Kim Il Sung -- A hero to remember

by Andy Brooks

KOREAN PEOPLE on both sides of the divided peninsula and amongst the overseas Korean community paid tribute to Kim Il Sung last week on the 95th anniversary of his birth on 15th April 1912. Kim Il Sung was an outstanding communist leader and thinker who will always be remembered by working people all over the world.
The great leader, comrade Kim Il Sung, was one of the giants of communism – the man who led the people in a war of liberation from Japanese occupation and then defended that victory against invasion by the United States and its allies in 1950, using the fledgling United Nations as a puppet.
He then went on to lead his country in building its own, independent socialism, steering a careful path during the period of Sino-Soviet ideological conflict and managing to remain on good terms with both parties.
And after the demise of the Soviet Union and the loss of the eastern European socialist countries, an enormous setback for communism globally, when parties were becoming demoralised and failing around the world, Kim Il Sung stopped the rot by summoning a global conference of communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang in 1992.
When Kim Il Sung formed the Down with Imperialism Union at the age of 14 no one, least of all the Japanese imperialists, could have dreamt that within 20 years Korea would be free.
Kim Il Sung saw the hopelessness of the sectarians, flunkeyists, dogmatists and factionalists who called themselves communists in the 1920s. So he decided to form a communist movement from the youth and the grass-roots of the villages and factories, and surprised everyone with the emergence of the mighty Korean communist movement that led the people to victory in 1945.
When Kim Il Sung gathered a small band of heroes to form the first guerrilla units to take on the Japanese Army no one could have imagined that this would become the People’s Army that brought the American imperialists to their knees begging for an armistice in 1953.
Kim Il Sung not only grasped Marxism-Leninism but he applied it to the concrete conditions of the Korean people. He knew that once the masses realised their own strength they would become unstoppable. He knew that serving the people was the be-all and end-all for the Korean communists and for the Workers’ Party of Korea that he launched in 1945. He developed Korean style socialism into the Juché idea – which elevates the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as its economic theories – and focuses on the development of each individual worker, who can only be truly free as part of the collective will of the masses.
Kim Il Sung was born in a world of oppression and exploitation. He lived and fought to end that rotten system and he lived to see the construction of a modern socialist system in the north of Korea. But he wasn’t just a Korean communist. He was a great internationalist.
The leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea championed the struggle for colonial freedom, non-alignment and Third World co-operation. He pioneered the call for south-south co-operation which is now bearing fruit today. He sent technical and military assistance to the African and Arab peoples struggling for independence and he constantly strove to strengthen the world communist movement.
Some members of the New Communist Party, like myself, had the honour of meeting Kim Il Sung. All of us know him as a great friend and teacher. The President of the NCP, Eric Trevett, met Kim Il Sung on a number of occasions because Comrade Kim was very interested in the British communist movement. Kim drew parallels with the problems the Korean communists faced in the 1920s but always maintained that communists had to resolve their problems in their own way, based on their own conditions – like the Koreans themselves.
Today, the Workers’ Party of Korea, with Kim Jong Il at the helm, is relentlessly advancing into the future to fulfil the dream of all Koreans, the peaceful re-unification of the country.
Kim Il Sung worked tirelessly all his life to end the cruel partition of Korea but all his efforts were rebuffed by American imperialism. More than six years ago, on 15th June, Kim Jong Il signed the historic joint declaration with south Korean leader Kim Dae Jung that outlined the way forward to achieve this goal. But the forces of US imperialism have moved to stall progress and prevent the Korean people from achieving their undeniable and inalienable right to the end of partition and to reunify their country.
Democratic Korea began to develop its nuclear industry in the 1990s but agreed to suspend its programme following an agreement with the United States that was to have led to the construction of two light water reactors in the DPRK. This agreement was never honoured and it was virtually torn up by the Bush administration. The American diplomatic and economic blockade on the north since the end of the Korean War was maintained.
The DPRK was branded by the American imperialists as part of the “axis of evil”, and one of the “outposts of tyranny”, that include Cuba, Syria and Iran, and was topped by Iraq until that country was invaded by US-led imperialism in 2003. The US army and its south Korean puppets rehearse the invasion of the north in annual war-games and the south Koreans have developed a cruise missile of their own targeted on the DPRK.
In face of these renewed threats the DPRK has had no alternative but to develop a nuclear deterrent to defend its socialist system. At the same time it has pledged that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons and it has also vowed never to threaten the use of nuclear weapons or allow the transfer of nuclear technology to other countries.
We believe that the will of the Korean masses, expressed in concrete terms by their vanguard party, the Workers’ Party of Korea, will overcome all obstacles to fulfil the revolutionary tasks that faced the Korean people when they began their long march to socialism in the struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Fighting Modern Slavery

Interview with Muhktar Rana

On Friday 23rd March MUKHTAR RANA, a veteran Pakistani campaigner for labour and trade union rights, former member of the Pakistani parliament and former prisoner of conscience, spoke to the New Worker on the campaign against bonded labour in Pakistan and his role in launching it. He began by explaining how people come to be bonded labourers:

FAMILIES become victim to disease or famine or some other disaster and have to borrow money in order to survive. They get an agreement with big landowners or factory owners and end spending the rest of their lives working to pay off the debt.
The big landlords and factory owners use dirty tricks and fraudulent accounting to keep them always in debt; they charge too much for helping these people to survive and pay wages too low for them ever to repay the debts.
Those who work on the land are given nothing from the crops they produce and the wages they are paid are very, very low. The children of these bonded labour families are also forced to work and the women are misused for sex.
This kind of slavery is spread all over the world and, according to various international human rights bodies; there are around two million bonded peasants and labourers in Pakistan working in farms, factories and kilns. They are kept in big camps under armed guard to stop them escaping.
My first contact with bonded labourers was when I was running an educational institution called the People’s Academy in Faislabad (formerly known as Lailpur but renamed after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia after his death).
Bonded labourers working in a nearby brick kiln walked miles to my academy to see me and explain their situation.
I had also become a member of the national Parliament of Pakistan. I won the votes of the working class of Faislabad and I also chaired the People’s Party of the district of Faislabad. Under my supervision we won 90 per cent of the national and provincial MP seats because I was very popular among the workers. Even one of the very big capitalists, Saigal, was defeated in spite of tremendous support from a lot of mullahs.
After coming to know the situation of the bonded labourers working in that brick kiln I decided, along with my family, to involve the trade unions in working for the freedom of bonded labourers and the movement started to gather momentum.
But I was thrown into jail for five years for opposing the martial law imposed by the President, Mr Bhutto, because our manifesto demanded democracy. We had been demanding this in the past, throughout various periods of military rule.
Some other trade union leaders also suffered and were even thrown out of Pakistan and never allowed to come back. They took refuge mainly in Britain and Sweden.
During my imprisonment Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience. After I had completed my term of imprisonment Mr Bhutto met me. There is a long story of how he apologised for his actions.
But during that period Bhutto again imposed another period of martial law in Karachi when the people demonstrated against the elections he had conducted – claiming they were fraudulent. I went with my family to Karachi to campaign against martial law, with a manifesto against military rule and for the restoration of democracy.
Mr Bhutto then, instead of putting me in prison, threw me out of Pakistan. It was because Swedish Amnesty International had adopted me as a prisoner of conscience. Then I had a choice of going to Sweden or Britain. I was born in the Punjab desert and I was a bit nervous about Sweden’s cold climate, and in any case I could speak English but not Swedish so I opted to come to Britain. And in London there were various committees – backed by some MPs – campaigning for me to be allowed residence in Britain. The British Library was another attraction that drew me to choose to come to London.
I walked out of London airport without much fuss; I had come on the grounds that I needed medical treatment and I had a certificate from Pakistani doctors confirming that I needed to come for treatment. I started living in London in 1977 and while I was living in sheltered accommodation as a patient I founded the Peace and Human Rights Trust. My wife Norma and her son became fellow trustees.
Our objectives were to campaign for peace and human rights. As I was well known in Pakistan, especially amongst the working class and peasants, I discussed with my fellow trustees and decided to start campaigning in Pakistan for two important goals:

1) To work for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants;
2) To work for the establishment of a welfare state and other human rights in Pakistan.

