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The Labour leaders are getting nearer to defining “working people”. Here’s Bridget Phillipson, the cabinet minister in charge of education:
“Appearing on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Phillipson said the manifesto pledge referred to people “whose main source of income is the income they earn from going out to work”.
“Speaking on Sunday, Phillipson said she could not give specific information on what would be in the Budget but said: “When people look at payslips they will not see higher taxes”.
(https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c789915n5elo.amp)So they are taking about workers with payslips, the members of the working class who are actually in employment. Woe betide those who aren’t as workers on incapacity “benefit” are about to discover.
The debate over who they meant has brought out some interesting points. Here’s a stupid comment Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss’s unfortunate Chancellor of Exchequer, in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday which nevertheless has an element of truth:
“Class war is back. The stupidity of trying to distinguish between workers and investors in property and other assets is pure socialism.”
Yes, socialists do say that the basic class division in society is between those whose main source of income is what they are paid for working for an employer and those whose main source of is unearned income from property ownership (profit, rent and interest).
And yes, there is a class war, an irreconcilable conflict of interest, between these two classes. This, irrespective of whether some capitalists choose to work and many workers have savings on which they get some interest.
What has been forgotten in this debate is that Labour pledged not just not to reduce take-home pay but to put “more money in people’s pockets” (https://labour.org.uk/updates/stories/labours-plan-to-power-up-britain/). They may be keeping to their other pledge not to reduce nominal take-home pay but they are definitely reneging on this one.
Although this clashed with one of national internal meetings 4 members leafletted the counter-demonstration:
20,000 people march against Tommy Robinson and the far right
We would challenge the figures of numbers. We didn’t see the anti-immigrant march but even the organisers of the counter-demonstration concede that there were less on it than on Robinson’s.
The SWP and its breakaways were there in force. Not surprising since Stand Up to Racism which organised the counter-demonstration is one of their front organisations. Which might explain the absence of SPEW who wouldn’t want to help a rival vanguard.
In a thread about this meeting on Libcom the ICC had this to say:
“a comrade from the SPGB was there and informed us that some comrades in the organisation are beginning to think that we are in an increasingly catastrophic situation, not just the endless cycle of boom and slump that the SPGB usually puts forward against the communist left’s notion of a decadent system which is posing a real threat to the survival of humanity.”
(https://libcom.org/discussion/icc-open-meeting-5-october-london).They like to pooh-pooh our view that capitalism will not collapse automatically for economic reasons but will continue going through cycles of booms and slumps.
Their view is that capitalism will collapse economically through a failure to find markets outside the capitalist system which it has to do as it produces more than can be sold within the system Luxemburg’s mistaken view). They haven’t mentioned this so much recently but their Spanish-language section has just produced a full-blooded defence of this position and that this supposed problem for capitalism is now more acute than it has ever been.
We will have to wait for the English translation to engage with them on this.
Here is what the May 1942 Socialist Standard said at the time it was published about the article by Pannekoek on “The Party and the Class” that the CWO text mentions. It also sets out our conception of a “party of the working class”:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/05/political-parties-and-workers.html?m=0
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-destroys-historic-house-of-20th-century-ukrainian-revolutionary/
I don’t suppose they deliberately singled out the building but this is the sort of thing that happens in wars. It looks as if the Russian state might soon capture Gulyaipole — or what’s left of it —which it claims is part of its territory.
The US elections as battle of the multibillionaires : Gates v. Musk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-donated-50-million-223354093.html
I see the Labour leaders are getting into difficulty over what they mean by “working people” in relation to their pledge not to increase taxes on them. The media are having a field day pointing the contradictions — as there are.
Starmer’s attempt is:
“people who earn their living, rely on our [public] services and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble.”
That would rule out a whole generation who can’t write a cheque because they don’t know what a cheque is (or was, as far as they are concerned). But also many workers who do have some savings. It would seem to include just the poorest section of the working class, even if this might not have been what he intended.
Reeves fares somewhat better:
“Working people are people who get their income from going out to work every day, and also pensioners that have worked all their lives and are now in retirement, drawing down their pensions.”
However, this would seem exclude those below retirement age who, for one reason or another, are not actually working — the unemployed, the long-term sick or the disabled. This was probably intentionally in view of the threats the new government has made to make benefit conditions more difficult.
How about: The working class is made up of all those who, excluded from ownership of productive resources, are economically obliged to get a living by trying to sell their mental and physical energies to some employer for a wage or salary.
We have discussed them here before, in 2017:
We also reviewed a couple of Furedi’s books:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/10/defending-modernism-2005.html?m=1
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-nature-of-russian-capitalism-1986.html?m=1
I remember we used to call Living Marxism “Dead Leninism” but they were a phenomenon and the other Trots didn’t like them because they often took up a different position from them on current issues.
I was only counterposing a hypothetical crass assumption to H.Moss’s crass assumption that to say that Russia’s invasion was provoked was to exonerate Russia.
So you go along with the Western media’s narrative that it was “unprovoked” and that it is “Putin’s war”, the personal choice of an evil ruler of an evil empire (and so presumably you can’t blame the US, NATO and Britain)?
Why is it not possible, in the clash of interests between capitalist states for one side to do something that provokes the other side into military action?
It has happened quite often in recent history. To say that one side provoked the other is not to take sides but merely to note a historical fact.
It was obviously a provocative act to expand NATO and its missiles aimed at Russia into Ukraine just as it was for Russia to try to instal missiles in Cuba aimed at America in 1962. On that occasion the provoking state backed down. In Ukraine it didn’t.
In any event, socialists don’t take sides in capitalist wars. We note that it is whole capitalist system with its built-in competitive struggle for profits that is war-prone, with wars breaking out when the rulers of one state judge that a vital interest is at stake that can be defended in no other way.
I wouldn’t have thought so but they might accept a truncated Ukraine joining the EU (if the EU wanted to take on a basket case).
In fact that might even have been part of a compromise solution before Russia invaded but the US was so insistent on expanding NATO yet further East to try to get the better of Russia, so provoking the Russian invasion (in a failed attempt to instal a pro-Russian government in Kiev).
One by of the points in Zelensky’s so-called peace plan is:
“Joint protection by the US and the EU of Ukraine’s critical natural resources and joint use of their economic potential.”
This has led those supporting Russia to investigate what these resources might be:
I don’t think this will be why the West is so keen to incorporate Ukraine into its sphere of influence and, in any event, in resisting this it doesn’t seem to be Russia’s intention to annex the whole of Ukraine.
In any event, an end to the war freezing the current line of contact would leave most of these resources still in Ukraine and so mean the West could still access them. Russia might even accept this as long as Ukraine doesn’t join NATO.
It seems more like Zelensky offering the West something he knows will appeal to them. Senator Graham too is speaking a language capitalists will understand so as convince them to support for US policy there. As a Republican he may even be trying to influence Trump who has been expressing a different view.
We are registered with the Electoral Commission as “The Socialist Party of Great Britain” which we can use on the ballot paper. We can also use “The Socialist Party (GB)” and “The Socialist Party (SP-GB)”.
They are registered as “Socialist Alternative” but have not be using it as they contest as TUSC.
