Book on Revolutionary Trade Unionism, Fascism and the Corporative State

David D. Roberts, Syndicalist Tradition & Italian Fascism (University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

Syndicalism is a form of revolutionary socialism that seeks to overthrow the liberal state and replace it with a society based on the trade unions in which they run industry. It was particularly strong in France, and played a major role in Catalonia and the struggle against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. It has also been a strand in the British labour movement, and produced a peculiar British form, Guild Socialism, whose leaders included the great socialist writer and former Fabian, G.D.H. Cole.

Fascism Mixture of Different Groups

Fascism was a strange, heterogenous mixture of different, and often conflicting groups. These included former syndicalists, radicalised veterans from the First World War, ultra-conservative Nationalists and the Futurists, an aggressive modern artistic movement that celebrated war, speed, violence, masculinity, airplanes, cars and the new machine age. Some of these groups shared roughly the same ideas. The war veterans were deeply impressed with the corporative constitution drafted by Alceste de Ambris for D’Annunzio’s brief regime in Fiume, the Carta de Carnaro. Superficially, the Fascist syndicalists shared the same goal of creating a corporate state to govern industrial relations and run industry. However, they approached this from very different directions. The Nationalists, led by Alfredo Rocco, were ultra-Conservative businessmen, who attacked liberal democracy because of the corruption involved in Italian politics. At the same time they feared the power of the organised working class. As Italy modernised, it underwent a wave of strikes. In response, Rocco recommended that the state should take over the trade unions, using them as its organ to discipline the workers, keep the masses in their place while training them to perform their functions efficiently in the new, industrial Italy. The syndicalists, on the other hand, wanted the trade unions to play a role in industrial management and at the same time draw the working class into a fuller participation in politics. The working class had been excluded from the liberal state, but through their economic organisations, the unions, they could play a much fuller role as these governed their everyday lives. They saw the corporations and the corporate state as a means of increasing democracy and popular participation, not limiting it.

Fascist Corporativism

The corporations themselves are industrial organisations rather like the medieval guilds or trade unions. However, they included both the trade unions and employers organisations. There were already nine of them, but by the end of the regime in 1943 there were 27. Under Rocco’s Labour Charter, the Carta del Lavoro, strikes and lockouts were forbidden in the name of industrial peace and class collaboration. The corporation were required to settle labour disputes. However, if management and the unions were unable to reach agreement, then the dispute was to be referred to labour magistracy for settlement in special labour courts. Mussolini also reformed the Italian parliament, transforming the Chamber of Deputies into a Chamber of Fasces and Corporations. In practice the corporate state never amounted to very much. It never won over real working class support, and the corporations were never given real legislative power. It merely added another layer of bureaucracy and acted as nothing more than a rubber stamp to pass the policies Mussolini had already made. And he seems to have used it as ideological window dressing to give the impression that here was more to Fascism than his personal dictatorship.

The Unification of Italy and Political Alienation

The book argues that the corporate state was a genuine attempt to solve the deep problems of Italian unification left over from the Risorgimento. At the same time, it was also a radical response to the crisis, breakdown and revision of Marxist socialism and the failure of Marxist syndicalism in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The process of unification has produced an attitude of deep alienation from the state and politics amongst Italians, and Fascism was partly a response to this. This alienation isn’t confined to Italians, but it is particularly acute. Social studies in the 1970s showed that Italians are less likely than Americans, Brits or Germans to become politically involved. They regard the state as distant with little interest in them. At the same time, there is also an expectation that the bureaucrats in Rome will help them.

Like Germany, Italy was unified by military force and the invasion of the other, constituent states. However, for reasons of speed and a determination to preserve the new nation’s fragile unity, the other Italian states were simply annexed by Piedmont to be governed from there. There was supposed to be a constituent assembly in which the other states were to have their say in the creation of the new Italy, but this simply didn’t happen. At the same time, the industrialisation promoted by Italian liberals was concentrated in the north, so that the south remained backward and agricultural. The franchise was extremely restricted. It excluded illiterates, so that originally only 2 per cent of the population could vote. This was later extended to 7 per cent. At the same time, Italy’s leaders prevented the formation of proper political parties by taking over individuals from different parliamentary factions in order to form workable governing majorities. At the same time there was discontent and widespread criticism of the protectionism imposed to help the development of Italian heavy industry. Middle class critics believed that this unfairly benefited it at the expense of more dynamic and productive sectors of the economy. This led to the belief that Italy was being held back by class of political parasites.