Since 1977 I had been going back to Pakistan to campaign against corruption but in 2003 I went to Pakistan and we held our first seminar on the issue of bonded labour, including in the bangle-manufacturing industry, for a welfare state and for the abolition of Bhatta (the form of bonded labour imposed on brick kiln workers). Various political leaders, human rights activists, representatives of labourers and peasants and journalists took part in the seminar. To the good luck of the trust it was very well reported and an office of the PHRT was formed in Pakistan.
To our pleasant surprise similar seminars were held in almost every province and the issues of bonded labour and a welfare state were brought into focus. But the most active and physical response was reserved for Hyderabad, the capital of Sindh province. The journalists, lawyers and human rights activists in Hyderabad responded enthusiastically and we formed a trust unit for Sindh.
After the creation of that unit and various conferences the issue of bonded peasants and labourers started whipping up. To our surprise the office of the chief minister of Sindh made a very wrong claim that there were no bonded labourers in Sindh. But to our greater and pleasant surprise the provincial minister for the interior came to our support. He said the Sindh government claim was wrong and that there were two million bonded labourers and peasants in Sindh. And he supported the campaign of the trust for their liberation.
As a matter of fact the cruelty of the big feudal landlords of the Sindh was so well known for such a long time that various peasant groups have been formed for the rights of peasants and tenants. One of the best known was the Hari (peasant) Committee.
Some of the bureaucrats favourable to the cause of the Haries had written very good reports about the problem.
Bhutto was from Sindh and for a while he was President, chief minister responsible for administration, Prime Minister and chair of the People’s Party. Part of the manifesto of the People’s Party was for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants but the problem continued under his rule and still continues today. After him his daughter also became president of Pakistan twice.
They also made a law for the abolition of bonded labour and the constitution of Pakistan bans any kind of forced labour.
There have been various High Court decisions and precedents in place banning bonded labour and freeing the peasants and labourers. And there are various human rights organisations all over Pakistan working for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants.
But in spite of all this today according to the human rights groups and the International Labour Organisation there are still an estimated two million bonded labourers and slaves in Pakistan. Because the big landlords rule the politics, hand-in-hand with the military. They have control over the government and politics.
But good things have been happening. For example a young minister of labour in the central province – a friend of mine and the son of another friend of mine – got deeply involved in the movement for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants.
He succeeded in getting thousands freed and rehabilitated in spite of serious opposition from a corrupt administration and cruel landlords.
According to Sajjad Ali Shah, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, a young labour minister was targeted and killed. Police claimed he had committed suicide. The workers and peasants of Sindh loved the young central minister and do not believe he committed suicide. They are indebted to the help he gave.
Soon our trust workers and leaders succeeded getting bonded labourers and peasants released with the help of lawyers, courts and the media.
To our happiness both the judges and the media have played a very big role in this and in getting the issue whipped up nationally.
There is a significant case of a bonded labour family that raised the issue throughout the nation.
Munoo Bheel is the head of the family; about nine years ago because of international pressure the landlord, Abdur Rehman Murri, was forced to release them. But shortly after that the landlords sent his armed guards and got the family re-abducted. They did not get Munoo Bheel himself because he was not at home when they came. But Murri and six other men were identified by witnesses as being responsible for abducting the family and the case was registered with the local police but they have taken no action yet to release the family or bring the kidnappers to justice.
Human rights org-anisations from Sweden and Pakistan were campaigning for the freedom of the Munoo Bheel family but the big landowner is so powerful that for years Munoo Bheel could not get his family released. We joined the campaign for his release and to our very pleasant surprise we found an ally in the Pakistan Chief of Justice, Mr Iftikhar Mohammed Choudry – the one who has been arrested and detained recently by the dictator General Perves Musharraf because of his actions to defend human rights.
In the Supreme Court, Choudry brought a “suo moto” (self-motivated by the court) case and ordered that the Munoo Bheel family should be released. But the police have been playing tricks and the family has not yet been released so far.
But the cause of this family is getting support from the trust and from the very highest court in Pakistan. The campaigning goes on.
In order to satisfy the Supreme Court, they sent the inspector general of police for Sindh, saying that anyone who gave information that led to the whereabouts and release of the Munoo Bheer family would get millions of rupees reward. But so far there has been no response because the chief minister of Sindh and his colleagues are refusing to cooperate with the Supreme Court.
Not only that; although the big landlord Murri had been imprisoned for abducting the family and not releasing them, his friends have been threatening our trust coordinator in Pakistan. They said that if the trust did not stop pleading to keep Murri in prison the coordinator would be killed. So far he has survived and our representations in court have succeeded in stopping attempts by Murri to get bail. We are determined that the Munoo Bheer family will be found.
And we will keep on with the campaign for the freedom of bonded labourers until every labourer who is a bonded slave is freed unconditionally.
To focus attention on the campaign in Britain we are having a gathering on Sunday 8th April on my birthday at the Bakehouse in Blackheath, which will celebrate the release of 3,000 bonded labourers.
We need to raise fund because once these bonded labourers and peasants are freed they have no home and no job. We need to build accommodation for them and to provide them with food and clean water. In the Sindh there is a problem with salt water; clean water has to be transported over long distances. We have taken out bank loans to set up camps to provide accommodation and we are getting support from NGOs (non-government organisations).
We prefer to raise funds from the working class and there has been a response. One small landlord who is sympathetic has given 50 acres to the trust to provide accommodation for freed bonded labourers. And recently some other small landlords have offered a car for communications. More and more political and human rights workers and social workers are offering cooperation.
But the process has been stopped because of the presidential attack on Choudry and now the progressive campaigners in Pakistan are having to fight to get justice for the Chief Justice.
Anti-Slavery International are supporting us and their director has promised to come to Pakistan and to provide more funds for legal and political work.

The Soviet National Anthem

A Paul Robeson classic

No to the New Anti-Cuba Manoeuvres of the EU

Joint Appeal of Communist & Workers' Parties of Europe

We, the undersigned parties, vehemently condemn the intensification of the anti-Cuba campaign being carried out by the EU, especially its intent to pass a “mid-term and long-term strategy on Cuba” at the next summit of the European Council.

With this document, the EU aligns itself completely with the policies and plans of the U.S.A. for a strike against the Cuban revolution, in complete contradiction with the powerful sentiments of friendship and solidarity for Cuba, held by the people of Europe.

For the first time ever, the EU will publicly reveal a joint strategy against another country of the world. It is assuming an active role in the imperialist, anti-Cuba campaign, in complete accord with the so-called “Bush Plan” and is striving to actively enlist the EU member countries in the interventionist plans against Cuba.

It intensifies the regime of outrageous discriminatory practices, pressures and intervention that was launched in 1996 with the so-called “common position”. This development constitutes yet another dangerous step towards convergence with the policies of the U.S.A. It reaffirms the hostile stance of the EU towards the ideas of national independence and sovereignty.

It is particularly objectionable that this new anti-Cuba campaign, under the pretext of supporting “human rights” and “democracy”, is being primarily instigated by champion anti-communist, anti-democratic governments who promote the most reactionary anti-people measures in their own countries: those of the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, and others.

The EU has neither the right nor the moral stature to impose terms on Cuba in regards to its relations with other countries.

We demand that our governments reject the “mid-term and long-term strategy on Cuba” in the European Council.

We demand the abolition of the “common position” and the development of relations with Cuba based on equality and the principles of international justice.

We call upon the working people, the youth, women and the peoples’ movements, as well as, every progressive and democratic-thinking person in Europe to express their opposition to these anti-Cuba maneuvers.

To reject and refute the reactionary propagandistic campaign, to isolate the political forces that support it.

To defend the right of the peoples to resist and determine their own fate.

To strengthen their solidarity with socialist Cuba and her people.


The Parties

Communist Party of Albania
Workers' Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
AKEL-Cyprus
Communist Party of Bohemia & Moravia
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Finland
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers’ Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Socialist Party of Latvia
Communist Party of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Malta
Communist Party of Macedonia
Communist Party of Norway
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party, Romania
Communist Party of Russian Federation
Communist Workers Party of Russia - Party of Communists of Russia
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Communist Party of Slovakia
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party of Turkey
Labour Party of Turkey (EMEP)
South African Communist Party

Killing ourselves to live

by Daphne Liddle

BRITAIN has been breaking records lately, with levels of personal debt, long working hours and having the unhappiest children in the western world. These things are linked and this article aims to explore how the ruling class manipulate us into becoming debt slaves and the cost this is having on ourquality of life and that of our children.
Since the Thatcher years of the 1980s, both Tory and Labour governmentshave tried to justify the rampant privatisation of public services and utilities on the grounds of giving us more choice. A choice of service implies that not all the services on offer are the same quality – some are worse than others. The best services, naturally, are reserved for those whocan pay a bit more. When we complain that the poor are getting fobbed off with inferior services they come back saying, “Oh no, everybody has choices,would you like a bit of credit to help you pay?”
So we end up going into debt to pay for things we once had supplied free,as part of the social wage – things like healthcare, higher education,social services and so on. Now, working class people can’t get into higher education without going deep into debt; many non-emergency surgicalprocedures that were once free have to be paid for.
Meanwhile the rapidly diminishing supply of council houses, coupled with rocketing house prices, have forced home buyers to take on record levels of major debt just to find somewhere to live. Banks and credit card companiesencourage everyone to borrow up to their limit and then pay back slowly –interest only – in a way that extends the amount of interest eventually payable.

