On transitional programme as a socialist alternative to the cuts -Guildford Against Fees And Cuts

How to oppose the cuts with a socialist transitional programme – including taking the banks under full social ownership and control, recouping bailout money, and closing tax havens and loopholes.

Eddie Ford (‘War on the working class’, June 24) correctly says that “it was always going to be the working class that would have to pay the price” for the massive financial crisis when “catastrophe was only narrowly averted by frantic and massive state intervention”. Under capitalism, there is no choice, especially with the mainstream parties needing to avoid clobbering largely middle class floating voters!

It is easy to say tax the rich and bash the bankers, and saying so is very popular at the current time, but what would be the consequences of doing so (more than the token £2 billion the coalition will raise from its levy on the banks which is chicken feed compared to the £375 billion bailout)? Companies and rich individuals would flood overseas. It is necessary to argue for the confiscation of their assets in this country if they do so, and to spread the revolution worldwide so there is nowhere to run to – but unfortunately few revolutionary socialists make such points even if they are aware of them. And if you don’t make such points, you ultimately lose the debate – as Green MP Caroline Lucas (who calls herself a socialist but not a revolutionary) did on Question Time on June 24 and as Counterfire’s Lindsey German (formerly of the SWP) did in a Radio 2 debate I heard on July 13.

Newsnight on the night of the budget pointed out that the Tories plan £40 billion per year more cuts than Labour did, showing chancellor George Osborne’s claim that the VAT rise is necessary because of the deficit accrued under Labour to be an utter lie. So much for the debate during the election campaign over the mere matter of £6 billion of cuts and the Tories’ claim that cuts will be achieved without hampering front-line services and would happen merely through not filling vacancies and cancelling IT contracts! Eddie is therefore correct to call the cuts “vicious” and point out that they don’t need to be as high as 25%.

So how do the Tories and their Liberal Democrat allies plan to avert another economic meltdown? By lowering corporation tax, by 1% each year for four years, and by giving incentives for small businesses. Once again, it is easy to say they shouldn’t help their business friends in that way but, under capitalism, they’ve got to do something (which means competing with other capitalist countries in a similar economic mess). After all, the Tories decimated manufacturing industry under Maggie Thatcher due to the unions being strong, and it has shrunk from 20% of the economy to a mere 12% under Labour. But it’s desperate stuff, bound not to work in my opinion.

Eddie correctly points to the likelihood of a double-dip recession as a result of the cuts, and I’d add that a depression rather than merely a second dip is on the cards. He says “we need a strategy leading to an alternative society” [his emphasis]. So what strategy does he propose – “a united Communist Party, guided by a principled Marxist programme”. Well, the Campaign for a Marxist Party didn’t take off at all, and the Greek Communist Party has been leading the protests there, but what has been missing in Greece is an adequate programme. To me, that is more important than the precise form of party, although I’d recommend a mass revolutionary socialist or anti-capitalist party not tied to any particular ideology.

In the budget response special of the Scottish Socialist Voice, newspaper of the Scottish Socialist Party, Raphie de Santos proposes a nine-point transitional programme including: “We would take the banks under full social ownership and control – they have £560 billion in liquid cash and £5 trillion of assets. This would not only allow us to recoup the £375 billion that we have ploughed into them during the financial crisis but allow us to fund socially useful projects.

An example of this would be a renewable energy programme. The design, administration, construction, maintenance, running, assembly, commissioning and servicing of the programme would create hundreds of thousand of jobs and apprenticeships for our young and old.” (downloadable from http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org).

I see this sort of demand, alongside a call for closing tax havens and loopholes (which Raphie also calls for), as key to winning the struggle. Merely calling for a revolution is not enough, although it’s important that some people do so!

By Steve Wallis
Web: http://www.prsocialism.org
Email: revolutionarysocialiststeve@yahoo.co.uk
Reprinted from the UK Left Network forum
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America’s strategy for world domination

Security & Control By Noam Chomsky

September 15, 2010
America’s strategy for world domination

A Pentagon study released on August 13 expressed government concerns that China is expanding its military forces in ways that “could deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off the coast,” Thom Shanker reports in the New York Times. Off the coast of China, that is; it has yet to be proposed that that the US eliminate military forces that could deny the ability of Chinese warships to operate off American coasts.

Washington is concerned further that “China’s lack of openness about the growth, capabilities and intentions of its military injects instability to a vital region of the globe.” The US, in contrast, is quite open about its intention to operate freely throughout the “vital region of the globe” surrounding China (as elsewhere). It also advertises its vast capacity to do so, with a growing military budget that roughly matches the rest of the world combined, hundreds of military bases worldwide, and a huge lead in the technology of destruction and domination.

China’s lack of understanding of the rules of international civility is illustrated further by its objections to plans for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington to join naval exercises a few miles off China’s coast, with alleged capacity to strike Beijing. In contrast, the West understands that such US operations are all undertaken to defend stability and its own security.

The term “stability” has a technical meaning in discourse on international affairs: domination by the US. The usage is so routine as to pass without notice. Thus no eyebrows are raised when a respected analyst, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile in 1973, it was necessary to “destabilize” the country by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship, which proceeded to slaughter and torture with abandon and to set up an international terror network that helped install similar regimes elsewhere, always with US backing, in the interest of stability and security.

It is also routine to recognize that US security requires absolute control. The premise was given a scholarly imprimatur in the first book on the roots of George W. Bush’s preventive war doctrine, by the noted Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis. As he explains, the operative principle is that expansion is “the path to security,” a doctrine he traces admiringly to the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual author of Manifest Destiny. When Bush warned “that Americans must `be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives’,” Gaddis observes, “he was echoing an old tradition rather than establishing a new one,” reiterating principles that presidents from Adams to Woodrow Wilson “would all have understood…very well.”

Wilson’s successors have also understood very well; for example, Clinton, whose doctrine was that the US is entitled to use military force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” with no need even to concoct pretexts of the Bush variety. The US therefore must keep huge military forces “forward deployed” in Europe and Asia “in order to shape people’s opinions about us” and “to shape events that will affect our livelihood and our security” (Defense Secretary William Cohen). This prescription for permanent war is a new strategic doctrine, military historian Andrew Bacevich observes, later amplified by Bush and Obama.

The traditional doctrine is understandable. As every Mafia Don knows, even the slightest loss of control might lead to unraveling of the system of domination as others are encouraged to follow a similar path. This central principle of power is familiarly formulated as the “domino theory,” which translates in practice to the recognition that the “virus” of successful independent development might “spread contagion” elsewhere, and therefore must be destroyed while potential victims of the plague are inoculated, usually by brutal dictatorships.

According to the Pentagon study, China’s military budget is expanding, approaching “one-fifth of what the Pentagon spent to operate and carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” a fraction of the US military budget of course. The concerns are understandable, on the virtually unchallenged assumption that the US must maintain “unquestioned power” over much of the world, with “military and economic supremacy,” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs.

These were the principles established by high-level planners and foreign policy experts during World War II, as they developed the framework for the post-war World, largely implemented. The US was to maintain this dominance in a “Grand Area,” which was to include at a minimum the Western hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire, including the crucial energy resources of the Middle East. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, Grand Area goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, at least its economic core in Western Europe. It was always understood that Europe might choose to follow an independent course, perhaps the Gaullist vision of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. NATO was partially intended to counter this threat, and the issue remains very much alive today as NATO is expanded to a US-run intervention force with particular responsibility to control the “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system on which the West relies.