Calling time on the call centres

Having talked to a few Indian's about their experiences of working in the call-centres it seems my personal anecdotal evidence appears very true from this story .

Young men and women in call and contact centres across India are over-worked and stressed out. Many are leaving the industry.Call centres hold no attraction for these people anymore. They are changing professions.

Shabana Pavaskar, a senior staff at a reputable call centre in Mumbai, feels it is not a career, just a job.
"I have been working here for many years but there's no promotion, no motivation and the hours are extremely demanding," she says. "Over-time is not an option but a compulsion. A government job with a fairly less salary will be more feasible than working here."
She says it loud, she says it clear. And so do many others. The industry has tried hard to make it lucrative for young people by creating cool recreational facilities and improving infrastructure, but that has failed to stop them from leaving for greener pastures.
"Where's the time to use their damn gym or cafeteria or other facilities?" says Ms Pavaskar.

Shameela Zaidi was among the first to join the fledgling BPO industry at the beginning of the decade. She found little time to spend with her growing son and the shifts were at odd hours [ due to varying time zones ].
"I didn't get time to spend with my son and my health completely deteriorated," she says. "The other important thing is that there is no growth in terms of salary and career."

There was a time when our office was cluttered with 500 to 600 people who came for recruitment in one day," Abhishek Tiwari, with many years behind him as a call centre man, left the industry recently despite being promoted to senior manager and recruiting youngsters for his call centre says. "Today, even after lowering our standards, getting 40-50 people a day was a struggle."

India's Riches

India is minting new millionaires at a faster pace than anywhere else in the world, buoyed by a fast-growing economy, according to a new study.
There were an estimated 123,000 millionaires in India at the end of 2007 -- 22.7 percent more than in the previous 12 months . India's millionaires have a combined wealth of 440 billion dollars.

And ,of course, big money requires the lifestyle fashion gurus to accompany it . Men's magazine GQ India hits the newsstands, following in the footsteps of other male-only publications such as Men's Health, Maxim, and FHM.

shit jobs

Who will do the dirty work is frequently the refrain from those who oppose a moneyless wageless society . All i can say that those who are forced by poverty to perform the sewer work in Delhi won't be expected to do it.

Omar Kumar gets drunk every day before he goes to work. It is the only way he can cope with spending hours chest-deep in Delhi's stinking sewers. "I have to drink alcohol -- if I don't, I cannot work," he said, after another shift unblocking tunnels beneath the Indian capital's slums, suburbs and factories. Health problems, and drug and alcohol addiction, are common among beldars who spend eight hours a day wading through sewage, said Hemlata Kansotia, a social worker
Kumar, a 30-year-old father of four, is one of thousands of men employed as "beldars," climbing down filthy manholes eight feet (2.4 metres) deep, dressed only in underpants and equipped with little more than a hoe and a wooden bar.
"When inside, the stench is so strong it hits you in your face," said Kumar's brother-in-law Vinod, also a sewage worker. "It is like descending into hell. Rats, cockroaches, mosquitoes. Dirty sludge and human waste all around. I hate my job but I have to earn money for my children."

"Sewer cleaners are operating in working conditions wholly incompatible with human dignity and hazardous to health," Delhi High Court Justice A.P. Shah stated in his ruling.

A 2005 report by a New Delhi-based Centre for Education and Communication, a think tank, found that half the city's sewage workers were malnourished or suffered from chronic illnesses.

Ashish Mittal, one of the doctors who wrote the report, said the High Court's intervention was desperately needed.
"Many workers die of asphyxiation," he said. "The sewers are full of noxious and dangerous gases -- hydrogen sulphide, methane, carbon monoxide -- from decomposing industrial, household and even hospital waste.A confined space without much oxygen can also cause syncope, which is a sudden loss of consciousness due to a stoppage of blood to the brain. Its long-term effects can be debilitating."
The manholes are too narrow for workers to wear protective suits, so skin problems and respiratory tract infections are also common, Mittal said

The Myth of the Transitional Society

Critique has recently published the translation of an article by Ernest Mandel, in which he develops his now familiar theme that, in the course of social evolution, there intervenes – and must intervene – between capitalism and socialism a transitional "society" with its own social base, relations of production, etc.[i] This is a point of view worth discussing but, despite the Marxist terminology in which it is expressed, it is in fact not a view held by Marx himself. As the present article will try to demonstrate, Marx did indeed speak of a "political transition period" between capitalism and socialism but never of a "transitional society". What, then, did Marx mean when he spoke of this "transition period"? Contrary to what is generally supposed (largely as a result of decades of Stalinist and Trotskyist propaganda), for Marx this period was not that between the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production and the time when the principle "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" could be implemented. Rather it is the period during which the working class would be using state power to bring the means of production into common ownership.

In other words, the transition period is a political form between the capture of political power by the working class within capitalist society and the eventual establishment of socialism, a period during which the working class has replaced the capitalist class as the ruling class, i.e. as the controller of state power. The end of this transition period is the establishment of a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control by the whole of society of the means of production, with the consequent disappearance of the coercive state, of the system of working for wages, of the production of goods for sale on a market with a view to profit, indeed, of buying and selling, money and the market altogether. That for Marx the "transition period" was the period after the capture of political power by the working class and before the actual establishment of the common ownership of the means of production is clear both from his early and his later writings. In 1852 he wrote to his friend Weydemeyer in America that one of the things he had proved was that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" (as he called the period of working class control of state power [ii]) "only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society"[iii](emphasis added).
Engels summarizes his own and Marx's view in 1873 as follows:

"The views of German scientific socialism on the necessity of political action by the proletariat and of its dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes and with them of the state. . ."[iv] (emphasis added).

The transition period, then, is the period up to the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production. Again, in 1875 in his private notes on the Gotha Programme adopted by the unity congress of the German Social Democrats Marx wrote:

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."[v]

Marx, we can note here, used the words "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably to refer to future classless society (if anything, he preferred the word "communist", but we shall follow Engels' later usage and employ the word "socialism" to describe future classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production). The idea that "socialism" and "communism" were two successive phases of post-capitalist society is not to be found in Marx, but derives from Lenin. Thus, when Marx writes, in the above quote, of "communist society", he means precisely the same as when he wrote of "classless society" in 1852.

It is true that Marx realised that, had socialism been established in his day, it would not have proved possible to implement immediately, or even for some years, the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", i.e. free access for all to consumer goods and services according to individual need. In the early years of socialism, established at this time, there would inevitably have had to have been some restrictions on access to consumer goods and services, some form of, if you like, "rationing" (if this word's association with the war- time and post-war ration cards is forgotten, for although full free access according to need would not have been possible in 1875, the amount allocated for consumption could have been considerably higher than the workers were then getting under capitalism). Marx suggested as one such possible method so-called labour-time vouchers. It is important to realise that this was only a suggestion and, moreover, one open to serious objections. But Marx's point was that, for some period of time, some method of rationing consumption would be necessary. He referred to the period of socialism during which this would be so, as "the first phase of communist society", as compared with a "higher phase" in which free access to consumer goods and services could be implemented. Note that Marx is talking of different phases of the same society, society "based on the common ownership of the means of production"[vi], i.e. a classless, stateless society with no wages or monetary system (Marx made it clear that the "labour-time vouchers" were not money, "no more `money' than a ticket for the theatre" as he put it in Capital [vii]). No doubt one could speak of a transitions from the "first" to a "higher" phase of socialism, but the fact remains that Marx did not employ the concept of "transition period" in this sense. For him, as we have explained, it was the transition from capitalism to socialism and not from one phase of socialism to another.