This backwardness also led to an acute sense of pessimism amongst the elite over the character of the Italian people themselves. The Americans, British and Germans were disciplined with proper business values. Italians, on the other hand, were lazy, too individualistic and defied authority through lawlessness. This meant that liberalism was inadequate to deal with the problems of Italian society. ‘This English suit doesn’t fit us’, as one Fascist said. But this would change with the adoption of Fascism. One of Mussolini’s minions once declared that, thanks to Fascism, hard work and punctuality were no longer American, German and British values.

Syndicalism, Marxism and the Revision of Socialism

By the 1890s there was a crisis throughout Europe in Marxist socialism. Marx believed that the contradictions in capitalism and the continuing impoverishment of working people would lead to eventual revolution. But at this stage it was evident that capitalism was not collapsing. It was expanding, wages were rising and the working class becoming better off. This led to the reformist controversy, in which socialist ideologues such as Bernstein in Germany recommended instead that socialist parties should commit themselves to reforming capitalism gradually in order to create a socialist society. The syndicalists were originally Marxists, who looked forward to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. However, they became increasingly disenchanted with Marxism and critical of the leading role of the working class. They originally believed, as with the French syndicalist Georges Sorel, that the class-conscious workers would be a new source of values. But they weren’t. They also believed that this would only be achieved through a long process of education through general strikes. They were horrified by the biennio rosso, the two years of strikes and industrial unrest that came after the end of the war, when it seemed that the Italian labour movement was going to follow the Russian Bolsheviks and create a revolution for which Italy and it working class were not ready.

At the same time, they came to reject Marxism’s doctrine that the political was determined by the economic sphere. They believed that Italy’s political problems could not be reduced to capitalism. Hence they believed that capitalism and private industry should be protected, but made subordinate to the state. Work was a social duty, and any industrial who did not run his company properly could, in theory, be removed and replaced. They also sought to give the workers a greater role in industrial management. This led them to go beyond the working class. They found a new revolutionary group in the Italian war veterans, who were radicalised by their experiences. These would have joined the socialists, but the latter had been strongly neutralist and as a result rejected and ridiculed the former soldiers for their patriotism. These found their ideological and political home with the syndicalists. At the same time, the syndicalists rejection of Marxist socialism led to their rediscovery of other, non-Marxist socialist writers like Mazzini, who also rejected liberalism in favour of a tightly knit Italian nation. Their bitter hatred of the corruption in Italian politics and its parasites led them to join forces with anarchists and other sectors of the Italian radical tradition. They believed that for Italy truly to unite and modernise, the workers should join forces with properly modernising industrialists in an alliance of producers.

Syndicalist Opposition to Mussolini’s Rapprochement to the Socialists

Looking at the development of Italian Fascism, it can seem that there was a certain inevitability to the emergence of Mussolini’s dictatorship and the totalitarian Fascist state. But this argues that there was nothing inevitable about it, and that it was forced on Mussolini in order to stop his movement falling apart. When Mussolini entered parliament and took over as prime minister, he seemed to be transforming what was originally a movement into the very type of party that the Fascist rank and file were in revolt against. Fascism was reconstituted as a party, and when the future Duce met the kind, he wore the top hat and frock coat of an establishment politician. Worse, Mussolini had started out as a radical socialist, and still seemed determined to work with them and other working class and left-wing parties. He signed a pacification pact with the Socialists and Populists, the Roman Catholic party, stopping the Fascist attacks on them, the trade unions and workers’ and peasants’ cooperatives. This horrified the syndicalists, who saw it as a threat to their own programme of winning over the workers and creating the new, corporatist order. As a result they pressurised Mussolini into rescinding that pacts, Mussolini and Fascism moved right-ward to ally with the capitalists and industry in the destruction of working class organisations.

Syndicalists and the Promotion of the Working Class

But it seems that the syndicalists were serious about defending the working class and giving it a proper role through the corporations in the management of industry and through that, political participation in the Italian state. Left Fascists like Olivetti and Ugo Spirito believed that the Italian state should operate a mixed economy, with the state running certain companies where appropriate, and the trade unions owning and managing cooperatives. Some went further, and recommended that the corporations should take over the ownership of firms, which would be operated jointly by management and the workers. This never got anywhere, and was denounced by other left syndicalists, like Sergio Pannunzio, one of their leaders.

