SOCIAL CREDIT AND THE LEISURE STATE - PART TWO

"The situation as the work moralist sees it."

PART TWO - WORK MORALITY AND THE COMMON CULTURAL INHERITANCE by Wilfred Price c.1990

In the old slave states and in the feudal system, work, especially manual work, was looked down on.  With the development of manufacturing and mercantilism, however, work become more dignified.  The child of this economic change, the Protestant Church, especially the extreme forms, the Calvinists and the Puritans, proclaimed the high morality of honest toil for six days in the week. Hard work was encouraged and much of the hostility in France against the Huguenots was due to the fact that they worked on most of the saints’ days while the Catholics did not.

This morality was very convenient when, in the Industrial Revolution, men had to switch from the creativity and independence of handicraft to the child labour and the workhouse.  Idleness was the great sin and vagrancy was severely dealt with.  This drudgery offered little improvement on the slavery of old; fear of destitution took the place of the whip.  It is claimed that any job that is imposed on one by fear of poverty, even if it were only one hour per week, is slavery – wage slavery. Being compelled to have a job means that you are tied to it, and can be controlled through it.

The Socialist Movement took over the Work Ethic and made it the central point in its platform.  The worker is the only person that matters; only he is entitled to the wealth that is produced by him alone.  The idle Rich is the villain of the piece and fit only for outer darkness.  Berbard Shaw wrote on more than one occasion of the “criminality of idleness”.

Karl Marx proclaimed this viewpoint in an extreme way.  All incomes not derived from direct labour, such as dividends, profit, interest, and rent, were declared to be surplus value and a robbing of the worker.  The banner of the class war was to be raised, the non-working capitalist class to be overthrown, all capital to be confiscated without compensation, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to be set up.  In measures for this in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, No, 8 says, “Equal liability for all to labour.  Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”  The Work Ethic features also very strongly in Fascism and Nazism.

As would be expected, the trade unions are all for it.  Present circumstances force them into a Luddite attitude.  They have a vested interest in overmanning and the doing of unnecessary work to provide jobs.  An example of this attitude was shown some years ago.  It was required to get an electric cable under a wide road using a narrow culvert with a cord attached which could then be used to pull the cable through.  The workers concerned objected to this and, as a result, the road had to be dug up to lay the cable.

This attitude is wasteful and is as much sabotage as smashing property in a riot.  When the Left accuses Capitalism of causing unemployment and point to the apparent absence of it in the Soviet Union, it could not be more misleading. The effect of the present financial system on private enterprise is to produce an aggressive commercialism that makes for a large amount of socially unnecessary work in mass selling and advertising as well as the waste caused by built-in obsolescence.

In the late thirties at Hollesley Bay in Suffolk there was a camp to which long term unemployed men had to go and were given work by being made to dig holes and then fill them in again.  This is nothing when compared to the vast system of slave camps by which the Soviet Union solves its unemployment problem.  No automation in these.  It also adopts Hitler’s remedy by vast armament production and maintaining a large conscript army.  Nothing like the war game for making work!

Besides being a moral obligation, compulsory toil is hailed as an aid to well-being.  “Hard work never hurt anyone,” is a saying regardless of the fact that hard work has killed millions.  “The Devil finds mischief for idle hands to do” is another which is wrong.  It should be “bored” not “idle” hands that are mischievous.  Many people take to crime as an escape from drudgery.

The conditions in ancient Rome are used as an argument against full-time leisure.  Actually what was there apart from the large number of slaves was a populace that was destitute, living on hand-outs, and demoralised by brutality under the Bread and Circuses policy.  Contrast that with the happy and peaceful lives for hundreds of years enjoyed by the leisured Pacific Polynesian islanders until the white man came with his trade gin and made them work.

In his aforementioned article, Dr. Chris Evans deals with this point thus:- “If the objection is raised that people hardly know what to do with the leisure time they have at their disposal already, then the rejoinder should be that people must learn to enjoy leisure, sustained leisure, in the way that some people enjoy sustained work.  Man is an active, creative being, born to explore the universe around him and equipped with a fabulous brain to help him.  There is no hint of a suggestion that his genetic structure, his psychological needs and drives, or even his social heritage demand that he spends a vast chunk of his life poring over figures in a neon-lit office, driving a diesel engine through smoky streets, or watching a million bottles a day pass him by on a conveyor belt.  As we move towards the end of this century, therefore, expect to find men throwing off the shackles of compulsory mindless labour, and embracing the new intellectual riches which the computer will provide.”