How long did Marx expect this political transition period to last?
His opinion on this question changed over the period of his political life. In 1848, he clearly felt it would have to last quite some years. Thirty years later, he and Engels thought it could be considerably shorter, as a result of the tremendous development of modern industry in the intervening period.
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 speaks of the working class capturing political power and using "its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible" (emphasis added).

Marx and Engels go on to list various immediate measures which they and the other members of the Communist League felt the working class should take on coming to power, in order to make "despotic inroads on the rights of property".

They conclude:

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character".[viii] (emphasis added)

Clearly, in 1848, Marx and Engels expected the transition period to the establishment of common ownership and the consequent abolition of classes and the state to be fairly long. Engels, in his draft for the manifesto which was not used but was later published under the title Principles of Communism {and which is always a useful gloss on the Manifesto), stated this explicitly. Answering the question, "Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?", he wrote:

"No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity".[ix]

It was not until later, after the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm of 1848 had ebbed, that Marx and Engels worked out the full implications of this. They had been saying, in effect, that the establishment of socialism was not possible in 1848. Engels, in 1895, in an introduction to some articles Marx had written, in 1850, on French politics, openly stated this:

"History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production."[x]

Engels was clearly correct on this point. Capitalism, as Fritz Sternberg has pointed out, was then dominant only in one country:

"When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote `The Manifesto of the Communist Party', – that is to say, about the middle of the nineteenth century – capitalism was dominant only in England; the United States was still a colonial country, in which the agricultural population far outnumbered the industrial; in Europe, the beginnings of capitalism were confined to the west – in Germany, for instance, pre-capitalist forms of production were still dominant; Russia and Japan were still feudal states; and there were relatively few points on the Asiatic coastline which were in contact with those occidental countries in which capitalist development had begun.
To say that, at that time, perhaps 10 per cent of the world's population were engaged in capitalist production is probably an optimistic estimate."[xi]

If socialism wasn't possible in 1848, this raises the interesting question (clearly relevant for later attempts to establish "socialism" in a single, backward country):
What would the working class, or rather a determined group of Communists, have been able to do in the unlikely event of them having gained control of political power at that time? Surely, only to develop capitalism. In fact, the measures listed at the end of Section II ("Proletarians and Communists") of the Manifesto, and referred to above, could accurately be described as being of a state-capitalist nature. Many of them have since been implemented in openly capitalist countries (progressive income tax, state bank, nationalisation of railways, free education, prohibition of child labour, etc.), thus indicating that there was nothing inherently anti-capitalist about them. Neither Marx nor Engels went quite so far as to repudiate these measures, or to state that the Communists of 1848 were wrong to have imagined that they could even capture political power, let alone establish socialism at that time. But this is what Engels wrote in 1872 of these measures:

". . . no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. . . this programme has in some details become antiquated."[xii]

Also, writing in 1850, Engels discussed the fate of Thomas Munzer, as the leader of a communistic party coming to power before conditions were ripe for establishment of a communistic society. This passage is worth quoting extensively:

"The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed, from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in a unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interest of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost."[xiii]

Marx himself had written something similar in October 1847 (a few months before he and Engels wrote the Manifesto) :

"If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, that will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1794, so long as in the course of history, in its `movement', the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule."[xiv] (Marx's emphasis)

Is it too much to say that, had Marx and Engels and the others in the Communist League come to control political power in 1848, that, not being able to establish socialism, they would have been "irrevocably lost", in that they would have had no alternative but to develop capitalism (even if in the form of a state capitalism)?

In any event, this situation never arose, nor was it even a remote possibility. In exile in London, Marx and Engels soon realised the futility of communists plotting to seize political power in the immediate future, and turned to concentrating on the long, hard task of preparing the working class to organise itself to capture political power. After 1848, modern industry made great advances. In 1847, Engels had written of the means of production not being available in sufficient quantity to permit the immediate, or even rapid, establishment of socialism. A quarter of a century later, in 1872, he was writing :

"...it is precisely this industrial revolution which has raised the productive power of human labour to such a high level that – for the first time in the history of mankind – the possibility exists, given a rational division of labour among all, of producing not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also of leaving each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture – science, art, forms of intercourse – may not only be preserved but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and may be further developed."[xv]

And six years later, in that part of Anti-Dühring later published as the immensely popular pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific :

"The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here." [xvi](Engels' emphasis)

In other words, it was Engels' opinion that by the 1870's, contrary to the situation in 1848, "the state of economic development was . . . ripe for the elimination of capitalist production". While he might not have answered the question, "Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?" with a `yes', he would certainly have answered that it could be abolished (i.e. common ownership, and a classless society established) fairly rapidly. The principle is clear here: for Marx and Engels, the higher the level of development of the means of production, the shorter the political transition period needed to make them the common property of society as a whole.
Engels was exaggerating when he wrote in 1872 that the means of production could then have provided "enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund". Certainly, they could have provided enough to completely eliminate material poverty and to raise the consumption of all well above the level they had to endure under capitalism, but it would not really have been possible to implement the principle of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". Engels, or course, recognised this, and it was precisely Marx's point as well in his notes on the Gotha Programme about the inevitability of some limitations on free consumption in the "first phase" of socialism.

Having discussed the question of how long Marx and Engels expected the political transition period between capitalism and socialism to last, we can now ask, how long did they think the transition (as one might want to call it) between the "first" and "higher" phases of socialism itself would take. This is something they don't seem to have discussed, but it is clear that the same principle applies: the higher the level of development of the means of production, the shorter the period.
One thing is clear, though, that the development of the means of production during this period would be on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, and the consequent abolition of the market, money, buying and selling, wages, profits, etc, The "first phase of communist society", like the higher phase, would be a non-market society in which production would be consciously planned to satisfy human needs. What would be produced would be useful things, for direct allocation to democratically-decided social uses (individual consumption, collective consumption, expansion of productive resources, reserves, etc.). What Marx called "commodity-production", the production of goods for sale on a market, would not exist; indeed could not exist without the society ceasing to be socialist.
Marx repeatedly made it clear that socialism, in both its phases, was a non-market, production-solely-and-directly-for-use society. The Communist Manifesto specifically speaks of "the Communistic abolition of buying and selling", and of the abolition not only of capital (wealth used to produce other wealth with a view to profit), but of wage labour, too.[xvii]
In Volume I of Capital Marx speaks of "directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities ...", [xviii] and, in Volume II, of things being different "if production were collective and no longer possessed the form of commodity production. ..". Also, in Volume II, Marx, in comparing how socialism and capitalism would deal with a particular problem, twice states that there would be no money to complicate matters in socialism: "If we conceive society as being not capitalistic but communistic, there would be no money-capital at all in the first place. ..", and, "in the case of socialized production the money- capital is eliminated".[xix] In other words, in socialism the production and distribution of wealth is solely a question of organisation and planning.

It is precisely Mandel who is the most influential and able opponent of Marx (and the others who have agreed with him, notably Bordiga) on this point about the entirely non-market nature of the "first" phase of socialism. In his essay Economics of the Transition Period, Mandel notes that:

"Immediately following the victory of the October Revolution, and especially in the period of War Communism, the Communist theoreticians saw the construction of a socialist economy primarily in terms of an immediate and general disappearance of the market and monetary economy."

