Sustainable Socialism

  The draft notes of a talk given on Discord for the Asia Live 

Sustainable Socialism or a Consumer's Cornucopia?

 Let me tell you that I am not going to be saying anything none of you already know. 

I’m more trying to capture the exchanges we will meet in Glasgow 

Expectations and aspirations are always changing.

 

We can probably safely say that when our Party started, people were wanting an indoor toilet and a bath with hot and cold running water. The idea of en-suite was still the chamber-pot under the bed.

But times do change as Bob Dylan sings.

Humanity is a part of nature

 We have to treat the world around us in a way which protects our present and future well-being. That is the only sensible criterion for ecological policies

The planet’s growing population is a success story.

Improvements in survival because of modern medical science and better sanitation 

Men and women are living longer

Fewer  toddlers are dying from childhood illnesses

Death rates have decreased.

 But for the a certain section of the environment movement,  people are viewed as the threat.

 Murray Bookchin called them ‘DEEP GREENS’, ecologists who seek to  return to a more primitive lifestyle,

They want what they describe as ‘DE-GROWTH’ with limits imposed upon the design and development of technology.

 Yet these activists describe themselves as the more radical, most progressive anti-capitalists.

And it is us in the World Socialist Movement they accuse of promoting  consumerism a society of individual consumption.

They tell us the type of world we are striving for is not environmentally sustainable.

OPENING

I have always been swayed by Sylvia Pankhurst’s statement, which is worth quoting.

“Our desire is not to make poor those who to-day are rich, in order to put the poor in the place where the rich now are. Our desire is not to pull down the present rulers to put other rulers in their places.

We wish to abolish poverty and to provide abundance for all.

We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume. ”

The eco-warriors of Extinction Rebellion call such a social system as undesirable and impossible to achieve.

Yet once again we are being labelled the IMPOSSBLISTS.

The supposed pragmatic choice to be made is regulation, legislation, Parliamentary edicts and global treaties are the realistic road to a green tomorrow

As is integrating the corporations into the solutions by transforming them into something they can never ever be - existing for the primary benefit of the community and not their investors.

Despite vociferously voicing criticism of Glasgow’s COP, they are not really challenging the actual purpose or the legitimacy of the COP.

The protesters still retain a trusting faith in its principles and forlorn hope to try and influence COP representatives towards their way of thinking.

When we attend COP26 it will be to expose it as a fraud which will fundamentally fail

We can concede it may manage some modifications to industry’s carbon emissions with cap and capture

And cosmetic changes to consumer patterns with repair, re-cycle and re-use rules becoming increasingly draconian.

Yet it is we who are the IMPOSSBLISTS.

There is another strong element among environmentalists - the catastrophists, harbingers of doom, disaster mongers.

We all know the saying that it is easier for them to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

When making their predictions. climate scientists normally set out two scenarios, what will happen if recommendations are followed  and what will take place if change does not occur, the worse case scenario

It is the latter projections, which makes the media headlines and presented as fact by environment activists.

I personally plead guilty to being prone to such thinking, being a pessimist by nature, always finding my glass to be the glass half-empty, never half-filled. There is a Private Frazer in many of us… we are doomed… doomed… I tell ye

Luckily, for the Party we have members who offer a more balanced and nuance analysis of much of the research being released.

Also I remember those experts who declared we had reached peak-oil in the 1970s which was to result in an energy shortage and later other finite elements such as peak-phosphorus that mean no more fertilisers, finite minerals.

It didn’t happen

THE NEO-MALTHUSIANS

We will meet on the streets of Glasgow many people who will have absorbed the beliefs of Malthus, although they will dress it up in more fashionable terms and minimise the anti-human and misanthropic basis to them.

I will not give a lecture on the 18^th Century Reverend nor his modern disciples Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin.

They are still defended for being correct excused for crying wolf just a bit too early and prematurely.

Greens do not see that Malthusians present anti-poor, nationalistic, and racist arguments. That it is the capitalist idea that says there isn’t enough to go around.

50 years ago we had Charlton Heston in Soylent Green movie depicting a future of over-population with mass euthanasia and people being turned into protein pills.