In answer finally to the morality question and also to the notion, “You can’t have something for nothing”, it should be remembered that the rays of the Sun, the source of all life on this planet, come to us free of charge. From them we get wind and rain giving power and moisture; the green-of-the-leaf uses these rays to provide lant life which feeds the animal life including us, and fossil remains of plants and animals over millions of years are stored in the earth giving coal and oil.  Man, from the time when he used crude tools of stone, wood and bone, and kindled fires to enable him to get his food and protect himself, has over the ages acquired a vast reservoir of knowledge and skill to produce a high standard of living with less and less need for human labour.  This treasure house of science, technology, philosophy, and the arts, built up brick by brick by millions of people dead and gone, (including many who were of the idle rich or patronised by them) constitutes the Common Cultural Inheritance.  We, who are alive as descendants of the creators of this heritage, are entitled, each one of us, to a share in it by right of birth.  Surely then, if our industry can be fully automated, we are each entitled to a leisure income.

Social Credit means that all will get the fruits of the Cultural Inheritance.

GREEN SWIPE WIND-UP

Next time: Part three - Human nature and the Origin of War

SOCIAL CREDIT AND THE LEISURE STATE - PART ONE

 

Horrible right-wing politicians and their media lackeys have started to denigrate the Social Credit economic system.  They say it’s what China’s got.  I don’t know about that.  We will explain it properly.  We are publishing posthumously in serial form, Wilfred Price’s “Social Credit and the Leisure State”, 3^rd Edition circa 1990.

PART ONE - THE SILICON CHIP AND AUTOMATION

N.B. For literary convenience masculine pronouns are used in this treatise.  However, it should be understood that both sexes are represented equally.

One of the most dramatic pieces of technology to hit the headlines in recent times must be that of the Silicon Chip.

The latter half of the 20^th Century could be described as the period of the Electronic Revolution, something which may prove as far reaching in its effect on human living as the Industrial Revolution.  Now, as a result of computers, not only can vast amounts of information be housed ready on demand, and the most complicated of mathematical problems be solved in the twinkling of an eye, but also can be stored instructional programmes for a whole series of intricate mechanical operations.  Even in the early stages this meant a switch from human to mechanical direction.

In the “Horizon” television series the film “Now the Chips are Down” described the impact of the Silicon Chip micro-processing technique on the making of computers.  The film showed that a system of computers which 25 years ago would have occupied an area the size of Greater London, and presumably, averaging six feet in height, can now by means of micro-circuits on assemblies of Silicon Chips, be contained in a volume the size of a human brain.  The film went on to indicate that Britain was well supplied with “Software” specialists, i.e.: people who can adapt these electronic “brains” to the direction of industrial processes.  Two years ago, Dr. Chris Evans, the scientific broadcaster, in an article, “Computers and Artificial Intelligence?” (Science Fact, edited by Professor Frank George – Topaz Books) states, “The horrendous fact that many prized skills are rather surprisingly easy to simulate by quite simple computers will not penetrate human consciousness overnight, but once it does there are likely to be fireworks.”

When also it is to be realised that, besides factories, such automation can enter offices, surgeries, transport, and, in fact any professional activity, an acute problem will certainly arise in a community conditioned to the idea that employment is the sole (or the only rightful) means of getting buying power.  As the new computers will not only be incredibly small, but also can be produced very cheaply, it is obvious that millions of people will no longer be required in industry. This is a view that is held by a large number of scientific experts who make it clear that far more jobs will be destroyed than ever could be created no matter how much output is increased.  Even if any government were to try and hold back this technical development, its country would suffer as a result of world competition.  It is this that forced our government to invest well over £100,000,000 in the Silicon Chip in 1978.

Professor Tom Stonier, of the School of Science and Society, Bradford University, has pointed out that 200 years ago people would not have believed that the agriculture of Britin could be carried out by 3% of the adult population and that today people find it hard to believe that our industry could be carried out by a similarly small proportion.

It has been contended that, though Japan is the leader in the use of Micro-Chip directed robots, there is still a low level of unemployment there.  However, the use is still on a small scale and the installation of the robots is labour intensive.  The picture will change in a few years’ time.  There is an assumption that there will be a repetition of the situation as in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when the then new technology made for more human labour than it displaced because of the great expansion of production.  Toay, however, the situation is different; if such an expansion happened, the increased demand for raw materials and for clearings for more factories and roads would impose a great strain on our country’s ecology.  The Japanese are beginning to find this out.

The idea that the diminishing work-load can be shared equally is a myth. The more automation is used the more industry is dependent on highly trained people to operate the new technology.  Let us take a case in point: coal-mining is a dangerous and unhealthy occupation; therefore it would be a good thing if it were completely automated, which it could easily be.  But miners are not “software” specialists and so would not be required at all in running the mines.  We must face the fact that, when the microchip technology begins to bite, the great majority of workers will not be required at all in industry.

