SPC Newsletter for 1st November 2014

[Socialist Party Head Office]

The Socialist Party of Canada

 

Secretary’s Report for November 1, 2014

 

Email Report

• WSPNZ GAC meeting notes for September received with thanks.

• WSP India notes from EC meeting received with thanks.

 

Good of the Movement

• One introductory package sent out

• Fall Imagines have been mailed out. Let me know if you did not receive one. Suggestions for future issues are welcome.

 

Finances

• Secretarial expenses for September, $90.52

 

Karl’s Quotes

• In “Pre-capitalist Relations” of Volume III, Marx describes the place of usury in helping establish capitalist production, “Usury thus works on the one hand to undermine and destroy ancient and feudal wealth, and ancient and feudal property. On the other hand it undermines and ruins small peasant and petty bourgeois production, in short all forms in which the producer still appears as the owner of his means of production. In the developed capitalist mode of production, the worker is not the owner of his conditions of production, the farm that he cultivates, the raw material he works up, etc. This alienation of the conditions of production from the producer, however, corresponds to a real revolution in the mode of production itself. The isolated workers are brought together in the large workshop for specialized and interlocking activity; the tool is replaced by the machine. The mode of production itself no longer permits the fragmentation of the instruments of production that is linked with petty property, any more than it permits the isolation of the workers themselves. In capitalist production, usury can no longer divorce the conditions of production from the producer, since they are already divorced…It is only where and when the other conditions for the capitalist mode of production are present that usury appears as one of the means of formation of this new mode of production, by ruining the feudal lords and petty production on the one hand, and by centralizing the conditions of labour on the other.” Capital, volume III, pages 731 and 731.) Obviously, capitalism has had, and still has, some sorry bed fellows to establish and continue its existence.

 

Food For Thought

• Thirty-six hours after the Obama government banned the importation of the AK-47 rifle as part of the sanctions against Russia, gun stores in the states sold out of them. Some customers bought eight to ten rifles at nearly $1000 each, stockpiling them as investment. “ The great irony here is that the threat of regulation has the perverse effect of stimulating sales, and not by a little,” said Philip Cook, a Duke University gun researcher and the author of, “The Gun Debate That Everyone Needs to Know.” Whatever the intentions of the purchasers, two things are clear – the fact that there are so many guns out there regardless of whose hands they are in is indicative of a dysfunctional society, and the need for a society where no guns are needed or even produced.

• Bill Clinton is credited with bringing his family back from the edge of bankruptcy. How, by hard work? Not on your nellie. In seven days he gave speeches to corporate executives in Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and the Czech republic and was paid $1.4 million. In fact, since 2001 when he left the White House to January 2013, he has made $104 million for 542 speeches. Lots of talking, maybe, but less of value than a day in the factory and a hundred times more lucrative. Hilary’s standard fee is $200,000. Values are distorted in capitalism. (Toronto Star, June 28.)

• The town of Jadugora, India, supplies most of the country’s uranium needs. There, the ore is mined, refined into yellow cake, and sent to the nuclear fuel complex in Hyderbad. There, the tallow cake is converted into uranium oxide, processed into nuclear fuel, and sent to one of India’s two dozen nuclear reactors. Uranium is at the center of India’s energy ambitions. Coal reserves are limited and gas and hydro are considered unreliable. If the monsoon season is weak, hydro- power output drops and energy experts say nuclear power is cheaper then coal. Exposure to uranium and the difficulty of getting it without bringing up two dozen other radioactive materials that are far more dangerous than uranium, have taken their toll on the people of Jadugora. Many children cannot walk, or hold anything. They can’t even feed themselves, bathe or use the toilet. Children with birth deformities live on every street in the town. There are many young women who have had miscarriages and men and women who have died from cancer. Long- term exposure to radiation can cause genetic damage so that future generations can suffer the effects. This shows conclusively that as long as the needs of capitalism, i.e., profits, are satisfied, people’s well- being does not matter.

• While workers are anxiously trying to keep up with rising costs and low increases in pay, there’s no such problem at the other end of the scale. Two former vice presidents of the Pan-Am games committee left after less than four years on the job and managed to win severance payments of over $300,000.