Such dystopias still remain popular if you watch Mad Max movies

To give them a modern  appeal they say that planet cannot support the population numbers and it is framed by referring to its carrying capacity

They will sometimes call it our ecological or carbon footprint.

 It was BP that helped to popularise the term “carbon footprint” and  encouraged people to measure their own emissions thus diverting corporate culpability to blaming personal responsibility

Each year we have the Earth Overshoot Day. That’s the day when the earth consumes more resources than it can regenerate that year. This year it was July 29

I refer you all to my Socialist Standard July articles on the topics. 

Earth's carrying capacity can vary widely and wildly. It is flexible and elastic and not a fixed figure. It depends upon the different assumptions made.

Too often they take America as the norm the world aspires towards.

The problem about the theory is human beings are capable of constantly changing the rules of subsistence by altering the resource base.

Zealous proponents deliberately ignore the capacity for our cultures to constantly adapting our diets and consumption levels.

Environmental issues are often expressed as if these were a choice between an environmentally sound policy and higher living standards.

Such arguments are always based on the assumption that the existing capitalist economic set-up. Many greens seem to blame the modest living standards of ordinary people in industrialised countries for most of the environmental dangers.

 The ‘Green’ rhetoric has a nasty authoritarian flavour

Instead of trying to make people feel guilty that we are consuming too much, socialists have to what is needed to look after the well-being of all.

Over-population is frequently described by the Greens as the elephant in the room

Yes, in many countries the populations are large and getting bigger.

Many cities are crowded

Population demands on resources does have a big effect, and puts stress on the environment.

Population numbers and density can burden the environment.

Nobody denies that

But the claim that overpopulation is the main cause of environmental degradation is inaccurate.

Population growth is not responsible for the global environmental crises.

Even if population growth stopped today eco-systems will continue to collapse.

Or see-population confuses symptoms with causes

People have the idea that there isn’t enough food, not enough jobs, a housing shortage.

Insufficient class-rooms in schools places

Too long hospital waiting lists

We are told there are only fixed amount of all these things

So-called population problem is shifting the blame from the rich to the poor.

It is all relative and all about choices

It is down to why and how resource are used that determine the ecological consequences.

We know resources, and materials are used the military or are locked into a wasteful system of production and distribution required by the buying and selling system.

Under capitalism there’s no question that both economic and population growth is at some point going to pass the carrying capacity of the planet.

Capitalism is anarchic and unplanned as socialists have always explained

Marxists say every human born might be an extra mouth to feed but he or she is also another pair of helping hands and an additional thinking brain.

Over-populationists are so convinced and committed to numbers being the blame of our problems that they ignore the fact that they are pushing against an open door.

Fertility rates around the world, even in much of Africa, are falling. Many countries are projecting reduced populations in the future.

Scare-stories of 11 and 12 billion people by 2100 before numbers level off are being adjusted downward

The rise caused by what is called population momentum ends earlier than previously thought and the high estimates are now much lower.

Perhaps 9 billion.

But what annoys me is that liberal-minded Greens when asked what policies to help speed up the population fall cannot suggest anything that isn’t already being done - such as empowering women to control their own bodies and making contraception easily available.

When push comes to shove the only alternative to what is  now voluntary successful is compulsory social engineering

I often ask advocates of curtailing people numbers that we because we  have higher survival rates for children and  because older people are living longer,

Does that mean they will introduce infanticide for the young and euthanasia for the elderly?

Over-populationists obscure the real causes of suffering under capitalism. 

With its short-termism,

Its unrelenting drive for profits,

Its international conflicts,

Regardless of the total number of humans living on Andarth, capitalism results in a tendency toward planetary crisis

Waste and pollution under capitalism is enormous

Many environmentalists dismisses the contention that Nature is sufficiently bountiful for our needs.

They ignore that more than half of the working population are not engaged in producing wealth at all, but are working wastefully, called into being by the capitalist system.

The problem of working-class poverty is not created by the number of people on the planet.

There is production and distribution of useless products, wasted labour and the creation of mounting piles of garbage as a result of planned obsolescence and single-use throwaway disposable products.