Of course, with anything new we have to adjust; problems are created which have to be solved.  One is that when automation destroys jobs it destroys wages and salaries.  Consequently there will arise a glut of goods for which there will be no buying power.  Is it therefore beyond the power and imagination of men to devise a method of distributing this glut in a way that is independent of employment?  Can we not give ourselves a leisure income and thus proceed towards a Leisure State in which no one is compelled by necessity to seek a job, and is free to develop his own culture in his own way, while all can enjoy the fruits of a fully automated economy?

The objective of the Social Credit policy is such a Leisure State.

GREENSWIPE WIND-UP

The Horizon film “Now the Chips are Down”, with extended studio discussion, was first transmitted in 1978 but is currently available to view in the U.K. on BBC iPlayer.

Next time: “PART TWO of Social Credit and Leisure State - Work Morality and the Common Cultural Inheritance”

 

The Socialist Workers Party 

and other cults

The Marxist tradition — Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels¹, Rosa Luxemburg², Theodore Lenin, Leon Trotsky.

«Bloodline

The SWP was set up in Britain by a Jewish immigrant who called himself Tony Cliff.  He had studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and he had moved to Britain in 1947: just a year before Britain’s Palestine Mandate ended and the state of Israel declared its independence.  Cliff founded the Socialist Review Group in 1950.  That became the International Socialists in 1962 and then the Socialists Workers Party in 1977.  It copied that last name from its counterpart in the USA. 

The media often describe the SWP as ultra-left or subversive.  The SWP describes itself as Trotskyist, whatever that means, but they are also big fans of Lenin.  Trotsky was actually an ally and a rival of Lenin.  They were both members of a revolutionary party called the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which was also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. 

Trotsky was a member of the Mensheviks, who were the minority in the RSDLP.  They believed in governance by the masses.  Lenin was a member of the Bolsheviks, who were the majority.  They believed that professional revolutionaries and intellectuals ought to lead the party and rule over the masses.³

Trotsky ducked and dived his way though post-revolutionary politics.  He did whatever was expedient at the time.  He held several senior positions in the Communist government.  He joined his old rivals the Bolsheviks, and he agreed to Lenin’s reintroduction of privatisation to allow the Russian economy to recover from over-centralization.⁴  Trotsky believed that the proletariat had to work with the bourgeois to create a liberal and capitalist regime which could then be transitioned into a socialist regime.

Lenin died in 1924.  He was succeeded by Stalin, who expelled Trotsky circa 1928-29.  Stalin accused Trotsky of treason in 1936, and he had him assassinated in 1940.

Now let us ask a few questions about cults in general and the SWP.  What is a cult?  Who are the SWP?  What are the SWP’s methods?

«What is a Cult?

The enlightened and forward-looking Star Trek TV series and feature films actually tried to dramatise cult behaviour.  The Federation were the good guys.  One of their deadliest enemies was the Borg Collective: a self-satisfied race of hybrid bionic people or cyborgs.  They lived in hives which were modelled on those of bees, ants and termites.  The Borg thought that everybody’s brains ought to be interconnected by antennas to form a giant neural network.  That way they would all keep singing from the same hymn sheet.  Anyone or anything that wasn’t one of them was to be ignored, assimilated or destroyed.  Their motto was: “You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile.”

The Borg Collective represented real life cults that try to control people by demanding conformity.

Everyone has an instinctive need to belong to something.  People search for others who share their interests and beliefs; birds of a feather flock together.  There is safety in numbers.  Some people call it tribalism or sectarianism.

We have all been influenced by cults: probably much more than we realise.  Most people would deny it, but we should ask ourselves some simple questions.  Do we support or take part in any sports?  Are we members of any gangs, groups, circles, clubs, institutes or guilds?  Are we devoted to any religions or sects?  Are we members of any political parties?  Are we members of any secret societies?  Do we prefer a particular way of life or culture?

All these activities, hobbies and pastimes have one thing in common: a set of rules, which all participants must obey.  These rules are often useful and harmless but strict interpretation of them can be dangerous.  Over-zealousness is what distinguishes a cult from a hobby.

As well as rules, all cults have the following things in common.

Cults always have a deity, an oracle or, perhaps, a spaceman who must be exalted or revered as supremely good or powerful and must be worshipped and obeyed.  Karl Marx represents that saviour figure for the SWP. 

Cults always have wise charismatic leaders, prophets, Gnostics or pedagogues who recruit and teach their followers.  They are usually venerable old men who stand on pedestals or soapboxes.  They pose as orators and spout rhetoric and propaganda.  An exception was the actor Vanessa Redgrave who performed a similar role for her own outfit: The Workers’ Revolutionary Party.  Tony Cliff acted out that role for the SWP.

Cults must have a dogma, a creed or an ideology: an uncompromising set of beliefs or principles, which must be learned, believed and disseminated.  Socialism provides a dogma for the SWP.