• Thought we were getting safer as the cold war ended and nuclear weapons arsenals would be de-commissioned? Think again – the US for one is ramping up nuclear weapon production to replace the aging stockpile. A sprawling, state-of-the-art plant in Missouri has thousands of employees working on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. This comes under a president who made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. Capitalism needs to show who is boss when it comes to discussion of treaties. It is an antagonistic system that can never change.

• Now that China has become a major economic power, it needs powerful armed forces (to match other super powers) to protect and further its economic interests and ambitions. Recently released statistics show that China spends $188 billion annually on the military, second only to that of the US. This is pushing other Asian countries to increase their ‘defense’ spending. Viet Nam’s budget has increased 83% in the last five years, Japan’s $48 billion budget is the biggest ever, expanding its main coast guard fleet from forty-one vessels to three hundred and eighty-nine. Its proximity to China and Russia is driving the spending. The capitalist class in every country needs access to raw materials and markets to gain its share of the profits. Conflict and war are inevitable at some point, as we have seen many times in the past.

• Oh the loyalty of capital – Dutch multinational, Royal DSM is now locating its plants in the US where there is an abundant supply of cheap natural gas and a ‘very lightly regulated labour’ market. (New York Times, Oct 5 2014). Apparently China, where the corporation has forty plants, is losing its edge as a source from which to serve the world. Is globalization making a U-turn? The paper asks. Not really, more like going in circles searching for the highest profit possible with no regard to the consequences for workers and their families!

• An article in the Toronto Star of September 15 focused on the Norwegian government’s efforts to produce oil without endangering the environment. Norway is one of only five countries making sufficient progress towards their target cuts in greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding international agreement to combat climate change. This means little when the US, Canada, and China, who have not signed the agreement carry on polluting regardless of its effect on the environment. But even Norway has its problems – the state-owned Statoil injects steam underground to thin the bitumen and then pumps it to the surface. After diluting the bitumen with lighter hydrocarbons, it is sent to the refinery as in situ drilling. The process burns up a lot of energy to produce a single barrel of crude oil. It also produces two or three more times the greenhouse gas emissions per barrel than open pit mining in the Alberta oilsands that has received so much criticism. The point is that under capitalism profit is the determinant and no well meaning government can get around that fact. Only a system of common ownership where production would use common sense will alter it.

– “Half a century ago, an essay in The New York Times titled “ Our  Invisible Poor” took on the then-prevalent myth that America was an affluent society with only a few pockets of poverty.” (New York Times, October 5 2014). Now, however, the current article states, it is the rich who have become invisible, hiding behind huge increases in wealth. When people were asked how many times greater they thought the recompense for top executives was than the average worker, the answer was about thirty times. That may have been true in the 1960s, the time of the original article, but today that number is 300 times. “So Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid…” continues the article. Even ‘the one percent’ is too broad when it comes to the real rich although their share of total wealth has grown from 25% to 40% since 1973, but the great bulk of that percentage is held by the top 0.1%. Apparently, the top twenty- five hedge fund managers, for example, averaged almost $1 billion each in 2013 – and we are strapped for money for hospitals, education, and social programs!

• On the other hand, The Toronto Star article, “ Retracing the Past of a Nestle whistleblower” (October 4 2014) who publicized the fact that Nestle bribed doctors in Pakistan to push its baby formula over breast- feeding. The result was malnourished and dying babies because the formula was more often than not mixed with dirty water, the only water available to 44% of the Pakistani population. It did not affect the Nestle profit, though – dirty water, clean water, it’s all the same to capital!

 

Reading Notes

• In “The Spirits of Just Men – Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen In The Moonshine Capital of The World”, author Charles D. Thompson Junior describes the plight of the farmer in the 1930s, “ As this upheaval took place (i.e., the agricultural mechanization) subsistence farmers still left on their little farms – those who had learned special skills as intricate as reaching into the uterus of a cow to rearrange the legs of a breech-birth calf, how to repair harnesses and make hinges for doors, or how to butcher their own meats and build barns from timber on their own land – would be told they were unskilled in the search for off-farm jobs. Their choices would be to hang on where they could at least manage their own time or sell themselves to an ungrateful industrial world. Some went willingly off the farms. Others remained and instead turned to the ingenuity they had always relied on.” ( i.e., the production of illicit moonshine – even here they were exploited by the gangsters and lawmen who demanded their ‘fair’ shares that always turned out to be much more then the worker, of course – shades of the closing of the commons and clearing of the land for industrialization in Britain.

 

For socialism, John

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