SPC Secretary’s report for Feb 1

[Socialist Party Head Office]

The Socialist Party of Canada

Secretary’s Report, Feb 1, 2012

Email Report

• The Bullet: Reclaiming the South African Dream.

• The Bullet: A Poisoned Chalice – Liberation ANC Style.

• The Bullet: Canadian Labour at the Crossroads.

• The Bullet: Tax Cuts, Privatization, and Deregulation Disguised as Public Policy.

• Left Streamed: Strategizing the Resistance – A Conversation with Manny Ness.

• The Bullet: The Distinguishing Features of Latin America’s New Left.

• The Bullet: Neoliberalism and the End of Shorter Working Hours.

• The Bullet: Standing Up to Indiana’s Attack on Unions.

Note that the above articles are not based on scientific socialism but are available to read for information.

Good of the Movement

• Two introductory packages sent out.

• One member questionnaire sent out.

• Attendance at Occupy Toronto accomplished, a table set up, and literature given and sold.

• Next activity – A socialist discussion, planning, and coffee meeting at the usual Second Cup in Toronto on Thursday, February 23^rd. 6:30 – 8:30pm. Reminder to follow.

• Elections for SPC officers underway. Any nominations, suggestions welcome.

• Dues are due, please send $25 to head office in Victoria.

Finances

• Secretary’s expenses for January, $17.92, $15 donation received with thanks.

Karl’s Quotes

• Continuing from last month, I recount more adventures of “Bulldog”

Drummond, the British Secretary of Embassy in Washington. Marx writes, “But the chief clue as to how to make the workers into rational consumers only comes at the end (of the report in “The Nation” of 1879). Mr. Drummond visits the cutlery factory at Turner’s Falls (Connecticut River), and Mr. Oakman, the company secretary, after telling him how American cutlery beats English in quality, continues, ‘The time is coming that we will beat England as to prices also; we are ahead in quality now, that is acknowledged, but we must have lower prices and shall have it the moment we get our steel at lower prices and have our labour down!’ Reduction in wages and long working hours, this is the kernel of the ‘rational and healthful process’ that is to raise the workers to the dignity of rational consumers, so that they ‘make a market’ for the ‘things showered on them’ by civilization and the progress of invention.”

(Capital, Vol II, page 592. Penguin Classics edition). And still the crap continues after another 150 years, i.e. drive wages down for higher profits. Time for a change!

Food For Thought

• Alan Greenspan, former golden boy of the monetarist camp until that

is, the recent financial meltdown, advises us in all his glorious wisdom that capitalism is not to blame for the growing and obscene income inequality. No, what is to blame is innovation and globalization (?). As if all the capitalist class, or any of them, were great innovators or workers. George Soros reputedly made $3 billion in a recent year, that’s just $1.5 million per hour on the average forty-hour week, or about two minutes to earn the average worker’s wage! That’s some innovation! Some hard worker!

• Our local country paper out in the sticks here reported on hospital CEO’s

Salaries. The CEO of Toronto Sunnybrook receives $750 000 per year including bonuses like, health club membership, parking, transit passes, and car allowances up to $1 500 per month. Meanwhile the average Joe, earning some $40 000 has to pay his own way for everything. Makes sense?

• Of course, as we all know, don’t expect capitalism to be fair or just.

That’s the big mistake of the Left Wing. The locking out of the workers at the Caterpillar plant in London, Ont. shows that. The workers held a rally on January 22^nd. Prime Minister Harper was invited to show his support for the workers but was a no show. London mayor, Tom Fontana said, “We need you down here to support the workers. Get your ass down here!” (Toronto Star, Jan 22, 2012) Nice sentiment but it’s going to take more than that. Caterpillar just reported record profits.

• Republican presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich, got it right. He said,

“If we identify capitalism with rich guys looting companies, we’re going to have a very hard time protecting it.” (Toronto Star, Jan 21, 2012). If he just changed ‘companies’ to ‘workers’, he would be there.

• The same article, though, shows just how dazed and confused the press is.