The marketing media and their friends in the Government encourage us to see spending as a pleasurable experience – “retail therapy”.
“Lifestyle” programmes urge us to throw out our old clothes to keep up with fashions, now this also applies to our furniture and home decoration. Our identity is expressed in our belongings and no longer in ourselves or in ourcommunity, so that when we are burgled or the bailiffs repossess something we feel as though we have suffered a physical injury.We are encouraged to be proud of what we own – and to forget what we havelost in terms of the social wage, community spirit and time for relaxation and recreation.
We think ourselves well off surrounded by the latest electronic equipmentbut forget that in our grandparents’ time the wage of one worker, usually a man, was enough to feed and clothe a family. Now it takes the wages of twoadults working all the hours they can and they never get to clear their debts or get time to relax.
House prices are so high that now we are seeing new kinds of mortgages –50-year mortgages; multi-generation mortgages and interest-only mortgages,which effectively mean the “buyer” will be forever paying interest withoutever coming closer to owning the home – they might just as well call it rent.
Bank staff are ordered to pressure customers into taking out loans. So the loans are offered to all, regardless of their ability to pay back, even topeople with a history of debt problems and to people with mental health problems. “As long as they’ve got a pulse,” is the criterion.
Whatever they can persuade us to want, someone is there to arrange a loan or credit agreement. When we get into trouble with the repayments, they offer to consolidate it all “into one affordable loan” – which could take many years to clear and ends up with us paying far more than the original debt.
Thousands of families are so much in debt they are living on the edge of financial disaster. It only takes a sudden change, usually beyond their control, to break them. This could be a rise in interest rates, a sudden illness or injury or losing their job because their employer has gone bankrupt.

According to Credit Action statistics compiled in February, total personal debt in Britain has exceeded £1.29 trillion. The debt growth rate for the past 12 months has been 10.9 per cent, equivalent to an increase of £114billion.
The average household in Britain has £8,791 in debts, excluding mortgages;if you include mortgages the figure is £53,326. The average debt owed byeach adult individual is £27,445 and the average interest paid by each household on their total debts is £3,400 every year. Britain’s personal debtis increasing by £1 million every 3.85 minutes.
Not surprisingly many people are having serious problems. The Citizens’Advice Bureau has dealt with 1.4 million debt problems in the last year;this equates to 5,300 people a day. Around 1.4 million adults with more than£10,000 of unsecured debt report that they are “quite likely”, “likely” and“certain” to declare themselves bankrupt or take out an IndependentVoluntary Arrangement.

During the last quarter of 2006 there were 34,626 mortgage possessionactions initiated by the banks and other lenders – a rise of 15 per cent onthe previous year.
The number of people given County Court Judgements (CCJ) for unpaid debts increased by 18 per cent, with lenders seeking to recover around £500million of bad debts through CCJs. This is a step lenders are reluctant totake, because once a CCJ is issued no more interest can be charged and thedebt is repaid at a rate the debtor can afford – as low as £1 a week for people on very low incomes.
Working class people tend to see debt problems as their own fault and to feel embarrassed about them. When snowed under with serious debt some try to blank it out and pretend it is not happening. These people are punished most harshly, with high penalties for missed payments that quickly turn a bill of a few hundred pounds into a debt of many thousands. There are threats of court action but the courts can be a debtor’s best friend. As soon as a CCJ is set there is no more interest and the repayments become reasonable.Furthermore magistrates have the power to write off some debts. They tend to do this where the debtor is on a low fixed income and has already made payments to cover the original amount borrowed, excluding interest and penalty charges.
But if the debtor does not turn up in court to present their case, they face a visit from bailiffs who are now to be given new powers to break into people’s houses to distrain goods. This is a punitive measure that finance companies take to shock and intimidate debtors into paying. The goods seized rarely raise enough money to cover the debt because they are sold at rockbottom prices at auction. When unregulated bailiffs get a reputation for behaving like bullies and terrifying the families of debtors it suits the loan companies, because this will intimidate other debtors into paying uppromptly.

How can a worker whose debt repayments and essential living costs combined are greater than their income find more money? Legally there is only one way– to work extra hours, either in overtime or by getting a second job. Again,many workers blame themselves for getting into debt and see the extra workburden as part of the penalty they are paying for being foolish – not as adeliberate policy to exploit them to the hilt.
And it is deliberate ruling class strategy. Chancellor Gordon Brown’s“economic miracle” has been based entirely on high levels of domestic consumer spending. Two Australian economists – Shaun Wilson of the University of Sydney and Nick Turnbull of New South Wales – describe this as“secret Keynesianism”. The original forms of Keynesianism, first implemented in the 1930s in Roosevelt’s New Deal in America and later in Europe, relied on Government deficit spending on large public works to combat unemployment,take people off benefit and into work and to put more money in circulation.
Many social democrats have seen Keynesianism as relatively progressive inthat it did fund public utilities and reduce unemployment – in the short term; they boasted that it did away with the old capitalist cycle of boom and bust. But it was still capitalism and ultimately capitalism does nothave a kind face. In the long term it led to the devaluing of money and the rampant inflation of the early 1970s, followed by collapse and a worse crisis than ever – as we saw in the 1980s. The ruling class then abandoned Keynesianism and reverted to old fashioned free market, or “liberal”,capitalism, and started privatising all the public utilities thatKeynesianism had built.
Wilson and Turnbull argue that the new “secret Keynesianism” operates not by the Government undertaking deficit spending but by pushing millions ofprivate households into deficit spending.
They describe how the system operates: “Faster growth rates among countriesthat have placed an ever greater institutional reliance on the privatesector have led to now familiar claims about the superior functionalperformance of markets and the strength of the new, flexible hi-techeconomies. Critics of the achievements of these economies, however, point to the shifting burdens of adjustment that faster growth has entailed longworking hours, widening earnings inequality and higher consumer debt.”
Then they describe the effect in Australia: “We must now look beyond theformal balance sheets of state finances to understand how the state iscontinuing to ‘pump prime’ the Australian economy by relying onhousehold-based deficit spending. Are these policies either desirable or sustainable dimensions of Australia’s economic performance?”
They continue: “Australian households are no longer net savers, saving lessthan two per cent of their annual income. At the same time Australia’s oncemodest household debt levels have ballooned out in the last 10 years, risingto about 90 per cent of household income, closing the gap between Australiaand other countries like the UK, Canada and the United States. Debt-financed consumption expenditure is important in explaining Australia’s recently improved economic growth performance…. Household consumption remains the solid and consistent contributor to Australia’s economic growth.”
Wilson and Turnbull explain how the Australian government is deliberately pushing households into taking on more debt: “Australia’s dependence on rising household expenditure for growth is not coincidental. As we shallsee, there are a plethora of public measures, inducements, taxes and incentives to encourage private spending and growth in household debt in order to sustain Australia’s growth rate.”
They show that household spending on childcare; education and rent have risen linked to the “long-term ‘rollback’ of public provision”. They also say that “gambling accounts for an ever-increasing share of household expenditure” – funded by a run-down in household saving. This follows a dramatic increase in gambling resulting from government deregulation of the industry and an increase in casinos – a warning for Britain.
They conclude: “Recent economic growth has little or nothing to do with the benefits of increased market dynamism. In fact, it is the same old indebtedeconomy we have always had, but with ever greater reliance on household consumption, debt and long working hours to keep it blooming … government policies have assisted this success as a reworked variant of traditional Keynesianism – something not immediately obvious.
“The state, rather than undertaking the expense and risk of deficit spending to stimulate growth itself, is using policy mechanisms to encouragehouseholds to do this. Through these mechanisms households now undertake more of the state’s function in maintaining growth, financed by their rising consumption and household debt.”

