, mining, cattle ranching, drug trafficking, and immunity to diseases such as influenza, measles, and the common cold brought in by outsiders. There were an estimated six million to nine million people in the Amazon region before Europeans arrived there in the fifteenth century. A century later, that number had fallen to one million. Now the remainder is being seriously threatened proving that nothing changes under capitalism. One of the worst places to live is on some valuable resource, sooner or later, the money grubbers will arrive.

– A recent government survey in the US announced that more than three million workers there prepare and serve food, making $9.08 an hour on average. This means many who work in the food industry can hardly afford to eat the product they serve.

– Meanwhile, the McDonald’s Corporation said its profits slipped in the the second quarter as sales continue to flag. (Maybe if the workers could afford to eat there sales would be up!). This is largely due to intensifying competition and the ‘persistent financial struggles’ of its lower income customers. In other words, poor folk can’t afford to eat there. Executives say they are working to improve basics such as operational speed and service, but they don’t expect performance to change significantly soon. As CEO Don Thompson said, " This is not the kind of thing that I would say I sleep well at night." What a system – even the guys at the top are stressed out!

– Meanwhile, the Queen’s union has been able to negotiate a new contract with the British government that will raise her state paycheque for 2014/15 to $65 million, am increase of 5% or three times the 1.6% inflation rate. Not bad, maybe we should look at joining the royal union.

– Last general election, four out of ten Canadians failed to show up to vote, the largest group by far. Toronto Star writer, Susan Delacourt asks, "Is it time to take away the no-voting option from Canadians? " (August 30). Maybe if we had an alternative to Capitalist party #1,2, or 3 it would make a difference. Most people know it doesn’t matter who wins, it will make no difference – time to make SPC the real alternative!

– In the same issue, business writer, David Olive, bewails the takeover of the iconic Canadian coffee shop, Tim Horton’s, because the buyer is 3G capital, a Brazilian investor group with a reputation for acquiring success stories and firing employees, e.g. Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewer, 8,000 jobs across Europe, and 2,000 in North America, Heinz Company, 740 jobs in Leamington, Ontario. This kind of action, according to Olive, "…taken to excess, as it has been over the past generation, the widespread practices of vulture investing and creation of near-monopolies be acquiring every major business in an industry have undermined capitalism." Say what? That is precisely what capitalism aspires to, Mr. Olive!

Reading Notes

– On nuclear disarmament, " That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe. It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardments in the spring of 1945. The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379." (Air Marshall Sir Robert Saundby, in David Irving’s "The Destruction of Dresden" and reported in Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse Five")

Happy Labour Day,

For socialism, John