From Internationalism to Imperialism

The book also raises grim astonishment in the way it reveals how the Syndicalists, who were initially quite internationalist in outlook, came to support Fascist imperialism. They shared the general Fascist view that Italy was being prevented from developing its industry through British and French imperialism. The two powers blocked Italy from access to trading with their colonies. They were therefore also critical of the League of Nations when it was set up, which they saw as an attempt by the great powers to maintain the international status quo. The Nationalists, who were formally merged with the Fascists, went further and demanded that Italy too should have an empire to benefit its industry, but also to provide land for colonisation by the surplus Italian population. Without it, they would continue to be forced to emigrate to countries like America and Britain, where they would become the lowest and most despised part of their working class. The syndicalists were also acutely aware of how low Italians were regarded and exploited in these countries, even by other members of the working class.

The syndicalists during the war and early post-war years criticised the Nationalists for their militarism and imperialism. Instead of looking forward to perpetual war, as the Nationalists did, they wanted to see instead the emergence of a new, federal European order in which nations would cooperate. This new federal state would eventually cover the world. They also looked forward to a new, equitable arrangement over access to the colonies. Pannunzio did support colonialism, which he believed was bringing civilisation to backward areas. But he also believed that colonies that were unable to become nations in their own right should be taken over by the League of Nations. Pannunzio declared ‘Egotism among nations is a material and moral absurdity; nations … cannot lived closed and isolated by must interact and cooperate’. This changed as time went on and Mussolini established the corporate state. This was always fragile and tentative, and accompanied by concessions to other sectors of Fascism on the right. In order to defend their fragile gains, the syndicalists gave their full backing to the Second World War and its imperialism, which they saw as a crusade to bring the corporate state, the great Italian achievement, but a backward world.

Workers Should Have a Role In Government, But Not Through Totalitarianism

I have to say I like certain aspects of the corporate state. I like the idea of trade unionists actively involved in the management of industry and in a special department of parliament, although as Sidney and Beatrice Webb point out in their Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, there are severe drawbacks with it. But any such corporatist chamber would have to be an expansion of liberal democracy, not a replacement for it. And I utterly reject and despise Fascism for its vicious intolerance, especially towards socialism and the working class, its rejection of democracy, and especially the militarism, imperialism and racism. Like Nazism it needs to be fought everywhere, in whatever guise it arises.

And the book makes very clear that the corporate state was an exaggerated response to genuine Italian problems, problems that could be solved within liberal, democratic politics.

Perhaps one day we shall see the return of trade unionists to parliaments reformed to allow them to play their proper role in government and industry. I make this recommendation in my booklet, For A Worker’s Chamber. But it should never be through any kind of autocratic, totalitarian regime.

Democratic Party Leader Donna Brasile Reveals Party Controlled by Hillary Before Her Nomination

This is another piece of political dynamite. In this clip from the Jimmy Dore show, the comedian and his two co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, discuss the latest revelation about the corruption within the Democrat party.

And it’s a doozy.

Donna Brasile, who took over as head of the Democratic Party after Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught corruptly acting for Clinton, has a new book coming out about the state of the Democrat Party during the presidential elections. Well, Killary has, so she may as well put her oar in as well. A passage from the book was published in Politico magazine. It was entitled ‘Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC’. It reveals how the DNC made a secret deal with Clinton in which they signed over nearly all the fundraising money and gave her control of the political campaign, including strategy and staffing.

Brasile is also corrupt like her predecessor, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. During the Democratic presidential nominations, she was leaking debate questions to Hillary, so she would have the advantage over Bernie.

And I know this is just ad hominem, or rather, ad feminam, but to me Brasile looks like the Afro-American cousin of Mrs Slocombe from the classic BBC comedy series, Are You Being Served?

Are You Being Served’s Mrs. Slocombe

The Democrat National Convention’s Donna Brasile

Brasile starts by slagging off her predecessor, dismissing Schultz as ‘not a good manager’. She then goes on to reveal the details of the deal. Under the laws set down by the Federal Election Commission, an individual can only give a maximum of $2,700 directly to an individual in the presidential elections. The limits are, however, much higher for the parties in the individual states. The donors, who had already contributed this amount to Killary’s campaign, could contribute another $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund. This represented $10,000 to the parties of the 32 states, who were part of the agreement, which made up $320,000, and $33,400 to the DNC.

She also mentions that the party usually shrinks the number of staff in the period between presidential elections. But Wasserman Schultz had decided not to do that. She had placed a great number of consultants on the payroll, and Obama’s consultants were also being paid by the party as well. Here Dore points out that this shows the contempt the party has for anyone except their donors. The party was already in serious financial trouble, but Wasserman Schultz was serving the consultants and donors from whom the party was taking money, not its grassroots supporters.

