Dictatorship of the proletariat
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This is an interesting analysis of the budget:
Quote:In terms of the raw politics, it was a confident attempt at imposing a fresh narrative for the next five years: a Tory party that convinced the public that it stood for high wages, lower taxes and reduced welfare would occupy an impregnable centre ground. The Government already has the pensioner vote sewn up; the aim now is to own the striving classes, boxing Labour into a fiscally irresponsible, pro-welfare, electorally suicidal corner.(from the Torygraph) Now, it's clear the Tories have learned from the US republicans how to win 'blue collar votes' (and using the ABC classification, it's clear the Tories are suppotrted deep into the working class).
The twin objective facts of the necessity of winning working class votes to rule, and the interests of the working class, have forced the Tories into this.
It seems that the analysis is there is little room for policy manoeuvre, Labour would have implemented a minimum wage that looked much the same, and would have cut just about as much (indeed, a we've sen with their volte face over the Rail improvements, the Tories lied with promises of spending to outbid Labour).
I've heard suggestions that one reason for raising the minimum wage is actually to promote productivity, a persistent problem. By shifting the wage bill to employers, and then forcing wages up, irrespective of the labour pool, employers will have to look at means of substituting for labour, and improving productivity. Again, this is classic borrowing from New Labour, using the state to regulate (or even nationalise) workforce in order to compete in the world market. I wouldn't be surprised if Ed Balls had a duplicate of this budget on his desk at home.
Imagine if Labour had done this. Now it's the Tories who are "Anti-Business", forcing employers to pay a higher mininimum wage, dragging their feet over expanding Heathrow Airport, and risking Britain's membership of the EU.
YMS wrote:The twin objective facts of the necessity of winning working class votes to rule, and the interests of the working class, have forced the Tories into this.You love pretending that 'objective facts' force humans to obey them, don't you, YMS? It's another facet of your unshakeable faith in Religious Materialism.The ruling class have themselves actively chosen at this point, firstly, not to install a dictatorship, and secondly that their interests in producing further profits for themselves are best served by these policies.Your own creative selection of 'facts', based upon your own unconscious ideology of science, are bugger all to do with 'objectivity'.Whilst the working class is continually bamboozled by the 19th century thinking of supposed 'socialists' and their Religious Materialism, they'll remain under the domination of the bourgeoisie.Even bourgeois philosophers have moved beyond that guff, the nonsense that Engels fell for, and which forms the basis of Leninism.But… as long as 'socialists' claim to have access to 'objective facts', the 'Material Truth', the lord god 'Matter', they cannot provide any guidance for workers, who require a critical and creative theory, which can provide them with an ideology to help change the world we presently live in.
I'd dispute that the ruling class can impose a dictatorship at a whim, they lack cohesion and they lack the basic power (and, yes, they would destroy their profit base, which is the essnce of their existence as a class). They might make history, but not in conditions of their choosing. the working class has imposed political democracy on them, and has imposed the burden of making up for the market failures of the labour market.Political democracy m,akes teh working class the decisive power in the land, it is they who have not chosen to use that power (which they could) to create socialism.
So, what or who tells you what 'objective facts' are, YMS?Does 'matter' speak to you alone, but not our class, so we can't vote on what it 'is'?Do physicists alone converse with 'matter', an elite conversation, a discussion into which the proletariat can never enter, and so can't vote on?You can't imagine, never mind desire, a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.You want a 'dictatorship of matter', the Holy Truth of 'what is' and will ever 'be'.Unless the producers of their world, both material and ideal, democratically control that active process of production, then socialism is impossible.The Religious Materialists deny this power to the producers: the RM-ers want either an elite of scientists or each individual to produce knowledge.RM-ers won't have democracy in the human activity of science.RM-ers in philosophy are Leninists in politics.All workers should beware the nonsense of 'Materialism': it is a religious worship of 'matter', and its priests arrogate to themselves the right to decide what it 'is'. 'Materialists' will not have democracy in the production of 'truth'.Religious Materialists insist that 'the rocks talk to them', and them alone.I'm a worker, and 'material conditions' have never spoken to me. The SWP claimed that the 'material conditions' spoke to the party, to the exclusion of our class, and all 'Materialists' claim the same.Otherwise, they would accept a vote by the producers of knowledge.Any ideology that claims that all production must be democratically organised (ie. Communism) must argue that democratic production of all human products is the only philosophical basis to Communism.This applies to 'truth', which is a social and historical product, not a 'reflection' of 'matter' (whatever that is – the Materialists will not tell us, and Engels didn't, either).
