The voice of our rivals

Interesting excepts of an interview with Ken Livingstone (the man who would-be-mayor-again) here. This is a fascinating insight into his politics:

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

That seems, to me, to sum up his whole career. He doesn't want to slay the monsters, but work with them: Jack the Giant Facilitator.

Now, we might want to ask how the ogres come to power? How it is that the world is so monstrous it takes monsters to run it?

Slightly more than tantatively, we would suggest that it is because we have the domination of the few over the many. We have a world run in the interest of the tiny number of people who own it: and the rest of us need to be quelled in order that to protect those interests; and to do that on a regular basis would make a monster of anyone. We have the option of ridding the world of monsters by ending that monstrous system. That we choose to make that our sole aim is what marks us out as different from those who would befriend the monsters.

The Big Issue

Bought a copy of The Big Issue outside Sainsbury's in Clapham High Street and found that it contained an article by David Harvey (in fact an extract from his new book The Enigma of Capital) which says some things we have long said:

Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes, of course. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding 'Yes it can'.
This will, however, require the mass of the people to give generously of the fruits of their labour to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights) and to suffer environmental degradations galore, to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards which will mean starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom.

and

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

That's why we're contesting this election -- to urge people to organise politically to dispossess the capitalist class and establish a world society of common ownership, democratic control and production solely not profit.

It's not too late to buy this week's Big Issue. But, remember, the real big issue is whether capitalism should be allowed to continue or whether it should be replaced by socialism (not which political non-entity would make the best managing director of UKCapitalism plc).

Putting the case

I went along, last night, to see Richard Headicar of the Socialist Party debating with John Meadowcroft an academic supporter of capitalism. Due to regent's Park football kick-about commitments, I missed the start.

What I was very interested to hear was the end. In his summation Meadowcroft basically abandoned defending capitalism, and resorted to the tried and tested "it's the least worst system we've got." A great rallying cry of conservatives throughout the ages.

Even more significantly, he ditched egalitarianism. It's often overlooked, that Adam Smith's strongest argument for the market was an egalitarian one. He argued that wages were equal (although they might command different money prices, the irksomeness or ease of the job would balance out over the cost, he claimed). More prosaically, his invisible hand was meant to indicate that pursuit of private trade could assist the general good (a useful selection of Smith quotes can be found here).

How could you look someone in the eye and ask them to be the poor part of society?

If that's the best that an ardent supporter of capitalism can muster now, they're in trouble. Let's hope for more opportunities to expose this weakness soon.