Brasile goes on to say that about the time of the Convention, leaked emails revealed how Clinton was keeping most of the money, and very little was going to the state parties. A Politico story published on May 2 2016, quoted Hillary as saying that they would concentrate on building the party up from the bottom. That’s how they were going to win. Instead the states kept less than half of one per cent of the $82 million they had raised.

Then Brasile found the document that would prove to be the smoking gun in the shape of the Joint Fundraising Agreement itself between the Democratic National Convention, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America. The Agreement was signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, amongst others, and a copy sent to Marc Elias, Killary’s lawyer. It specified that Killary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised in return for raising money and investing in the party.

Killary’s campaign would have the right of refusal over who was the party’s communications director, and the final decision on other staff. It also bound the DNC to consult Killary over all other staffing, budget decisions, data and mailings.

This explains why Tulsi Gabbard got removed from the DNC when she suggested that there should be more debates, because Bernie did well in them.

The agreement was signed in August 2015, four months after Killary had announced her candidacy, and nearly a year before she got the nomination.

Brasile also goes on to say that she tried to find other incriminating documents or evidence of corruption within the DNC, but did not find any. Dore pours scorn on this, pointing out that Brasile herself was involved in a series of shady moves to give the nomination to Killary over Bernie Sanders. She also states that the agreement was not illegal, but it was certainly unethical. It wasn’t a criminal act, but it compromised the party’s integrity. This comment again draws very heavy sarcasm from Dore, as it’s just about the worse act of corruption that could possibly be done. It sweeps away any kind of democracy or popular accountability within the party and places it very much under the personal, dictatorial control of a single individual. She also states that she didn’t trust the polls. Touring the country slocombe – er, I mean Brasile, had found there was little enthusiasm for Hillary. And she was particularly worried about Obama supporters and millennials.

Dore, Placone and Zamorano also take the point to reproach the show’s critics for defending Hillary from these charges of corruption, and the smears and accusations they had made against Killary’s left-wing rivals. Dore reminds his audience how he and the other left-wingers were told they were ‘misogynists’, because they backed Bernie against Killary. And because a group of lads had thrown dollars bills after her in protest at her taking money from the corporations and Wall Street. This was despite the fact that Dore himself had voted for the Green New Deal, and its presidential nominee, Jill Stein. Who was very definitely a woman. And throwing money at Hillary and calling her a corporate whore is just fair comment. She is a corporate whore, just like all the corporate whores, male and female, in politics around her.

As for all the accusations she made about Donald Trump conspiring with Russia to steal the election from her, this was exactly what Killary tried to do. She had made a deal with the Russian intelligence services to get dirt on Trump. Whatever the Clinton campaign claims is happening, he says, you can bet that the opposite is true. He also responds to Killary’s comments attributing her failure to having the election stolen from her by stating that Killary had also tried to steal the election through rigged primaries and superdelegates. And then there’s the highly undemocratic electoral college. With an exasperated sigh he asks the rhetorical question of how she could lose to someone like Trump.

He names all the various politicos and celebrities, who attacked him for not backing Hillary, including the producer of the Family Guy. He makes the point that the Democratic Party was lying to its supporters. It wasn’t the Russians, it wasn’t Trump, it was the Democrats, lying to their own grassroots supporters about the corruption within it. He is also angry about how people are turning their anger over their cavalier treatment by the Democrats and Killary on the Jimmy Dore Show. These are people who are poorly raised and have no power. If they really want to show how brave they are, instead of attacking a jag-off YouTube show, as Dore describes it, they should take those who are really powerful. Like Killary and her backers in the DNC.

But the Democratic left and ordinary people are sick of it. Various groups, including progressives and the unions, and in fact 80 per cent of the party, are talking about breaking with the Democrats and forming their own. He urges Bernie Sanders to join them and form a third party, rather than urging people to join the Democrats.There’s no point in anyone joining the Democrat party, as in the view of Dore and his co-hosts, the Democratic Party is dead.

These revelations should have repercussions over here in Britain. The Blairites in the Labour party are joined at the hip to the Clinton Democrats. Blair modelled his New Labour on the Clintons’ New Democrats, copying their policy of adopting the policies of their right-wing opponents in order to win them over at the expense of ignoring their own working class grassroots.

And just as the Clintonites started screaming and libelling anyone who dared to think that Bernie and his policies of strong unions, protectionism and single-payer healthcare were better for America as ‘misogynists’, so the Blairites over here did the same to anyone and everyone who supported Jeremy Corbyn. Because obviously wishing to return to strong unions, higher wages, better workplace rights for employees, proper welfare provision and the renationalisation of the railways and electricity, and an end to the privatisation of the NHS, are real threats to women’s welfare.

