Letters

Golden age?

According to David Douglass, we are apparently living in a golden age of prosperity, when compared with any other period in history (Letters, September 8). When people make this claim - and Jordan Peterson makes it on an almost daily basis (but he is not highly motivated) - I wonder how they know. It isn’t like they have lived through the last 10,000 years. They make this claim because they believe the history books, or the archaeologists or statisticians.

So everything, according to Douglass, has never been better - well, apart from our ability to analyse the climate, which is being hampered by high motivation apparently. We are clearly no better than the Aztecs at doing that.

While David Douglass pours scorn on climate scientists and their high motivation, he positively swallows the entire historical narrative peddled by our esteemed historians, and the statistics peddled by our hard-working and diligent statisticians, who beaver away, unencumbered by any motivations or politicians poking their noses in.

It is hard to know where to next address the points made by Douglass, because, once you assume climate scientists are highly motivated (which I am taking to mean ‘fraudulent’) and in cohorts with politicians, there isn’t really anywhere to go - other than to politely ask, ‘Please clarify what highly motivated means’.

We could point to a recent report published in the journal Science, which shows that five dangerous tipping points out of 16 may already have been reached, with four or five likely to be passed if there is 1.5°C of heating (a conservative estimate) and that going beyond 1°C means the Earth may have left its safe level, given that the whole of human civilisation was developed in temperatures below this. But what would be the point of that - what with all these climate scientists and their motivations and David Douglass’s reasonably priced alternative view?!

So carry on folks, consuming like crazy. And keep the anarchy of the market - no need to rationally allocate energy based on need. No, siree, we have oceans of energy just waiting to be used up with no consequences whatsoever for biological life.

Douglass has spoken and he isn’t highly motivated. In fact he couldn’t give a shit.

Steve Cousins
email

Hamsters

During many decades of reading both ‘right’ and ‘left’ (mostly left) books on politics, economics, philosophy, history, etc, I noticed a while back that leftwing publications tended to have endnotes, whereas rightwing ones didn’t. When I first realised this, maybe three or four decades ago, I found the disparity quite fascinating and kept an eye out for it. I thought it was unsurprising though, since the rightwing stuff tended to just be polemics.

One of the most obvious (notorious?) of the former is Noam Chomsky, who tends to have page after pager of endnotes. They also tend to be official statements, documents or quotations from the periodicals or programmes he is attacking. In the excellent Manufacturing consent (1994), co-authored with Edward S Herman, I note that they have 307 pages in the main text, 23 pages of appendices and 62 pages of notes.

But, more recently we’ve had Britannia unchained (2012), written by Elizabeth Truss, Dominic Raab and a few other Tory MPs (some in the new cabinet). This is currently notorious, in part because of the passage, “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Truss denies this bit, but Raab has said that, while each author wrote their own chapter, they all agreed on the total output.

Anyway, this has 116 pages, followed by 15 pages of notes. A modest total for a modest work, one might say - though it took five of them to write it; but, when I read it (I do read some rubbish from time to time) I couldn’t help noticing in one chapter that a source I’d never heard of kept coming up. I’ve looked for this striking item, but despite a bit of a search I can’t find it - but there’s no way I’m going to reread the book. However, as I recall, I downloaded the obviously important source and found it to be a 19-page pdf work.

So, economic theory - Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and a 19-page pdf. Perhaps we’re fortunate that economic theory has become so simple in these difficult times. These are obviously very busy people (I read recently that Liz Truss is notorious for her devotion to hard work). I’m afraid that my imagination took me to the image of a hamster busy on its wheel - but hamsters don’t do any harm, do they?

Jim Nelson
email

In the dark

Will the United Kingdom ever have a people-led social revolution, as it heads back into the dark ages? Britain is about to enter a sustained period of recession, including blackouts and energy rationing.

This is not Lebanon - under attack from an American-inspired devaluation of their currency as leverage for undermining the democratically elected government of the country, to include Hezbollah. This is not Gaza - bombed back into the stone age by the most powerful military machine in the middle east, the Israeli apartheid regime, which illegally occupies and sanctions Gaza in contravention of international law. This is not Libya - destroyed by Britain and Nato, turning one of Africa’s most equitable and stable societies into a modern-day hell on earth. This is not Mali - still being occupied by French forces against the express wishes of the peoples’ government.

This is the United Kingdom, the mother of all parliaments, the bastion of democracy (?). It’s a former empire that enslaved millions, colonised and controlled hundreds of millions and stole tea from China, diamonds from South Africa, cotton from America and all the valuable natural resources of every country it enslaved. The empire that gave genocide a modern face. Four million perished needlessly in the Bengal famine, more than one million in the Irish famine, and Britain murdered tens of millions in Africa, Australia, America and Canada.

They told us in 2008 that the banks were too big to fail. No-one told us that Britain in 2022 would fail. Can you believe it: Britain is a failed state? One of the G7 countries with the fifth largest economy in the world, with billionaires and tax-dodgers a plenty. Yet Britain has inflation projected to reach 22%, interest rates that are rising and a compliant workforce that has seen wages stagnate for over a decade. But workers are now becoming restless and demanding pay rises to meet their ever-increasing household bills, with strikes now taking place and many more planned.

