WINZ, Spin Doctors and 'Healthy Work'

Sir Mansel Aylward

On 30th Sept the NZ Herald quoted Welfare Minister Paula Bennett as reporting that on average 3500 benefits are cancelled weekly, 2000 being due to 'other reasons than the recipient finding employment). Most of these are presumably results of the harsh new sanctions regime against those failing to comply with job-seeking requirements. Amongst these will be sickness and invalid beneficiaries who have been declared fit to work by WINZ’s designated doctors. Enquiries made under the Official Information Act have revealed that designated doctors are being indoctrinated at WINZ training seminars in the ‘health benefits of work’ and in the doctrine that benefit dependency is an addiction

In its crusade to reduce benefit numbers by 40,000 the government has found a powerful ally in the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) and its Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (AFOEM), which is currently conducting a campaign to convince doctors of the health benefits of work. So well does this fit with the government’s plans that WINZ quotes the AFOEM's Position Statement on the application form for the work capacity medical certificate in a blatant attempt to educate doctors signing it. The WINZ form erroneously attributes the quotation to the AFOEM's Consensus Statement, misleadingly implying that the signatories have all examined the evidence for the hypothesis advanced and agree that it is "compelling." (Thanks to George Bush Jr and Tony Blair we have learned that when government agencies start to talk of "compelling" evidence, it is time to start doubting).

The other words, the government is cynically intervening in the education of doctors to promote a theoretical model of dubious validity, not out of any concern for the health of the population but because it happens to correlate so well with neo-liberal policy goals of workfare to drive down wages and restore profits.

The medical theory it is promoting is the so-called bio-psycho-social model of illness (BPSM), which has some grounds for criticising traditional medicine for ignoring social and environmental factors in the causation of illness. But while it has indeed become part of regular medical practice to mobilise multi-disciplinary teams comprising psychologists and social workers in the treatment of illness BPSM has failed to achieve recognition as a comprehensive theory of medical causation.

Moreover, the BPSM restricts its definition of social to the immediate social situation of the patient without inquiring into the mediated power-based relations of the class-based wider society. As expounded by some of its champions, it claims that if a person is treated as if they were ill they are likely to become so, which is not much of an advance on Christian Science and Norman Vincent Peale.

Prominent among the advocates of the health benefits of work is Sir Mansell Aylward, formerly Chief Medical Adviser, Medical Director and Chief Scientist at the UK Department of Work and Pensions, and now HOD in an academic chair sponsored by Unum, the world's largest disability insurer. The AFOEM has acknowledged his leadership and he has had the ear of Welfare minister Paula Bennett. Not only has Unum been thoroughly discredited for the scale on which it has attempted to evade payouts, it has demonstrated an interest in taking over the UK welfare system.

It was Sir Mansell who devised the Personal Capability assessment (PCA) to which British claimants are subjected, the administration of which is contacted out to a private sector firm ATOS. The United Kingdom is further down the path of work-focused welfare reform than is New Zealand, and the results it has achieved- little published in New Zealand, are truly alarming

‘The Express’ Jan 17th 2013 reported: Former Labour minister Michael Meacher accused the firm (ATOS) of “ruthlessly” pressurising the sick and disabled into work. Opening a Commons debate, he said 1,300 people had died after being placed in the “work-related activity group”, for those currently too ill to be in a job but expected to take steps towards an eventual return to employment. Some 2,200 died before the assessment process was completed and 7,100 died after being placed in the group for those entitled to unconditional support as they are too ill or disabled to work.

No wonder the disability support group opposing the UK's benefit reforms has adopted as its symbolic title "Black Triangle" after the stigma worn under duress by disabled citizens in the Third Reich.

To return to AFOEM’s position statement: this document does not shrink from making recommendations to the government, but recommendations that poverty be abolished are not amongst them, despite the link between ill-health and poverty clearly shown in the evidence it marshals, which demonstrates beyond doubt that the children of welfare beneficiaries are more than averagely prone to illness.