Cults usually have some sort of preeminent scripture or Sacred Writ, which serves to provide history, credibility, validity and authority for their creed.  “The Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels is the SWP’s bible.

Cults usually impose severe censorship.  They tend to push their own stuff.  The SWP consider English Literature to be decadent; they frown upon it and more or less blacklist it.  They also disapprove of any specialized textbooks and reference books about hobbies and interests which might distract their members.  SWP members are spoon-fed the works of Lenin, Trotsky and the SWP's own latter-day philosophers.

Cults often need an adversary: a mystical enemy, a devil or a hate-figure who opposes them.  The “Ruling Class” are held to be the arch-enemies of the SWP. 

Cults always have blindly devoted disciples who suck-up to their leaders and who are totally dedicated to their causes.  Latter-day apparatchiks, commissars, sycophants, hangers-on, lackeys, mugs, and suckers are the  SWP's disciples.

Cults are never democratic.  They usually have a one-way communication system: top down.  Questions from beginners may be tolerated at first but new recruits soon get the message: “Keep your gobs shut!  Just listen and learn.”  Woe betides anyone who asks awkward questions at any kind of SWP gathering.

Cults often use Brainwashing techniques to control their members.  Coercive Persuasion, Conditioning or Mind-Control is a systematic effort to persuade nonbelievers to accept a certain allegiance, command, or doctrine.  The SWP uses a wide range of psychological mind control techniques: including pernicious isolation and tragic betrayal tactics.

Cults usually insist that their members make sacrifices; they must suffer hardship or perform some sort of rite of passage, ritual baptism or rebirth to demonstrate their eligibility and commitment.  The SWP expects its members to jeopardise their health, safety and livelihoods.  Members are told to organise union activities at work and to provide “truncheon-fodder” on public protests, demonstrations and riots.

Cults usually ask their members to contribute resources: time, effort, money.  The SWP expects its members to attend meetings, to do voluntary administrative duties, to sell newspapers, to buy party publications, and to tithe and subscribe.

Cults are nearly always patriarchal or misogynistic.  The SWP hates feminists.  A typical SWP husband will quit his job and sit in an armchair ranting and raving about Karl Marx, while his submissive woman is expected to behave like one of the “Stepford Wives”⁵.  His attitude seems to be: “You wanted equality didn’t you?  Well, I’ll stay at home and you go out to work!”  Could you even imagine a GP woman putting up with that?

Cults usually promise their followers a wonderful reward, which is often imaginary, distant, and unlikely; it is usually some sort of utopia which can be gained only after a life-time’s struggle.  The SWP does not promise its members "pie-in-the-sky"; it offers them a communist republic after they have fought a protracted, blood-soaked, revolution.

Cults are always intolerant of other cults.  Marx mockingly called religion: “The opium of the masses.” 

«Welcome to the SWP

The SWP has always targeted the same sorts of people: the intelligentsia, the academics, the visionaries, the idealists;  the agitators, the instigators, the inciters; the bored, the curious, the seekers, the hobbyists; the wayward, the alienated, the blamers; the misfits, the dead-beats, the-ne’er-do-wells, the also-rans; the outcasts, the lost, the lonely, the destitute, and the irrational.

That hodgepodge of humankind does not represent a cross section of the general public; it represents people who exist on the fringes of society: they who are searching for something to believe in, for something to latch on to, for an extended surrogate family, for basic help and support. 

The SWP’s organization structure is hierarchical: pyramid shaped.  At its apex is the politburo: the executive or principal policy making committee of the party.  The politburo is made up of the party’s smug leaders: the elite intelligentsia who think that they are the modern day equivalents of Lenin and Trotsky.  They are prolific talkers and writers who publish heaps of pamphlets, newspapers and books, and they expect their inferiors to consume it all and distribute it. 

The next tier down is occupied by the apparatchiks or spin-doctors: the fanatical SWP cohorts who hold official positions, get paid, and aspire to join their leaders on the top of the pile.  They do not just spin facts; they twist them.

The next tier down is occupied by the obliging commissars, who maintain discipline and keep order in the ranks.  These voluntary henchmen quell dissent and persistently grovel to their superiors.

The lower tiers are occupied by the foot-soldiers: sidekicks, hangers-on, sycophants, lackeys, and mugs.  These include rebellious, condescending students who seem to think that they are performing some sort of civic duty or national service, and wide-eyed, uneducated, proletarians who think that they have found sophisticated bourgeois comrades who will actually speak to them and accept them as equals.

Some of those people become institutionalized in the same way that some convicts are reluctant to leave prison or some veterans are reluctant to leave the armed forces.  They know that freedom would be better than stagnation but they have gotten used to the constant and orderly procedures, which govern how they think, what they say, and what they do.

