Stat attack!

The people of Tulse Hill should be rich. Some 5,000 or so of you work between 31 and 48 hours per week. That is, Tulse Hill Ward alone is producing a minimum of 155,000 hours of work a week. There’s a further thousand working more than 49 hours. This is a highly educated workforce: over 800 work in education, 700 in Information and communication and nearly a thousand in professional and scientific activities. So, this is an area that would be called by some “middle class”, with professional office based work predominating.

Yet, in such an area, only 600 households own their home outright, and thirteen hundred homes are owner occupied with mortgages. Over two thousand households are in social accommodation, and fifteen hundred rent privately. 2,400 households have one dimension of deprivation (unemployment, overcrowding, lack of education or disability), twelve hundred have two and 490 have three of those four states.

The picture is, that the majority of people in Tulse Hill have to work in order to keep their home, or to keep deprivation away. They may work with their minds or skills, but they are working class non-the-less, selling their ability to work in order to access the means of living. So, they don’t get to use those 155,000 hours of weekly work to make their area better, to look after those unable to work, or anything of the sort. Those 155,000 hours are fed into a system that generates profits for the tiny minority who own the means of living and who demand our labour to get to it.

All statistics from here

From the comments box:

vin maratty said...

I wish you all the best for the elections but - as I understand Marx and your position - the material conditions for socialism do not exist within capitalism: class consciousness. The election will only show that the workers neither understand nor want socialism.

As my colleague has already said: we don't expect to win, just to raise class consciousness. More than that, though, how can we know the state of class consciousness unless we test it in the most effective way available, through the universal franchise?

More importantly, though, if people let others know about their class consciousness, the more chance we have of spreading it and building it. That's why it is important that, if you live in either of the constituencies we're contesting, and you support the socialist case, that you vote for us.