Thursday 27 February 2014

The Coalition of Kleptocracy

Long, long indeed have opponents of the Tory-Lib Dem Government expressed concern about their desire to privatise everything that moves: large swathes of the NHS out to tender, the Royal Mail sold off at bargain basement prices, even student debt put up for sale and now the highly profitable state run East Coast rail company is up for grabs.

There is a striking correlation between funders of the Government parties, especially the Tories, and the people/companies benefiting from this great sell-off. But what to do when, literally, there is NOTHING LEFT to sell. After all, even notionally state-owned assets are leased-out and when they are even trying to flog off the RAF's fuel supply line, this ideological regime must fear that it is reaching the limits of its asset stripping.

So, what is left indeed?

Why people of course! Now, as covered by yesterday's post, robots may get the better of us humans in due course as they don't need paying, other than a quick recharge in the wall socket and a touch of WD40 on cold mornings -but what if you make unemployed people pick fruit for really, really low wages? Or maybe none at all - call it training perhaps? The robots can't best that, at least not yet; can they?

So we have had supermarkets taking on unpaid trainees who have to stack shelves and clean floors at nil cost to the company - rather they have to do it to keep their benefits. Once their "training" is up, with their magnificently un-enhanced skills, do they get a job offer? Not at all - they are simply replaced by more "trainees".

What a wheeze, the taxpayer paying for free labour for big firms that avoid their tax.

But now, it gets worse: at least until now, the Government has, however dubiously, claimed this is all for the public good. Today, however, the level of rank self-interest and plundering of the state by these chancers was exposed just a tad more than maybe even Dodgy Dave would have liked.

The Farms Minister, George Eustice, commenting on the end of a scheme to recruit temporary migrant workers for seasonal agricultural work in the UK, was asked about how to replace the now barred workers. Simple, he declared - make benefits claimants do the work instead. Get them to pick fruit.

And Mr Eustice should know. After all, he and his family own...a fruit farm. No conflict of interest there; nothing self-serving at all. Is there?

Next week: "Indentured service; why it's not so bad after all." "12 years a Slave: good personal development opportunity." 

Wednesday 26 February 2014

I, Paycheck



Bloomberg News unsurprisingly hails such advances - and rather vaguely posits that this will lead to as yet unknown and unseen "new economic opportunities" being identified in the future. This in spite of the same article pointing to how the current recession is so persistent and the much lauded recovery so skewed towards a tiny elite - for example, of the £60,000 millions created in the British economy since 2008, less than 1/60 has reached the pockets of ordinary people.

With one recent survey suggesting that by 2040, nearly half of all jobs will be automated, it poses a major challenge that capitalism appears ill-equipped to handle: in the absence of paid work for humans, how will companies with even the lowest prices have any significant market to sell to? Whilst some have posited a basic citizens' income as a means to the end of maintaining some sort of demand in the economy, the levels suggested appear to represent an emergency lifeline rather than a means of resuscitation and sustainable recovery. 

Communist Robotics will set us free!
And so, even in this age of apparently untrammelled neoliberalism, some socialists have hailed the advance of mechanised labour as the key to the eventual overthrow of capitalism, finally undone by its own contradictions. The robot worker is transformed into the Trojan Horse; the apparent gift of low cost or even free labour is in fact a deadly poison in the heart of a system that needs a market to sell to in order to keep its pulse beating. No workers, no wages, no purchases - Ford foresaw the need to prevent this by paying his employees enough to afford their own products; but now, in a sharply competitive global economy with its race to the bottom, such a philosophy, even one as manipulative and self-serving as the Fordist one, is soon undercut and negated. The System faces ruin and replacement with a society where instead of marginalising the People, robots free them to pursue the higher human plains foreseen by Trostky in "The Dream" and Morris in his visions of egalitarian anarchism. 

Or does it? 