Socialists hope that the world doesn't starve to death before reaching the conclusion that it is capitalism that is the real problem. In the words of Engels:

"There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. It does not seem to me that it would be at all difficult in such a society to achieve by planning a result which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in France and Lower Austria. At any rate, it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when, and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ for the purpose. I do not feel called upon to make proposals or give them advice about it. These people, in any case, will surely not be any less intelligent than we are."

VEGANISM VEGETARIANISM

Before I move the more contentious topics I often bring up on the forum is that of our diet and the influence of what we eat upon the environment and upon our individual health.

The subject of turning to a plant-based menu I guarantee will arise in the exchanges with environmentalist visitors to our lit-stalls

Our case is that meat-eating will be less common and will become increasingly vegetarian.

We are sympathetic to the flexitarian diet. The middle way.

Livestock will still be reared but it will on a very smaller scale and involve different types of farm animals.

More sustainable and more suited for land that is marginal, in the hills, such as goats and sheep, which don’t compete for fertile arable fields and less need for added fodder-foods like soya and maize.

I won’t predict the exact details of food production but there will be innovations on better ways of farming for specific regions and climates and soil types.

A new science has grown up called agro-ecology and there are a variety of styles of farming now.

There will be a healthy debate (pardon the pun) on organic growing versus chemical inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, and GM foods and seeds

Small local farming, called a loca-vore diet, versus our global industrial food network which involves transportation, processing, packaging, refrigeration, storage, wholesale and retail operations, and waste management which emit greenhouses gases.

It will be horses for courses, the best method that fits best.

We aren’t against hi-tech tools

The WSM wishes to build a production system that will bring us a benign and harmonious relationship with the environment. 

That will begin to repair the damage capitalism has inflicted upon the planet.

And begin to reverse global warming.

This aim is shared by those in the environmental movement.

We do share a common goal

We do NOT share a common answer

But it is where we possess the stronger arguments

It is where we are the more realistic and practical and pragmatic

It where we should concentrate our exchanges upon

I began with points where we disagree and diverge from the environmentalists.

But now we show that the socialists do possess answers that are viable. Not merely desirable for environmentalists to adopt but indispensable to them if they seek solutions.

The Post-Scarcity Socialist Solution

We are seeking a “steady-state economy” or “zero-growth” society. A sustainable socialism

A situation where human needs are in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them.

In Marxist jargon it is called “simple reproduction” where human needs were in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them.

To-days world is a society of scarcity.

Today’s shortages are unnecessary

Today’s scarcity is artificial.

Abundance

In Glasgow, we will be challenged to show how 

socialism will work and I will try to explain how

We do not call for population control or self-denial.

 We don't call for divvying up the world’s wealth with “fair” shares of so many acres of land, so much food, so many consumer goods, so much money with which to buy, sell, and carry on trad

Even if all people were equal, a hierarchy would soon arise again and society would be back to square one.

The fair share of a member of the socialist commonwealth is the right and the possibility of the abundant satisfaction of the needs from the common store-house, the right to participate as an equal in the common production.

All previous societies have been rationed societies, based on scarcity of food, healthcare and housing.

Our modern world is also a society of scarcity, but with a difference.

 Scarcity is achieved by elaborate effort and sophisticated planning.

The world is truly haunted by a spectre – the spectre of abundance.

Socialism means plenty for all.

First,  we should define what scarcity is.

Orthodox economics argue it is limited supply - versus - boundless demand.

Our wants are essentially “infinite” and the resources to meet them, “limited”, claim the economists.

Conventional economists such as Otto Von Mises tell us that without the guidance of prices socialism would become inefficient.

According to their arguments, scarcity is an unavoidable fact of life and applies to any goods where the decision to use a unit of that good entails giving up some other potential use.

 It is about "opportunity costs"

that is the opportunity to do something else which one thereby forgoes; economics is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources. 

However, in the real world, abundance is not a situation where an infinite amount of every good could be produced.

Similarly, scarcity is not the situation that exists in the absence of this impossible total or sheer abundance.

Abundance is a situation where the supply of resources is sufficient to produce enough wealth to satisfy human needs,

While scarcity is a situation where resources are in short supply and insufficient for this purpose.

Abundance is a relationship between supply and demand, where the former exceeds the latter.

In socialism, a buffer of surplus stock  can be produced and held in reserve to allow for future fluctuations in the demand

Achieving abundance can be understood as maintaining adequate levels of stock for any demand.

