Actually existing news

The Labour Party is abstaining from a bill being rushed through Parliament that will create a retroactive law overturninghundreds of thousands of benefit rebates due to unemployed people wrongly sanctioned. What is more incredible, the fact The Party of Labour refuses to oppose workers exploitation, or the government’s explanation for the bill, that it will “protect the economy”?

Firstly the estimated total pay-out is £130 million, which is of course next to nothing in the grander scheme. It is nothing compared to Trident, nothing compared to Afghanistan, nothing compared to uncollected tax... You could go on. But there’s also a disturbing tendency in public life, which is fast becoming a blood sport, where the weakest in our society are hounded, sometimes to their literal death. These people have been wronged by a government department but because they're unemployed the rules have to be rigged so they always lose out. For shame!

There’s more though. The national economy is being dragged down by suppressed demand, job losses, part-time work, VAT rises, service cuts and closures all add up. Using the unemployed to fill entry level, often minimum wage positions saves a little in the short term, but only for favoured companies. The government is effectively subsidising companies like Poundland. But is depressing wages and knocking the bottom out of the economy. Without effective demand there is no recovery, just a downward spiral. 

Thoughts for the Brain - thoughts about other people's thoughts

The Graun is celebrating/chroniclingthe return of the Stone Roses. The current sharp observation, repeated by everybody, is the Roses represented an age that looked forward to the future. There’s also an interesting piece by Owen Hatherley today about work. There was a time when everyone, from socialists to reformers to technocrats agreed in the future people would work less. OK the socialists, especially the earlier ones, such as Lafargue and Wilde, would have said this prediction was based upon the establishment of socialism.

The fact is this vision is no more. The future has failed. Automation has led to people today working longer, harder and proportionally (if not actually) less than their parents. It is one of the ironies (call it dialectics if you like) that Marx focussed upon in his critique of political economy: the past dominates the present.

Workers slave away making the technology that renders them obsolete. In areas of the economy where working people used to team together in vast numbers, now they are sparse and interstitial. In seeming contradiction to this the refinement of roles means there are more wage workers now than ever. They still produce the same volume of commodities and services, if not more, which gives them and even greater latent power, but this power is only hinted at in episodes like the recent bus strike in London – a few thousand workers holding their own against British capitalism.

The relative marginalisation of workers is part of the crisis for capitalists too. Past labour is only cost. Only present, living labour adds value. This is the tendency of therate of profit to decline.

The last observation: what does this mean for the muscular reformism being debated by the European left? There may be left wing parties arising, occupying the space between the old socialist/communist parties and the revolutionary left (though clearly not in Britain). Given the poor prospects for life under 21^st century capitalism, what chance is there for new reforming movements to actually succeed without a bit of revolution thrown in somewhere?