Of course they aren’t. The only women they threaten are the Blairite shills in the Labour party and the media, including the Groaniad, who regard the real horny-handed sons and daughters of toil with a mixture of horror and condescension, and confidently expected that, as upper middle class gels from public schools, they were entitled to a place in government along with their brothers from the same class and educational background.

This applies to the various media hackettes, who were raving about Killary’s tour promoting her book What Happened in Britain and the rest of the world the week before last. One of them raved about how, when Killary spoke at the South Bank Centre, women brought their daughters to hear her. She was inspirational! Well, she is to women, who also have an absolute lack of any real morals and admire a corrupt, corporate shill and ravening warmonger. A woman without absolutely any qualms about backing right-wing Fascist coups in small Latin American states. And then, when she loses the election, throws a colossal tantrum and blames everyone else except her, and particularly the Russians.

A woman, who falsely claims that she’s an outsider, simply because she’s female, while being just as much an insider as the men with whom she works and against whom she competes. While also consistently voting against those measures which would improve the lot of ordinary women. Like Medicare For All, stronger welfare provision, better wages and regulation of the banks, so that ordinary folks would not have to pay higher taxes to bail out greedy financiers after they destroyed the economy. Policies that would allow poor women, and this means just about everyone in America and Britain who aren’t rich, to eat, rather than starve in order to feed their children and pay the utility bills.

And, you know, ending foreign wars so that women don’t have to watch and fear for their daughters, sons, husbands and friends coming back from the Middle East with broken or missing limbs and shattered minds, or in body bags.

You know. Those kind of misogynistic policies.

With these revelations, I think everyone in the Labour party, who were smeared as anti-female for supporting Corbyn, is owed an apology by Rachel Reed and their friends in the media.

But I ain’t holding my breath.

The Rise of Fascism and the Failure of Neoliberal Capitalism

Today Mike put up a very good piece attacking Theresa May’s speech praising capitalism as the greatest force in human history for raising people out of poverty. In fact, as Mike shows, the type of neoliberal crony capitalism May is really in favour of, has done nothing but reduce people to poverty. The force that raised living standards in Britain and gave British people the highest standard of living that they enjoyed in 1977 was the mixed economy of democratic socialism and the welfare state introduced after the War, and which the Tories have been trying to destroy ever since the rise of Thatcher.

This should come as no surprise. The Korean economist, Ha=Joon Chang, makes pretty much the same case in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Chang is also an admirer of capitalism, but his book is a sustained attack on Thatcherite neoliberalism. He shows that every country in the world has begun its rise to economic prosperity through protectionism, and that the countries with the most flexible labour markets and stable, prosperous industries are those with a mixed economy of socialized and private industries and a welfare state. And this includes those countries, where the industries may not be nationalized, but the workers have a share in the management, such as in Germany and Austria.

And the decline of socialism and communism in Europe has had terrible consequences. On Tuesday Counterpunch published a lengthy article by Gregory Barrett commenting on the rise on votes for the Nazi Alternative fuer Deutschland, The German Election: The West’s Nervous Breakdown Continues. He makes the point that this was assisted by the massive poverty and disillusionment caused by the failure of western capitalism to improve the lives of people in eastern Europe. He writes

As Stephen Gowans writes in his recent essay “We Lived Better Then”:

‘Of course, none of the great promises of the counterrevolution were kept. While at the time the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was proclaimed as a great victory for humanity, not least by leftist intellectuals in the United States, two decades later there’s little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well. Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries, where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them — and from humanity as a whole: “We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security.” And with the threat of jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats many. They too lived better — once.’

While the often racist and xenophobic manner in which East Germans and Eastern Europeans express their anger at what they see as an influx of foreigners who go to the front of the line for Western largesse — while the 30-year betrayal of the promises and misleading propaganda directed at themselves from 1989 to 1991 continues, although unacknowledged — is ugly and despicable, it is not hard to understand in its historical context. Somehow the assurances of the good life for all, thanks to the benevolent “invisible hand of the free market”, and the forecasts of blooming landscapes of prosperity across Eastern Europe, have failed to materialize. After more than a quarter of a century, prosperous areas exist but are exceedingly rare. In East Germany many small towns and villages are dying, and the population is shrinking as many follow the jobs westward, since few major employers have chosen to come eastward to them. Unemployment is much higher than in West Germany, and the cultural divisions between the citizens of the old DDR and West Germans have proven very stubborn and difficult to overcome. But the damage has not been confined to those in the formerly socialist countries. As Stephen Gowans points out:

‘But that’s only part of the story. For others, for investors and corporations, who’ve found new markets and opportunities for profitable investment, and can reap the benefits of the lower labor costs that attend intensified competition for jobs, the overthrow of socialism has, indeed, been something to celebrate. Equally, it has been welcomed by the landowning and industrial elite of the pre-socialist regimes whose estates and industrial concerns have been recovered and privatized. But they’re a minority. Why should the rest of us celebrate our own mugging?

