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Wednesday 27 May 2020

Pandemic Britain Way Forward - Socialist Planned Economy


The Way Forward out of Pandemic - A Socialist Planned Economy

'Jobs for all, That's Our Call' but not just any job...  A Green Planned Economy that Provides For All

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government continued discussions with big business and trade union leaders in a bid to restart capitalism mapping out a “mass return to work.” The reality - millions excluded. National Debate must take place about what kind of Britain we want to emerge from LockDown.

A real Fitness to Work consensus needs to be established.

Still to date we don't know how many have been infected. We still don't know the long-term health implications of those who became infected, from the most severe to the asymptomatic. Its clear from the evidence thus far that many workers will be unable to work in the future as more and more long-term ailments are realised upon the population as time goes by.

The current regime within the Department for Work and Pensions on harassing claimants back to work using the Work Capability Assessments needs to be scrapped. The Work Capability Assessments fails to take into account the long-term impact of covid 19's secondary impact diseases upon the unemployed and those workers who may become unemployed in the future. The Work Capability Assessments must be scrapped its contributed to the deaths of more than 100,000 benefit claimants in recent years - directly or indirectly many have been persecuted and suffered under this regime.. it has to stop!  

We now have 8.4 million workers furloughed unable to work on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. Recent figures from the government's independent economic forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, show that the cost of the government's efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic is expected to hit £123.2bn. The OBR expects annual borrowing to equal 15.2% of the UK economy, which would be the highest since the 22.1% seen at the end of World War Two.


The true cost to people's lives could well prove to be breathtaking. We could well be looking at Millions being Unemployed within months. Statistics over next six months will expose the real impact of this tory regime mismanagement of our economy and this pandemic. Foodbank Britain the Coronavirus shows the enormous scale of the crisis.

Currently as of May 27 the excess UK deaths from Covid-19 outbreak approaches 60,000 which is set to soar once all data is collated. Data shows Britain has one of world’s highest rates of coronavirus deaths per head. Yet under Boris Johnson reckless governance we still dont know the true figure of those who contracted the coronavirus from day one. 

More than 240,000 people worldwide have already died of Covid-19, and before the pandemic finishes, it could kill hundreds of thousands, even millions, more. But the final toll is destined to be far higher than just those who die of Covid-19. Experts warn that deaths from secondary impacts — poverty, hunger, diseases, and violence exacerbated by the pandemic — may dwarf the number of those who die of the novel coronavirus itself.

Only a Socialist Plannned Economy can get Britain out of this mess!

We need to lift people out of hunger, poverty, sickness and ignorance.  Our planet's eco-system must be rescued. Even under wasteful and destructive capitalism, the productive forces exist that could, if planned and utilised to meet human need instead of maximising capitalist profit, ensure sufficient food, nutrition, health care and education for all.

Never before in history have the rapid advances in science and technology provided such opportunities for the all-round development of every human being. 

But while it has proved possible, from time to time, to curb capitalism's tendencies to crisis, pandemic deprivation unemployment and war, those tendencies have always reasserted themselves because they arise from the nature of the capitalist system itself.  The capitalist economic cycle produces gluts, crises, cut-backs, redundancies and then shortages before beginning all over again.

We can not allow economic crisis to allow a busness as normal mentality. The anarchy of the capitalist economy in general militates against society's need for planned, balanced, equitable and sustainable development across countries, regions and the whole world.

Nonetheless, the experience of social-democratic policies and the attempts so far to build socialism – albeit in very different conditions to those in Britain – provide some valuable lessons.

They demonstrate, for instance, that public ownership, economic planning, collective provision and the redistribution of wealth can provide substantial economic, social and cultural benefits to the mass of the population, even when these are restricted, distorted, exploited and subverted by monopoly capitalist interests. Experience also indicates that unless such policies are mobilised as the basis from which to make deeper inroads into capitalist economic and state power, they will prove to be partial and temporary.  Their weaknesses and inadequacies will then be used to discredit any alternative to private capitalist ownership, the 'free' market and social inequality.

After centuries of capitalism, the first attempts to build a socialist society arose fewer than 100 years ago in conditions of world war, in less developed societies facing the advanced, hostile and powerful forces of imperialism. Both the achievements and the failures of these pioneering socialist systems have to be considered in this context, and lessons learnt accordingly.

For as long as capitalist ownership of the economy exists, whether or not the so-called ‘free market’ is dominated by monopolies, its operations will produce crisis, destruction, inequality and waste on an enormous scale.

Capitalism's drive to maximise profit leads it to turn every area of human need – food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, sex, leisure – into a market for the production and sale of commodities for profit at the expenses of more damage to the enviroment. 