The relative amounts of something would indicate how easy or difficult it was to maintain such an adequate buffer stock in the face of a demand trends (upward, static, or downward).

If the assumption of abundance is not regarded as far-fetched (which, we say it is not) then there is an even "better method" of ensuring individual consumer choice than voting with money: free access.

Socialism will make economically unencumbered production decisions as a direct response to needs. With production for use, the starting point will be allocating resources to meet needs.

Stock control logistic systems employing calculation-in-kind are vital to any business. Today they operate within price parameters that are not the same thing as saying they need such a process in order to function.

Most experts in logistics will be able to explain how unnecessary pounds and pence are for its operation.

The key to good stock management is the stock turnover rate – how rapidly stock is removed from the shelves – and the point at which it may need to be re-ordered

Just-In-Time systems are a tried and trusted tool of warehousing and the supply chain 

Buffer stocks provide for any requirement for re-adjustment. We even have the existence of store "loyalty cards" and consumer research that can be put to more creative and constructive non-commercial usage.

We tell people that socialism does not necessarily involve creating new bureaucratic layers of administration but simply the transformation of what we already have.

We economise most on things that are scarcest and make the greatest use of those things that are abundant.

Effective prioritisation  of resources requires discrimination and selection

We cannot treat every factor equally – as equally scarce – or it will result in misallocation of resources and inefficiency.

How are priorities to be determined?

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” can be a guide.

It is reasonable to assume that needs that were most pressing take priority over other needs.

We are talking here about our basic physiological needs for food, water, sanitation and housing and so on. This would be reflected in the allocation of resources.

High priority end goals would take precedence over low priority goals where resources are common to both.

We can also speculate, that some kind of “points system” in a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate a range of different projects facing socialist society.

Again those more qualified can explain how cost-benefit analysis is not dependant upon pound and pence calculations, as (even now) ecological concerns are required to be taken into consideration in planning.

In fact each day we all individually use various methods of adding up pros and cons to determine actions.

Under capitalism, the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs advantages and disadvantages of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms

In socialism, a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead.

In this sense, one of the aims of socialism is to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time and money cost.

What we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value such as labour time vouchers but one technique among others for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.

A broad picture would be that production-for-use would operate in direct response to need.

These would arise in local communities expressed as required quantities such as grammes, kilos, tonnes, litres, and so forth, of various materials and quantities of goods.

These would then be communicated as required  as a technical sequence

It would be self-regulating because each part of production would be self-adjusting to the communication of these material requirements.

Each part of production would know its place in the order of things.

If requirements are low in relation to a build-up of stock, then this would an automatic alert to a production unit that its production should be reduced.

The supply of some needs will take place within the local community and in these cases, production would not go beyond this

For example local food production for local consumption.

Local communities can only be the basis for consumption and for democratic decision-making but not for wider production.

Other needs have to be relayed to a regional organisation of production.

Local production, for instance,  would require glass, but not every community should have its own glassworks.

Duplication of effort and scales of industry is involved

Local requirements for glass could be communicated to regional glassworks. The glassworks has its own suppliers of materials, and the amounts they require for the production of 1 tonne of glass are known in definite quantities.

The required quantities of these materials could be passed by the glassworks to the regional suppliers of the materials needed for glass manufacture.

This would be a sequence of communication of local needs to the regional organisation of production, and thus contained within a region.

Local food production would also require tractors, and here the communication of required quantities of things could extend further to a world coordinating body. Only a few functions would really be needed to be dealt with at the world level.

Then regional manufacture could produce and assemble the component parts of tractors for distribution to local communities.

These would be required in a definite number and, on the basis of this definite number of final products, the definite number of component parts for tractors would also be known.

The regional production unit producing tractors would communicate these definite quantities to their own suppliers. Eventually, this would extend to world production units extracting and processing the necessary materials.

This would be the structure of a self-regulating system of production for use.

Each production unit would know its own material requirements and pass these on to its suppliers.

This system of self-regulating production for use is achieved through communication.

And socialism will make full use of the new methods of Information Technology which have developed such as collaborative filtering and mobile phone texting

IT would be used to integrate the requirements of different parts of its world.