The above argument rests on the traditional view that the economy of any society ultimately exists to serve its inhabitants, however tangentially and unfairly. Even the Hobbesian social contract extends beyond the political into the economic - everyone needs some stake, however small, for society to function in any civil manner. Hence, even rightwing governments used to see unemployment as at least a threat to stability and no matter how reluctantly sought to reduce it.

But with monetarism and the rise of neoliberalism, birthed by the bastard alliance of Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the 1980s, a new view emerged - unemployment as an political-economic tool : maintain a significant level of mass unemployment and you can reduce the power of unions and lower the wages of those in work with the threat of their easy replacement. 

And so forward to the next step change following on from 2008: with insecure employment and low wages a major feature of the world economy, human labour as a factor in driving economic demand becomes weaker and weaker. But with increasingly repressive surveillance states more and more the norm and with multinational corporations operating above and beyond the reach of the national governments largely in their pockets in any case, the needs of ordinary people matter less and less and a new economic paradigm is reached.

In the UK, major corporations have sat on over £800 billions of cash assets throughout the recession, refusing to invest in any supply sided recovery on the basis that there was insufficient demand in the economy. No one would buy anything they created.

This did not lead to them going bankrupt or losing out to competitors: with more and more monopolies and informal cartels in place, there was little chance of challenge from new companies. Instead, they sat out the recession, avoided their tax and paid out higher and higher dividends to shareholders and bonuses to senior staff, ratcheting up the inequality that in the past would have spelled out ruin for their enterprises.

But instead, as posited in more detail in this article from the US website, Punkonomics, the business elite have worked it out: they don't need you and me to sell stuff too. They can make their money other ways; and much more of it - by selling and wheeling and dealing with each other. Like a bubble above us, though still plundering our world of its resources and exploiting the surplus of the labour of those for now still required for human employment, the capitalists have reached the threshold of a new age of elitism: the Golden Age of Acquisition by Android.

American capitalists have found ways to profit even when their workers cannot buy their stuff.


From Punkonomics, February 2014:  (with thanks to Dr Beni Balak)

WHOSE RECOVERY?
by Jerry Friedman

There is a story that when the late union leader Walter Reuther was given a tour of a GM plant, a manager introduced him to a set of the company’s new robots.  The manager challenged Reuther to say how he would organize the robots into the UAW.  The union leader supposedly responded by asking: how will General Motors sell cars to the robots?  While American unions have failed to organize the workers in the new economy’s factories, its capitalists seem to have figured out a good answer to Reuther’s question.
We shouldn’t be surprised that conservative politicians and orthodox economists are calling for the Federal Reserve to end its program of monetary ease and for the Federal government to end its program of extended unemployment insurance.  Believing in Say’s Law and the virtues of unregulated markets, they have never been comfortable with state action to help the unemployed; instead, they have long argued that the only proper role for government is to protect price stability and the integrity of banking system.
What should surprise us is that so few in the business community are pushing back against these ideologues in support of policies to bolster economic growth and employment.  Robert Reich asks whether capitalists and managers have forgotten the basic Fordist compromise, in which businesses rely on affluent workers to consume their products?[1]  If a rising tide lifts all boats, don’t capitalists benefit when unemployment falls and workers have more to spend?  And shouldn’t they support policies that bring the tide in?
They don’t because American capitalists have learned to profit from recession.... MORE HERE
"Has anyone else here seen sea-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate?"

Sunday 23 February 2014

Mythbuster no.52 - "Tories with Naked, Merciless Power Run Amok When Scotland Leaves"

The progressive left, socialist and non-socialist, is somewhat divided over Scottish independence. While long standing stalwarts like Jim Sillars and Tommy Sheridan argue alongside the Scottish Greens for a non-nationalistic "Yes" vote to deliver a more egalitarian Scotland, the Scottish Labour Party, with some honourable exceptions, has maintained a stubborn resistance to the idea.