Significantly, he does not question why this should have been, since this would have led him to have to admit that, on this point, the Bolshevik thinkers were in the Marxist tradition.
Mandel goes on to state that in Russia it soon appeared that "maintaining money and market relations was best suited to maximising economic growth and to the best defense of the interests of the workers as consumers" and to conclude by formulating the following general law:

"The survival of market and monetary categories thus proves inevitable during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism."[xx]

(Actually, what the experience of Russia under so-called "War Communism" proved was that isolated Russia was ripe at that time only for some form of capitalism – with its "market and monetary categories" – and not for socialism). Mandel accepts socialism as a world-wide, classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society (to define it somewhat negatively). As he wrote in The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism :

"Socialism means a classless society. It therefore presupposes not only the suppression of private property of the means of production, henceforth managed in a planned way by the associated producers themselves, but it also calls for a level of development of the productive forces which makes possible the withering away of commodity production, of money, and of the state."

and,

"The working class ... is not capable of building a socialist society in a single country, not even the USA (not to speak of Britain or Western Europe)."

All that can be established in the immediate future, says Mandel, is a third society neither capitalist nor socialist, which will have the aim of developing the means of production to the level where world socialism becomes possible as a society of abundance: a "transitional society" between capitalism and socialism, with its own social structure and economic laws different from those both of capitalism and of socialism. Mandel describes this so-called transitional society of his as follows:

"nationalisation of all the means of production under workers' control, democratically planned economy, but still with commodity production of consumer goods, with the survival of money, with foreign trade, and with a workers' army as long as the threat of strong bourgeois states subsists."[xxi]

This "transitional society", like capitalism but unlike socialism, can be established on a national scale. In fact, says Mandel, it should be the immediate aim of each national working class (thus rejecting the Marxist view that the working class of all countries should be aiming at a more or less simultaneous world socialist revolution).

If Marx had really subscribed to this view, that there was another system of society –lasting for a whole "epoch" – between capitalism and socialism, it is curious, to say the least, that he never mentioned it. Nowhere, in fact, does Marx speak of any "transitional society" in between capitalism and socialism, or, to use some of the phrases employed by Mandel, "the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism", "a transitional-economy", "the society in transition
from capitalism to socialism". He certainly spoke of a "political transition period" and of "a period of revolutionary transformation" between capitalism and socialism but, as we have seen, this was merely the period during which the working class would use its control of state power to establish the common ownership of the means of production, a relatively short political transition period, which would be shorter the higher the development of the means of production was at the time the working class won control of political power, and certainly not lasting an "epoch".
Mandel tries to justify his position by identifying his "transitional society" with Marx's "first phase of communist society" (despite the fact that the phrase "first phase of communist society" obviously means what is says: the first phase of communist, not some other, different, society).

Marx, we have seen, did recognise the inevitability of some limitations on free consumption in the early stages of socialism (had it been established in the 1870's), and did mention "labour-time vouchers" as one possible method of doing this. Mandel claims that whether these labour-time vouchers or money is used in these circumstances, is just a matter of choice. Money, he argues, is better because it allows workers, as consumers, more freedom of choice than would labour-time vouchers, or some system of physical rationing. But, this is based on a complete misunderstanding of the Marxian theory of money. For Marx money was not a thing but a social relation, an economic category which existed on the basis of certain social relations between the producers, specifically, an exchange economy, reflecting the fact that production was not yet socialised but carried out by isolated individual producers – and later the fact that, despite socialized production, there was still private or sectional appropriation. He pointed out that "labour-time vouchers" were not money; they were simply pieces of paper entitling a person to draw so much from the stock of goods set aside for individual consumption. They did not circulate, nor did they reflect a relationship of private property. As Marx put it, in a passage in his notes on the Gotha Programme, – a passage incidentally quoted by Mandel in the Critique article – "within the co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products."[xxii]

We do not want to defend the "labour-time voucher" system. Even for Marx's day, it was inappropriate, suffering from numerous anomalies, only some of which Marx himself recognised. We would subscribe to the view that Marx's criticism of schemes to introduce "labour- money" under capitalism, applies to some extent also to the scheme for "labour-time vouchers" in the early stages of socialism.[xxiii] But it is clear that Marx did not regard the use of money (a commodity that has come to be universally exchangeable with all other commodities) as an alternative form of rationing in the "first phase of communist society". In fact, he would have regarded this as an absurd, contradictory proposal. We can imagine him lambasting Mandel in the same terms as he lambasted Proudhon for similar inanities!

Let us now return to the question of how long, after the establishment of socialism, some restrictions on free consumption would have to continue. Today, looking back, we can say that, had world socialism been established in the 1870's, it might have taken about a generation before full free access to consumer goods and services, according to individual needs, could have been implemented. This estimate is based on the fact that it was by around 1900 that the effects of the so-called second industrial revolution – the application to production of the electric motor and the internal combustion engine – were beginning to be felt. Marx and Engels, remember, were judging the possibilities of socialism on the basis only of the first industrial revolution (the application to production of the steam engine). Marx, who died in 1883, never saw either an electric motor or an internal combustion engine. But of course every advance in technology made his case for socialism even more relevant.
By about 1900, thanks to this second industrial revolution,capitalism became the predominant world system. By "predominant" we don't mean that capitalism existed all over the world, but merely that all the people of the world, even if they lived under pre-capitalist conditions, were decisively affected by the workings of world capitalism, 1900 marks, if you like, capitalism becoming a world system – a fact which some Marxist writers have described as its becoming "imperialist". 1914, with the outbreak of the first world war in the history of mankind, was a bloody confirmation of this. To quote Sternberg again:

"Capitalist development had taken several hundred years to arrive at a stage at which perhaps 10 per cent of the world's population produced along capitalist lines, but within the two-thirds of a century which followed – approximately from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the first world war – capitalism became the dominant form of production not merely in one country, England, but all over the world, until perhaps between 25 and 30 per cent of the world's population were producing along capitalist lines, whilst in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Western Europe in general, capitalism held practically a monopoly of production. At the same time capitalist development had made considerable progress in Russia and Japan, although the remnants of feudalism still existed, whilst in the other Asiatic countries the pre-capitalist forms of production had been definitely undermined."[xxiv]

We can, in fact, place the end of capitalism's role in history – to create the material basis for a world socialist society of abundance – at this time. By 1900, capitalism had completely outlived its usefulness. From then on only the immediate establishment of world socialism has been "progressive". From then on, in fact, world socialism – given, of course, the development of a majority socialist movement amongst the working class in the industrialised parts of the world – could have been established "at one stroke" by a more or less world socialist revolution.

Since 1900, the working class has still, it is true, needed to organise itself to capture political power in all the various states of the world, and, in this sense, a "political transition period" during which the working class uses state power to establish the common ownership of the means of production, is still necessary. However, since this period would be so short as to be negligible, the concept of a transition period has become outdated.

