Take the Knee

A Global Intifada

Across the globe, people are rising up to resist their ruling regimes. While African-Americans in Minneapolis may have led the way, they were joined by many white and brown people too. They are also angry about the injustices that are against them as well. Poverty-stricken and helpless working people that has been mistreated for decades by its own ruling class have finally taken to the streets to express their despair. Our fellow-workers, black, white and brown have all suffered demeaning and sustained poverty, political powerlessness and decades of broken promises of change. The dehumanisation of the people has triggered mass protests. One demand stands out that captures the imagination and that is the call for "dignity" - not wealth, not power, not revenge, but to be treated with simple human dignity. We now recognise that the politicians who pledge reform and make promises, offer little but platitudes and palliatives, willing to say anything to preserve their power and privilege, particularly to protect the present political order that enrich them and impoverish everyone else. The mainstream media can no longer mask the interconnected and deep-rooted grievances of the subjugated. What is now required is a worldwide intifada, revolutionary resistance, to the capitalists and capitalist society.

 We must become a movement of solidarity. As members of a world community they have the responsibility to care for one another. We cannot abandon our fellow-workers. As citizens of the world we have a choice—either the capitalist market’s laws of competition and unlimited profit or the laws of humanity and follow our minds and our hearts, to re-shape our society. We need to recognise that everybody are members of one family. We need to end the economy that acts in the interests of the 1% to one that provides for the common good and well being of all.

 Only socialism can unite our diversities and bring ourselves together to escape the destructive rule of the capitalist class so we can all breathe free. The Socialist Party seeds our collective future with new ideas and a vision of what could be. The inability of the capitalist exhausted economic system to provide for the needs of the people and to sustain itself has been once again exposed by recent events. It is an absurdity that today’s advanced technology which is capable of meeting the needs of people ten times over, fails to provide for billions worldwide. Production and distribution must be controlled by those who actually create the wealth of society, not those who live off the sweat of others. Without the socialist intifada, the rich will continue to get richer and our misery will keep multiplying.

World Environment Day

Friday the 5^th of June was World Environment Day. The Earth just experienced its hottest May on record, scientists said Friday—just a day after it was announced that atmospheric CO2 levels hit a new high.

"Progress in emissions reductions is not visible in the CO2 record," Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in a statement. "We continue to commit our planet—for centuries or longer—to more global heating, sea level rise, and extreme weather events every year."

"The crisis has slowed emissions, but not enough to show up perceptibly,” geochemist Ralph Keeling, who runs the Scripps Oceanography program at Mauna Loa, explained.

Marking World Environment Day, United Nations Secretary-Gneral António Guterres said."Climate disruption is getting worse."

"Extinction is a political choice," Center for Biological Diversity senior scientist Tierra Curry declared in response to new extinction study. "We've reached a crossroads where our own future is at stake if we don't move away from fossil fuels and end wildlife exploitation, and at the same time, necessarily, address poverty and injustice."

It is now more than George Floyd

Across America, one city after another, spreading like a wildfire across the nation, working people have braved tear gas, pepper spray, and police clubs as well as mass arrests to the mostly non-violent challenge to racist police violence. In the main, peaceful protesters are being violently attacked by police across the country today. Socialists know the pain and frustrations of those who are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Enough is enough, fellow-workers, let us fight the real enemy. Are we forever bound to a system of oppressor and oppressed? For far too long, the voice of the workers has gone unheard. Not just black lives are slowly being sucked dry by the unfairness and injustice of the capitalist system. Working people are beginning to understand that this system— the capitalist system - increasingly rewards the wealthy and ignores the rest of us. Members of the working class of all colors of all genders, of all ages today know their lives are being destroyed more insidiously, step by step, year by year, as they struggle to survive. Our fellow-workers are being laid off moving from one low-paid job to another, lacking minimal health benefits, acquiring debt upon debt, changing apartment to apartment as rents keep rising, with no hope of ever achieving a decent secure family life, of ever paying off the accumulative loans, at a time that corporations are registering record profits, wealthy investors benefiting from stock buybacks and dividend payouts and while all the time the rich are getting richer.