That is why seasoned SWP foot-soldiers seem to exist in semi-conscious, vegetative or vacant states like insensible “zombies” and robotic “Stepford Wives”.  Those conditions have been instilled into them.  Organized, insidious abuse, which includes tedious and repetitive browbeating makes them malleable, compliant and steadfast.  They will stubbornly hold on to absurd ideas against all reason and logic.  They cannot be reached but, sometimes, their inner turmoil gets betrayed by the involuntary, mischievous grins, which suddenly erupt on their senseless faces.

Psychologists might call that cognitive dissonance: mental conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.  George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called it Doublethink: “... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

«Modi Operandi

The SWP operates in the same way as most other cults.  They target vulnerable people: the feebleminded, the empty-headed, the suggestible.  They befriend them.  They talk to them.  They “hook” them with a few undeniable facts like: “The 1% rule over the 99%!”  They invite them to join their group.  All is well, but then the brainwashing starts: a cascade of half-truths and downright lies.

The SWP uses all sorts of brainwashing techniques to achieve its particular indoctrination.  It wants individuals to deny themselves; the party must come first.  These techniques may include: Re-education, Hypnosis, Repetition, Peer Group Pressure, Love Bombing, Rejection of Old Values, Confusing Doctrine, Control of Communication, Meta-communication, No Questions, Uncompromising Rules, Controlled Approval, Finger Pointing, Guilt and Shame, Isolation, Shunning, Induced Dependency, Financial Commitment, Mockery, Deception, Verbal Abuse, Threats, Dread or Fear, Ostracism, Exclusion, and more.

Look at some of those techniques.

Repetition

Anyone who has spent any time with the SWP soon gets sick and tired of their continual repetition of stock phrases: “Marx said blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack ...”  “The ruling class blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack ...”  “Capitalism blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack ...”.  No matter how many times somebody tries to change the subject, the conversation always gets reverted back to: “The ruling class blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack, etc.”  It is intensely irritating, annoying, and insulting, especially when it is accompanied by that crazy, sly, grin.

Verbal Abuse

The SWP introduce all sorts of startling, bizarre and extreme topics into their rhetoric.  “Pacifists and feminists are misguided!”  "The Green Party are Nazis!”  “We’d line up the Ruling Class against a wall and shoot them all.”

People are expected to listen to all that without batting an eyelash.  Suddenly, mass murder is alright!

Anybody who disagrees with the SWP about anything is likely to be labelled a racist or a fascist or a Nazi.  The SWP attend national Marxist rallies where they organize sham debates between them and, say, Christian representatives.  Those debates do not last long.  The Christians get insulted, abused and threatened: heckled, jeered and yelled out of the room.  It is just baiting, which gets laid on for the amusement of the herd.

Isolation

It is not possible for a normal member of the public to go along to an SWP meeting, and to sit in to find out what is going on.  The SWP do not respect personal space.  They believe that people must be challenged, provoked and shaken.  The shunning starts immediately.  Bystanders get eyed with suspicion and treated like trespassers.  They soon get accosted by stern, self-righteous, finger-pointing, foot-soldiers whose body language says: “You're not one of us.”

Bystanders who decide to stay receive mind-control treatment.  One of the first things that the SWP tries to do is to separate people from their families and friends, because all cults know that families and friends will try to protect one of their own. 

The SWP also try to limit outside influences.  Hobbies and interests are discouraged.  Members are guided toward political activities.  The SWP insist on detailed study and analysis of every political issue whether it is necessary or not.  That means members have to spend years reading cheerless books written by old and new philosophers; they have no time to read anything else.  A typical SWP member’s bookshelves are filled with party publications, which will probably include the dubious works of working class heroes with titles like “The Thoughts of Johnny Nobody”.

Evasion

People who can be bothered can easily win arguments with the SWP.  That is because much of what they know is received and much of what they say is not just highly controversial but just plain wrong; their dogma is riddled with contradictions and double-standards.  The SWP usually react with evasion tactics.

They might keep trying to change the subject; they go off at a tangent.  The original argument gets lost or forgotten and a different angle gets explored.  

They might use emotional blackmail or the old "have faith" trick: “I can’t explain, but I know I’m right.”  The normal person might feel sorry for them.

They might try to make the argument personal: “Are you calling me a liar?”  Normal persons do not want to fight so they let them have the last word.

They might resort to crass insults or shock tactics to cast doubts in their opponents’ minds: “You are a fascist!”  A normal person might think: “Wow!  If they are that serious, they must be right.”

«If it looks like a duck …

Tony Cliff was probably an Israeli secret intelligence agent who was working for Mossad and the newly created American Central Intelligence Agency.  His mission was probably to recruit left wing activists and to disillusion them by making respectable Marxist theories appear sinister and ridiculous.  He seems to have succeeded.