The gap between wages and productivity is where profit is made. When production rises and wages remain dormant, profits increase. For a decade businesses have accrued wealth, while the workers scrimp and save. Now inflation will devastate people’s disposable income; huge hikes in energy costs will decimate their savings; ordinary working men and women will become even more indebted to the banks and the scurrilous money-lenders who feed off those in desperate need.

With a crisis in employment to follow a deep recession, Britain like most of Europe should now be ripe for a social revolution. Yet, unlike Latin America and the Caribbean, which has a real left, Britain has a false left-right political facade just like North America and most of western Europe, Canada and Australia. We have no ‘party of the people’, no representative of the working class and the underprivileged, no voice for the voiceless, no leader of the poor.

We have micro-managed, career politicians, operating a duopoly of centrist and neoliberal reform, which is replicated all over Europe and the white Anglo-Saxon countries of Britain’s former commonwealth. We have corporate-funded and financed lobbyists of vested interest groups, controlling the political narrative.

As the lights go out this winter and houses grow cold, as we re-enter the dark ages, we should remember that serfdom and feudalism has never left the United Kingdom. Its name has changed, but the practices are the same. We are now enslaved to the banks, the bosses and the bipartisan political duopoly that exists to continue the wealth transference from the poorest to the richest in society. Do people really think by changing the party in power they are effecting real change?

There is no third way. There are only the political prophets and opportunists who claim they will reform the system if elected, but ultimately they become part of the system, they defend that system and become the very thing they claim they entered politics to change.

Look at Jeremy Corbyn - arguably the best prime minister Britain never had. He’s finished and appears quite happy to go meekly into that dreaded dark place of anonymity; destroyed by the Zionist lobby and his own party because of his support for Palestine and socialist vision.

The French parliamentarian, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, shortly after the French revolution said: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees, so let us rise.” If only! We have a very small neoliberal spectrum through which British parties and politicians are allowed to navigate.

Despite the words of ‘Rule Britannia’, celebrating Britain’s imperial past, which declares that “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”, shackled by neoliberalism, indebted to the banks, handcuffed by the political elite, Britons are indeed slaves.

We need revolutionary change to bring about a more equitable, multipolar world. That begins with the defeat of the present, failed mismanagement of government that places profit before people. We need a people-first political system that ends free-market capitalism, graft and corruption. We won’t get that through voting for the present duopoly of two corporate political parties, so we must find another way.

Will the last person leaving Britain please turn the lights off? That’s, of course, if they are not already in a blackout.

Fra Hughes
Belfast

Free transport

In Germany a three-month experiment has provided unlimited travel on buses, trams, metros and regional trains for just €9 (£7.80) a month. The experiment is meant to help tackle the cost of living crisis and to cut car emissions.

More than 50 million tickets have already been bought. Sure enough, it has relieved citizens financially and it will have a positive effect on the environment. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says it is “our best idea yet”.

Spain is going to offer free tickets on all local and medium-distance intercity routes until the end of the year. Austria has a Klima Ticket (climate ticket), which covers nationwide travel for €91 euros a month, whilst Luxembourg made bus and rail travel free back in 2020.

Surely this all shows that free or heavily subsidised public transport is an idea whose time has come.

Alan Stewart
Wakefield

Not so stupid

I must take issue with Tony Greenstein in his letter last week (September 8). Referring to the previous week’s issue and the contribution of Ted Talbot (Letters, September 1), comrade Greenstein contended:

“That this kind of racist filth makes an appearance in a socialist paper is deplorable in itself. To lend a spurious air of credibility to this racist filth has nothing to do with working class unity or the struggle for socialism. That it merited no editorial comment I find equally shocking.”

What Ted Talbot had written was indeed “racist”, Islamophobic and generally reactionary. He talked of “40-plus years of young, vulnerable white girls being raped, trafficked, abused and occasionally murdered by organised Muslim gangs”. He was disappointed that the “men of Pakistani heritage” who had committed such crimes had “not been forced to return to Pakistan” after their release from prison.

The point, however, is that the kind of nationalist Islamophobia Talbot was expressing is not only widespread within the working class: it surfaces from time to time amongst elements of the left - he actually regards himself as a ‘communist’, after all. The question is, then, how do we combat and defeat such ideas? The answer, of course, is not by ignoring them, but by allowing them to be expressed in order to expose them and demonstrate how wrong they are. While I did not agree with everything they wrote, I thought that comrade Greenstein, as well as Steve Cousins (who also responded in the same issue), made some useful points in response.

In other words, our commitment to “free speech” is not based on some abstract belief, and certainly not on the desire to give such nonsense “credibility”. It is based on the need to defeat mistaken ideas in order to win workers, and the left in particular, to a principled position, based on Marxism, internationalism and democracy. We can only win people over through the open exchange of ideas, when the correct, principled position is best placed to win through.

I will add also that comrade Greenstein is by implication very insulting towards our readers. Not only does he seem to believe that a good number of them will be persuaded by the likes of Ted Talbot: he also thinks that some will believe we actually agree with Talbot, because we did not publish an “editorial comment” distancing ourselves from what he wrote!

I can assure comrade Greenstein that our readers are not that stupid!

Peter Manson
London