This poverty hasn’t been confined to eastern Europe. It’s led to us in the west being forced to work harder, for less pay, and fewer welfare benefits. Otherwise capital simply outsources our jobs to one of the eastern European nations.

He then examines the way Merkel and the Christian Democrats, and the other right-wing parties have persuaded their workers to vote for policies which only benefit the rich industrialists. This is by stressing ‘innere sicherheit’, ‘internal security’, and the threat to it posed by crime and immigrants. Just like the Tories, Kippers and other parties of the right over here. She also took credit for many of the welfare reforms initiated by the SDP, the German equivalent of our Labour party. This has led to the SDP being reduced to only 20 per cent of the vote, and they have said that they are no longer available as coalition partners. Barrett is extremely pessimistic, stating it is probably too late, with the exception of Britain, to save Europe’s Social Democratic heritage. Germany now joins the Netherlands as a country, whose political landscape is a mosaic of competing parties. A landscape in which one element is the extreme right, who believe she betrayed Germany by allowing an influx of migrants.

See: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/26/the-german-election-the-wests-nervous-breakdown-continues/

There isn’t much to add to this, except that the SPD could probably save themselves by scrapping the heritage of Gerhard Schroeder and moving leftwards, as Labour has over here. Schroeder was the German equivalent of Tony Blair, and just as Blair tried to remake Labour as a party of the neoliberal right, so did Schroeder try to do something similar with the German Social Democrats.

As for Merkel, I think her mistake was announcing that one million immigrants from Syria and the Middle East could settle in Germany. She meant well, and I think it was a genuinely liberal, generous gesture intended to show how non-Nazi and welcoming modern Germany was. But she failed to take into account some of the simmering racial tensions in Germany. The German birthrate is falling, so that when I was at school in the 1980s, there were headlines in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Germany’s paper of record, stating that there would be 30 million fewer Germans by the year 2000. Of course, this was before reunification boosted the country’s total population. The Germans have also been worried about Turkish Germans creating a parallel society, in which they needn’t speak German, because they’re surrounded by Turkish businesses and Turkish language broadcasters. And some German Turkish writers have also written about how the authorities in their communities placed pressure on the young in their community not to become friends or associate with ethnic Germans, or to see themselves as Germans, but to remain Turks and isolate themselves from mainstream society.

Of course Germany isn’t the only country facing such issues. Our government has similarly expressed fears about the immigrant, and particularly Muslim communities over here, as have the French across le Manche.

Even so, I think some of the xenophobia that led to the increased voting for the AfD could have been avoided, if Germany had not suffered the 200-odd spate of rapes committed by Syrian or North African immigrants the other Christmas. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that most rapists in Germany are ethnic Germans, just as the majority of child molesters over here are White Brits, and not Pakistanis or other Muslim Asians. But just as resentment over the rapes and abuse committed by the Asian paedophiles in Rotherham, and the failure of the local authorities to act against it, aided UKIP, so did the rape attacks aid the far right in Germany.

And also, it should be said, the rest of the world. They were widely reported to the point where a new word, ‘rapefugee’, was coined by the Islamophobic right.

Across Europe and America, immigrants and decent, ordinary people are facing the threat of renewed Fascism. It will need determined action by anti-Fascists to defeat it and support genuine anti-racist, tolerant and pluralistic societies. At the same time, we also need to recognize the role of neoliberalism in creating the poverty and insecurity, which leads to so many traditional White Europeans fearing for their future, and the way Conservatives and Fascists across Europe and America are exploiting this to keep themselves in power by misdirecting these fears onto immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, Roma and Jews.

Vox Political: Tories Lying About Full Employment

Mike yesterday put up a very necessary piece critically examining the Tories’ claims that Britain now has ‘full employment’, meaning that the unemployment rate is 4.5 per cent, and three million more people are in work since this time last year. Mike states very clearly that if you’re confused by your inability to get a decent job or a proper, living wage, despite this news, you’re quite right. It’s because the figures are a lie.

He cites the figures included in two critical reports of the Tory claims, one by The Canary and the other by the UK Business Insider. The Canary states that in order to reach this figure of 3 million more in work, the Tories have had to include 10,000 unpaid family workers and 35,000 on temporary training contracts.