This has of course reached a screeching crescendo in the petulant denunciations of the Yes campaign by former Nu-Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling, though his qualifications to be referred to as a progressive of any sort may be highly questionable. Somewhere to his distant left, George Galloway MP is to be found touring Scotland, having upped-sticks from his temporary base in Bradford, to caustically excoriate the independence cause, citing in its place class solidarity over nationalism - socialists should stay in the Union to fight for a more egalitarian, socialist society.

At the heart of this argument is a supposition, repeated by Laurie Penny of the New Statesman magazine on the BBC at the weekend, that (allegedly progressive) Scottish Labour MPs are essential to delivering a non-Tory Government across the UK as a whole. Ms Penny contemplated the prospect of "permanent Tory Government" in the remaining UK if Scotland was to depart. This echoes Galloway's argument and also is deployed by some in the Labour movement as a decisive reason to be against independence - vote for an Edinburgh Government, and you abandon the people of Liverpool to the neoliberal grip of the Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs.

Can only the Scots stop her legacy?
Terrifying stuff if you live south of the border and have either a social conscience and/or personal vulnerability. How dare progressive Scots be so self-indulgent as to veer off to their communitarian Nirvana while the rUK (remainder of the UK) is mired in the social dystopia that the Coalition has summoned up.

Except, it is (nearly) complete nonsense. As with so much of the No campaign, it relies on combining fear and guilt rather than contemplating the facts.

And here they are:

Since 1945, there have been 18 UK-wide General elections.

At a UK level, Labour have won 8 of these outright: 1945, 1950, 1964, 1966, October 1974, 1997, 2001 and 2005.

At UK level, the Tories have also won 8 outright: 1951 (although Labour won more votes than them), 1955, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992.

Two UK elections - February 1974 and 2010- produced "hung" Parliaments where no one party had an outright majority. In 1974, Labour had more seats than the Tories (although this time the Tories won the most votes) and governed as a minority administration for 7 months before calling another election which they won outright by just three seats.

By contrast, in Scotland, Labour have won more than half the Westminster seats in 16 of the 18 elections. The only exceptions were 1951 when they tied with the Tories on 35 seats each and in 1955, when the Tories won outright by 36 seats to 34 . After that, the Tories declined gradually, with a decisive moment in 1987 when their seats more than halved in number after Thatcherite economics devastated swathes of Scotland. The decay continued all the way to 1997, when they finally lost their last MP in the country. They have since regained one, but remain a somewhat diminished force north of the border - and in addition to Labour, the SNP and (until recently at least) the Lib Dems have held significant levels of support to create a rather different political system and voting culture compared to other parts of the UK, a tendency further embedded by the devolved Parliament.

So Scotland has almost always elected a majority of Labour MPs (albeit their numbers exaggerated by the first past the post voting system) but on numerous occasions has ended up ruled by a Tory or Tory-led Government it didn't vote for.

What about the reverse - the claim that Scottish MPs have been so numerous on the Labour benches that they have made the critical difference for the UK, tipping the Union supposedly leftwards where, in their absence, the Tories would have held naked, merciless power?

Well, from a good look at the statistics, the answer is that Scottish Labour MPs have made the decisive difference precisely once - in 1964, their 43 to 24 lead over the Tories in Scotland trumped the results in the rUK, where the Tories led Labour by 280 to 273. This produced an overall UK total of 317 Labour to 304 Conservatives and 9 Liberals. With such a narrow majority, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson went back to the country in 1966 and won by a much wider margin and although Labour continued to dominate in Scotland, it also won outright in the rUK.

The only other occasions where arguably there has been a crucial impact were October 1974 where the absence of Scottish Labour would have seen the rUK with a continuing hung Parliament - this occurred in any case by 1976 when Labour lost its UK-wide majority through by-election defeats and had to survive via a pact with the Liberals. And in 2010, an absence of Scottish MPs would have produced an rUK Parliament with an outright Tory majority - though how different this would have been to the present Coalition, which has pursued the most extreme rightwing agenda in our history, is anyone's guess.