Of course, the actual degree of centralisation and decentralisation will be up to the people to decide in the light of their traditions, experiences and preferences.

The first and most important point is that we are not starting from the beginning.

It's not a blank sheet we are working on.

We are taking over and inheriting an already existing economic system that has in place various means of determining allocations and trade-offs.

There are countless professional and trade associations and marketing boards and government departments which have the research and diagnostic tools available, plus the trade union movements with their skills and knowledge.

All those bodies may at present be based on commerce but they can be quite easily democratised, socialised and integrated organisationally.

Planning in socialism is simply a question of industrial organisation, of organising productive units into a smoothly functioning system to supply useful things which people had indicated they need to consume both for both individual and collective consumption.

What socialism would establish would be a rationalised network of planned links between users and suppliers; between final users and their immediate suppliers, between these latter and their suppliers, and so on down the line to those who extract the raw materials from nature.

There is no point in drawing up in advance the sort of detailed blueprint of industrial organisation that the Industrial Workers of the World, the various syndicalists or GDH Cole’s Guild Socialists did and what supporters of Parecon now do

But it is reasonable to assume that productive activity would be divided into branches and that production in these branches would be organised by a delegate body.

Responsibility of these industries would be to ensure the supply and delivery of  goods

Now to finally address the anti-human attitudes of many environmentalists.

People behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in.

Human behaviour reflects society.

Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating desires.

Capitalism requires customers, whether it improves our lives or not, and it drives us to consume up to, and beyond with rising debt, our ability to pay for that consumption.

Businesses need to stimulate demand and persuade customers to buy their products or they close down or are bought up. They would not otherwise spend the vast amounts they do spend on advertising.

Also, as Marx contended, the prevailing ideas of society are those of its ruling class.  

We can understand why the wealth flaunted by the rich preoccupies the minds of workers and one reason such a notion of status is so deep-rooted. 

In other words, we emulate our betters.

It does not matter how modest one's personal needs may be, capitalism's "consumer culture" leads people to want more since this conspicuous consumption is to enhance his or her status within this hierarchical culture of consumerism. In a capitalist society, there is a tendency for individuals to seek to validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions.

What this amounts to is a kind of institutionalised envy and that will be unsustainable as more people are drawn into alienated capitalism.

Under capitalism, people's needs are not met and reasonable people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because physical possession provides some security.

In socialism, status based upon material wealth would be a meaningless concept.

All this helps to confirm the myth of infinite demand,  that people want too much.

In a socialist society "too much" can only mean "more than is sustainably produced."

Perhaps, in the opening days of socialism, some people will indulge in a few feasts of over-opulence

Who would be surprised at such action after years of poverty and social inferiority?

But such actions will soon end when the reality of irrationality are felt.

Why would we take more than we need when we can freely take what we need when we need to?

If people decide that they individually and as a society need to over-consume then we concede socialism cannot possibly work.

What this leads to is that people have to understand and  appreciate what is meant by "enough"

We are confident such an attitude can be accomplished

Nor should the insatiable consumerism of capitalism be projected into socialism

People have a tendency to distrust others because the world is presently organised in a dog-eat-dog manner.

The establishment of socialism presupposes the existence of a mass socialist movement and a profound change in social outlook.

It is simply not reasonable to suppose that the large scale desire for socialism and the conscious knowledge of what it entails on the part of all who participated in the revolutionary process would not influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other.

Habits of manners, attitudes and values are absorbed by an individual through the experience of the immediate social environment and society at large.

Individuals can, through their own actions, change their attitudes and values, and alter the material conditions of their life.

We make our own history as it is often said

From the basis of experiences and in response to the general social environment acting and reacting on one another is how social evolution occurs.

It is a basic need of the individual, in order to sustain a healthy stable existence, to be supported by the acceptance and approval of those with whom we have all entered into a relationship.

Since goods and services would be provided directly for socially determined needs and not for sale on a market; they would be made freely available for individuals to take without requiring these individuals to offer something in direct exchange.

People act selfishly or anti-socially only when they can see no other way of getting what they want.

If there is another way by co-operation, for instance, there is no reason to suppose that they will not choose it when they see it is better to do so.