The SWP is a cult and it is similar to the fictional Borg Collective.  It is totally uncompromising and intolerant of every other political party or well-meaning organisation.  It calls members of the GP, Feminists, Pacifists, Animal Rights Activists and other decent people: racists, fascists and Nazis!  At the same time, it instructs its followers to vote doggedly for the Labour Party, whose members really do include fraudsters and war criminals who advocate and practise euthanasia.

Ask a typical, brain-dead, SWP member why he or she votes for the Labour party.  They cannot explain because they have been programmed that way.

The SWP are just another group of doom and gloom merchants with outlandish solutions.  They pretend to be good people but they are not.  Good people do not resort to mind games.

We do not need a university education to understand politics.  We do not need any lessons in history, philosophy, law, economics, sociology or any other subject.  We just need to ask a few simple questions.

What has the SWP achieved over the last seventy years? The obvious answer in positive terms is nothing. The less obvious answer in negative terms is much. They have wasted lots of valuable resources: good people, energy, and time.

The SWP have severely damaged the trades union movement and the prospects of working class people.

By supporting every workers’ strike, no matter how unworthy, they have helped to bring trades unions into disrepute. A good example of this was British Leyland in the seventies. So called communist trouble makers, who led the union and who behaved like pantomime villains, caused industrial unrest nearly every week; they continually demanded and received “Pools Winning” pay increases until the nationalised company collapsed. Those union leaders were probably undercover establishment agents. Both the government and the bosses played their part; it would not be the last time that an entire industry would be sacrificed in order to destroy a powerful trades union.

They SWP also damage justifiable strikes by well intentioned workers who are just trying to gain fair pay and decent working conditions. The SWP join their picket lines and pretend that their industrial action is the beginning of a revolution; that ensures the loss of public support and the defeat of the strikers.

The SWP’s support for unlimited mass immigration such as the Asian Invasion has played into the hands of the establishment and it has created mass poverty for British natives. All the main political parties, including the GP, support unlimited mass immigration. It is one of their common policy “ID badges”, which unites them. British working class people would be unbelievably wealthy were it not for mass immigration and the web of lies and subterfuge which surround it.

Britain is critically overcrowded; its population needs to be reduced by at least 30 million people. Property developers are building houses on the green belt. Millions of British people cannot afford to buy any kind of accommodation. Hundreds of thousands of British people are homeless. Millions of British people are unemployed; they cannot get jobs because of Positive Discrimination, which puts immigrants first. The capitalist establishment encouraged mass immigration to create blackleg labour which undermines the trades union movement , holds down wages and pushes up prices.

The SWP helps to malign the British working class by chanting their invented “bigot” and “racist” slurs. Anybody who speaks out against mass immigration and the use of “scab labour” gets smeared, and possibly branded and blacklisted for life. That way the SWP helps the establishment to restrict opposition, dissent and freedom of speech.

What was input to the SWP?  Resources were input: people, effort, and money.

What was output to the SWP?  Claptrap, empty promises and double-dealings were output.

Who are the winners?  The Labour party and the conservative establishment are the winners.

Who are the losers?  The losers are the environment and everyone who wants to bring about real change for the common good.⁶

Readers might think that this article is mere lampoonery and a bit improbable.  After all, the SWP do not manage to hold on to all of their followers.  The majority of them grow up; they become disillusioned with the precarious, never ending drudgery, and the total lack of success, not to mention the none-existent rewards.  Thousands of students drop out after graduating; they have to choose between self-sacrifice and self-actualization. 

So, it seems likely that Tony Cliff and his SWP were agents of the establishment.

Look at this. 

The Labour party have just lost an election.  They still have two hundred seats in parliament but they will not use that strength.  Instead, they will do nothing but skulk and mope about and make excuses for the next five to ten years.

Imagine what the GP could do with two hundred MPs!  Without a doubt, they would be running the country.

One of the best things about the Green Party is that it is not a cult.  GP members are not brainwashed; they are not forced to believe or accept anything; they are more or less aloud to say and do what they want.  Let us keep it that way. 

The GP is not perfect, but I think Trotsky would have loved it.

«Footnotes

1)   Friedrich Engels German Socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx in the foundation of modern Communism.  They co-authored the Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.  He died of cancer in London in 1895.  (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008)

2)   Rosa Luxemburg was a polish born Jew who married a German to obtain German citizenship.  She became a revolutionary and agitator who helped to found the Communist Party of Germany.  “Luxemburg advocated the mass strike as the single most important tool of the proletariat, Western as well as Russian, in attaining a socialist victory. The mass strike, the spontaneous result of “objective conditions,” would radicalize the workers and drive the revolution forward.  In contrast to Lenin, she de-emphasized the need for a tight party structure, believing that organization would emerge naturally from the struggle. For this, she has been repeatedly chastised by orthodox communist parties.”  She was assassinated by reactionary troops in 1919.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008)

3)   Was Lenin elitist?