This is something the Child Poverty Action Group, the Children’s Commissioner, and a wide variety of community health practitioners have been pointing out for years. Is the fact that the government has been able to ignore this for so long due to the influence of the RACP and those who in turn influence it? Do the learned physicians of the AFOEM really believe that it is lack of work that is making the children sick? Should we anticipate a return to Victorian era child labour laws? The Position Statement includes further evidence that it is poverty, not unemployment that creates ill-health by acknowledging the existence of an unemployed stratum of capitalist parasites which is nevertheless able to remain in good health.

We say the pressure to force the poor into work is to drive down wages and create cheap jobs so that the whole working class is forced to pay for the bosses’ crisis. No way! For the working class to live parasitic capitalism must die!

Class Struggle 107 Rape culture, Dirty Dairying, Comrades and Cossacks, Pike River Disaster

“Rape Culture” and Patriarchy

The ‘Roast Busters’ scandal created a national protest about teenage boys bragging about getting underage girls drunk and having sex – in fact rape. Many agreed that there was a culture of rape that made this sort of behaviour OK. Moreover the police share rape culture hiding behind excuses for failing to act on written complaints for three years. Many said this culture was part of the patriarchy – a system of male gender domination of the female gender. This is only half the story however. It reduces rape to a symptom of male power over women that can be changed by social reforms.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t explain why patriarchal power and a rape culture exist today. Humans lived in relative gender equality for tens of thousands of years before men imposed their dominance on women. Engels called this the “overthrow of Mother Right”. The matriarchy where public wealth was allocated through the female line for the benefit of the whole society became the patriarchy where men now controlled the accumulation of private wealth.

Patriarchy was the first class society to come into existence. Women fought their oppression and were met by male violence and a culture that justified oppression. The real ‘herstory’ is the resistance of women to the changing forms of patriarchy over the ages. It has persisted through slave and feudal class societies where women were oppressed in ruling and ruled-class families. Today it serves capitalism which exploits unpaid domestic labour to produce each generation if wage-labourers.

Since the patriarchy originated in the overthrow of gender equality it can itself be overthrown and gender equality restored. But to do that women and men have to join forces in the working class to overthrow capitalism.

We learned all this from the Marxist women who participated in the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution from 1917-1923. Women took active roles in the revolutionary parties fighting male prejudice to be treated as equals. Because they were socially oppressed under capitalism they won the right to form independent caucuses and present motions in their name. Moreover they played key roles in leading these socialist revolutions.

In Russia in 1917 it was striking women textile workers demanding bread that sparked off the February revolution which led months later to the October Revolution. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was the main leader of the German revolution before her cruel murder in 1919. She was betrayed and killed because she would have played a decisive role in making the German revolution a success.

We urgently need new generations of Bolshevik women. Can the Pussy Riot women jailed by Putin as ‘hooligans’ give us some pointers? It is significant that they brand Putin as an ex KGB dictator and draw inspiration from the ‘Trotskyist resisters’ who stood up to Stalin in the 1930s. Rather than making friends with pseudo Marxists like Slavoj Zizek, they should look to the life and work of Rosa Luxemburg, the many Bolshevik women, and those who fought as ‘Trotskyists’ against Stalinism, then join the struggle for a new revolutionary Marxist Party today.

Dirty Dairying

Dirty dairying arises from the large scale expansion of dairying by corporates who are hungrily exhausting land, destroying environment and producing dirty products to extract as much monopoly rent as possible. Rent is the value that labour-power produces on the land arising from the inputs of soil, climate, location etc. Monopoly rent arises from the limited supply of land that is fertile, in a temperate climate and has good access to markets. The expansion of dairying in Aotearoa makes use of all of these factors to meet a growing demand for milk in the emerging economies of Asia.

The business takeover of Dairying is not a new gentry or new feudalism as some argue. It’s capitalist farming. NZ farming since British settlement has always been part of the global capitalist economy. Large scale farming employed agricultural workers, while small scale family farming was a source of profits for the banks, stock agents, meat works and shipping companies. During depressions indebted farmers walked off the land and governments made the less valuable land available. Wealthy farmers bought up the best land and got wealthier. The amalgamation of farms in the recent decades continues the trend towards the concentration of large scale or corporate ownership of capitalist agriculture.

