The Austerity Show or a Real Alternative?

We're All in it Together?

British families are on average £910 worse off than they were two years ago. Rising food, clothing and energy prices mean the average British family will have £910 less to spend this year than they did in 2009.The squeeze - which is considered the worst in peacetime for 90 years - is set to continue with a two per cent fall in household disposable income this year. The fall in disposable income is comparable with the savage post-World War One recession which lasted between 1919 and 1921, as a result of a collapse in manufacturing and international trade. The fall in household disposable income is sharper than in the 1930s depression.



David Kynaston's Work on Post WW2 Austerity

Employment Rights? Forget It!

Employment lawyers have predicted that older workers and pregnant women will be hit by a fresh wave of job cuts. Paul Griffin, head of employment at DBS Law, said: "The growth of discrimination claims from older workers and pregnant women suggests that employers are now targeting their more expensive staff, despite them being in protected groups. Obviously mistakes are being made in companies as accounts departments win out against human resources."  

Make no mistake, the wealth of the ruling capitalist elite is founded upon extracting surplus value from the labour of waged or salaried workers, so it should be no surprise the Financial Directors call the shots.

Meanwhile the UK coalition government, under the auspices of Business Secretary Vince Cable is quickly preparing  legislation to prevent workers having any legal rights if ruthless employers sack them unfairly within the first two years of employment.

Edvard Munch - The Scream

Economic, Political and Social Crisis

Presently, the savage public sector cutbacks include sacking front line workers which the State previously tacitly pretended were there to support working people through Capitalism's unpredictable twists and turns.  These include nursing, ambulance, elderly, youth and children's workers, Job Centre Plus and CAB debt advice staff to name but a few. 

The Capitalist state has never provided these services out of  kindliness - contrary to received wisdom - it has, for example NEVER been OUR NHS or Welfare State.  It was created out of the necessity of maintaining social order, and patching up and maintaining a cheap and productive supply of  wage slave labour in the mid 20th Century after the Second World War. But the Post WW2 settlement with the official Labour Movement is now long over.  The Historic role of the British Labour Party as a mediating factor between Capital and the British Working Class is finished.  Long Dead.  Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair saw to that.  And no bad thing as the Labour Party has been a brake upon any meaningful aspiration for the Working Class for over a Century. 

Social Breakdown

What comes next is difficult to predict as the sense of crisis and capitalist malaise deepens within the ruling elite.  Capitalist political parties of all stripes have no more wriggle room within what is now a moribund system tested to destruction.  Quick credit fuelled booms followed by long slumps seem to be the prevailing trend.
All around us the infrastructure of communities are breaking down further and the inevitable social division and personal misery caused by the requirements of Capitalism to restore profitability for a minority of wealthy elitists is necessarily despoiling the lives of all the generations caught up in this economic, political and social failure.  Just take a look around any town centre on a weekday.  Boarded up shops, pubs, and dole queues are there for all to see - but that doesn't tell the full story. 

The Malaise within the Elite

The real crisis is within the world ruling elite.  They know their system has failed - and they have no answers.  Far from Thatcher's 'There is No Alternative' (TINA) of yore, now apparently, 'We're All in This Together', according to UK Prime Minister - the Millionaire minor aristocrat Dave Cameron who is married to a multi-millionheiress. 

Until the Next Crisis?

And when, inevitably, the profit system undergoes a recovery of sorts, however slowly and sluggishly, despite what may occur in the interim, we will all be expected to carry on and continue creating value from our labour for the ruling elite.  Until the next crisis. And the next one after that. 

There is an Alternative

And it has never been tried before. It is founded firstly in an understanding of the basis of our insecurity and exploitation, which is the world system of production for profit.  That is the Capitalist Mode of Production.  We must think and discuss this fundamental fetter upon Humanity constantly in a spirit of openness, and keep in close touch with what other people are thinking. 

Capitalism Can be Beaten

Capitalism can be beaten once everyone decides it can be beaten.  And then we can set about organising a higher and more Human form of society in a completely new way.  We can collectively build upon the positive achievements of Capitalism, and they are many, to create a new and truly democratic world society in which production is for need and not for profit, in which people co-operate rather than compete to produce the necessities of life. 

Ghost of a Ne'er do Well stands for a world society in which Human ingenuity and creativity will be placed at the secular altar of majority Human need and not the pyre of minority Capitalist expropriation.  It is not about trying to reform or regulate a social system which has reached its useful objective limits, it is about creating a new world society.  It is impossible to be neutral in this debate.