Back in Britain we can see now why the European Union 48-hour directive is not working in Britain. Workers up to their ears in debt are as keen to subvert it as the bosses are. The boss does not need to crack the whip and impose long hours when the bank manager is cracking it harder. But of coursethe boss is well pleased with all the extra surplus value that long workinghours bring.
But the effects on our health and quality of life are devastating. A recentAmerican survey, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, showed that overtime and extended working hours are associated with anincreased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, fatigue, stress,depression, musculo-skeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes andother health complaints.
In Japan they have a word, karoshi, for death by overwork and a few years ago there was a minor epidemic of it, leading to court cases against bosses.In Britain people rarely die of overwork but thousands suffer breakdowns –physical or mental or both – and end up on the “scrap heap” of incapacity benefit, with their life-expectancy shortened.
Professor Cary Cooper, a stress expert at Lancaster University Management School, claims the risk is not only to those who work over 60 hours a weekbut affects anyone regularly working over 45 hours. She said: “If you work consistently long hours, over 45 a week every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically. In the UK we have the second-longest working hours in the developed world, just behind the States and we now have longer hours than Japan.”
An Amicus survey found that one in five workers was put off sex because of long hours and a third said they did not have enough time to spend with their children. Long hours also lead to tiredness, lapses in concentration and higher accident rates.
Binge drinking is another product of the long hours culture. When young workers do not have time for leisurely relaxation and recreation they findthat hard drinking and drunkenness brings them a few hours respite from thestresses and tensions of endless work. But it does long-term damage to their health and leads to violence and anti-social behaviour.
Another factor in lengthening working hours is the target culture that has invaded many workplaces, where lower and middle management are constantly set new targets to improve performance. Failure to meet targets leaves them vulnerable to sacking so they drive those under them all the harder. Andsince it is unrealistic to imagine performance can be improved under all circumstances, this culture also encourages corruption, of middle management falsifying figures to make their performance appear better than it is.
The effects of long working hours on our children are also devastating andthere is a developing anti-child culture. Once children were seen as thefuture of the nation and our pride and joy. Winston Churchill, in the middleof the Second World War, spoke of the importance of “putting milk into babies” as a vital investment. Now children are seen as a nuisance, theydemand our time and attention and they distract us from work. Childcare is no longer taught in schools and few young adults have grown up with anyexperience of minding younger siblings. Many are terrified of the responsibility.
Long hours and big debts put many young people off having children at all.We are told that bringing up a child will cost us £180,000. Those who dohave children are regarded as self-indulgent and a burden on society.Overweight pregnant mothers are told they are a burden on the NHS. Anyone who takes time off work to look after children is regarded as a selfish slacker.
The rich of course are exempt from this disapproval. And the ruling classdoes not need to worry about the next generation of workers. There are thousands in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe – fully adult and trained at another country’s expense – queuing up to come to Britain to escape the direpoverty and wars that imperialism is imposing on their home countries.
It is not surprising that the recent Unicef report found that Britain’s children are the unhappiest in the developed world. The Unicef report covered six different areas of well-being using 40 separate indicators. In five of the six areas, British children came in the lowest third, making them overall the unhappiest children in the western world. In particular their own assessment of their well being was very low. This is hardly surprising in a society that regards them only as a nuisance and a burden.It is heartbreaking to compare them to children in socialist countries who are so confident and high achieving because they know their whole community treasures them and takes pride in them.
Britain is one of the few countries around the world that does not celebrate International Children’s Day, usually set on 1st June or in late May, though some countries celebrate it at different times.

What can we do to combat this culture of debt, long hours and child neglect? We can call on the trade unions to fight for higher wages but this alone is not enough. The credit companies would probably raise everyone’s credit limits and the Treasury and the banks would look upon it as a fresh supply of household deficit spending. This is a problem that has to be fought on many fronts.
Karl Marx said: “Workers of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Now the debt culture is fooling too many workers into working all hours to pay for the use of the chains. It sets workers at odds with their unions in wanting to work long hours.
We must support the trade unions in their fight to defend the 48-hour limit. And we must involve them in discouraging debt, supplying debt counselling and campaigning for the restoration of the social wage – in other words to reverse the privatisation of the last two-and-a-half decades and restore free healthcare and education.
We must support the campaign to restore council housing, which will bring down house prices. We could demand that mortgage payers in serious trouble and facing eviction should have the right to demand that their local authority buy out the house from the mortgage lender by compulsory purchase– at a price that takes into account what has already been paid – and thenthe family remain in the house as council tenants. And we must call for the restoration of the Rent Act.
We must call for stiffer lending controls, so that banks and finance companies who lend to people they know will struggle to keep up payments cannot pursue their mis-sold loans in the courts. We must definitely call for the restoration of strict gambling controls and oppose the opening ofsuper-casinos.
We must use all our propaganda resources to combat the culture that judges people by the possessions and try to restore a sense of community in the working class. We must also use our resources to remind people that after a socialist revolution, personal and household debts would be abolished overnight. Probably in today’s anti-political and cynical culture not many would believe us but it is one benefit a socialist revolution can deliver instantly.

Common appeal of communist and progressive parties of Europe on the Rome Treaty

Common Appeal of Communist and Progressive Parties of Europe
on the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC)

The Rome Treaty for the foundation of the EEC was an option of the main powers and West European monopolist capital. Today, 50 years later, the developments in the EU vindicate the forces that struggled against its policies, that had said and still say NO to the Maastricht Treaty, that voice their opposition to the “Constitutional Treaty”. They vindicate all those who today continue to fight against the European Union of big capital – a directorate of the big, neo-liberal and militaristic powers.

The goals trumpeted by the EU's dominant forces, the social democrat, conservative and various right wing forces – namely, the convergence of national economies, employment and improvement of the workers' conditions, more democracy, peace and cooperation on an equal footing - have proved false. The EU mission is to strengthen the European-based transnational capital and big business in the main European powers, by taking away rights and gains of the workers, expanding its economic power and influence upon policies at the European and State levels, and exploiting new markets and natural resources. This course leads to an increase in social inequality and regional asymmetries, the spreading of poverty and marginalization.

At present, there is a growth in attacks against jobs and wages, pensions and social security, labour and union rights. Fundamental rights, such as the right to an education, to healthcare and social security are transformed into commodities and sources of profit for big business. There is growing exploitation, unemployment and precariousness.
At the same time that, through the so-called “Economic Partnership Agreements”, unfair trading relations are imposed on some of the poorest countries of the planet, walls are built up for migrants in a fortress Europe.

Family-sized farming and fishing are ruined, self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs in industry, commerce and services are annihilated by the dominance of the financial and large-scale distribution corporations. Democratic rights suffer severe blows. There is a growth in anti-communism, in some cases sponsored by the governments of European countries, and in others, promoted by the European Union institutions themselves. Prohibitions and persecutions of left-wing, anti-capitalist political forces and popular movements are widespread. Racism and xenophobia are being fomented.

The militarization of the EU advances, as well as its cooperation with NATO and the US in the imperialist wars namely in Afghanistan and in Iraq, in the illegal CIA flights, the pressures against Socialist Cuba and Bolivarian Venezuela, against countries and peoples that resist. As “requested” by NATO and by the European Commission, military expenditures are rising and there is an ongoing arms race.

The big European capital uses the enlargement of the European Union and of NATO towards the East, as well as the policies of pressure against sovereign Eastern countries, to pursue its own objectives of political, economical and geo-strategic domination.

The sovereignty and independence of peoples and nations are increasingly undermined. There is a plan to re-launch the "Constitutional Treaty", in spite of its explicit rejection by the French and Dutch peoples. This global offensive of imperialism is being confronted by promising struggles of the peoples and workers, which we hail.

Our parties will strengthen their cooperation and joint action and will actively contribute to strengthen the working-class organisations and struggles and the anti-imperialist movement, to resist, challenge and fight against the neo-liberal policies and militarism and to reject the "Constitutional Treaty".

We appeal for the creation of alternatives that meet the needs and interests of the people, affirming socialism as the real alternative for the peoples of the European continent. We appeal for the convergence of activities and struggles that, throughout Europe, can pave the way for a Europe of peace, of cooperation among sovereign States, equal in rights, a Europe of employment and true economic and social development. A Europe open to the world, able to develop relations of friendship, fair trade and cooperation with all the countries and peoples of the world, respecting their right to an economic and social development. A Europe that can promote peace internationally and stand for the political resolution of the conflicts.

The Parties:

Workers' Party of Belgium
Workers' Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
The Progressive Party of the Working People (AKEL) - Cyprus
Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia - Czech Republic
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Finland
German Communist Party (DKP)
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Communist Workers' Party
Communist Party of Ireland
Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist Party of Lithuania
Communist Party of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Norway
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party - Romania
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Workers' Party of Russia
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
Party of Communists of Cataluña
Communist Party of Turkey
The Party of Labour (EMEP) - Turkey
Communist Party of Ukraine
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia


23rd March 2007

Slavery and Freedom

by Prof Mohammed Arif

A talk given to the World Muslim, Sikh Federation in February.