Similarly, though in the first few years of socialism, as the mess left by capitalism is cleared up, some restrictions on full free consumption may still be necessary, world socialist society could now move rapidly (i.e. in well under a decade at the most) to implementing free access to consumer goods and services according to individual need as the principle of distribution. To sum up, the concept of a "transition period", lasting some years, between capitalism and socialism is today an obsolete 19th century concept, while the ideal of a "transitional society" between capitalism and socialism, as proposed by Mandel, was never to be found in Marx in the first place.
Adam Buick , Critique 5, 1975

[i] Ernest Mandel, `Ten Theses on the Social and Economic Laws Governing the Society Transitional between Capitalism and Socialism', Critique 3.
[ii] As is clearly shown by Hal Draper in his detailed study of the occasions Marx and Engels used this, and similar, phrases. See Draper's "Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat", New
Politics, Vol. I, No.4, Summer 1962.
[iii] Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5,1852. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958.p.452
[iv] F. Engels, "The Housing Question", in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I; FLPH, Moscow, 1958, p.613.
[v] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p.26.
[vi] Ibid, p.16.
[vii] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I. I, FLPH, Moscow, 1961, p.94.
[viii] Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, FLPH, Moscow, 1954, pp.80-81.
[ix] F. Engels, Principles of Communism, Pluto Press, London, n.d., p.13. [x] F. Engels, "Introduction" to "The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850", Selected Works, Vol. I, p.125.
[xi] Fritz Sternberg, Capitalism and Socialism on Trial, Gollancz, London, 1951, p.19.
[xii] F. Engels. "Preface" to the German Edition of 1872 of Manifesto of the Communist Party, p.10.
[xiii] F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969, p.115.
[xiv] Karl Marx, "The Moralizing Critique and the Critical Moral", quoted in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Ed. T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Penguin Books, 1963, p.244.
[xv] F. Engels, "The Housing Question", in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp.564-565.
[xvi] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, FLPH, Moscow, 1959, pp. 389-390.
[xvii] Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, pp.72-73.
[xviii] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p .94.
[xix] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, p.451, p.315 and p.358.
[xx] Ernest Mandel, "Economics of the Transition Period", in Key Problems of the Transition Period, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970, pp.38-40. Originally published in Fifty Years of World Revolution (1917-1967): An International Symposium, ed. by Ernest Mandel, Merit
Publishers, New York, 1968.
[xxi] The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism, International Marxist Group. London, 1969, pp.17-18.
[xxii] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, quoted by Mandel in a footnote on p.13 of Critique 3.
[xxiii] See "La Période de Transition (deuxième partie)", Révolution lnternationale 8, Paris, March-April 1974. See also "Labour-Time Vouchers", Socialist Standard, London, May, 1971, and "Marx's Conception of Socialism", Socialist Standard, December. 1973.
[xxiv] Fritz Sternberg, op. cit., p. 19.

Walmart Robbers

Walmart , owners of ASDA's were likened to 19th Century Mexican dictator .

A Walmart employee who had complained that vouchers handed out by the company as part of its salary payments could only be spent in the company's stores.

The practice of vouchers "that come from the worker's salary only to be exchanged in the management company's establishment is similar to what happened in old company stores (that existed during Diaz's dictatorship)," the court said in its decision.The company stores under Diaz's dictatorship were abolished under the 1917 constitution.

In both cases, "the cost of the respective discounts were absorbed by workers, not bosses," the court said.

Mexican non-governmental organizations last November called for a boycott of Walmart to protest low salaries and working conditions of its employees.Walmart is the largest private employer in Mexico, with 157,000 employees, according to Mexican media.

USA sponsors regime change again ??

Nearly 100 leading academics and foreign policy experts signed the letter last Friday, voicing their "deep concern" over the recent events in Bolivia that left dozens dead and cost millions of dollars in lost revenue to the developing nation.

The letter's signers, who represent dozens of top U.S. schools -- including New York University, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University -- as well as Latin America think tanks and journalists, said they were especially concerned about Washington's support for groups and individuals in Bolivia who are using violent means to oppose -- and potentially overthrow -- the popularly elected government of President Evo Morales.

Since the election of Morales in December 2005, the United States has sent millions of dollars in aid to departmental and municipal governments in Bolivia, but some agencies have failed to disclose who they provided money to, and for what purposes.USAID opened an "Office of Transition Initiatives" (OTI) in Bolivia in 2004, which provided some $11 million in funds to "build on its activities designed to enhance the capacity of departmental governments."In its 2006 report, the OTI said it sought to "[build] the capacity of prefect-led departmental governments to help them better respond to the constituencies they govern," and even brought departmental prefects to the United States to meet with state governors.

Some of the same departmental governments later launched organized campaigns to push for "autonomy" and to oppose through violent and undemocratic means the Morales government and its political platform.

The letter urged Washington to "cease any and all support -- financial or otherwise -- to any group or person in Bolivia and other Latin American countries that engages in violent, destructive, terrorist, or anti-democratic activities such as we have witnessed with great shock and sadness in the past weeks in Bolivia."

Food waste

Mailstrom has previously reported on food waste here and now it is reported that food distribution charity is calling on the industry to make better use of millions of pounds worth of food earmarked as waste.
It argues that excess or nearly out-of-date produce that might be regarded as rubbish to supermarkets or food producers can be a lifeline to others.

FareShare Leicester has come to an arrangement allowing groups to collect fresh produce from local supermarkets on a daily basis.
"When you have the choice that either surplus food is put to good use like this or goes to landfill, then it's a bit of a no-brainer really," said Mr Willetts. "It's just about putting the mechanisms in place to make it happen."

Naturally , the only long term mechanism is Socialism but it will take a while for all those charities to reach that conclusion .

One in the eye for the conspiracists

The fall of the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) in New York City late in the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, was primarily due to fires, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced on August 21 following an extensive, three-year scientific and technical building and fire safety investigation. This was the first known instance of fire causing the total collapse of a tall building, the agency stated as it released for public comment its WTC investigation report and 13 recommendations for improving building and fire safety.

“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings, caused an extraordinary event,” said NIST WTC Lead Investigator Shyam Sunder. “Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.”

“Video and photographic evidence combined with detailed computer simulations show that neither explosives nor fuel oil fires played a role in the collapse of WTC 7,” Sunder said. The NIST investigation team also determined that other elements of the building’s construction—namely trusses, girders and cantilever overhangs that were used to transfer loads from the building superstructure to the columns of the electric substation (over which WTC 7 was constructed) and foundation below—did not play a significant role in the collapse.

According to the report, a key factor leading to the eventual collapse of WTC 7 was thermal expansion of long-span floor systems at temperatures “hundreds of degrees below those typically considered in current practice for fire resistance ratings.” WTC 7 used a structural system design in widespread use.

Citing its one new recommendation (the other 12 are reiterated from the previously completed investigation of the World Trade Center towers, WTC 1 and 2), the NIST investigation team said that “while the partial or total collapse of a tall building due to fires is a rare event, we strongly urge building owners, operators and designers to evaluate buildings to ensure the adequate fire performance of the structural system. Of particular concern are the effects of thermal expansion in buildings with one or more of the following features: long-span floor systems, connections not designed for thermal effects, asymmetric floor framing and/or composite floor systems.” Engineers, the team said, should be able to design cost-effective fixes to address any areas of concern identified by such evaluations.

US oil corruption

Some US government employees have tried to hide their close association with the industry they were supposed to be regulating, the report says.

The investigation appears to have been prompted by an internal whistle-blower's report in 2006, and concerns activity from 2002 to 2006 by the department responsible for selling the oil and gas the government collects as rent from companies drilling on federal lands.

The report alleges inappropriate behavior by 19 members of the Royalty in Kind program -- about one-third of the department. Some have since left the department, making it unclear what kind of disciplinary action they could be subject to.

