SPC Newsletter 1st November 2013

[Socialist Party Head Office]

The Socialist Party of Canada

Secretary’s Report for November 1.

Email Report

• WSPNZ GAC meeting minutes for September received with thanks.

Good of the Movement

• One introductory package sent out.

• Distribution of Imagines have been on hold due to moving. Hopefully, this will be done soon.

• New email address for me, for your information, is jayers4@cogeco.ca

• General Administrative Committee meeting for September concluded discussing the renewal of domains

Finances

• Secretarial expenses for October, $44.20

Karl’s Quotes

• On people and profits, Marx writes, “ The barriers to the capitalist mode of production show themselves as follows:

1. in the way that the development of labour productivity involves a law, in the form of the falling rate of profit, that at a certain point confronts this development in the most hostile way and has constantly to be overcome by crises;

2. in the way that it is the appropriation of unpaid labour , and the proportion between this unpaid labour and objectified labour in general – to put it in capitalist terms, profit and the proportion between this profit and the capital applied, i.e. a certain rate of profit – it is this that determines the expansion or contraction of production, instead of the proportion between production and social needs, the needs of socially developed human beings. Barriers to production therefore, arise already at a level of expansion which appears completely inadequate from the other standpoint. Production comes to a standstill not at the point where needs are satisfied, but rather where the production and the realization of profit impose this.” (Capital, volume 3, p367). Therefore to put people before profits we must get rid of the system in which this rule is embedded, the capitalist system itself, in other words, get rid of profit itself.

 

Food For Thought

• A report issued by the United Nations-sponsored International Panel on Climate Change said that much of global warming is irreversible and even if we stop greenhouse gas emissions immediately, the warming process will continue for centuries. Global warming is a chilling thought. Only a socialist system not tied to capital and profit can tackle such a world- wide problem.

• A recent survey in the US showed that 80% of adults struggle with unemployment, near poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least part of their lives. Nineteen million white people live below the poverty line of $23, 021 for a family of four, nearly double the number of poor blacks. 1.5 million white single mothers live in poverty, comparable single black mothers. It is clear that poverty ( and the exigencies of capital) does not discriminate.

• There’s a strike going on in the Cambodian garment industry. They do not think the new minimum wage increase implemented by their government is enough. The increase would bring monthly wages to $75 plus $5 for a health benefit, or 45 cents per hour. The capitalist apologists have a hard time explaining the nineteenth century wage rates and conditions that capital is flocking to. Isn’t capitalism supposed to bring widespread prosperity?

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• Toronto mayor Rob Ford announced a task force on homelessness. He even appointed a chairman. Trouble is, more than two years later, nothing has happened. Talk’s cheap!

• Most people work for about fifty years then retire ready to take it easy And enjoy life. However, many have seen their retirement saving go up in smoke. In Japan, crimes committed by the elderly have doubled in the last decade. Shoplifters are now more likely to be over sixty-five than teenagers. Seventy per cent of such thefts involve food. Last year the Japanese government spent C$86 million to add elevators, handrails, and ramps in three prisons to cater to elderly criminals. The struggle to make ends meet has no age limit under capitalism. This is especially surprising in a country that, until recently, was touted as an example of how the good life could be provided for all.

• As always, the Canadian Communist Party never flags in its efforts to Improve life under capitalism. An article in the September 16-30 issue of “The Peoples’ Voice” lists some of their achievements – “such as fighting against fascism, organizing industrial workers into unions, initiating movements to win unemployment insurance, public health care and other social programs, to campaign for peace and disarmament, fighting for the full national rights of aboriginal peoples and Quebec, and to defend Canada’s sovereignty.” Upholders of capitalism should admire and respect the so-called communist party, whereas we, of the SPC aim for creating a society where none of the social evils the Communist Party is working hard to reform will exist.

• Deforestation in Brazil is increasing and that means a decline in the Rainforest. Environmentalists blame farming, miming, and infrastructure projects that are consistent with the Brazilian government’s (lack of) environmental policies. 2, 776 square kilometers of the rainforest has been cleared in the last year, a thirty-five per cent increase over the previous year. The city of Los Angeles could fit twice into the cleared ares. One third of all plant and animal species on earth I found in the Amazon rainforest. It’s only too obvious what the government’s policy is – bring in the profits and to hell with the environment and that is tantamount to saying to hell with the future of the planet. Capitalism must be stopped!

