I want all those who think cuts in benefit are right to read this.

[Leithlurker]

blacktrianglecampaign.org/2012/05/24/mum-june-heaneys-response-to-idss-lies-in-our-letter-450-signatures-to-the-daily-telegraph-which-the-telegraphs-editor-studiously-ignored/#comments

I agree, leithlurker, which is why it is so important to keep on at the Free marketeers.

After 600 years of capitalism with all it's contradictions and inbuilt flaws we are no better off. Well some are, which is why they hold so tightly to the idea that free markets and trickle down economics is going to feed and shelter the world. The fact that millions are starving, some are freezing, other's are being turfed out of their homes and the sick/people with disabilities are being made a the new jews scapegoat seems to allude the individualists.

I really don't know what the answer is if we continue down the road of neo-liberalism, governments could spend/should spend to stimulate the economy and that money needs to be spent on the most vulnerable, through benefits and through employing others in supportive roles. It isn't going to happen under the tories (although they will be out before the end of their term and I don't think labour has any integrity and even less sense.

Yes we need something radical and it won't be found on your next voting slip.

How can it be acceptable to cut the benefits of families with disabled children and yet slash taxes for the very riches. It isn't acceptable and it can't be justified. I just hope that the decent people of this country come out in force at the next general election.

Richest not riches.

I'd rather the good people got off their bums before the next election. Why should we just capitulate and allow this government any more time in which to inflict suffering upon the most vulnerable.

Hmm if Brown thinks it's tricky to claw money back from big business so not doing kinda proves they are going got the sift targets because they not got big enough balls

One thing I don't understand is that if they need to slash the welfare budget (which they do and are doing), then why are they targeting the disabled so much? Surely limiting child benefit/tax credits to the first 2 children (the replacement rate) would be much more sensible? In an overpopulated world the last thing we need is people being encouraged to have more children by throwing extra benefits at them for each child they have? We have overburdened infrastructure, schools, water etc.

Disabled people can't choose not to be disabled but people can choose to have a child or not. I think they should be cutting incentives for having kids when you can't afford them rather than cutting benefits for the disabled. It makes no sense!

MiniTheMinx

I am rather sick of people assuming every socialist is a large state, top down communist. I am not.

Well unless you're really on the Libertarian wing, then yes, you are a large state, top down communist.

Communism had to embed itself against stiff capitalist class antagonism and pressures from the free markets/global powers around it. Communism is not what happened in Russia over a sustained period. You should read up because the bedding in period is necessary only where there is opposition and only over a short period. Unless you read Trotsky who had a theory about constant revolution. (which may well be unavoidable esp in the face of selfishness and individualism) but Chomsky is far more interesting, having adopted Marx's critique of capital and understanding that we need more democracy, it is the closest ideology to Marx's own. For those people who believe in entrepreneurial spirit, creativity and equality an end to "the money economy" where commodities are valued against money and money against gold offers, democracy, people power, human advancement and cooperation. Instead of endless idleness for many and work for a few, wealth for a few and poverty for the many.

No, Communism failed because it didn't let people be people. It treats people as things.

Capitalists treat workers like any other commodity, they pay for it in the same way they pay for any other investment into their business, constantly driving down costs. That's why there is no demand in the economy. This government is treating the working classes (that's everyone if they work for someone else or would sell their labour to an employer if employed) incl the most vulnerable members of our society as less than human.......things.

Mini so has there been a country with your version of socialism implemented?

No, I don't have a "version of socialism" as such. I am studying Marx amongst other things and find that using marx analysis makes sense to me, most of what he predicted is being borne out now, esp in terms of the financification of capital, the diminishing profits in production and wage suppression. His work is of course based on some of the earlier work by other economists such as Ricardo, which was incomplete.

I am also interested in the political philosophy of Libertarian socialism and anarcho-socialism which is about organising society without hierarchy. So yep it's tedious because people always throw the term communism in with any ideas on the left and many people on the left feel the same way about state hierarchy as those on the right.

Problem is with diminishing natural resources, population boom and financial melt down esp since the 70's, states have actually got bigger not smaller. The welfare state is shrinking but other areas of state are expanding, as is the relative spend on those areas, including such incidentals as issuing parket fines, speeding tickets, security cameras, bin fines, on the spot fines, private securitisation of law enforcment, rights to the city, freedom of speech, curtailed through various means but primarily through changing social consciousness about what is "pc" speech etc,,,Google Noam Chomsky for a really good analysis of state power and how states are coercive through law, military and media and use power to suppress individuals mainly for the financial benefit of the 1%

MiniTheMinx

Capitalists treat workers like any other commodity, they pay for it in the same way they pay for any other investment into their business, constantly driving down costs.

Your decision to use the word 'capitalist' obscures any point you're trying to make. You're grumbling about people using the word 'communism' to describe your ideology but you're choosing to slap a single label - 'capitalist' - on everyone else. It's unhelpful.

I don't have an ideology, I agree with marxist analysis of capitalism. We have a capitalist system of exchange and value, of employment and trade, what else would you call the participants. Marx refers to Proletariat or capitalist class on the basis that there are really only two classes.

At the moment the political class, I would call them capitalist, you can call them clowns or what ever your chosen name is are engaged in the age old game of protecting their own assets. Whilst this continues you can expect to find many more people made vulnerable, dispossessed of their property and means of work, the product of their labour whilst the rest of us are invited to mock them.