I WOULD LIKE THANK the World Muslim, Sikh Federation for inviting me to speak to you on the subject of slavery and freedom.
In March this year we will be celebrating the bicentenary of the end of Britain’s part in the slave trade. There will be lectures, film shows, exhibitions and TV programmes. The Heritage Lottery Fund has granted £16 million for this purpose.
The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1807. This Act outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. However, the slave trade continued for more than 30 years in deferent forms after the act was passed.
During this period, major slave rebellions took place in Jamaica, Dominica, Barbados, Honduras and Guyana. This was primarily because the Act gave false expectation among slaves that their servitude might soon come to an end. This was a mistake and the rebellions were savagely crushed.
In fact, the Act was not respected even by the British who violated it by purchasing black people in the slave market to serve in their imperial wars. Black people were imported from the slave market in Goa and Mozambique to fight a war of conquest in Ceylon.
However, when the final end of the slave trade took place it was due to the enormous struggle by slaves themselves, who were at the heart of their own liberation (today they would probably be described as terrorists), with the help of their supporters and sympathisers throughout the world.
To understand the horrors of slavery, we need to be both passionate and informed about the way in which human relations were perverted by the insatiable thirst for incredible wealth.
I would like to quote Makgabuka K Kola, a distinguished African writer who said, “a person without knowledge of his own history, culture and identity is a lost person. He is like a lifeless leaf that drifts aimlessly with neither direction nor destiny over the ocean of time.”
This quotation underlines the significance of this meeting. The slave trade did try to disconnect African slaves from their heritage, achievements, culture and identity. The impact of the injustices of slavery is palpable today among the descendents of slaves.
Slavery is about the ownership and control of people by other people through economic and military means. It has existed since the beginning of time, long before it came to be seen in terms of race. In fact, slavery was an economic institution of the greatest importance. It was the basis of the Greek economy and propped up the Roman Empire.
The demand for African slave labour arose in the New World through the development of plantation agriculture, the long-term rise in the price of sugar, cotton and minerals, and the need for domestic servants. The African slave trade was massively boosted and carried out on an industrial scale as Europeans began to invade and occupy that continent. Corrupt African rulers were supported by Europeans to participate in the ghastly trade.
This point was eloquently elaborated by Karl Marx: “Western capitalism, in its period of primitive accumulation, turned Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black skin.” Marx further pointed out that “labour in the white skin can never be free when in the black it is branded”.
The British, French and Spanish scoured the Gulf of Guinea, moved east, around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Mozambique.
The slave traders moved into the interior, plundering as they went, capturing all, regardless of age and sex, setting tribe against tribe, murdering and looting. Darcus Howe, a distinguished writer has pointed out that for the first time in its history, Africa experienced murder and plunder on an unimaginable scale.
For the African continent it was tantamount to a Holocaust. The continent was robbed of its physical, intellectual, technical and productive capabilities. The process of negative “cumulative and circular causation” devastated the continent economically and socially.
Richard Gott has pointed out: “For more than two centuries the slave trade has been the central feature of Britain’s foreign commerce. The beneficiaries included financiers, landowners, and merchants. The wealth created by slave trade was a crucial element which made the industrial revolution possible. In some specific families that wealth has cascaded down from generation to generation.”
The state of Virginia in the US was the primary site for the development of black slavery. In 1672, the King of England chartered the Royal Africa Company to bring a shipload of slaves from West Africa to the trading centres in Virginia. Prior to that time, the Dutch had already formed their own Dutch West Indies Company in 1621 to ship slaves to the Americas. African slaves were in great demand because they were skilled workers and experts in tropical agriculture. They had high immunity to malaria and yellow fever compared with Europeans and Native Americans. The slave trade made slave traders rich and brought a massive supply of labour to the Caribbean and American colonies. Capitalism in America could not have progressed without the slave trade.
They did not succeed in enslaving Native Americans (so-called “Red Indians”) as they were rebellious, supported by their tribes and knew their country better than white immigrants, while African slaves found themselves in a strange atmosphere in a strange country without any help or support.
As a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and mid 19th centuries, over 20 million Africans were removed from their home and shipped to the New World. Around 50 per cent died, either in transit or while being prepared for servitude.
These sons and daughters of the African continent were kidnapped and forcibly carried to the Americas to be sold and branded with the initials of their masters’ name, with large iron hooks hung around their necks. Extremely cruel instruments of torture were used against them. This applied not only to the US but also to the Caribbean and South America.Slavery in US was fundamentally different from other parts of the world. Here, most blacks were slaves and no slaves were white. It was strictly racial.
From 1660 to 1860, slavery in the United States was governed by an extensive body of laws: These laws made slavery a permanent condition inherited through the mother and defined slaves as property. It placed the label of inferiority on black skin and black culture. Slaves could not marry, own property, give evidence in a court of law, carry weapons, assemble in groups or leave plantations without permission of their master; slaves could be bought and sold, auctioned, rented and separated from their family.
It may be worth noting that many distinguished leaders of the US were slave owners. In 1774 George Washington held 202 slaves, while Thomas Jefferson owned 187 slaves and both became President of the United States and “founding fathers” of the nation. However, in their lifetimes, they did very little to relieve the suffering of slaves.
In fact, African slaves had very few supporters and friends in the countries which owned and traded them. With the honourable exception of Methodists and Quakers, many leading churches supported and profited from the slave trade. Many Bishops owned hundreds of slaves. The Church of England has recently apologised for its role in the slave trade.
Many slaves were converted to Christianity but that led to little improvement in their conditions. Slave owners had Christian names but no Christian ethics. The complicity of some Christian missionaries in the plunder of Africa has been very powerfully presented by Jomo Kenyata former president of Kenya: “When the white man came to Africa, he had the Bible and we had the land, and now we have the Bible and he has the land.”
The intellectual basis for the slave trade was provided by a twisted logic promoted by the slave owners, that slave labour was uneconomic and if slaves were freed, then they would not produce enough to feed themselves. At the same time, slave owners were renting slaves, earning rental income and were still able to feed them. This proved the duplicitous nature of this logic.
Slavery in America was different from other parts of the world not only because of its racial dimensions but also because it was solely motivated by commercial incentives. In other was words a slave was not only considered to be a chattel but also racially and culturally inferior.
It is important to note that ‘slavery was not born out of racism but racism was the consequence of slavery’.
Slavery has existed as a human institution in Africa and Asia since the days immemorial but it was not based on race or the colour of skin. It typically involved prisoners of war and was considered a humane alternative to prisoners being put to death. It was common in Africa for slave owners to adopt slave children and to marry slave women who then became a full member of the family. Slaves, after gaining their freedom, faced no difficulty in settling down in society as equals.
Slaves accumulated property and in some cases reached the status of kings, for example Jaja of Opobo in Nigeria.
One finds similar instances in the Islamic world: Prophet Mohammed’s own spokesman was a slave named Bilal. There had been a slave dynasty in India. Within Europe, slavery was common but was not based on the racial inferiority of slaves. For example, Cicero, the great orator and statesman of Rome, had a low opinion of the intellectual ability of the English, but it was not racial. He wrote in 50 BC to Atticus, his close friend and a slave trader who had settled in Athens: “Do not obtain slaves from England because they are so utterly stupid and incapable of being taught that they are unfit to form a part of the household in Athens.”
On the other hand, slavery in America was solely based on the colour of the skin and the racist perception of the inferiority of the African culture.
The example of Phyllis Wheatley is a case in point. Phyllis was born in Senegal in 1753. She was abducted into slavery at the age of seven and shipped to Boston, US. She was brought up by a family called Wheatley. At the age of 13, Phyllis had not only achieved a complete command of the English language, but also had studied Greek, Latin and published her first poem.
Later on, she published many masterpiece poems and pieces of prose. Had she lived in more enlightened times, she could have won the Nobel Prize. Many of her white opponents could not believe that a young black slave was capable of writing so well and so profoundly. They also could not tolerate her revolutionary views regarding freedom, human equality and human dignity.
The racists at the time tried to dismiss her as a fraud. The Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts prosecuted her in a court of law for plagiarism, which was a criminal offence at that time. She won the case and the racists were forced to acknowledge that she was the sole author of her works.
Oscar Wilde later on wrote that the mistreatment of Phyllis Wheatley could be put down to the fact that they (Americans) were a nation of philistines who would not have been able to define the term ‘philistine’.
It is an established maxim that where there is oppression, there is resistance! There were slave revolts in America as early as 1712. In New York slaves revolted – the revolt was not successful and 21 slaves were executed. Again there was another revolt in New York in 1741.
However, the successful revolt took place in Haiti in 1791. The slaves set up the first free black state. The Haitian revolutionaries exploded the myth of white imperialist supremacy by driving the Spanish, the British and the French out of their island in a brilliant guerrilla war.
Yet other islands also saw serious uprisings by slaves, assisted by French, they seized control of large parts of Dominica, Guadeloupe, Grenada, St Vincent, Jamaica, St. Lucia and Trinidad. The rebellion defeated two British armadas sent to destroy them, killing thousands of soldiers and seamen. The rebels were eventually defeated but they deprived the British of income from their sugar plantations for years. The danger of the continuing slave trade to British commercial interests became evident.
At the same time, anti-slavery movements were set up all over Europe and in America.
The 1772 Case of Somerset vs Stuart, with Judgement by Mansfield, the Chief Justice of England, freeing the slave (Somerset) from bondage is held to be a landmark in British judicial history. Mansfield held that slavery was irrational and could only be maintained by perverse laws.
In 1774, a Ghanaian scholar presented a brilliant thesis against slavery in a University in Holland, arguing that slavery was inconsistent and incompatible with Christianity.
In 1775, Lord Dumore, Commander of British Forces in America, declared freedom for slaves who joined the British forces against the rebels.
George Washington also asked the help of slaves to fight for freedom from the British, promising that he would put the issue of abolition of slavery before the Congress, knowing full well that the Congress would never approve it.In 1778, the Society of Friends of Blacks was set up in Paris.
In 1807 Britain finally abolished the slave trade in all its colonies.
In this respect, the contributions of Lord (William) Wilberforce (a Conservative MP) and Thomas Clarkson in fighting slavery were extremely important. They helped to set up anti-slavery committees throughout the country and mobilised public opinion against it.
Moreover, the French revolution of 1789 played a major role in providing the ideological basis for revolt against slavery. One of the first acts of the revolution was to abolish slavery.
When Britain finally abolished the slave trade, it compensated the slave owners but not the slaves, leaving the question of compensation and reparation unresolved. What Africans are asking for is the stolen fruits of their ancestor’s labour to be given back to their rightful heirs.
This is a powerful argument for the cancellation of all African debt as a collective way of admitting responsibility and atoning for the suffering western countries caused. Tony Blair has belatedly expressed “deep sorrow” over the slave trade without tendering an apology or restitution. This gesture is vacuous and unlikely to satisfy those who are demanding compensation for the descendants of slaves as well as for Africa generally.
It will not be out of the place to mention that indentured migrant labour from South Asia in the 19th century carried on where the classical slave trade left off. Indentured labourers from South Asia were dispatched to the plantations of the empire from the Pacific to the Caribbean. Death rates on these sea voyages were similar to those on the earlier Trans-Atlantic slave trade voyages.
Today there are some 30 million slaves in the world, if you include bonded labour, child labour, and a large numbers of women caught up in international prostitution.
Moreover, neo-liberalism and the dominance of multinationals are enslaving the people of Africa, Asia and Latin America, with debt bondage predatory pricing, skewed concepts of intellectual property rights, interference in internal affairs under the pretext of “human rights”, wars, occupations, setting up puppet regimes, and the outright exploitation and theft of the natural resources of these countries.
Whatever we do, ladies and gentlemen, we must not allow the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade to mollify us into self-congratulation. We ought to link it with the broader issues of today, such as poverty, disease, inequality, exploitation, environmental degradation, unprovoked attacks against defenceless countries, and occupation.
I firmly believe the battle is far from won.