The Department of Justice declined to prosecute two former employees named in the report, the inspector general said, without saying why. Another pleaded guilty to a criminal charge.

The investigation turned up e-mails in which MMS employees "preparing to attend industry events used such language as 'this trip is to be kept quiet,' or were asked to RSVP 'in private' by their supervisor," the report says.

One of these employees when asked why they needed to avoid discussing their social activities with industry, he responded with a slight chuckle, 'They might have, you know, contacted the [inspector general],' the report says.

Brazil will use revenue from newly discovered offshore oil fields to eradicate poverty, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has vowed.

We await with interest ....for just how long we must wait ...who knows

Will the "curse of oil" be broken

Are we Sadists -- Perhaps

"Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures; in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery...; I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by the other, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality and was told it was utopian; but I soon saw those who denied its possibility were those who would loose by it..."

The Marquis de Sade wrote the above before 1788.

More to be found here 

Don't panic , Mister Mainwaring

Bloody well do panic is the answer according to this report .
The most common response in most disasters is not panic, but rather the opposite.

On the deck of the Estonia ferry, which sunk in the Baltic Sea in 1994, one man smoked a cigarette. Others sat in groups, doing nothing, as the water surged onto the ship.

In the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, about 1,000 people took the time to shut down their computers before evacuating. On average, people waited six minutes before beginning to leave. Once they entered the stairwell, they descended at the rate of about one minute per floor - twice as long as engineers would have predicted.

We know that in all kinds of disaster, from ship wrecks to burning buildings, the brain tends to go through three phases: denial, deliberation and the decisive moment. Our first instinct is to normalize the situation - to come up with wildly creative and reassuring explanations for why smoke might be creeping across the ceiling or why oxygen masks might have dropped from the airplane ceiling.

The Revolutionary Vote 1

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never held that a merely formal majority at the polls will give the workers power to achieve Socialism. We have always emphasised that such a majority must be educated in the essentials of Socialist principles and have a party democratically organised .

William Morris wrote. "It should be our special aim to make Socialists by putting before people, and especially the working classes, the elementary truths of socialism… before any definite socialist action can be attempted, it must be backed up by a great body of intelligent opinion — the opinion of a great mass of people who are already socialists…"

It is the quality of the voters behind the vote that, in the revolutionary struggle, will be decisive.

In our Declaration of Principles we stress the necessity of capturing the machinery of government including the armed forces. That is the fundamental thing. The method, though important, is second to this. The attitude of fetishism which some anarchists show towards "armed struggle" , their advocacy of street warfare against overwhelming odds only serves to make more difficult the Socialist education and organisation of the workers.
This either-or approach to activism is self-defeating. There appears to be disagreement on what form of resistance to capitalism is the most effective. Direct action or party political work through the electoral system . Such views have always divided anarchists and socialists. Some now argue that both forms of resistance not only complement each other but are also essential in the pursuit of class struggle. For the Trotskyist Lenininist Left, all activity should be mediated by the Party (union activity, neighbourhood community struggles , etc.) , whereas for us, the Party is just one mode of activity available to the working class to use in their struggles, a tail to be wagged by the dog.

The easiest and surest way for a socialist majority to gain control of political power in order to establish socialism is to use the existing electoral machinery to send a majority of mandated socialist delegates to the various parliaments of the world. This is why we advocate using Parliament; not to try to reform capitalism (the only way Parliaments have been used up till now ), but for the single revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism by converting the means of production and distribution into the common property of the whole of society. No doubt, at the same time, the working class will also have organised itself, at the various places of work, in order to keep production going, but nothing can be done here until the machinery of coercion which is the state has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist class by political action. As the SPGB said in 1915 ( yes , we do have a long history as a political party based on agreed goals, methods and organisational principles. ) "The workers must prepare themselves for their emancipation by class-conscious organisation on both the political and the economic fields,the first to gain control of the forces with which the masters maintain their dominance, the second to carry on production in the new order of things" .

Political democracy is not, or is not just only , a trick whereby the capitalist class get the working class to endorse their rule. It is a potential instrument that the working class can turn into a weapon to use in ending capitalism and class rule. The ballot box is a tactical but never a strategic (and the only) option (and that is true for Capitalists as well for Socialists.) The working class is the key political class, whoever wins its support wins the day, hence why the factions of the capitalist party vie for working class votes

According to our analysis of society , the capitalist class are the dominant class today because they control the State (machinery of government/political power). And they control the State because a majority of the population allow them to, by, apart from their everyday attitudes, voting for pro-capitalism parties at election times, so returning a pro-capitalism majority to Parliament, so ensuring that any government emerging from Parliament will be pro-capitalism.

If the workers (the vast majority of the population) are to establish socialism they must first take this control of the State (including the armed forces) out of the hands of the capitalist class, so that it can be used to uproot capitalism and usher in socialism. The Party has always said that, in countries where there exist more or less free elections to a central law-making body to which the executive, or government, is responsible, the working class can do this by sending a majority of mandated delegates to the elected, central legislative body. Just as today a pro-capitalism majority in Parliament reflects the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population wants or accepts capitalism, so a socialist majority in Parliament would reflect the fact that a majority outside Parliament wanted socialism. The SPGB contest elections making no promises and offering no reforms except for using parliament as a tool for the abolition of capitalism .

Anarchists have to envisage some other means of expressing the popular will/public demand than a parliament elected by and responsible to a socialist majority amongst the
population. But what, exactly? It would have to be something like the Congress of Socialist
Industrial Unions or a Central Council of the Federation of Workers Councils . That's not to deny that it could be one of these (because bodies such as these will exist at the time), but would any of these bodies be more efficient and more effective (and even more democratic) in controlling the State/central administrative machinery than a socialist majority elected to Parliament by universal suffrage in a secret ballot.

It is hardly conceivable when there is, say, 10 percent of the population who are socialist, that at election times they will not decide to put up candidates against those favouring capitalism.
What would be the point of boycotting elections? There would be nothing to gain (in fact there could be something to lose in terms of political stability).When it came down to it, when they felt that something important was at stake, not even the anarchists in the one place where they did have appreciable support (Spain in the 1930s) were able to maintain their boycott position: they allowed, even encouraged, their supporters to take part in both the 1931 and 1936 elections there (in the one case to kick out the monarchy and in the other to secure a parliamentary majority favourable to the release of anarchist political prisoners)

No-one can be exactly sure which form the revolutionary process will take but the Socialist Party of Great Britain has always held that the potential use of parliament as part of a revolutionary process may prove vitally important in neutralising the ruling class's hold on state power. For us, this is the most effective way of abolishing the state and ushering in the revolutionary society . The working class cannot enter the class war with one arm tied behind its back.

And disagreeing with the IWW deletion of the political clause in 1908 , James Connolly remarked "just try and stop them " or as he later elaborated in this article
"I am inclined to ask all and sundry amongst our comrades if there is any necessity for this presumption of antagonism between the industrialist and the political advocate of socialism. I cannot see any. I believe that such supposed necessity only exists in the minds of the mere theorists or doctrinaires. The practical fighter in the work-a-day world makes no such distinction. He fights, and he votes; he votes and he fights. He may not always, he does not always, vote right; nor yet does he always fight when and as he should. But I do not see that his failure to vote right is to be construed into a reason for advising him not to vote at all; nor yet why a failure to strike properly should be used as a gibe at the strike weapon, and a reason for advising him to place his whole reliance upon votes." http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/05/changes.htm

North Korea and world capitalism

North Korea , that archetype state capitalist centrally planned economy has been undergoing certain changes recently , according to the BBC .
In areas designated "special economic zones", North Korea now invites foreign investors - mainly South Korean - to take advantage of cheap North Korean labour.
At the northern frontier with China, trade is thriving, and bribes can often buy passage across the border for North Koreans wishing to buy goods, visit family or flee the country.