Rod Oram writes about how this concentration of assets is highly debt-laden as amalgamations, new technology and economies of scale require big outlays usually financed by bank loans. Oram shows how this is leading to the growing involvement of foreign investors. The word ‘foreign’ here is misleading as most of NZ big business is always been owned by banks and firms that operate globally. Agriculture is no exception.

Fonterra, NZ’s biggest dairy corporation now operates globally, and it’s only a matter of time before it will offer shares that are not under the control of the cooperative producers making it a target for takeover or merger by some other big food monopoly. The concentration of ownership in large scale international British, US, Japanese, Australian and Chinese monopolies on the one hand, and the increasingly internationalised working class on the other, proves Marx prediction that as capital becomes global, so does the working class.

This is the international class structure that underlies the increasing inequality globally. It is certainly inherently unstable as it requires one class to exploit the other and pretend it’s doing it in the common interest. Workers first response is local and national. For example, as the social costs of Fonterra’s dirty dairying become clear, when contamination, dumping of excess milk, poisoning of catchments etc become better known, there will be working class demands to re-nationalise dairying, with cooperative ownership under working class management and control.

Capitalism will not collapse but be revolutionised by the vast millions who already constitute its global productive apparatus. Those multi-millions are also part of capitalism. It is their power over the productive apparatus that will render the political power of the tiny parasitic class impotent. The only question is whether this revolution will happen before global warming kicks off enough feedback loops to make as all equally extinct.

 

Comrades and Cossacks

Putting up a memorial to Cossacks who broke the strike of the Auckland wharfies and helped set up a scab union in 1913 is a provocation to today’s workers and the Labour Party which evolved out of the Federation of Labour formed in 1909.

That FOL (known as the ‘Red Fed’ because of its socialist principles) broke from the Arbitration Court because it refused to increase wages in 1908. The Miners Federation became the FOL and other unions like the wharfies, flaxworkers and shearers joined. Acting as free unions registered under the 1878 Trade Union Act. There was no prohibition on strikes and these workers gained better wages and conditions than under the Arbitration Court.

Also formed in 1909 was the Reform Party led by Bill Massey a small farmer. Small farmers newly settled on land broken up by the Liberal Government in the 1890s and assisted by state loans became a new force for private property opposed to the more progressive wing of the Liberals who favoured state leaseholds over freehold. The prize of capital gain was the main route for the landless out of the working class.

From 1910 the freeholders and business class behind Massey organised to force the FOL back into the Arbitration Court. It became the Government in 1912 and the first major fight was at the Waihi gold mines in 1912. The Waihi Miners Union joined the FOL in 1911 and won better wages and conditions. The mine owners used the Arbitration law to form a scab union imposing a wage cut on the FOL miners locked out until they agreed.

For six months the miners held out supported by the FOL and overseas unions. Police, scabs and armed thugs attacked the locked out workers. George Evans was killed. 68 of the miners including all of their leaders were jailed for attempting to keep the scab union out of the mine.

This dispute was a dress rehearsal for the 1913 strike which again began as a lockout this time of the Wellington Watersiders by British shipowners who refused to employ men not in an arbitration union. Now the bosses were emboldened to smash the whole Red Fed and the newly formed Social Democratic party and force all workers into the Arbitration Court. Strikes in support of the locked out Watersiders spread around the country and were faced by police, armed scabs, the Cossacks, and even the army and navy (the latter with permission of the British crown).

According to WB Sutch in Poverty and Progress in NZ p. 165:
“Young farmers, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, rode into the main ports as ‘specials’ to intimidate the strikers and the public, to form arbitration unions and take the place of watersiders and seamen…When police and specials took over the Auckland waterfront so that scab labour could work the ships, many other unions (including craft unions) struck in protest. There was almost a general strike in Auckland. Strike leaders were put in jail (there were 169 convictions); at the ports the Employers’ Federation formed new arbitration unions, often based on the young farmers were there partly for this purpose; the ports were worked by these people and other scabs; and the Supreme Court decided that arbitration unions could not contribute strike funds to another union. The arbitration unions formed by the employers were registered, and the watersiders told that if they wanted to work again on the wharves they must join these unions. By 20 December 1913 the strike was over, and Massey was able to give Waikato farmers medals for strike breaking.”