NHS caught in debt trap

By Daphne Liddle

THIS YEAR has seen NHS trusts throughout England facing huge deficits and resorting to drastic cuts in jobs and services that match those of the Tory years in the early 1990s and lost the Tories the 1997 election. It has also seen unprecedented levels of local demonstrations against these cuts. People from working and middle classes who normally take no interest in politics have been driven to take to the streets with banners and placards by the threat to their local services.
The cause of these cuts is in the capitalist system itself and the need for capitalism to continually find new sources of profit and in particular the revival of the most extreme monetarist policies under the Thatcher government in the 1980s. The reasoning behind this theory is that the market should rule every aspect of life; to allow anyone so much as an aspirin without them paying for it is immoral and leads to idleness and sponging off of others who work hard to pay for everything they use or consume.
It is an economic policy that values money above people. The market serves the rich; their every demand stimulates a supply along with innovation and invention of new products. But it totally ignores the needs of the poor who have no money to bring to the market.
The monetarists believe that ideally the role of government – both central and local, is to meet once a year to hand out contracts to the private sector to actually deliver all public services – at a cost of course. The decisions as to which companies will get the contracts will be based on advice from private sector finance consultants.
The monetarists regarded the NHS and all forms of state welfare with horror. NHS inefficiencies were ascribed to an inexhaustible source of demand, which would eat up more and more taxpayers’ money as work-shy workers thought up more and more health problems to suffer from.
For the workers, the NHS was the crowning glory of modern post-war society, where anyone who needed healthcare would get it regardless of ability to pay. Banished forever was the nightmare question: “Can we afford the doctor?” that blighted every working class sickbed. It was created just after the Second World War when the organised working class (mostly just demobbed) was strong in Britain and in the world with the Nazi-defeating Red Army high in prestige. The ruling capitalist class at that time preferred to concede state welfare rather than risk revolutionism. But they begrudged it and when the organised working class in Britain became weaker – after the defeat of the 1984 miners’ strike and the decline of the Soviet Union – they decided to withdraw it, but stealthily.
This is the policy of the capitalist ruling class and is not dependent on any particular political party. Whoever sits on the front benches of the Palace of Westminster, the capitalist class dictates the important policies.
The first stage of the assault came in the 80s with the closure of many hospitals, especially those for long-term patients and the transfer of those patients into “the community”. The idea sounded fine, releasing people from institutionalisation to be cared for in their own homes by visiting doctors and nurses. But of course the extra funding for those community services never materialised and people were left to sink or swim. Many with mental health and addiction problems ended up as a part of the growing army of homeless people in cardboard boxes on the streets of our cities.
Then in the early 90s under the Major government, NHS hospitals were pushed into acquiring “trust status” – becoming independent of local health authorities. The role of these local health authorities – who were accountable to elected local councils – was diminished. When the NHS trusts were founded, each with a board of trustees which included senior medical staff and local business people, they formally had to buy the land and buildings of the hospitals from the Government, with the aid of mortgages. This meant that they all came into being in deep debt and with a drain on their funding.
At the same time the Tory government, under Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley, set about a new and drastic round of hospital closures, especially in London, which was deemed to have far too many hospitals. This ignored the fact that the big London teaching hospitals took patients with difficult health problems from all around the country for the best specialist care. The cuts in the number of hospitals and hospital beds led to fast growing waiting lists.
At the same time hospitals were compelled to privatise their cleaning and other ancillary work – brining in private companies to do the work. These companies made their profits in the only possible way by employing fewer people on lower wages. Standards of cleanliness in hospitals dropped and diseases like MRSA started to take hold in the wards. This infection is easy to pick up and many hospital patients get the germs on their skin without knowing. But if this infection gets inside the body, for example through an open wound, it is a killer because it is resistant to most of the antibiotics that doctors can prescribe.
The Tories also set up an internal market within the NHS. Trusts were funded according to how many treatments were carried out. Each episode in a patient’s total care was logged as a separate treatment – for example an x-ray was regarded as an extra treatment to an operation. This called into being an army of administrators, accountants and pill counters – another useless drain on the trusts’ budgets.
It also encouraged trust managers to try to cram in as many treatments as possible, with patients being speeded through their care and discharged to make way for new patients as fast as possible. People were sent home to be cared for “in the community” far too fast. Many had to be re-admitted quite quickly with complications that developed from lack of care. But the managers were happy because it led to more treatments for them to notch up.
The standard time in hospital after childbirth was reduced from 10 days to six hours. Patients who had major heart surgery were discharged within a couple of days to terrified families who did not know how to cope with loved ones who clearly needed highly expert care. This was supposed to be supplied by visiting doctors and nurses; sometimes they came, sometimes not; it depended on communications between the hospital and local doctors. Some elderly and helpless patients were discharged to homes where they lived alone with no one to care for them. If the local support teams were notified, they were cared for, if not they were left to suffer alone and unaided, sometimes for days. All this happened while the local support teams were suffering cuts, reorganisation and privatisation of home-help services.
Commercial finance consultants (their huge fees yet another drain on trusts’ budgets) were brought in to advise hospital managers. They saw extremely expensive intensive care beds and infant cots standing empty and unused most of the year, so they reduced the numbers to save money. Then in mid winter the regular and predictable rise in need for intensive care beds and cots rose; desperately ill patients and premature babies started to be carried from one end of the country to another to find the intensive care treatment they needed. Many did not make the journey. We began to see the regular winter horror of hospital corridors full of patients on trolleys, needing urgent admission but with no beds available. Waiting lists for elective surgery grew even more.
The Tories also dreamt up the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) – a system of financing the building of new hospitals or major reconstructions of old ones using money put of by a consortium of financiers. To the Government the advantages were that this scheme avoided large capital expenditure being made from the government funds for public facilities like schools and hospitals – a form of financing that was outlawed by the European Union. Instead the repayments to the PFI companies appeared as smaller regular yearly costs – along with maintenance and so on – which was acceptable to the EU. It also provided great opportunities for capitalism to make profits. It meant that total costs over the period of the PFI contract – usually 30 years – multiplied dramatically. For example, the former military Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Woolwich Common in south east London was due to be restructured as a major NHS hospital (the last remaining open NHS hospital in a borough that used to have eight). Costs were estimated at £26 million when the project was to be funded by a central Government grant but at £90 million when PFI was introduced.