Gingrich was defending himself against ‘anti-capitalism charges’. That’s because he attacked opponent, Mitt Romney for his leadership of a private equity firm known for plundering floundering companies and tossing workers into the streets and walking away with $250 million. Later on the article says, “ Was Karl Marx correct? Is the boom and bust cycle about to go bust forever?” Something he never supported, of course. And this, “socialism is for tycoons and capitalism is for the rest of us.” Go figure where that one came from. Dazed and confused!

• The National Post, the mouthpiece of laissez faire (unfair) capitalism

Reported that the capsizing of the Costa Concordia would cost the owners $90 million US not counting the impact on bookings. Shares in the cruise company are down 16% reducing the company’s value by $1.09 billion. Wow, the social good we could do with that kind of value!

• The Toronto star reports that 297 000 UK firms folded in 2010 – 813

everyday. On the same page it is remarked that Ekaterina Ribolovlev, 22 year-old daughter of Russian billionaire. Dymitri, bought a New York apartment for $88 million – 10 rooms, 6 744 square feet. The differences in human fortunes are truly staggering. Surely there will be a call for the end of this nonsense.

• Well, it seems there is one alternative – ‘System D’, the black market, the lemonade stands, flea market vendors, etc. About 1.8 billion people are counted in this class with an economy as large as that of the US. It’s all cash and no taxes. Apparently, System D outperformed the regular economy as the recession hit.

• The way of capitalism – Resilient Technologies of Wassau, Wisconsin,

have produced, after five years work, an automobile tire that won’t go flat. Great, does that mean savings for all, less social labour expended? Not likely, it was developed for army humvees to transport troops and their necessities for war!

• When the Honeywell plant closed in Scarborough, 250 people, many of whom had worked there for decades, were unemployed. That was through the early months of last year. Only 18 have found work. Most are chasing jobs that pay about half the $20 an hour, plus benefits, that they earned on the assembly line. An all too familiar tale for far too long – time to act.

• Re the environment – we have just had an incredible year – dust storms in Arizona, drought and fires in Texas, towns like Goderich, Ontario flattened, tornadoes, massive floods, yet, according to Dailyclimate.org (The Toronto Star, Jan 15 2010) mention of climate change in newspapers dropped 20% from 2010 and 40% from 2009. It asks is it climate change fatigue? I ask, is it a deliberate attempt to put it on the back-burner.

Reading Notes

• As the mining industry gets set to blow the top off Blair Mountain,

archeologists and activists join together to stop it. Archeologists are there to record the evidence of the ‘Battle of Blair Mountain’ in 1921. Some 10 000 miners, marched to the courthouse in Logan to protest martial law and heavy- handed treatment of strikers. They were opposed by 3 000 volunteers under anti-union sheriff, Don Chafin. The archeologists, from the pattern of ammunition distribution, have determined that the miners fought cleverly in guerrilla fashion, not the undisciplined mob that they were thought to be. One million rounds were fired in five days and estimates of the dead range from twenty to one hundred. Now the archeologists have been told to pack up and get off the land by the owners, the mining company, of course. It was a fairly major battle, probably bigger than some of the small skirmishes in the War of Independence, but, unlike them, remains almost completely forgotten. Another example of the manipulation of facts and the media to deny labour history. (Archeology magazine, Jan/Feb, 2012)

• Continuing from a couple of months ago, Philippe Gigantes, in his

Book, “Power and Greed”, hints at how the ‘grand acquisitors” (or thieves) including the precursors of the royal families got their land and wealth after the collapse of the Roman empire, “Franks were not the only culprits. The Thuringians attacked the Ostrogoths who attacked the Lombards who attacked the Franks who attacked the Visigoths, the Bavarians, the Saxons and vice-versa: endless wars, led by grand acquisitors to grab someone else’s territory. And the behaviour of the bishops mentioned above was also a pattern – not for all bishops but for many who were grand acquisitors too, as we shall see. National schoolbooks may describe this predatory behaviour as glorious. But what one side viewed as a glorious victory, the defeated viewed it as a treacherous massacre, pillage, and rape. Most royal families developed from ancestors who eerily resemble the murderous Mafia bosses of recent history or fiction.”

 

For socialism, John

 

 

 

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