In case anybody thinks that that episode can never be repeated it most certainly was in the 1951 lockout, and will inevitably again when organised labour stands up for its rights against the class that owns the means of production and controls the state to enforce its class rule.

Pike River Disaster is us all

The NACTs are so far refusing to be shamed into making state corporate and ministries pay court ordered compensation to the Pike River families. After Key’s crocodile tears at the public rally following the disaster, he now claims there is no legal or moral reason to compensate the families. What do you expect? The NACTs crony capitalist regime is speeding up its rip, shit and bust style of plundering Aotearoa’s natural resources. This means privatising land, water, minerals into the hands of crony capitalists, destroying nature and furthering the carbon burning climate collapse of the failing capitalist system.

The Royal Commission, numerous testaments of miners, crusading journalism like Rebecca Macfie’s book, and committed working class histories like Paul Maunder’s book, put the case beyond reasonable doubt: capitalism rapes nature and chews up and spits out workers and their families in the process so it can make its profits out of their blood and guts.

What we have said consistently about this disaster is that it is typical of capitalism in its terminal decline and no faith in the bosses’ state or in any of the capitalist parties, NACTs, Labour or Greens will change that. Labour and the unions are part of this retreat into rip, shit and bust. The old miners union has been replaced by the EPMU who are committed to working within the confines of capitalist laws.

We need to fight like the Red Fed of the early 1900s before the labour movement was co-opted into parliament. The Red Fed was notorious as a federation of labour that put the interests of workers before the bosses’ law. They broke from the IC&A Act – labour’s ‘leg iron’ in the words of Harry Holland – and fought the bosses attempt to break their federation by violent attacks and force them back into the Arbitration Court. This year, 2013 is the 100 anniversary of the 1913 General Strike that signified the defeat of the Red Fed.

A Red Fed today would be in a very different situation than 100 years ago. As Maunder points out, the capitalist world division of labour has changed. While the NZ economy is still based on extraction and export of raw materials, workers interests do not lie in defending their jobs by the further plunder and destruction of nature. A Red Fed would face climate catastrophe not by fighting for ‘fair shares’ in the destruction of the planet, but by fighting for a new sustainable socialist system in which the working class plans production for our need and not the profits of the 1%. So while the families should get their compensation in this life, the workers need to go on the offensive. The alternative to ongoing destruction of nature and deaths of workers is to rebuild their unions and fight for a Workers’ Government that would socialise the strategic industries without compensation to private owners, and plan production under workers control for a socialist economy.

Review of 'Going Dark'

by Guy R. McPherson
Publish America, Baltimore, 2013.

Guy McPherson is rapidly gaining a reputation as Guy ‘McStinction’ as the climate scientist who is predicting near-term human extinction “beyond the 2030”s. He makes the case that Climate Collapse (CC) is upon us and that only industrial collapse could stop it. When that happens we as a species will as he says, “Go dark” as it becomes extinct. The 26 positive feedback loops (PFLs – causal chains that are self-reinforcing and increase exponentially) are many and almost all are already beyond human control. McPherson accepts that against all odds there are (currently) two positive feedbacks that we can influence. These are the ones that set all the other PFLs in motion. Broadly they are the extraction and burning of fossil fuel. The only way McPherson thinks we can reverse and stop those positive feedbacks is for industrial civilisation to collapse. 

The problem is that while McPherson has the scientific credentials to understand and explain CC, he lacks these credentials when it comes to explaining the industrial civilisation that caused it. One requirement of science is that if you are postulating human action to stop an effect you need to understand the cause. Before we talk about ‘industrial society’ collapsing we need to know what it is and how to make it collapse.