The sense of mutual obligations and the understanding of universal interdependency arising from this would profoundly colour people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society.

We may characterise socialist society as being built around an economy and a social system of generalised reciprocity.

Work should not really be equated with the drudgery of employment.

People most fitted for a certain task will do it because they want to, and not through compulsion or necessity

The rigid division of labour will not exist in a socialist society.

Capitalism has made the production of abundance a real possibility.

There is now very little that modern science and technology can not do, given sufficient resources and effort.

Factories in a socialist society can be structured to operate quite differently from today

A slower pace of work, shorter hours, non-polluting machinery, democratic participation in decision-making, facilities set among trees and gardens as suggested by the dissolving of the town country divide

These would be making goods to supply all the local communities in a given area.

The potential of automation for a post-capitalist, democratic society is enormous.

Capitalism only automates to increase profits and for no other reason.

We look towards a virtually limitless range of possibilities.

One of the weirder objections to socialism is those who ask “who will do the dirty work?”.

Imagine those Doubting Thomases  saying  “I don't want to live in a world without want and hunger, and where my needs are satisfied, if it means I have to do some nasty work once a week.”

Socialism can do lots of things, but it won’t make shit smell of roses - that is one little fact of life we'll just have to put up with.

Unpleasant work will still have to be done.

But it will as Oscar Wilde said, be mechanised by labour-saving machinery.

What unappealing toil cannot be accomplished through machines, and still require manual effort, will be shared out.

It will NOT condemn the same people to perform it ALL the time. The tasks will be rotated among all able members of the community

All able members of society will take turns at such work.

As for the lazy greedy shirkers and free-loaders who may contribute less and take more, why should this be an issue?

Socialist society will contain millions of babies and infants. There will be those in socialist society who are old frail or disabled.

 Society will not impose restrictions upon them.

And for those who are too idle to work, they will not be a drain on society’s resources for very long without risking vegetating from boredom.

Capitalism has made abundance a possibility and made feasible the "Communistic abolition of buying and selling” as the Manifesto proposes.

 The changeover from world capitalism to world socialism will not occur over a single weekend.

 However, changeover can be envisaged as taking place over a relatively short period of time of, say, five years or so - we simply don't know - but definitely not in far-off decades.

We can rightly and justifiably charge those so-called “radical” greens of a failure to act to conserve nature because they are actually too conservative with their thinking.

But we should be minded that ideas can be shared. 

The evolution of ideas has reached breakneck speed with the internet. Changes in ideas are becoming more frequent every day.

  Within the ecology movement it is increasingly understood that if production and an ecosystem are not in harmony,  the one will destroy the other.

At its heart is their notion of sustainability a symbiosis

Sustainable socialism is about the ability to meet the needs of today's generation without compromising the next generations’ ability to meet theirs.

 And its heart is the idea of stewardship, our  duty to act as custodians or trustees for the future

Marx explained in Volume Three of Capital

“ Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias  and that Latin phrase means [good heads of household].”

So in ending the most radical of the environmentalists we are likely to meet on the streets of Glasgow during COP26

They will present political reforms such as proportional representation - We offer economic democracy

They will advocate for more co-ops - We offer the cooperative commonwealth

They will argue for free money through various UBI projects - We offer the abolishment of money and prices and instead free access and the end of the exchange economy

They suggest more government power to challenge corporate power - We offer the abolition of both and the end of politicians and CEOs running our lives.

So when we are accused of not having the answers, we say they don’t know the questions to ask.

We have ample empirical evidence from the pandemic and we aren't just theorising that although we have the basic global administration ie WHO, national politics and economic interests takes precedence to the answer and solutions of a worldwide problem  

 It is an aspect we should all emphasise

 I am not an oracle and it would be better if members offered their own opinions  on how to respond to the expected issues we can expect in Glasgow in November

But one thing I think we can all agree on.

 It simply makes no sense when we are told that the threat of capitalist catastrophe makes the prospects of socialism harder and more difficult to achieve, it is, therefore, better to give up the fight.

The threats from capitalism should redouble our efforts to bury it, not to acquiesce to it.

Lastly, my appreciation to Adam, Robin Cox and the late Pieter Lawrence who I stole most of this presentation from