Jamie Oliver and food

Perhaps Jamie Oliver might have a point .

80% of British people did not sit around a table for dinner, the chef said: "It's true in London and in the big cities of the north. It is connected to the new poverty."

Oliver went on: "England is one of the richest countries in the world. The people I'm talking about have enormous televisions - a lot bigger than my own - the latest in mobile phones, cars and they go and get drunk in pubs at the weekend.

"Their poverty shows in the way they feed themselves."

Oliver said in his experience the cuisine of "people living in the slums of Soweto" was "more diverse" that that of Britons.

For Oliver a soundbite guaranteed press coverage but should we forget other facts .

Elizabeth Kineelwe, the cook at a drop-in centre that provides meals and support to orphans and impoverished families in Soweto, Johannesburg's largest township, is on the frontlines of a nationwide struggle to cope with rising food prices. Lately, she has been cooking a lot of cabbage soup.

"I used to grill chicken for the children, but now we can't," she sighed. "Yesterday, I paid R6.19 [US$0.81] for a bundle of cabbage. It used to be two or three rand six months ago."

The cost of basic foods like bread, rice and maize-meal is climbing.

Elizabeth Rapuleng, who also runs a drop-in centre for children, told IRIN/PlusNews that a local bakery was no longer donating bread. "We've tried to reduce the number of kids we're feeding but they still come here, so we just have to make the food go further," she said.

Prof Alan Whiteside, head of the Health Economics and HIV Research Division (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the AIDS epidemic affected the ability of households both to produce and buy food when families lost productive adults to HIV/AIDS. "It results in skipping meals, eating less quality food. It’s a catastrophe on top of a chronic problem,"

So it is still the same old story - good diet depends on the money in your pocket

It is a small world

A social graph derived from billions of instant messages validates folklore that there are about six degrees of separation between any two strangers on the planet.

A research team at US software giant Microsoft studied 30 billion instant messages sent by 240 million people in June of 2006 and determined that, on average, any two could be linked in 6.6 steps.

"We've been able to put our finger on the social pulse of human connectivity - on a planetary scale - and we've confirmed that it's indeed a small world." Microsoft told AFP

The "6 degrees of separation" premise stems from an oft-cited 1969 study by Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers.

Milgram and Travers asked nearly 300 people in the US state of Nebraska to send a letter to someone in Boston through acquaintances.People were considered one degree apart from a friend, two degrees away from a friend's friend and so on.While most of the letters didn't make it to the designated recipient, those that did arrived with an average of 6.2 degrees of separation from senders.

"We used a population sample that is more than two million times larger than the group studied earlier and confirmed the classic finding," Horvitz and Leskovec concluded.

Class and Life

Women live longer than men, whites live longer than blacks, and the rich and well-educated live longer than those who are less well off in schooling and wealth. The gender and race gaps have narrowed. But the opposite has happened with wealth and education. The rich and well-educated have pulled further away from the pack in life expectancy.

See report for full details

Poor told to eat rat

A state government in eastern Indian is encouraging people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.

Authorities in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, are asking rich and poor alike to switch to eating rats in a bid to reduce the dependence on rice. They even plan to offer rats on restaurant menus.

We await the Hilton to serve rat .

We were not the first, nor shall we be the last

The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and store-houses, by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or-other provision they may go to the store-houses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers; and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers' shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth, and the labours thereupon, are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling; as is shewn how more largely in the office of overseers for trades and the law for store-houses...

...Store-houses shall be built and appointed in all places, and be the common stock.

There shall be store-houses in all places, both in the country and in cities, to which all the fruits of the earth, and other works made by tradesmen, shall be brought, and from thence delivered out again to particular families, and to everyone as they want for their use; or else to be transported by ship to other lands, to exchange for those things which our land will not or does not afford.

For all the labours of husbandmen and tradesmen within the land, or by navigation to or from other lands, shall be all upon the common stock.

And as every one works to advance the common stock, so every one shall have a free use of any commodity in the store-house, for his pleasure and comfortable livelihood without buying and selling or restraint from any.
And having food and raiment, lodging and the comfortable societies of his own kind, what can a man desire more in these days of his travel?

Indeed, covetous, proud and beastly-minded men desire more, either to lie by them to look upon, or else to waste and spoil it upon their lusts; while other brethren live in straits for want of the use thereof.

But the laws and faithful officers of a free commonwealth do regulate the unrational practice of such men.

There are two sorts of store-houses general and particular.

The general store-houses are such houses as receive in all commodities in the gross, as all barns and places to lay corn and the fruits of the earth at the first reaping: and these may be called store-houses for corn, flax, wool; for leather, for iron, for linen and woollen cloth or for any commodity that comes into our hand by shipping; from whence [a] particular family or shop-keepers may fetch as they need, to furnish their lesser shops.
So likewise herds of cattle in the field, flocks of sheep and horses, are all common store-houses- so that from the herds and flocks every family may fetch what they want for food or pleasure, without buying and selling.

So likewise all public dairies are store-houses for butter and cheese: yet every family may have cows for their own use, about their own house.
And these general store-houses shall be filled and preserved by the common labour and assistance of every family, as is mentioned in the office of overseer for trades.
And from these public houses, which are the general stock of the land, all particular tradesmen may fetch materials for their particular work as they need, or to furnish their particular dwellings with any commodities.

Secondly, there are particular store-houses or shops,

To which the tradesmen shall bring their particular works: as all instruments of iron to the iron-shops, hats to shops appointed for them; gloves, shoes, linen and woollen cloth in smaller parcels, to shops appointed for every one of them; and the like.

Even as now we have particular trade[rs?] in cities and towns, called shopkeepers, which shall remain still as they be, only altered in their receiving in and delivering out. For whereas by the law of kings or conquerors they do receive in and deliver out by buying and selling, and exchanging the conqueror's picture or stamp upon a piece of gold or silver for the fruits of the earth; now they shall (by the laws of the commonwealth) receive into their shops, and deliver out again freely, without buying and selling.

They shall receive in, as into a store-house, and deliver out again freely, as out of a common store-house, when particular persons or families come for anything they need, as now they do by buying and selling under kingly government.

For as particular families and tradesmen do make several works more than they can make use of: as hats, shoes, gloves, stockings, linen and woollen cloth and the like, and do carry their particular work to store-houses:

So it is all reason and equity that they should go to other store-houses, and fetch any other commodity which they want and cannot make; for as other men partakes of their labours, it is reason they should partake of other men's.

Gerrald Winstanley , The Law of Freedom , 1652

Indian Independence

The anniversary of Indian Independence from Britain is approaching and by coincidence one of the latest articles by Hardy ( Edgar Hardcastle ) of the SPGB has been placed on the Marxist Archives here . From 1935 the artickle discusses what independence for India would really mean .

The article ends "Now is the time for those in India who really desire Socialism to strike a blow for it by preparing the way for the genuine Socialist Party of India, which has yet to be formed."

Sadly rather belatedly but hopefully a beginning there now exists a group of genuine socialists socialist.