PFI contracts were binding on the NHS trusts for 30 years or more. The contracts were kept very secret for “commercial” reasons so that on occasions the NHS trust managers did not even know what companies were involved in the PFI consortium. Anti-PFI campaigners were denied any detailed information and to this day do not know who, at the end of the contract, ends up owning the buildings and land. Are the contracts a form of mortgage with the property belonging to the NHS at the end or a form of rent, with the private sector owning it all at the end? That is a commercial secret.
This state of affairs played a large part in the Tories losing the 1997 general election. The ruling class was pushing the destruction of the NHS too fast and backed off a bit. When Blair began his premiership he stopped the internal market in the NHS and put a lot more public money into the NHS. It began to recover slightly and services improved.
But Blair embraced PFI gladly – it solved Government budgeting problems by turning big lump sum grants into yearly instalments, thus pleasing the EU – and allowed a vote-winning expansion of hospital building and renovation. One of the first Acts passed by the New Labour government was a guarantee that any risk taken by PFI companies would be underwritten by the Government. The capitalists could not lose.
But PFI hospitals invariably have fewer beds than the old hospitals they replace – the number is determined by the PFI companies – by businessmen, not by medical staff. The actual work of putting the buildings up has been to sub-contract and sub-contract again, leading often to poor quality work. The buildings are unlikely to last much beyond the length of the PFI contracts; healthcare practices are changing so fast now they will probably be out of date by then anyway.
Since then many PFI companies have sold their contracts on to other companies and the contracts have been rescheduled so the trusts have to pay much more interest.
The Government claims that not so many hospital beds are needed now because techniques such as keyhole surgery mean shorter stays in hospitals. Also from time to time the Government comes up with new initiatives for people with chronic conditions such as asthma, some heart conditions and so on to be treated in their own homes by community doctors and nurses instead of being admitted to hospitals.
Meanwhile, the local doctor services had been undergoing a transformation into primary care trusts (PCTs). Doctors were encouraged to work together in small groups and to include practice nurses, who would deliver routine care for minor problems, carry out health screening tests and immunisations. The doctors were given large budgets with which they could buy hospital care for their patients.
This was supposed to give patients a “choice” in what care they received and where they got it from. The actual choice is made by the doctor but 90 per cent of patients prefer to be treated at their nearest hospital. The Government seems totally unaware of the fact that long-distance travel when seriously ill is very uncomfortable. A more distant hospital may have better facilities but the trouble of getting there, and subsequently attending out-patient clinics, outweighs most benefits.
Local doctors also benefit from the attentions of the sales teams from the major drug companies, who fund medical conferences in nice holiday spots like the Bahamas and many other perks. The drug companies realised long ago that when a doctor prescribed one of their drugs for a patient with an acute (short-term) condition – for example an infection – they make so much profit, the patient gets better, no longer needs medicine and the profit stops. But if the patient has a chronic condition (permanent), like diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure and so on, the patient has to take medicine for the rest of their lives and the profit goes on and on. Some medical experts believe that real cures for these chronic conditions could bankrupt big drug companies.
In China most of these conditions that are considered chronic in the West are considered acute in the East. Asthma is regarded as a childhood ailment that is completely cured by a combination of herbs and acupuncture but mainly by a change in diet – avoiding certain foods. Incidentally, Chinese visitors to the West are stunned at the volume of confectionary sold to adults. To them, sweets are only for children – and only then as treats – and people lose their taste for them as they grow up.
In the summer of 2005 the Government put forward a plan that would change PCTs from bodies that delivered direct care to patients into administrative bodies that simply bought care from private medical companies: the monetarist dream come true. The Government all the while has been urging doctors to use their spending power to send more and more patients to private hospitals and clinics.
In December 2004 the Blair government was almost defeated in the House of Commons by a backbench rebellion when it passed the Bill that would introduce “foundation” hospital trusts. These trusts would be freed from Government constraints to use their budgets as they chose. They would be able to borrow money from finance companies and engage in commercial enterprises to raise money. But they could also face bankruptcy if they got their sums wrong.
And this is what has happened. Most trusts eagerly went for foundation status but they had been set up to fail from the start. They began with deep debts from their very inception and by now invariably loaded with long-term heavy PFI commitments. But they drew up business plans and expected to be able to cope by increasing their rate of operations and other treatments and reducing waiting lists by doing so.
But they did not take into account the growth of private sector hospitals and clinics, with the Government putting heavy pressure of PCTs to use them wherever possible. So the private sector took a large volume of routine operations, leaving the more complicated – and therefore expensive – cases for the foundation trusts. Within a year the foundations trusts had run up serious deficits. Foundation status had also reintroduced the internal market into the NHS, making hospitals compete against each other and against private sector hospitals and clinics.
They hoped the Government would bail them out but it flatly refused, telling the trusts they must sort out their own financial affairs.
The effects of this were felt earlier this year as trusts throughout England (Scotland and Wales are lucky enough to have democratic control of their own health services) realised they had to make drastic economies – cutting thousands of jobs and reducing services and provoking a storm of protest. The health service unions are playing a leading role in organising this protest, which also involves patient groups, pensioner organisations and many local community groups.
But there is worse to come. Predictions are that next year’s deficits will be as bad if not worse than this year’s. Job cuts have led to big redundancy payments but the worst problem is the way the Treasury works. When any Government department cuts buildings and jobs, the budget to sustain those jobs and buildings is also cut. Furthermore trusts are still obliged to pay for PFI buildings even if they are no longer used. So we end up with empty wards that the trusts cannot afford to staff but which still have to be paid for.
There is only one way that trusts can make a dent in their huge debts – and a small army of Government financial consultants has been going round the country pointing this out to the trusts. They must engage in more commercial activity. Those empty wards could be used for private, paying patients, or subcontracted to private healthcare companies.
More extra services could be offered to patients – at a price.
So now cash desks are starting to appear near the reception desks in major hospitals. And services that were once part of standard treatment are now being offered as extras at a price. For example a seriously patient needing a room to themselves will be offered such a room “for £30-a-night” extra, when previously the decision would have been based on their need and the availability of single rooms. It is clear that very soon the standard of treatment will depend very much on the ability to pay – not just for extras but for basic care. The monetarists are winning.
Stopping this process depends entirely on the strength of the organised working class. This is a struggle that cannot be left to health service unions alone. Every union in the country must become actively involved in the struggle. The ruling class must again learn to fear the strength of the working class as it did in 1948.