So it seems quite an act of either dissimulation or of ignorance to parrot the idea that without Scotland, the rUK would be condemned to perpetual Tory Government. All bar one of Labour's post-war victories would still have been achieved without Scottish MPs (which is not to diminish the powerfully positive contribution of many Scottish politicians to the progressive and socialist causes over the years - with some powerful contributors to the advance of the welfare state and to significant social gains in the days before Thatcherism and Nu-Labour).

But in sharp contrast, Scotland has had governments it did not vote for after the eight of the eighteen elections. It's not a happy record and is one that speaks of a country with a basically egalitarian culture that has instead been subjected periodically to ever harsher neoliberal experimentation. The UK is now by some indices the fourth most unequal country on the planet - if Scottish votes could make a difference, there is precious little sign of it; and crucially, the maths show it is an argument that really does not add up. Scottish MPs make up 9% of the total - a small minority and for much of the time an effective irrelevance in terms of any numerical impact.

Radical Independence - ideas for a new society
The truth is that progressives on both sides of the border have nothing at all to fear from an independent Scotland but rather quite the opposite: for those to the north, there is the prospect of building a more equal society freed from much of the block on change posed by the London Establishment and its agents. Movements like the Radical Independence Campaign have been central to promoting this alternative vision of a new country.

For those to the south, there is the prospect of a neighbour powerfully demonstrating the value of a society based on the common weal as opposed to narrow personal interest. Moreover, there is indeed no reason at all to contemplate perpetual Tory Government with Scotland gone. The real challenge it to ensure that there is a genuine left wing alternative on offer to the people of the inelegantly named rUK.

And that's another matter altogether.

The stats:



Election date
Labour (seats won)
Conservative
(seats won)
Liberal & successors
(seats won)
Others
(seats won)
1945 Scotland
37
27
0
7
1945 UK
393
210
12
25
1945Ruk*
356
183
12
18

1950 Scotland
37
31
2
1
1950 UK
315
298
9
3
1950 Ruk
278
267
7
2

1951 Scotland
35
35
1
0
1951 UK
295
321
6
3
1951 Ruk
260
286
5
3

1955 Scotland
34
36
1
0
1955 UK
277
345
6
2
1955 Ruk
243
309
5
2

1959 Scotland
38
31
1
1
1959 UK
258
365
6
1
1959 Ruk
220
334
5
0

1964 Scotland
43
24
4
0
1964 UK
317
304
9
0
1964 Ruk
274
280
5
0

1966 Scotland
46
20
5
0
1966 UK
364
253
12
1
1966 Ruk
318
233
7
1

1970 Scotland
44
23
3
1
1970 UK
288
330
6
6
1970 Ruk
244
307
3
5

1974 f Scotland
40
21
3
7
1974 f UK
301
297
14
23
1974 f Ruk
261
276
11
16

1974 o Scotland
41
16
3
11
1974 o UK
319
277
13
26
1974 o Ruk
278
261
10
15





1979 Scotland
44
22
3
2
1979 UK
269
339
11
16
1979 Ruk
225
317
8
14

1983 Scotland
41
21
8
2
1983 UK
209
397
23
21
1983 Ruk
168
376
15
19

1987 Scotland
50
10
9
3
1987 UK
229
376
22
23
Ruk
179
366
13
20

1992 Scotland
49
11
9
3
1992 UK
271
336
20
25
Ruk
222
325
11
22

1997 Scotland
56
0
10
6
1997 UK
418
165
46
30
1997 Ruk
362
165
36
24
2001 Scotland
55
1
10
5

2001 UK
412
166
52
29
2001 Ruk
357
165
42
24

2005 Scotland
41
1
11
6
2005 UK
356
198
62
30
2005 Ruk
315
197
51
24

2010 Scotland
41
1
11
6
2010 UK
258
306
57
29
2010 Ruk
217
305
46
23


*rUK - "remaining UK" - i.e., combined totals of MPs sitting for England, Wales and Northern Ireland constituencies at Westminster

Data Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Scotland#1945
http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/uktable.htm