4)   In 1928 Stalin abandoned Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in favour of headlong state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008)

5)   The Stepford Wives was a novel which was written by American author Ira Levin.  It was published circa 1972/73.  It was difficult to classify, but critics called it a feminist science fiction story.  It has since been described as a satirical thriller.  In 1975, British film director Bryan Forbes made it into a disturbing horror movie.  The GOOGLE definition of a Stepford Wife is “someone who is so obedient and perfect that she seems almost like a robot."

6)     Doesn’t that sound populist?

«Wind Up

Some people ask Green Swipe why we continually attack parties on the so-called left.  Well, we do that because they are so disappointing.  They promise so much but deliver so little.  Their supposed opposition to the so-called right is ineffectual.  They have under-performed so consistently over the years that we think that they must be agents of the so-called right.

Why We Shouldn’t
Vote Labour

Caretaker Management: Kinnock, Smith, Blair,
Brown, Miliband and Corbyn.

déjà vu
A General Election will be called soon and the Labour Party (LP) will appeal to working class people like me to vote for them.  They will tell us that things will be different this time because Jeremy Corbyn is in charge.   We may well ask them: “How many chances do Labour want?  We’ve heard it all before!”

Things will not be different this time or any other time, partly because Corbyn is not in total charge.  More than 38% of LP members do not want him and neither do 172 (81%) out of 212 MPs.  Corbyn’s leadership of the LP so far has resulted in proverbial missed opportunities and glorious defeats.

The Zionists have got him hog-tied and they have penned him in.  As far as they are concerned, he is a dirty animal and they do not mind telling him that to his face and in public.  They threaten to slaughter him if he continues to protest against IDF atrocities in Palestine.  He seems to have given in to them.

We might ask: “What about Corbyn’s CND comrades?  Will they not defend him?”  The answer is yes, but they are a minority in the LP.  Corbyn has always believed in the efficacy of nuclear disarmament but, contrary to popular belief, the LP has always advocated nuclear proliferation.  He has had to bow down to those shite-hawks too.

Just imagine how much good could be done with all those billions of pounds which get spent on Trident missiles and Vanguard submarines.  The biggest nuclear threat to Britain is those things bobbing up and down around the coast.

What about the EU and Brexit?  Corbyn could have been on to a winner there.  He always distrusted the EU, and the majority of British people felt the same.  He could have become Britain’s popular leader of the Brexit campaign, but no.  He has had to adopt the LP’s policy on that.  Their 2015 manifesto stated: “Labour believes that our membership of the European Union is central to our prosperity and security.”  Boris Johnson has become Britain’s popular Brexit hero.  Corbyn has become a sad clown: dillydallying, trick-cycling and back-pedalling while trying to flog a dead horse.

Corbyn has already backed down on three important issues while he is still in opposition.  What is he going to be like when Big Business and the U.S. President start bossing him?

What about the LP as a whole?  They cannot all be bad, can they?  Take a look at these three specimens of their badness: War Crimes, the Expenses Scandal, and the WCA Euthanasia programme.

WAR CRIMES

In 2003, Tony Blair instructed Britain’s armed forces to invade Iraq.  His justification was The British Government’s Assessment of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: chemical, biological and nuclear.  It stated that Iraq’s missiles could be made ready in 45 minutes and that they could reach Britain.  I did not believe it and neither did MoD weapons expert David Kelly, but 254 Labour MPs believed it?

Kelly made his thoughts known to the public. The LP’s propaganda machine challenged, ridiculed and embarrassed him and, suddenly, he was found dead in a field.  The police investigation stated that he had taken his own life.  I think, like many other people, that he was murdered.

Iraqi war casualties have been estimated roughly anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000.  British casualties amounted to 179 dead and over 3000 injured.

That is a bloody disgrace by anybody’s reckoning.  British service personnel are skilled technicians.  They ought to be deployed responsibly and for just causes.  They are not toy soldiers who can be played-with and broken by the likes of Tony Blair and his warmongering pals.

After the war, UN inspectors didn’t find much evidence to support the British government’s assessment.

The war was illegal.  It was about regime change: to get rid of Saddam Hussein.  Tony Blair and every minister and MP who supported him are war criminals.  They could still be tried for their war crimes.  Perhaps Corbyn could add that to his list of Things To Do?

PARLIAMENTARY EXPENSES SCANDAL

The Freedom of Information Act came into effect in 2005.  Investigative journalist working for newspapers like The Daily Telegraph immediately started making information requests about parliamentary expenses.  The House of Commons resisted and obstructed the requests until 2009 when the High Court ruled that the information had to be released to the public.