The murder of George Floyd and the institutionalized racism of the police are merely the tip of the iceberg. There’s a deeper frustration and desperation behind it all, affecting tens of millions. The protests are an eruption of social solidarity among wide sections of American workers. Not just among black, or brown or white workers but all workers. What the protests show is that the working class is coming together. They are fearful of police brutality but equally fearful of being condemned to a life of low-paid, no benefits, insecure and futureless part-time and temp work. Working often two and even three jobs just to get by.  There is a growing awareness of a deepening political and economic crisis across America. Covid-19 and climate change is heightening these fears. The protesters know this. They sense and feel it and are growing frustrated, angry and desperate. It’s no longer about George Floyd any more. Organization is needed as well, an independent political movement, with a grass roots  structure,  in order to expand and build the protests and demonstrations, and to ensure they continue with ever larger turnouts.

Fight the power of the ruling class. America needs much deeper, radical and systemic change than any cosmetic reform to its coercive forces. By pitting people against one another it blinds most people from seeing who the real enemy is. It is extremely unlikely that anyone in power will have a problem with the military enforcing ruling class rule if the perfect storm of the pandemic, massive unemployment, evictions, hunger, racism and police brutality pushes the situation in the streets closer to the brink. Indeed, the boardrooms of Wall St will join together in their demand troops restore the ruling class version of law and order, no matter what party they claim allegiance to. Despite that, we shall build a better world.

“I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”- Mark Twain (Autobiography, Vol. 3)

Election Manifesto

Supermarket Super Profits

David Potts, the CEO of Morrisons, and Trevor Strain, its chief operating officer, are set to take a 24% pension contribution, in direct opposition to a corporate governance code that says their rates should be aligned with those of their workers. Morrisons staff – the ones putting their lives on the frontline - are only getting 5%.

Tesco is expected to clock up £300m extra profit thanks to Covid-19. Its CEO is taking an extra 25% cash payment on his £1.25m salary, holding out for a performance-related bonus, while Tesco frontline staff get just a 7% contribution to their workplace scheme. Tesco recently paid out £635m in dividends to shareholders while receiving a similar sized tax-break from the government’s emergency coronavirus support package. 

The phenomenal share option taken by Ocado’s top executives amounts to £88m – while the pay ratio from boardroom to average staff wage is a staggering 2,605%, says the High Pay Centre. It’s worth noting, wryly, that Ocado’s top three executives take 1% of the company’s value, but are met with rather less public outcry than when John McDonnell proposed companies should put 1% of their value into a fund for their entire workforce.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/supermarket-workers-praise-bosses-pay-recession-company-profits

We need a better world

In the United States, the low level of working class consciousness permits the ruling class submission of the majority.” We may participate in formal mechanisms like political parties and voting but these only ratify decisions already denied by our “betters. The option of changing society rarely appears on the ballot or is even be imagined by working people. Democracy is allowed only if control of production and distribution of societies wealth is not on the electoral platform. Not enough people grasp the importance of moving on from street uprisings to the revolutionary reconstruction of our society. The entire world has its neck under the iron heel of the capitalist jack-boot.

The media is an organ of capitalist propaganda and attempts to mould working peoples’ ideas to suit the interests of the capitalist class. A glance at the world in general reveals a sadly sick and chaotic society. Socialism cannot be created if it is not a world-wide system. Some parts of the world may advance towards it slightly before others. But the eventual establishment of it must be a virtually simultaneous act, to transform society from a competitive to a co-operative basis. Tragically, our fellow-workers still believe they could solve their problems by voting for reformist parties. They would always remain wage slaves until they voted for an international socialist society, with no wages, no money, no national slates, and where goods would be produced for human need, not profit. State-capitalism and nationalisation are forms of capitalism. They have nothing in common with socialism. The way to abolish racism is to abolish the capitalist system that bred it. There could be no guarantee of permanent peace without a world-wide system of common ownership and social equality.