The Insanity of Capitalism

That rabid, rascally, racist rag the Daily Express has on its front page yet another story attacking people on Benefits. Better still for it, the person cocnerned is originally from Nigeria, though has lived in Britain for ten years. Better still for it she is a single mother with five kids. No doubt it is the kind of story to get the kind of rabid, rascally, racist readers of the rag riled into a rage.

See: Racist Rag

The poor woman concerned lost her previous accommodation after a conflict with the Landlord. Now to add to her problems she has to face all of the hassle whipped up against her for no fault of her own. Having lost her previous accommodation her local Council could provide her with no adequate Counci Housing. So she found a house to rent, and corectly claimed her Housing Benefit. The Express is in a righteous rage over the fact that the house concerned is a £1 million - looks overpriced to me from the picture - house in a leafy suburb. What really is the gripe here?

This poor woman's problem really comes down to the fact that there are insufficient Council houses. But hang on, the main reason for that is that egged on by papers like the Express, Maggie Thatcher, in the 1980s forced Council's to sell their Council houses at give away prices!!! Now having helped cause the problem, the Express wants to whip up a moral panic against the very people who are the victims of the situation Thatcher and the Express created!!!!

Its amazing that the Express can feel that it can continue to appeal to its small-minded readers with such stories about trivial matters like this affecting disadvantaged people given the fact that over the last few weeks the capitalist State in Britain along with Capitalist States hroughout the world have paid out hundreds of billions of pounds in benefits to the rich bankers and their shareholders. They quote someone from the taxpayers Alliance saying that Housing Benefit should be only a stop-gap while people get back on their feet not a lifelong commitment. If it were possible for everyone to get a decent paid job in such a short period of time that might be fair enough, but, of course the reality is different. Especially if you face the likely probles of this poor woman of having to deal with a society in which racial discrimination in employment is rampant, and especially given the problem of trying to cover the cost of childcare. Moreover, they might want to consider that the chances of employment have just got a whole lot worse, and not for any mistakes made by those on benefits or other workers. No, it is the greed of Capitalism that led to the reckless decisions of Bankers and Capitalist States that led to the Credit Crunch and its effects on the real economy.

The answer to the Express's righteous indignation is simple. If they object to the cost of the rent for houses like the one in question then the State should simply take them over as it has done with the Banks. The Express doesn't complain about the Housing Benefit paid to the Queen to enable her to stay in the rented accommodation at Buckingham Palace - whose value I'm sure is much more than a million, and hte annual rent would be a lot more than £25,000. What about taking that over for more efficient use along with all the other udner-occupied palaces and large houses, and converting them to flats for the homeless to make up for all those Council houses Thatcher forced Councils to sell.

Of course, the Capitalist State won't do that, and its pointless socialists demanding that it did, or misleading workers into the belief that it might. The job of marxists is to provide workers with real solutions to their problems, solutions they can bring about thesmelves here and now through their own activity not playing games in trying to make the State and its agents look bad - no effort is required for that it does it itself. The answer comes both from Marx and Engels and from the experience of workers own activity in the past. Marx and Engels argued that workers should not look to the bosses or their State to provide them with solutions. Instead they had to rely now and in the future on their own self-activity, in their own collective and co-operative efforts. That was true wheter it was in defending their wages and conditions through their Trade Unions, in building their own economic and social position through the creation of Co-operatives, or fighting the attempts of the bosses to frustrate them politically, by building their own political party. Workers and small farmers in the US did that. They had a thing called "Barn Raising". When a new small farm started up, all the neighbours would club together and build the barn and other buildings. Through, their collective, co-operative effort not only could they build a barn quickly, and efficiently - often within a day - but they could do it cheaply.

Today, tat perhaps, is not a possibility in the literal sense - although there are examples of peple working co-operatively udner the guidance of skilled craftsmen tobuild their own houses - but we do have the possibility of creating Co-operative construction companies, we do have Co-operative and Mutual Banks and fianncial institutions such as the Co-op and Unity Trust Banks, and e do have the experience of building Tenants and residents Association to bring about some measure of co-operative control over local estates. If instead of wasting its time in futile battles with the Capitaist State sapping its energy and strength the Labour Movement set itself the task of developing such solutions, of bringing the Co-op Bank etc. properly under workers control ensuring that funds were dircted accordingly and so on workers could begin to build worker owned an controlled estates throughout the country desigtnd to meet the needs of the people living there, not the whims of some bureaucrat sitting in a planning office at the local Council or in Whitehall. Not only could the cost of such communities be reduced, for those living there considerably, but they would be under their direct control with no fear that at some point the Council will icnrease rents, introduce some new edict, try to sell off the houses to some private company or fail to maintain them for years on end. In place of the huge sums that go just to cover the bloated expenses of State Capitalist bureaucrats that run Housing departments in local Councils or in the Housing Associations, the administration cost would be slashed with the consequent benefit for tenants.

In so doing and bringing back a large amount of property int the ownership and control of workers a start would be being amde in constructing a different type of society. A society workers could begin to understand and believe in in place of the anrarchy and madnesss of Capitalism, a society where the great inequalities in wealth and income create the lunacy of a surfeit of million pound homes amidst a shortage of decent homes for the vast majority.