It is ONLY THE SOLDIER and WORKER who understands a poor man and a waged worker and only a trade union official who accepts the bona fides of a salaried worker and well-paid public service officer. Only a well-informed judge or socially-minded clergyman can mediate between workers and employers in intractable labour disputes.
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The bigger picture in Britain. The Trades Union Congress
Some blue-collar workers say that salaried public employees and health staff should never have been allowed into the Trades Union Congress. The result,they claim,is the marginalisation of the blue collar worker and watered-down political and social endeavours of the TUC.
Labour and Capital?
Today,this is a political struggle between waged worker and public servant and higher-up civil servant and well-paid medical consultant.
The self-employed?
Self-employed workers have no opportunity to bargain collectively, create any real social impression or make an impact apart from at political election times when they are amongst the most vociferous of those calling for lower taxes and higher thresholds for social relief.
The phenomenon of falling living standards and declining economic outcomes?
Social facts are something Labour and Tories know very well. In the 1980's Tory governments and employers tried to not just accelerate capital accumulation but to deskill and reduce the wage-employed to performance-related pay,self-employment and short-time working.
The international dimension
Super-exploitation of the native and foreign workers creates the conditions for absolute impoverishment, renewed world conflict and open superpower rivalry. The super-exploitation of poor countries is part of the colonial legacy. It is also part of the outworkings of the internal polarisation and industrial decay created by changing economic factors and trade winds. The features of falling living standards were aggravated by Thatcher,Reagan and others.
Continental socialism vs. that old bed-bug of Marx, German university chair socialism (Kathedersozialismus)
Continental socialism is not very relevant to England because many well-trained and knowledgeable academic, judicial and political luminaries have been student journalists, jurists or barristers without a brief and know only too well the foibles of the 'Frenchies'.
In the early stages of their working lives and professional careers,those sorts of person had to accept low pay and long hours slaving over a hot computer until internet traffic reached critical mass and the interface closed down. They soon lost their love for the adoption of Marxist sociology. That put any notion of the future Labour types following the Continental path to socialism out of their heads.
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27.5.2022
Continental socialism and the Labour Party in Britain
It is fashionable for Anglophone Communists to criticise democratic gains. It is clear to most people that those individuals do not have any real educational grounding in modern political thinking or real connections to the working class.
Ireland
The Official Communists in Ireland belong to the class of fellow travellers of Maoists and opportunists. For proof,listen to one of them who dare not speak his real name,Richard Boyd Barrett.
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American politics. The US role in super- exploitation
The US is an imperialist state,the behemoth of world exploitation and crafted imperialist designs. Workers are left with almost no protection outside the trade unions and Democratic Party. US politicians and generals are the main obstacle to world socialism. US politics is founded on weak social conceptualisation and its politicians embrace the political abandonment of the sick and poor. Cultural phenomena spur the US to moral abandonment and reckless endangerment of its own citizenry. Imperialist wars and counter-insurgency campaigns lead to acts of random violence at home and wars of aggression and mass murder abroad. These actions are indicative of a morally-endangered and violent society. They are partly aggravated by industrial decline.
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And,there are signs,everywhere,of industrial societies,modern countries and advanced states slipping into a deathly silence about the slow passing away of ordered charity in the West.
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Therefore,we say,the future belongs to the East.
The relative eclipse of the West is upon us. Despite this fact,wars of aggression are being stirred up by Britain and America. In England and the US,the imperialists and President's Office play the lead role in the repression of dissenting voices such as those of us who want peace.
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26.8.2022
The NHS and the state socialist designs crafted by British university heads?
Utter nonsense with a resonance for quasi-autonomous government organisations alone.
I refer primarily to the NHS.
Public health inside Britain?
No symmetry,no matching options,only grand designs crafted for non-entities in political middle management, being the work of fickle social engineers and economic designers who never go on strike or join a political party or a trade union.
The gist of my message about revolutionary change in Britain?
Left-wing partisans in fringe journalism harp on about things they don't understand such as the cash demands of our medical dictatorship. They are not truly cognisant of the real workings of modern, post-Fall society or of the proper functioning of state health and business concerns. They fail to see in the latter the whimsies of the rich and powerful.
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Continental socialism in the Soviet Union (1917-1918) before central planning
Lenin realised the shortcomings of industrial trusts,entirely publicly-owned, whose formulations German doctrinaires had created in the 1880's. After 1919 and more so in the 1930's,others puzzled over the attempt to outpace the Soviets by firstly their American and then their Nazi counterpose.
But to wrap up with some practical advice for working people not familiar with British and Continental political history,I say,openly and publicly as someone who worked in the land of state intervention,Germany.
Langsam,aber sicher. Arbeiter,wehrt euch gegen schlechte Handlung. Mach mit die Gewerkschaften!
Slow,but sure! Workers,protect yourself against bad treatment and pay no heed to idle mouthpieces. Join a trade union or,better still,the British or Irish Labour Party and Keep Left!
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The brutal and merciless doctrines of either fascism,Nazism or Marxism have no place in any civilised country.
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21.7.2024
The question of terrorism
It is easy for me to mock,never having had to stand for elective office in any organisation other than one which has now dissolved itself in keeping with its own rules and procedures.
The path taken by my ageing generation was a path to ruin being pursued today in Sudan and elsewhere,one of left-wing extremism.
Left-wing extremism? Ireland,I hear you ask?
Yes,the Provos were that most radical of types,left nationalists. They behaved then as they behave now by calling for open-ended welfare payments and low taxes on small business and property tax exemptions. They have no grasp of financial probity or wider fiscal reality.
The use of violence is one thing no true Continental socialist can be accused of not having a ready answer to. He answers in the negative,firmly against.
Apart from the occasional priest who you meet once in a blue moon,you will never find anyone in public Establishment circles who included the actions of the IRA in the framework of a just war.
The sooner the Irish people part with illusions as I had to in 1989,the sooner they will be free of ubiquitous nationalist verse and song bowdlerised from the Scots and French by people such as myself (The 'play', July-August 1988,Dublin). The sooner they will throw of the language of cultural nationalism (and special interest pleading) which ennervates and bedevils this island nation of ours in equal measure.
No to national exclusiveness! No to terrorism! No to cultural autonomy for special interest groups!
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4.8.2024
Continental socialism was shot down at the TUC Annual Conference in 1882 (see Introduction to the Communist Manifesto).
In Russia, Marx and Engels saw hope in the agricultural commune as a future model for socialism (the kolkhoz) (Introduction to the Communist Manifesto).
In Britain the social gains have all been made by the Labour Party which expelled the Communists in 1925. That occurred after the publication of the Zinoviev Letter. The Zinoviev Letter fracas was a secret police hoax.
In Ireland socialism is modelled on syndicalism. Trade unions and the Labour Party led some of the process of social amelioration and labour regulation. The Church looked on from the sidelines aghast at any talk of society and class and abandoned all contact with its own pet croney concerns after the 1970's . That occurrence was due to failing interest in Christian worship.Those matters which it referred to in its schools as Civics or The National Issue.
Due to its grip on the education system,the Church prevailed on the poor farmers and Sinn Fein's urban followers to vote against anything socialist. Its leading supporters became the public representatives of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Those parties successfully agitated to their own followers and urban workers to make Fianna Fail the champion of public services such as health,housing and a fairer division of social wealth and Fine Gael the shouters for the law and order brigade.
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British Judaism or Reaction is not a proper foundation for the running or executive management of any country or trade union. It leads to nationalist socialist revanchism and sitting-it-out when action is required and key initiatives are being debated.