• The Toronto Star is examining clothing manufacturing and the retail sector in Canada. Retail is “a job where workers face low wages and part-time hours; it is the largest employment sector in the country; a business where many employers compete by cutting labour costs (only here, I ask); a growing part of the country’s economic future.” Capitalist apologists keep telling us that growing poverty of the working class was a mistake by Marx. As wealth to the capitalist class continues to soar, it seems Marx’s analysis is getting harder to disprove.

• The same series reported on Cambodia, a growing player in the garment–making world. Cambodia was touted as a model for fair labour practices. Right now that means starting work at 7am and sewing T-shirt sleeves until eight or nine at night, six days a week with one hour for lunch and sewing 950 shirts per day, with 25 cents extra for every one hundred shirts above that quota. With all that work, a young woman can expect to receive $130 per month. Now that’s fair, by nineteenth century standards that capital hastens to reproduce wherever it can get away with it.

• The Star published photographs of children working in Bangaldeshi garment factories. The captions read, “ A young boy sleeps at his sewing machine after a long shift in an open-air garment factory…” and , “ Twelve –year-old girls glue on sequins at the AT garment factory”, and how about, “ Shakil Khan, 10, has worked for four months as an unpaid trainee. When he finally gets a salary, it will be $4 a day.” Capital doesn’t care, the human race should!

• Thanks to frozen hospital budgets, heart surgeons and eye doctors are among a growing number of specialized physicians who can’t find work in Canada despite long waits for surgery, according to a report issued by The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. Sixteen per cent of those interviewed for the report said, although newly qualified, could not find work in their field. Thirty-one per cent said they were pursuing extra training to become more employable. Nearly a quarter of the new graduates said they were working part-time jobs. This shows that no matter what training one receives, either there is a market for your skills or there isn’t, and if not, tough. But that’s capitalism.

• Low-key environmental hearings have been going on in southwestern Ontario to address the question of burying nuclear waste next to Lake Huron, a remarkably pristine body of water and one of the wonders of the world (Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, Oct 12). It’s just that some of the material will be buried near the ‘picture-perfect’ town of Kinkardine that will remain dangerously reactive for up to 100,000 years. Did I ever say we have a sane system?

 

Reading notes

• When we think of World War I, we tend to think almost exclusively of the European theatre and certainly not about Africa. Niall Ferguson in his book, “Civilization : The West and the Rest”, although a decidedly capitalist supporter, tells us, “The war that began in 1914 was not a war between a few quarrelling European states. It was a war between world empires (socialists would not disagree with that)…In no theatre were the problems of communication more severe than in Africa, and, in tha absence of extensive railways and reliable beasts of burden, there was only one solution: men. Over 2 million Africans served in the First World War all of carriers of supplies, weapons and wounded, and although they were far from the fields of Flanders, these forgotten auxiliaries had as hellish a time as the most exposed front-line troops in Europe. Not only were they overworked and underfed; once removed from their usual locales they were every bit as susceptible to disease as their white masters. Roughly a fifth of all Africans employed as carriers died, many of them the victims of the dysentery that ravaged all colonial armies in the field.” Ferguson also tells us that as recruits dwindled, the French turned to Africa for manpower in the trenches. The first African elected to the French Assembly, Blaise Diagne became a recruiting agent for the French army. Africans were often sent into enemy gunfire first, whites behind. One in five Africans died in the war, one fifth of those who joined up, compared to 17% for French soldiers.

Despite the establishment line of the book, Ferguson prints Thomas Carlyle’s comment on capitalism in his essay, “Past and Present”, “…the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get work and ever more work done, , it has had no time to think of dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for by the Law of the Stronger, law of supply-and-demand, law of Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-Laws. We call it a society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named ‘fair competition’ and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings…[it] is not the sole nexus of man with man, – how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man’s Life itself.”

So there!

For socialism, John

 

 

 

 

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