The Budget – A lot of spin with pleenty of smoke and mirrors … Anybody the least bit acquainted with pay rises know the devil is in the detail and not the headline figures. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33463864Thirteen million UK families will lose an average of £260 a year due to the freeze in working-age benefits. Three million families, which are likely to lose an average of £1,000. Even taking into account higher wages, people receiving tax credits would be "significantly worse off," said Paul Johnson, director of the IFS. Higher wages would not compensate for cuts to tax credits."There is simply not enough money going in to the new minimum wage to anywhere near compensate – in cash terms – people on tax credits" Those in work – but receiving low salaries – will be the worst-affected. Those in the second poorest category are likely to lose more than £1200 a year.According to the Resolution FoundationA low-earning single parent with one child, working 20 hours a week at £9.35 an hour, will be £1,000 a year worse off.A low-earning dual-earner couple with two children will be £850 a year worse offA middle-earning dual-earner couple with two children, each earning £15 a hour, will be £350 better off, as a result of increases in the personal tax allowance.Families moving on to Universal Credit, or applying for tax credits after April 2017 could face much bigger losses.For example, a low-earning couple with with three children making a new claim would be £3,450 worse off, following the tax and welfare changes set out in the budget."We shouldn't think that a higher minimum wage will compensate all low income working families for their losses – many working households will be left significantly worse off,"
Whilst we're at it…'matter' is the philosophical basis of 'private property'.For those who deny democracy in the production of ideas and the tangible, there has to be a final, decisive, philosophical category, which sits outside of collective human control.That 'category', an idea produced by human society, is 'matter'.The Religious Materialists always finally refer their arguments to 'matter', the 'physical', which cannot be argued with or criticised. It just 'is'.Marxists (ie., 'idealist-materialists') argue that every 'category' is created by human thinking, and the categories adopted play a fundamental part in 'theory and practice', in the production of knowledge and the tangible.The 'ideal' and the 'material' have the same status for Marx. We would now call them, collectively, the 'real'. The 'real' includes both being and consciousness, because both are required by humans for their active creativity in their world. Nature is both being and consciousness. Humans are natural consciousness, and our active production is nature attempting to know itself.The bourgeoisie have to separate 'matter' from 'ideas', just as they separate 'property' from 'democracy'. Once they allow 'ideas/consciousness' to necessarily mingle with 'tangible matter', they allow 'matter' to be subject to democracy. Idealism-materialism, the ideology of Marx and Communism, spells the end of 'private property' and the category of 'matter'.Individualists, who claim that they as individuals have knowledge of the world (ie. outside of what they have been told by society, a knowledge that is necessarily historical), cling to 'matter', something they can 'touch', to keep at bay the forces of democracy and collective production of our world.Religious Materialists are always, finally, individualists. At best, they want special individuals, elite scientists, to produce undemocratic 'knowledge of matter'. And to keep this 'elite knowledge' from the masses, they produce it by means of a language alien to the majority – that is, 'mathematics', the Latin of the priest-physicists.
Ironically, this image posted by Guido Fawkes (I won't link, cheers), shows a lot of what is happening: The blog's point was that if you include Pensions in the welfare budget, they take up a huge slice, and inflate the total value, making it seem more people are in the firing line. But, if you minus pensions from the target list, the above is what you have: there is no traction in cutting unemployment benefit, it's already minimal. Disability is intractable, because they really can't work, the only viable targets are housing and family, and that's what they've gone for, these can lead to adjusted market relations.
alanjjohnstone wrote:The Budget – A lot of spin with plenty of smoke and mirrors …Yeah, and unless we criticise their 'spin, smoke and mirrors' and create our own 'spin, smoke and mirrors', then their version will remain the 'truth' of the budget.I'm, in effect, saying no more than what the SPGB supposedly support, that is, the need for the proletariat to self-educate itself, with the aid of its own worker-communists, by criticising their 's, s & m' and creating its own 's, s & m'.The ideological belief that 'The Budget' will 'materialise' itself to workers is nonsense.If necessary, 'The Budget' will 'explain itself' as being produced by greedy immigrants, who are out to steal from the British, and have done so by the unavoidable budget, which British workers can see in front of their own eyes.Active education, propaganda, agitation and organisation is required, a strategy at odds with 'materialism', which argues that 'material conditions' will themselves remove the scales from the eyes of the proletariat, merely by the passive experience by the proletariat of those conditions.Neither 'The Budget' nor 'matter' talks to us.We must criticise the existing 'material conditions' (matter) and create new 'ideal-material conditions' (theory and practice).Waiting for the 'spin' to cease, the 'smoke' to clear, and the 'mirrors' to break, is to give victory to our exploiters.'The Budget' will not speak of its own accord. And neither do 'rocks'…
A week or so ago, I saw the Tories spinning about tax credits subsidising employers who paid low wages. I thought then, how would the lefties respond to a Tory chancellor introducing the 'living wage' as the minimum wage and 'paying' for it by reducing employment taxes ( and cutting tax credit). Well Gideon didn't quite manage it, renaming a poverty wage a living wage doesn't make it one. But now the left is swarming to defend tax credits, a system which enforces and entrenches poverty, and rewards low wage employers.
Osborne also stole the Green Party's clothes:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29066870
Quote:The Green Party of England and Wales is calling for the minimum wage to rise to £10 an hour by 2020.In an address to Greens' autumn conference, party leader Natalie Bennett said Britain was a low-wage economy and people deserved "a decent return on their labour".Under the plans, wages would rise by £1.15 to £7.65 an hour next year before increasing each year until 2020.The only difference is that under Osborne's plan the aim by 2020 is £9 an hour with the increase next year to £7.20.A real stroke of Orwellian genius to rename the Minimum Wage the Living Wage since there already is a so-called Living Wage which, in London, is already £9.15 an hour. Still peanuts of course.Meanwhile, as we know from another thread here, Warren Buffett is calling for an increase in tax credits, partly on the grounds that increasing the mimimum wage (other than marginally) is a "job killer":http://www.wsj.com/articles/better-than-raising-the-minimum-wage-1432249927
Just seen this:https://twitter.com/FrancesOGrady/status/618777305943556096Now, I think O'Grady is largely right, not in so much as the campaign has been listened to, but that the need has been recognised, from a market perspective. I doubt the Tories would be doing this if there wasn't an organised working class pushing for its interests (then again, they'd probably have to create yellow unions to help administer the labour market if that was the case).
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