As for wages, these have fallen by 0.5 per cent year on year, so that you’re actually £6 worse off now than when the Tories took power.

The Canary article concludes

“Since the Tories came to power in 2010, more people are in precarious self employment; the public sector has been decimated; young people have been abandoned and we’ve all seen our wages plummet. So, far from being “all in this together”, the UK is becoming a dustbin for employment opportunities. ”

And the UK Business Insider states that the official stats are lies, and the true unemployment rate is higher. Much higher. So high, it will shock you.

“The statistical definition of ‘unemployment’ relies on a fiction that economists tell themselves about the nature of work,” the article states. “The official definition of unemployment disguises the true rate. In reality, about 21.5% of all working-age people (defined as ages 16 to 64) are without jobs, or 8.83 million people, according to the Office for National Statistics.

They also state that this is proved by the fact that wages have not risen. Economics states that if there is low unemployment, then wages should rise as firms compete to attract more workers by offering higher wages, because labour is so scarce.

But instead, public sector wages are capped at 1 per cent, and wages generally are stagnant.

The article goes on

“More important, wages are not keeping pace with inflation… Workers’ real incomes are actually in decline, which is weird because so-called full employment ought to be spurring wages upward. Overall inflation ought to be driven by wage inflation. Yet wage inflation isn’t happening.

“The answer is that unemployment is not really that low. In reality, about 21.5% of British workers are either officially unemployed, inactive, or employed part time even though they really want full-time work. (The ONS has a chapter on that here.) Some of those people — parents with newborns, university students — may not want jobs right now, but they will want jobs soon.”

Mike concludes

Now, you could argue that nobody is saying that 21.5 per cent of working-age people aren’t out of work – the employment rate is only said to be 75 per cent, after all.

But the unemployment rate is said to be only 4.5 per cent. That’s why we’re being told the UK has full employment and it isn’t true.

That’s why you can’t get a job that pays well – even though the Tories claim there are 768,000 vacancies; there are still so many people out of work that they can continue pushing wages down.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/08/17/still-cant-get-a-job-even-though-weve-reached-full-employment-its-because-the-figures-are-a-lie/

This is important, as these fiddled and highly unreliable figures are being touted by the Tories to show that they’ve been successful in tackling unemployment. And as Mike’s shown, they’re a grotesque falsification.

Mike’s piece has also confirmed what I’ve suspected for a very, very long time: that the official statistics for unemployment have been doctored and adjusted by successive governments to disguise the real rate, that they’re completely unreliable.

I can remember how Margaret Thatcher’s administration altered the official unemployment rate when she came to power way back in 1979. And every government since then has done the same thing.

The latest trick done by the Tories was by making the figures count only those who were signing on as jobseekers. As the whole benefits system is designed to humiliate benefit claimants into either getting a job, or not signing on, with sanctions imposed for even the most trivial reasons, many people don’t sign on for jobseeker’s allowance because of the stress of being harangued and bullied by the jobcentre staff.

Thus the unemployment figures are a conscious lie here, based on a spurious method of counting the unemployed.

Then there’s the actual percentage of people really unemployed in Britain – 21 per cent. This makes a complete lie out of the Tory claim that we’re much better than the other EU states, which may have an unemployment rate of 25 per cent. I’ve read that this is Spain’s unemployment rate, along with some of the other EU countries. The argument is that these nations’ more generous welfare systems and highly regulated economies are causing high unemployment by stifling the free market and the beneficial effects of private enterprise.

This becomes extremely questionable if the true British unemployment rate is only 4 per cent behind that of states like Spain. Moreover, economists such as Ha-Joon Chang have shown that free market economics simply don’t work, and that the older, ‘Keynsian’ system of protectionism and a mixed economy with a welfare state actually works far better in promoting economic growth and prosperity.

My guess is that the drive of successive European government to have 50 per cent of all school leavers enter higher education is also, in part, an attempt to disguise an otherwise high unemployment rate. There probably simply isn’t the jobs for all the school leavers, if only 2 to 20 per cent of young people entered university as they used to before the expansion of higher education back in the 1990s.

In short, the unemployment figures May and her cronies are proudly boasting are complete fabrications, designed to deceive the public into believing the economy and job opportunities are far better than they are.

Don’t be fooled. Get May out before she make the situation worse, and already desperately poor people even poorer.