Right now there is a huge shift in material wealth and it is all headed in one direction, Clegg, Dave and Georgie Peorgie are just the puppet show, the distraction that tries to allude to democracy.

MinitheMinx "After 600 years of capitalism with all it's contradictions and inbuilt flaws we are no better off."

Please explain how we are now "no better off" than an average English person was back in 1412?

Government spending as a total is actually still increasing. they have only slowed the rate of increase - as of yet an actual total spending 'cut' hasn't happened.

and yes, this has been done..

"Capitalists treat workers like any other commodity, they pay for it in the same way they pay for any other investment into their business"

Why is that necessarily a bad thing? An employment contract is a two way deal. If the worker doesn't like their terms of the deal they can vote with their feet. The worker has far more flexibility in this matter than the employer does.

I agree with your paragraph about the rise in the size of the state. How would you feel about taking a hatchet to the non-productive areas of the state ? there must be hundreds of thousands that we could fire?

MiniTheMinx

I don't have an ideology,

Everybody has an ideology.

I agree with marxist analysis of capitalism.

There's your ideology.

Pants

Why is that necessarily a bad thing? An employment contract is a two way deal. If the worker doesn't like their terms of the deal they can vote with their feet. The worker has far more flexibility in this matter than the employer does.

Because, as history has shown, the employer has more leverage than the solitary worker. Before social-democracy came about, thanks to Marx, and the struggles which workers engaged in against the Capitalist class beginning in the 19th Century, workers had very few rights and poor and sometimes abusive working conditions.

It is only after workers collectively bargained that we have most of the rights that we enjoy today: i.e. the right not to be physically or sexually abused, laws against child labour, minimum wage, unfair dismissal laws, pensions, etc.

And you are wrong about flexibility. In most cases, a worker needs the job more than the employer needs the employee to fill it. In the former, his livelihood is at stake. In the latter, a profit margin, and in many cases, the employer has a number of candidate employees.

If you're in a position to tell a potential employer to 'stuff it', then you're probably financially independent or part of a very small minority of workers who posses a certain set of skills which are highly in demand at a certain period of time.

amic - Germany doesn't have the same business culture of relentlessly driving down costs. They have workers on the board and much more of a social democratic approach, with accountability not just to the executives (who often are reaping the rewards themselves these days rather than working in the shareholder's interest) and shareholders but to customers, workers, neighbours and others.

Seems to be working very well for the Germans - maybe we should try a bit of that here.

German efficiency = lower cost.

they manage to have a high per-capita output whilst working fewer hours. so maybe the culture is differently expressed, but something makes it possible for them to get more done in less time.

Please explain how we are now "no better off" than an average English person was back in 1412?

Yes we have many benefits, we have diminishing social mobility, global warming, deforestation, we have vulnerable elderly people unable to heat their homes and some are now being admitted to hospital with malnutrition because they lack the material means and the social support to feed themselves. We have people with disabilities committing suicide, we have working families unable to buy food and food banks springing up everywhere, farmers are going out of business, agri-chemicals businesses are using oil and intensive farming to deplete the soil and there are virtually no wild bees in America. In the states they have stopped resurfacing the roads because the state is bankrupt and kids in the poorest areas of luisianna no longer attend school because they lack the uniform and even shoes. Tent cities and stories about parents eating rat because they have to feed their children first. I could go on..........I could post links and I could direct you to plenty excellent books but you won't read them, because you don't want to know.

'something makes it possible for them to get more done in less time.'

It is investment in business, not in banks. They have state of the art machinery and factories and so their workers can produce more for less time. They back business and back workers, they are not in the game for a fast financial buck.

While we didn't invest in our own car industry, but invested in bankers, they ended up exporting cars to all corners of the planet.

And they can bail out all of Europe, not because their bankers are bright, but because of their manufacturing exporting might. They got it right. But we won't copy them; it would give our bankers a fright.

ami-

Would you, as a consumer, be prepared to pay what it would cost for goods and services provided by businesses whose costs were not 'driven down'?

Firstly, that's a false dichotomy. The average citizen is both a worker and a consumer. There is no benefit to having cheaper goods if you're also being paid less. In fact, one of the problems we're experiencing now is lack of demand because nobody has any money to spend; wages have been stagnating in real terms for three decades.

Secondly, apart from lower costs or lower wages there is a third option: lower wages for CEOs and those at the very top, and lower corporate profits. The difference between the highest paid and the lowest paid was, on average, about 10x during the 1950s. Now it is something like 1000x on average.

There is a real problem here. A tiny minority are getting filthy rich whilst everyone else is just getting by - or worse, not managing to get by at all.

BTW, I'm old enough to have worked through a few of these cycles. There have been times when work has been plentiful and even as a young, not-particularly-qualified-or-experienced worker, I could pick and choose. At other times I have had to take whatever was available, regardless of whether or not it suited me or my circumstances (or, I suppose, claim benefits or starve).

I'm glad, but unemployment is at 8%, and in the double digits in many countries. For the young, it's in some cases nearly half. There simply aren't enough jobs to go around, and some jobs simply cannot be filled with people who are not suitable: it's not just about PhD graduates working in a bar, but about people who can't walk working in a factory, or people with Alzheimers working as a receptionist, or someone who needs flexible hours because they have to care for someone at all.