Finding Sanity in a Mad World

By Daphne Liddle


Britain is currently suffering an epidemic of mental illness, especially depression and anxiety. NHS mental health services are desperately under-funded but the problem is not just the shortages – it is also the remedies that are put forward that do not work.
The first remedy offered by the NHS is invariably strong drugs which do help some but carry the risk of severe side effects. Then there are the “talking therapies”, in particular Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, in which patients are told to control their thinking, block negative thoughts and to think only positive thoughts.
This approach insists that the depression comes from inside the brain of the patient – not from the objective reality of the outside world. But in a world threatened by global warming and ecological disaster, by wars involving nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and by extremes of wealth and poverty, is it madness to be depressed? At a more personal level the working classes are now more exploited, more in debt and working longer hours while traditional community and social structures are disappearing. What is the sane response to living in a mad world?




THE NEW Communist Party Congress in early December 2006 gave rise to an unexpected level of interest on the topic of mental health issues in modern Britain, including rapidly rising levels of depression and anxiety. It seemed that nearly everyone in the conference room had been involved, either as a professional health worker in the NHS or prison service, or through a close friend, family member or themselves suffering through the inadequacy of help from official services.
The whole of the NHS over the last year has suffered drastic cuts and mental health services have not escaped. One typical south-east London NHS mental health trust, which opted recently for foundation status, has restructured its services and cut £300,000 from its budget. This means that most people who now turn up at their GP with depression or anxiety will no longer be referred to specialist services but will be treated by the GP, almost invariably with anti-depressant drugs.
These drugs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), include Prozac, Serotonin, Cipramil, Fluoxetine and others. They do help some people but many patients find the side-effects cause more problems than they solve. These side effects include kidney problems and water retention and they can be addictive or they can make the depression worse. These drugs have been linked with suicides and violent outbursts. Last year a senior executive of Glaxo-Smith-Kline admitted that most of their drugs are effective on only about a third of patients. Even when they work, the drugs do not address the root cause of the problems of depression.
Although all these SSRIs are chemically similar (the illegal drug ecstasy is the strongest version of them), a doctor will insist the patients try all on the names on the list before concluding that these drugs do not help them. Even then, the patient has to refuse to take any more of the drugs before being referred for other treatment. One very depressed patient, fresh from hospital after an overdose of pills, was asked: “Do you want to try the pills again?”
The next line of treatment offered by the trust, for those who are not helped by the drugs or who do not recover by themselves, is referral to specialists in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which sometimes is offered as “anger management”.
But there has been a marked reduction in these services, with many changes of location. Drop-in centres have been closed and an annual Christmas party for patients who live alone had been withdrawn.
But the trust has presented these changes in a pamphlet as “improvements”; new services were described operating from various locations and then on the last page, under the heading “Location changes”, all the locations of the new services were listed for closure with no new locations mentioned. This led to serious confusion in some patients and confirmation in others that what they are being fed is just bullshit.
One disgruntled patient succeeded in getting an interview with the director of the trust. This elicited an admission that the changes were indeed cuts rather than improvements and that although £300,000 had already been cut, further cuts of £900,000 were needed to balance the books. But the director was an intelligent woman, trying to do the best she could in impossible circumstances. She had gone out of her way to avoid the pitfalls of Private Finance Initiative deals; she had opted to close buildings rather than cut jobs; new locations for services had not been mentioned in the pamphlet because they were not yet definite, she said. The danger is that with a further £900,000 cuts to be made, they may never be.
It also became evident that her view of the services provided was quite different to those on the receiving end. When told that a call to the trust’s emergency response team for someone in a mental health crisis had been made on a Thursday and had resulted in a call on the patient the next Monday, she thought that was a good and swift response. All patients were supposed to have a “care co-ordinator” in charge of their treatment and an emergency contact number. Many patients were totally unaware and certainly did not have one. It was one of those all too typical situations where middle and lower management fear to tell the boss that their section is underperforming for fear of their job being cut – so no bad news ever reaches the top.
But in any case bad news is something that a service based on the CBT philosophy of relentless positive thinking at all times cannot acknowledge.
Last year Labour economist and peer Robert Layard suggested that millions of people suffering from depression could be helped much more effectively through talking therapies rather than taking pills. He proposed that the Government train a small army of counsellors capable of delivering Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). He claimed that 16-session course usually gets the patient well enough to resume work and would save the economy a fortune in rehabilitating most of the long-term mentally sick
It sounded good at first – better than the pills at any rate. The National Association of Cognitive Behavioural Therapists (based in the United States) described CBT: “It is a form of psychotherapy that emphasises the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. CBT therapists teach that when our brains are healthy, it is our thinking that causes us to feel and act the way we do. Therefore if we are experiencing unwanted feelings and behaviours, it is important to identify the thinking that is causing the feelings/behaviours and to learn how to replace this thinking with thoughts that lead to more desirable reactions.”
The NACBT claims links to stoicism and the Socratic method – continually questioning one’s own thoughts and assumptions.
In practice it comes across with patients being given work sheets with instructions on “How to challenge thoughts: You need to know what you are thinking to be able to challenge your thoughts. Thoughts occur automatically. They flash so quickly we are therefore not always aware of them, or their content. There may be an error in the way you are thinking about something.
“To challenge negative thoughts you must: 1) identify what you are thinking 2) challenge the thought 3) replace the negative thought with a positive one.”
Patients (no longer called patients, that is too negative, but renamed “service-users”) who report that global warming, ecological disasters, wars, injustice, poverty and exploitation make them feel depressed are told that they are thinking too much. “Thinking is the cause of your illness. You must stop thinking your way and start thinking our way. You must think positively about the world.”
This soon becomes close to the philosophy satirised by Voltaire in his book Candide, where the eponymous hero is told by his mentor, Dr Pangloss, who taught “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology”, that there is no effect without a cause and that this is the best of all possible worlds.
“It is proved that things cannot be other than they are, for instance since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose. Observe: our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them. Stones were meant for carving and for building houses, and that is why my lord has a most beautiful house; for the greatest baron in Westphalia ought to have the noblest residence. And since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. It follows that those who maintain that all is right talk nonsense; they ought to say that all is for the best.” Throughout wars and disasters Pangloss, at every turn, insists that everything they are suffering is “for the best”.
This perpetual optimism, totally at odds with objective reality, is likely to make depressed patients feel worse, not better. They are told that the world is as it is and cannot be changed but that thinking it might be changed makes you ill and depressed.
This of course consigns every social reformer and revolutionary, every member of a left-wing political party or progressive campaign to be labelled as mentally ill. History makes nonsense of this. If the CBT view of the world was correct we would still be living in slavery under the Roman Empire. We could list thousands of people, from Cromwell, Robespierre, Marx and Lenin, to Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez who have brought major change to the world – and millions of others who have played an active role in the process.
There is another school of psychologists who reject CBT. They include Dr John Read from New Zealand and Oliver James. They claim that mental illness is a natural reaction to a mad world.
James writes: “All too often, CBT tutors the patient to tell a relentlessly positive story, to ignore many of their true feelings, just as drugs do. Not surprisingly, the studies show that once the teacher is no longer there, the depressed or anxious truth of our crazy world reasserts itself within a few months.
“CBT comes from a stable of psychology that deems accurate negative thoughts about oneself as ‘depressive realism’, and health as living in a rose-tinted bubble of positive illusions. For, truly, emotional distress is a form of dissent – an important signal that early family experiences and adult society have been or are distressing.”
He has recently written a book, Affluenza, in which he depicts the values and pressures of modern consumer society as the root of the growing epidemic of mental ill health. “The Affluenza virus is a set of values which increase our vulnerability to psychological distress: placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. Many studies have shown that infection with the virus increases your susceptibility to the commonest mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder.
“The virus values prevent you from fulfilling fundamental human needs which seem to exist in every society.” He lists the four most commonly identified fundamental needs as “security (emotional and material), connectedness to others, authenticity and autonomy, and feeling competent”. He says that urban societies are more affected by the virus than rural ones; that the epidemic is worst in America and Britain and that younger generations are more afflicted than older ones, “the young being especially influenced by America’s Affluenza-promoting cultural imperialism”.
He quotes the works of the German social democrat psychologist Erich Fromm who taught that being is more important than having and that anxiety about possessions leads to a transfer of our sense of identity into the things we own – a form of madness.
Bourgeois psychologists have wrestled long and hard with the problem of optimism. Statistical analysis shows that pessimists are usually better at predicting the future than optimists. Yet they insist that optimists have better mental health. They also say that those most in touch with objective reality are the sanest. Both statements cannot be true. They advocate the adoption of rosy illusions in the hope that these will become self-fulfilling prophesies.
CBT is taking the place of religion in persuading the exploited masses to resign themselves to their lot in life but it is grounded in an idealistic philosophy which ultimately claims that the material world exists as the creation of an idea (God’s) and is experienced through our ideas of it. This is the opposite of the Marxist-Leninist historical materialist view of the world which says that objective reality exists outside our own heads. And not only can it be changed but it is in a constant state of change in any case. For us, the sane method is to analyse that objective reality and the way it changes in order to be able to influence those changes – to think for ourselves and not be fooled by rosy illusions.
Dr Read, in his book Models of Madness, disputes the definition of schizophrenia, claiming that it a name for a collection of different conditions that result from bad experiences, especially in early childhood. He claims the idea of this as a genetic illness that should be treated by drugs is sustained by the drugs industry. He is part of what is known as the anti-psychiatry movement which began in the 1950s and 60s with psychologists like RD Laing. He advocates instead psycho-analysis and talking therapy of the type that looks into the patient’s past to find the events that have triggered the problem. Getting this high quality and effective therapy on the NHS can take years of waiting; properly qualified psycho-analysts are very thin on the ground – though there are plenty in private practice serving the rich.
James does not go quite so far. He agrees that some people are possibly more susceptible to mental ill health than others but that it is the circumstances of their life, and particularly their childhood, which determine whether the susceptibility is triggered. In other words mental health, or the lack of it, is produced by a dialectical process between nurture and nature.
But both Read and James look only at the immediate personal circumstances of the patient. They do not look at the wider class and political context. As soon as we do this we can pinpoint the things that make us depressed and anxious at a global and at a more personal level: social injustice, extremes of poverty coexisting with obscene levels of wealth, threats to the ecological future of the planet, the threat of nuclear war, other weapons of mass destruction, exploitation, being deep in debt, working excessively long hours, lack of time to spend with our families, lack of control over our own lives and general helplessness.
The root of almost all of these problems is the capitalist system.
If we take the view of the CBT advocates, we cannot do anything to change any of this but must adjust our minds to see it all through rose tinted spectacles. This leads some people to hedonism – escapism through refusing to listen to the news, being obsessed with the celebrity culture, drinking and partying as much as possible: “if there is no hope we might as well enjoy ourselves while we can”. This is one trend that has taken a large proportion of the working class away from active participation in anything political.
The other trend is despair, which has captured many of those who cannot turn off their minds, who cannot help but see what is happening around them. But feeling isolated and helpless they become paralysed by depression and or by suppressed anger. They become unable to function as part of a society which they can see is going mad.
The only sane and rational alternative is to ignore the CBT people and the pills, take stock of objective reality and set about trying to change it. And to do that we have to believe that it can be done – and we have the whole history of human society to provide the evidence that it can.
We recognise that the individual alone cannot change the world political situation. The great leaders of historical change: Cromwell, Robespierre, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kim Il Sung, Mao, Castro and so on did not accomplish anything alone. They were leading millions of others who shared their views and worked together in an organised way.
There were many other movements for social and political change that did not succeed in their own time but made an impact on history long after they were gone, like the Chartists and the Irish volunteers of the 1916 Easter Rising. Even those who have made mistakes and gone off on the wrong path, who may seem to have ended their efforts in defeat and despair, have helped future generations to learn from their mistakes. It is never a mistake to try.
But we don’t have to keep repeating the mistakes of the past. One lesson that workers have learned over the last 200 years of struggle against capitalism is that unity and solidarity are key – that means we must be organised. If everyone is rowing in a different direction our boat can only go round in circles. This is why all working class organisations operate democratic centralism. Every member has a right and duty to take part in discussing policy and voting on it. But once the decision is taken all fall in line behind the agreed policy and work together.
This is why the bourgeois psychologists are no use. The root of all our depression is capitalism and the only solution is to join a fighting working class party to combat it. They would have to tell their patients to join the New Communist Party.