Capitalist competition invariably means unnecessary duplication, takeovers, 'rationalisation', closures, asset-stripping, commercial secrecy, excessive packaging and large-scale contrivances of style and fashion – all of which represent a waste, limitation or destruction of society's productive resources.  Whole economic sectors have developed – advertising, property management, business consultancy – that perform little or no useful function in society, except to promote the interests of monopoly capital and, ultimately, to transfer income to it from the working class and intermediate strata.

Only public ownership of the economy's major sectors and enterprises – the economic essence of socialism – can restart the UK economy out of this pandemic and put an end to monopoly power and fundamentally change the basis on which economic decisions are taken. Pointless and wasteful competition and duplication would be eliminated. The development and deployment of society's productive forces would be planned in order to meet people's real needs and aspirations. Jobs, houses and vital or useful goods and services would be created as the primary purpose of planning and production, not as the incidental consequence of maximizing profits for shareholders.

In particular, public ownership is the only viable basis on which energy and public transport can be planned and developed in an integrated way, to combat global warming and climate change while ensuring renewable power supplies.

Unemployment in the United States and Britain 'may be worse than in Great Depression' 

Unemployment in Britain and the US look set to surpass the levels reached during the 1930s Great Depression within months as the coronavirus crisis crushes the global economy, a former Bank of England official has warned.

In a stark forecast as job losses mount around the world, David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College in the US and a member of the Bank’s interest rate-setting monetary policy committee during the 2008 financial crisis, said unemployment was rising at the fastest rate in living memory.

Writing in Guardian the economist said recently that UK unemployment could rapidly rise to more than 6 million people, around 21% of the entire workforce, based on analysis of US job market figures that suggest unemployment across the Atlantic could reach 52.8 million, around 32% of the workforce.

“There has never been such a concentrated business collapse. The government has tried to respond but it has no idea of the scale of the problem it is going to have to deal with. We make some back-of-the-envelope calculations and they are scary,” he said.

Making the assessment alongside David Bell, an economist at the University of Stirling, the former Threadneedle Street policymaker said the collapse in activity amid Covid-19 and the accompanying rise in unemployment looked to be at least 10 times faster than in the recession triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.

A report published by United Nations University UNU-WIDER outlines:  COVID-19 could push half a billion people into poverty in developing countries

A new analysis by researchers from King’s College London and Australian National University and United Nations University UNU-WIDER, warns that the economic contraction caused by Covid-19 could push an additional 500 million people — about 8 percent of the Earth’s population — into poverty, reversing 30 years of economic improvement. “We were surprised at the sheer scale of the potential poverty tsunami that could follow Covid-19" said one of the study’s authors.

We can not continue pretending everythings OK.... there is an alternative...

Social ownership of economic property puts an end to the exploitation of the working class including the unemployed working class, whereby surplus labour is performed for the benefit of the capitalist class.  

When there is social ownership, surplus labour takes place to meet the needs and aspirations of the working class and society as a whole. This will have to mean that workers and their representatives are fully represented in the economic and political spheres of decision-making, ensuring that surplus labour is not exploited for the benefit of a privileged class or group.

Since society first became divided into classes, the ruling class of the time has used the oppression of sections of the exploited classes to maximise exploitation and reinforce its rule. Under capitalism, the oppression of women, black workers and other groups has reaped super-profits and helped ensure the reproduction of existing class relations economically, ideologically and politically – not least by fomenting or perpetuating divisions within the working class itself.

Such oppression is sustained by sets of prejudicial ideas and assumptions, for example those of sexism and racism. These ideologies apply across class boundaries, affecting members of the oppressed group in every class, although their impact is felt most severely by those in the exploited classes.

Putting an end to capitalist property relations and the exploitation of labour would remove the material basis for social oppression. No class in society would gain from the super-exploitation of any section of the working class, or have the means by which to secure it.  The reorientation of priorities in production to meet the needs of the people would further reduce the scope for conflict over scarce provision, whether of jobs, housing, public services or essential goods.

The experience of socialism confirms that prejudice and discrimination on grounds of gender, nationality, sexual orientation, age etc., can survive the abolition of capitalism, at least for a period, weakened but not altogether eliminated.  But socialism furnishes the material basis, and therefore the potential, to bring all forms of social oppression to an end.  

With the abolition of capitalism, the most powerful forces for the perpetuation of racist, sexist, homophobic and other reactionary attitudes are disarmed, leaving the forces of socialism with the responsibility to consign them to the rubbish heap of history, promoting a culture of equal rights and liberation instead.

As we navigate many unchartered territories we must embrace alternatives - A Socialist Plannned Economy would get Britain out of this econonmic, political and pandemic crisis.



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