World Socialist Group,
Vill Gobardhanpur. PO Amral, Dist. Bankura, 722122

America the Poor

Early each morning these days, the manager of Mendota Food Center on Derrick Avenue in this small community west of Fresno, boxes his aging produce, which he would normally throw away, and leaves it at the back of his store.

Within an hour, the boxes are all gone.

"It shows there's hunger in Mendota, and people will take anything," said Mayor Robert Silva, who manages the grocery store. Some other grocery stores are doing likewise.

The economic downturn, state-enforced water rationing, poor rains, and unemployment have all come to a head here. Now, hunger is sweeping through the community. Town officials are bracing for longer lines at food distribution centers, starting next month, when Mendota's single largest employer, the 42-year-old Spreckles Sugar Company, is set to shut its door.

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On Wednesday and today , Saturday , people remembered the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .

Was the toll of all those innocent civilians justified because it shortened the war and saved the lives of tens of thousands American troops ?

An article from the Socialist Standard questions the validity of that claim .

Understandably Allied servicemen involved in the Pacific war, many of whom experienced the unspeakable horrors of Japanese prisoner of war camps, welcomed the atomic bombs as a “miracle of deliverance”. With a few notable exceptions, even those historians who conclude that dropping the bombs was not necessary to obtain Allied victory – that it would not even have been necessary to invade Japan – generally accept that using the bombs probably shortened the war. Even if only by a few weeks. In the grim reality of war, the life of a single comrade saved is worth a thousand enemy slain.

But what would such men think if they knew that, far from shortening the war, the atomic bombs actually prolonged it? That for all the crocodile tears shed about the “terrible plight” of the captives; for all hollow praise heaped upon the “heroic sacrifices” of the armed forces they were, after all, merely expendable pawns in the unrelenting hostilities of power politics? That “bringing our boys back as soon as possible”, was not actually the first order of business?

By the time the atom bombs were dropped, Allied victory through overwhelming military superiority was virtually assured.
Japanese diplomats initiated peace feelers as early as late summer 1944. They continued to do so - through Sweden, Switzerland, Russia and even the Vatican. Particular efforts were made via Moscow in the (mistaken) belief that the Neutrality Pact that existed between Japan and Russia made it the most viable channel.
Following the collapse of Okinawa (21 June 1945), Emperor Hirohito told the Supreme Council for the Direction of War to reverse their “Basic Policy”, urging them to seek peace by diplomatic means: “You will consider the question of ending the war as soon as possible”. It was the specific mission of the new cabinet of Prime Minister, Baron Kantaro Suzuki (appointed 7 April 1945), to seek peace. Neither the US nor Russia were interested in Japan’s efforts for peace; the US wanted to wait until it could drop the atom bombs and Russia until it was ready to declare war.

US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded, less than a year after the bomb had been dropped:

“Certainly before 31 December 1945 and in all probability before 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Some historians argue that the bombs were unnecessary precisely because Russia intended to enter the war.

Projected invasion casualties – ranging from “hundreds of thousands” to “millions” – were post-war exaggerations designed to contribute to the successful establishment of a public justification for the dropping of the bombs.

The Japanese forces was described by Hanson W. Baldwin as consisting of “Green conscripts and second rate troops”; communication lines were in disarray; fuel was in extremely short supply; roads were in a poor state of repair; transport and transportation could be bombed at will; ports were becoming paralysed; food was scarce; illness through malnutrition was an increasing problem and (not surprisingly) public morale was diminishing by the day. In marked contrast to this, the US armed might remained immensely powerful.

Major General Curtis E. LeMay expressed the truth quite bluntly a few weeks after formal surrender of the Japanese Emperor. “The atomic bomb,” he stated, “had nothing to do with the end of the war”.

Since Hiroshima was designated as a major port and home of Regional Army Headquarters and the northern sectors of Nagasaki contained the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, why did they remain largely untouched until the Bombs were dropped (Hiroshima hardly damaged at all and Nagasaki comparatively unscathed)?

The answer is provided by the proposals of the Target Committee, 27 April 1945:

“To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids.”

A complex labyrinth of reasons lay behind the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Once the vastly expensive machinery of production had commenced, and the original purpose of its instigation forgotten, sufficient resolve not to use it ceased to exist. The astronomical investment of public funds needed to be justified; the widespread public antipathy of the American population towards the Japanese following the Pearl Harbour attack, demanded revenge – a mood of which the American leadership was acutely aware. As Secretary for War Stimson subsequently observed:
“No man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities could have failed to use it and afterwards look his countrymen in the face”.

The fact that two bombs were dropped, however – without warning – on specifically targeted and crowded locations which had been spared aerial bombardment; the fact that each bomb had different technology (one uranium-explosion; one plutonium-implosion), each with different yields, dropped at different heights but both resulting in prolonged and deadly after-effects of which little was understood, suggests the conclusion that the primary motives might have been the seldom mentioned (almost unmentionable) one of “scientific” experimentation.

Leaflets were dropped warning of an atomic attack. In an act of macabre cynicism that almost defies belief, those leaflets were not dropped until 9 August - three days after the bombing. Things improved for Nagasaki - they were only one day late.

Extracts from the Socialist Standard here and here

Tony Bliar

From The Times

MI6 told Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq that a high-placed Iraqi source said that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

The report stated that according to Mr Habbush, the head of Iraqi Intelligence , Saddam had ended his nuclear programme in 1991 — the same year that he destroyed his chemical weapons programme — and ended his biological weapons programme in 1996. These assertions turned out to be true.

MI6 had sent one of its top agents, Michael Shipster, to the region. Mr Shipster held secret meetings in Jordan with Tahir Jalil Habbush . The meetings were confirmed by Nigel Inkster, former assistant director of MI6. Mr Inkster also confirmed that Mr Shipster was told by Mr Habbush that there were no illicit weapons in Iraq. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of British Intelligence , confirmed the Shipster meetings and report.

So contrary to his weasel words that all the intelligence indicated that Saddam was a threat , Blair knew WMD did not exist .

World Capitalism

"By 2012, sovereign wealth funds will have about $7 trillion to invest worldwide," Peter Barker-Homek predicts."That equals US GDP."

"These funds are un-transparent," says Jeremy Warner."They're frequently run either directly by government officials or by government cronies. So although we have not yet seen any cases of outright abuse, it's quite possible that we'll get them and, in fact, I think it is extremely likely over the next five to 10 years."

SOVEREIGN FUNDS BY ASSET SIZE

United Arab Emirates: $875bn

Norway: $380bn

Singapore: $330bn

Saudi Arabia: $300bn

Kuwait: $250bn

China: $200bn

Singapore: $159.2bn

Libya: $50bn

Qatar: $50bn

Algeria; 442.6bn

The Terminator

Schwarzenegger of California has moved to end a budget crisis by sacking 22,000 state workers and ordering pay cuts for 200,000.

Waiting for Death

The time prisoners spend on death row has nearly doubled during the past two decades. Waits rose from seven years in 1986 to 12 years in 2006, the latest Justice Department statistics show.

In California, wait times average nearly 20 years.

The three offenders executed in Alabama in 2007 spent an average of 23 years on death row.

he wait times amount to prisoners getting "two distinct punishments": the death sentence and years in solitary confinement, says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes the death penalty. "Death row was only supposed to be temporary," Denno says. "Now we have inmates on death row for more than a quarter-century."