Another Fascinating Video from Ha-Joon Chang

I put up a piece yesterday about an interview Owen Jones made with Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean lecturer in economics at Cambridge. Mr Chang’s the author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. He makes it clear in his book that he is not opposed to capitalism, but is very definitely opposed to neoliberal economics, the free market rubbish that has dominated global economic policies at the expense of the poor since Thatcher and Reagan. The book’s well worth reading, if you can find a copy. It’s written for the general reader, and so is written in clear, simple language to make a devastating critique of current economic dogma. He shows how states can make good economic decisions, constructing and managing efficient industries and planning the general economy. The welfare state does not make people lazy, but actually makes them willing to accept change. And western, developed nations are hypocritical and destructive in demanding that the developing world should open their countries up to free trade. He shows very clearly on this point that both Britain, America and the other industrialised nations actually industrialised under a system of very strict protectionism to keep foreign competition out and protect their nascent industries. He also goes on to disprove some of the twaddle that’s been talked about the difficulties Africa faces in industrialisation, such as tribal conflict and the supposed racial or national character of its peoples. He points out that there were also vast ethnic or regional friction in the developed countries of Britain, France, and even Korea, for example, until very recently. As for the supposed laziness of Africans, this was also said in the 19th century of a people, who now have a colossal reputation for hard work: the Japanese. It was also said of the Germans even further back in the 16th century.

Michelle also commented on the piece, and enclosed a link to another of Mr Chang’s videos. She wrote

Several years back when I used to blog I had links to Ha-Joon Chang’s writings, he’s brill! This recent RSA animate video of his perspective is also very much worth a watch, ‘ ‘Economics is for everyone’ (or thinking outside the matrix part one, to go with Beastie’s post): https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=_a53Qt0ZpsUhttps://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=_a53Qt0ZpsU

When I posted both these links last week, a commentator rightly said “Neoliberalism is not a matrix it’s a crime against humanity.”

I haven’t seen the video, but anything by Chang is bound to be great. And I entirely agree with her last comment. Neoliberal has caused mass suffering across the globe. It is responsible not just for a growing number of impoverished people, both unemployed and in work, in this country, but also for wrecking the economies of whole nations in the Developing World. People are dying of starvation in this country. It’s contributed to mass starvation there. And this has also fuelled political and social unrest, from militant Islamism, to Marxist uprisings and piracy off Somalia and the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. In terms of the magnitude of the suffering it’s caused, it is indeed almost literally a crime against humanity.

Vox Political on America Raising Tariffs Against Chinese Steel

Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece from the Mirror about the US slapping a massive protection barrier of 522% on Chinese steel to stop it flooding the market and destroying their domestic steel industries. However, the unions are impatient with Brussels and the British government, which are currently dragging their heels. At the moment the EU tariff placed on Chinese manufactured goods is only 16%.

Mike comments:

Neoliberals would have you believe that any increase in the tariff on Chinese steel is protectionism that would harm the economy in the long run.

But this is nonsense.

It seems likely that China is subsidising its steel industry in order to flood the world markets with cheap product. The aim would be to cripple the profitability – and therefore the viability – of non-Chinese steelmakers, and shut them down.

This would leave China alone in the market and able to set whatever price it wanted.

Mike’s exactly right, and to be fair, the British diplomatic corps know it, and have known it for a very long time. It’s only David Cameron and his cabinet of overpaid, over-privileged numbskulls and parasites that don’t.

Years ago I used to work with a former diplomat. I can remember talking to him once about China, its emergence as an industrial power, and the lingering, bitter resentment that still exists in the Middle Kingdom about the way we conquered and ruled it with the other European powers in the 19th century. Others I have spoken to about the situation told me that they believed that China would deliberately set out to destroy this country economically. I told my colleague about this, and he agreed. They would, he said, first set about destroying the Japanese. And then they would come after us. They would do it thoroughly and very politely.

The Chinese government’s subsidization of their steel industry, and their determination to flood the global market and so close everyone else’s industries down, seems to me to confirm this amply. The conversation took place about a decade ago, if not more.

So as I said, this has been known and forecast for a very, very long time. But of course, it’s given no account by Cameron and his fellows, because they’ve grown up with the self-serving economic dogma that manufacturing industry in the West is somehow passé. Besides, it creates a tightly organised, skilled workforce than when really annoyed and well-led, can bring down Tory governments, like the miners and Ted Heath.

And professional selfishness is also involved. Cameron’s a PR man, and most of the Tories come from the financial sector. They have no interest or experience of manufacturing, and so are quite happy to let the manufacturing sector of this country be destroyed. Because no matter how many British workers are put out work, no matter how badly the overall economy is damaged, they can always get another job in another bank or investment house.