In 2010 criminal charges were brought against six Labour MPs for false accounting: David Chaytor, Jim Devine, Eric Illsley, Denis Macshane, Margaret Moran, and Elliot Morley.  They were all given prison sentences and some of them lost their Right Honourable titles.

Other Labour backbenchers, who got criticized over their expenses, included Ben Chapman, Harry Cohan, and Anne Moffat.  They all stood down.  Lots of others got criticised too.  The superb SALFORD STAR web site had these things to say about their MP Hazel Blears: “Salford one of the most deprived areas of Europe  …  During the year 2006-2008 Hazel was the joint champion of claiming ,,, Altogether, over the last five years, Hazel has claimed £694,462.”  She must have found her time in parliament extremely rewarding: every day yielded another bonanza.

It went on and on.  The fact is, if Labour politicians had kept their hands clean, they would have won the 2010 general election.  The voters decided that Labour’s candidates were just a bunch of light-fingered, swindling, fraudsters.  Instead of voting for Brown’s babes, they voted for Cameron’s crumpets. 

EUPHANASIA PROGRAMME

Have you heard of the NAZI’s T4 Programme?  It was a semi-secret, pre-war, euthanasia programme that the NAZIs experimented with before they got started on their Holocaust final solution.

Chronically sick and disabled people, who were considered to be of no use to society, were invited to appear before a panel of doctors.  The doctors would question them about their ailments and then they would award them points.  If the patients scored low, the doctors would send them to Killing Centres.  There they would be dressed in paper gowns, given lethal injections and cremated.

Does any of that sound familiar?  Anybody who has suffered the degrading and humiliating experience of being “examined” by the Department for Work and Pensions’ “Healthcare Professionals”, will be familiar with it.  The DWP’s Healthcare Professionals are actually: unqualified private practitioners who pretend to be medics.

The LP introduced the Work Capability Assessment in 2008.  The Labour government was concerned that too much money was being paid out to sick and disabled people and it wanted to cut their benefits.  The LP decided that benefit money would be better spent on hiring private contractors to assess sick and disabled people and then to try to prove that they were “fit for work”.  The DWP produced a dreadful fifty-page questionnaire in book form to guide their quacks.  It asked questions like: “Please explain how your cancer prevents you from working?”

The WCA Programme was successful.  Thousands of sick and disabled people had their benefits cut.  Some managed to survive by juggling heating and eating,  Others died from malnutrition, hypothermia, or melancholia: they killed themselves.

In some ways, the NAZI’s T4 euthanasia programme was more humane than Labour’s WCA programme.  The NAZIs employed real doctors and they invested in killing centres where their victims might not have suffered too much.  Labour just let their victims die cheaply at home.

CARETAKERS

Voters need to understand that the LP is not a genuine political party.  It is just a sub-set of a right-wing group of politicians who inhabit the Palace of Westminster.  All the so-called parties are much the same.  That is why so many MPs are able to effortlessly cross the floor to join rival parties.

The role of the LP is to perform caretaker duties.  Labour governments have never achieved anything.  They have never done anything of worth or merit.  The Attlee government (1945-51) took the credit for implementing welfare reforms, which had been planned and drawn up by other parties.  A political consensus at the time would have seen any other party make the same reforms. 

Attlee’s government nationalized most of Britain’s industry.   It was ruined and worthless after the war.  The LP paid out vast sums of taxpayers’ money to private shareholders in return for derelict, scrap and junk infrastructure, which needed to be completely rebuilt and restored with more taxpayers’ money.  Thirty years later, it was all profitable again and Thatcher’s Tory government privatised it all.  That is how it works.

The LP enables the Tory Party.  When voters cannot tolerate any more Tory hardship, they usually vote for the LP.  The LP, having promised allsorts, eases-up a bit.   Then, when the voters have settled down again, the LP hands back the reins of government to the Tories.

This sort of carry-on was acted out ludicrously in recent years by Labour leaders Brown and Miliband who agreed to dumb-down and play the parts of bungling foots so as to make Tory leader Cameron look like a star.

So there we have it.  Jeremy Corbyn bends-over like a glove puppet and the majority of Labour MPs are corrupt, self-interested, lying, cheating, malevolent, murdering, war criminals.

If voters want something much better than caretaker management, something radically different, then they really ought to vote for the Green Party.

WINDUP - ELECTION FEVER 2

Is the Green Party serious about getting elected?  It's easy.  They could just promise to reduce Council Tax bills across the board.  They could also promise to stop taxing unemployed people: that’s a dirty Labour Party trick.  The GP could also promise to look into councillors' expenses: that would probably recover a few quid!

Don’t miss our next post – 

"You’ve Been Conned" – 

Multiculturalism 

Part Two – The American Dream

"Up the women!" "peace man"

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