Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Capitalists rule - ok

In a 1901 article James Connolly writes "Socialists are always accused of trying to create ill feeling, to bring about a class struggle, to “set class against class”. Of course, the real fact is, we only point out what already exists,....His masters who are interested in keeping him in that plentiful lack of knowledge are always careful to raise the cry “Capital and labour are brothers” and don’t “set class against class”....while the worker is not class-conscious – that is, knowing and understanding his class subjection and its cause, and therefore knowing and understanding his class interest in overthrowing the institutions which keep him so – it is not so with the landlord and capitalist. They, as a rule, are thoroughly class-conscious and in all their measures never lose sight of the cardinal principle of the class struggle. While the average worker makes a great show of having nothing much to do with politics, the other class have calculated to a nicety its exact value not merely to their whole class, but even to each of their sections. All government is therefore class government."

Members of the US Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010. The 50 richest Members of Congress who hold 80 percent of the net worth of the institution. The wealth overall is scattered fairly evenly between the two parties. Of the 435 members of the House, 244 current members of Congress are millionaires - that's about 46 percent and that includes 138 Republicans and 106 Democrats. By comparison, around 1% of Americans are millionaires. Therefore, no other minority group is as over-represented in Congress as the rich.

The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices. The wealthiest member of the U.S. Congress is Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who had a maximum wealth of $700.9 million in 2010, according to the center. If he were in China's National Peoples Congress, he would be ranked 40th.

In the Kremlin Russian oligarchs, the class of ultra-rich that emerged during the 1990s, have notoriously close ties to the country's political class and have even created their own political parties. Critics of the governing United Russia party say it serves the wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country. Multi-billionaire tycoon and owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team Mikhail Prokhorov ran as an independent candidate in the 2012 presidential election. According to Sergey Alexashenko, the former vice president of the Russian Central Bank and now a lecturer at Moscow State University of Economics "These days, the oligarchs work with the government and do their lobbying quietly in the background"

In the UK millionaires, as we have recently seen, regularly donate to the financial coffers of the main political parties to gain influence and access to decision meakers.

It was Warren Buffet the third wealthiest man in the world who famously said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

While the workers accept the poisonous nonsense that capital should have a fair profit, while they swallow the lies and humbug of the capitalist apologists that the interests of the master class are the interests of the community or society they will be easily led to vote their masters into possession of the power to rule society. When the working class rids itself of this stupidity they will find that the way to their emancipation lies through organisation for control of the political power, wresting control of the state from the capitalist class.

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