Wasting food

Mailstrom has previously reported on food waste and once more the BBC reports this problem .

More than a million unopened pots of yogurt and yogurt drinks are thrown away in the UK every day - that's 484 million a year, according to recent research , that is about 9.4% of yogurt pots bought which are thrown away unopened . There is no consideration of unused pots thrown away by shops, restaurants and cafes , so the actual figure for wasted yogurt is probably much higher.

Also found was that 4.4 million whole apples and 1.2 million sausages are thrown away each day.

The crazy market system

Wheat , maize and rice prices rocket and people go hungry but in the Indian state of West Bengal farmers have been dumping their potato crop on roads in protest against poor prices.

Farmers say they are selling at a loss because a bumper crop and lack of storage facilities has led to a dramatic fall in prices.They say a bumper potato crop has led to a huge surplus of more than 15,000 metric tones and there's not enough cold storage facilities in the state to preserve it for off-season sale when prices are better.

The price of potatoes has fallen across West Bengal this month by almost half - to around four to five rupees (12 US cents) a kilogram.The farmers say they get only half that much - the rest is pocketed by middlemen who the government has so far failed to control .With such low income, the farmers cannot even hope to recover their costs.

People go hungry in Capitalism when food is available .

Uncles boom

Boom times for American pawnbrokers as rich hit hard times reads the headline .

Like most pawn shops in Los Angeles - home to not one but two failed mortgage lenders, Countrywide Financial and IndyMac Bank - it is doing a roaring trade.

With America's banks refusing to lend money even to wealthy customers there is now an overwhelming demand for an alternative. In Beverly Hills, where keeping up appearances is all-important, Collateral Lender is only too happy to help.

everyone hurts when homeless

The United States' current record-breaking rates of mortgage foreclosure will directly impact 2 million children this year and next, according to a recent report from First Focus, a bipartisan child advocacy organization.

"Our homeless education liaisons are noticing increases in the number of students who are homeless, not just in high-poverty families but also those who have typically been middle class and facing this for the first time," says state coordinator for homeless education in Virginia.

Frequent moves have been shown to take a toll on children's learning, behavior, and health. Elementary school students who change schools twice or more in a year show poorer reading than their peers who do not change schools, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Government Accountability Office finds similar negative impacts on math performance.

"Absenteeism, a drop in performance, and students who were normally active participants suddenly being withdrawn -- these are all warning signs," First Focus' Phillip Lovell told One World.

Progress or a way of life ?

The Dongria have lived in the Niyamgiri hills in a remote part of eastern India's Orissa state for centuries. They survive by gathering fruit, growing small crops of millet and selling jungle plants in the towns at the foot of the hills. The modern world has yet to reach Golgola - there's no electricity, no school, no television, no telephones.

"We get everything from the jungle like the fruits we take to the market. This is like our source of life for our Dongria Kondh peoples," says Jitu Jakeskia, a young Dongria Kondh activist. He's one of the few Dongria to have got a formal education, and he's now fighting to preserve his tribe's way of life. "We are not paying any money to get these fruits, this is free, it is like paradise for us here."

But the mining giant Vedanta Resources, one of Britain's biggest listed companies, wants the minerals from Niyamgiri hill. The range is rich in bauxite, from which aluminium is derived. An Indian subsidiary Vedanta Aluminium Limited has invested $1bn in a giant alumina refinery at Lanjigarh. It's a vast sprawling site right at the foot of Niyamgiri hill. A tangle of pipes, silos and vast processing towers cover around six square kilometres (3.75 miles).

The refinery is losing money. The Orissa government promised Vedanta access to the bauxite in the hills. However mining can't begin until India's Supreme Court has given its clearance. For now Vedanta is bringing in vast quantities of the red bauxite rock by rail and truck from mines elsewhere just to keep the refinery operating way below its full capacity.Vedanta has big plans.

"...once we start exploiting these ores, the day is not far away when we will see the same development in Orissa as we see in Australia." says chief operating officer of Vedanta Aluminium Ltd and head of the Lanjigarh refinery.

The bauxite in Orissa is extremely high quality which makes it relatively cheap to refine into aluminium. Vedanta wants to expand the site fivefold and make it the largest of its kind in the world.

India's Wildlife Institute has said that mining threatens an important ecosystem with irreversible changes.A Supreme Court committee which investigated the project said Vedanta Aluminium violated guidelines in the Forest Conservation Act when it built its refinery and should have its environmental clearance withdrawn.

And Norway's official Council on Ethics, which monitors investments for the country's huge state pension fund, said investing in Vedanta Resources, which has many mining interests, presented "an unacceptable risk of complicity in current and future severe environmental damage and human rights violations".Norway's government sold all the Vedanta shares it held which were worth $14m.

"If the Supreme Court will give a decision to allow mining here, all our Dongria Kondh people from children to old women will go to the factory and sleep on the road and say first you will kill us then you can mine, because we cannot live without our mountain," Jitu Jakeskia, a young Dongria Kondh activist. He's one of the few Dongria to have got a formal education, and he's now fighting to preserve his tribe's way of life.

Scrap metal war

In 2004, 10 workers were killed in a steel factory outside Delhi when the scrap metal they were melting down in the furnace caused a blast. The consignment was later thought to have included war scrap from Iran.
This led to the government considering a complete ban on the use of scrap metals from war zones in this trade, but four years on, the law is yet to be implemented. In June this year, two boys were injured in an industrial estate in Tamil Nadu when they were handling old cartridges while looking for metal in a scrap pile. The authorities seized the bags of ammunition

The scrap prices for iron and steel have doubled in less than a year, as rising world metals prices stoke demand for scrap. That is proving to be big business for Indian companies who specialise in melting down everything from used cars to unused missiles. A substantial amount of the scrap comes from war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
War scrap is cheaper because most developed countries have banned imports from war zones while others have stringent rules for import . Currently, Indian government rules state that any non-shredded scrap metal imported from a war zone has to have a pre-shipment certificate of inspection. But critics say that these regulations can easily be flouted by unscrupulous traders who ship the consignments to other countries and then re-ship them to India.
This changes the port of origin and the consignment is not checked as thoroughly as it should be.

the survivor

An interesting article from the BBC website

...in a simple one-storey brick house next to a row of wooden shacks, is the home of Antonio Garcia Baron.
He is the only survivor still alive of the anarchist Durruti column which held Francoist forces at bay in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the founder of an anarchist community in the heart of the jungle...

...The Spanish press has covered up that the (Catholic) Church masterminded the death of two million Republicans during the civil war, not one million as they maintain," Mr Baron said before launching into one of his many anecdotes.
"I told Himmler (the head of the Nazi SS) when he visited the Mauthausen quarry on 27 April, 1941, what a great couple the (Nazis) made with the Church.
"He replied that it was true, but that after the war I would see all the cardinals with the Pope marching there, pointing at the chimney of the crematorium." ...

he decided to leave and create a mini-anarchist state [sic] in the middle of the jungle, 60km (37 miles) and three hours by boat from San Buenaventura along the Quiquibey River.
With him was his Bolivian wife Irma, now 71.
They raised chicken, ducks and pigs and grew corn and rice which they took twice a year to the village in exchange for other products, always rejecting money. ...

Later a group of some 30 nomadic Indians arrived and decided to stay, hunting and fishing for a living, also never using money.
"We enjoyed freedom in all of its senses, no-one asked us for anything or told us not to do this or that," he recounted