McPherson has a good grasp of industrial society as that of ‘empire’ controlled by corporations. He sees industrial society ruled by those in power now using a police state and NSA to keep a hold over the people. He hoped that the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 would bring about the collapse of industrial society. But that did not happen. The big banks and big business rallied with big bailouts and bonuses from big government that then turned the big cops on Occupy. Far from collapsing, the monopoly capitalist state then embarked on a crash program to extract and burn all known fossil fuels to boost profits. What will it take to build a citizens crash program to stop the corporate crash program turning the planet into a ball of fire? McPherson’s response to this is the need for ‘total revolution’, ‘anarchy’ and ‘freedom’ but he has no road map for how this can be made possible. This is the main problem with Going Dark and the rest of this review is about spelling out that crash socialist program for survival.

Capitalist crisis meets Climate Catastrophe

Why didn’t the 2008 GFC bring about the collapse of industrial civilisation? The short answer is that the capitalist class did not allow it to collapse and the working class did not make it. Industry is capitalist industry owned and controlled by capitalists. They are motivated by profits which they screw out of the working class surplus-value. Capitalism is a dynamic contradiction. It develops technology to increase labor productivity to get more surplus-value out of workers. But the consequence of this is the increase in investment in the tools of production (machines etc) that cannot produce value, relative to the wages of productive workers, who do. This is the famous organic composition of capital. This sows the seeds of crisis in the form of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). The capitalists fight the TRPF with counter-tendencies, plundering the world for cheap resources, cutting wages, and of course inventing better machines to make labor more productive.

But inevitably the capitalists cannot screw enough surplus value out of workers to make a profit on their investment and the TRPF wins. A crisis of falling profits results leading to a fall in investment, the classic capitalist slump, and an overproduction of capital which must be devalued to restore the rate of profit. The last major slump began in the 1970s but despite devaluations of capital, particularly in the neo-liberal years, surplus capital remained. It found an outlet in speculating in existing values creating fictitious values was above true values. 

The 2008 GFC was a collapse of several of these overvalued speculative markets, beginning with housing but spreading to the whole banking system. To prevent this system collapsing along with these fictitious values, the banks were bailed out by central banks which created $trillions of debt to be paid for by future generations of workers in cuts to living standards - hours, wages, pensions, conditions etc. But $trillions of fictitious values remain to be destroyed before profits recover back to their post-WW2 boom levels.

The GFC did not lead to the collapse of industrial civilisation because it was no more than a symptom of that long decline as capitalism exhausts its capacity to plunder the earth and the labor value of workers sufficient to sustain its profits. The capitalist class treated the symptom of an ailing capitalism but it has not yet been able to cure the disease – falling profits. 

This explains why the ruling class is ruthlessly mining, drilling, fracking the earth, and ruthlessly spying, militarising, and repressing workers, activists and ‘terrorists’ who resist its headlong rush to destruction. It is the crisis-ridden capitalist system in extremis that accounts for the polarisation of the global population where the ruling class, with its political parties, fake social movements, and media bullshit oppress the global working class which is fighting to survive as part of the natural world that parasitic capitalism threatens to make extinct. This contradiction is becoming more extreme and can be resolved in favour of nature and humanity only by the international working class, the proletariat, overthrowing and replacing the capitalist system.

Green capitalists and socialists

McPherson’s terms, ‘anarchism’, ‘freedom’ and ‘total revolution’ are subversive concepts, but they need to be translated into revolutionary strategy and tactics to overthrow capitalism. Logically, ‘total revolution’ is the only course of action in stopping the positive feedbacks still within our control. If we succeed then survival makes ‘Freedom’ possible. But are ‘Anarchism’, ‘ecosocialism’ and even ‘Marxism’ up to the task? The first test is to reject ‘Green Capitalism’ which is both utopian and reactionary. Utopian, because capitalism cannot coexist in harmony with nature; reactionary because it limits itself to “peaceful civil disobedience” as a sort of passive-aggressive behavior; activist against the ‘corporate elite’ but pacifist against capitalism. 

Who are the Green Capitalists? James Hansen calling for more nuclear power; Bill McKibben’s 350.org and anti-Keystone campaigns funded by Rockefeller and other business foundations to the tune of $10 million to stop the tar-sands and shale fracking; Climate Ground Zero and the defenders of Coal River Mountain, or Greenpeace climate activism all over the world. All assume civil disobedience can stop fossil fuel burning without overthrowing capitalism. While they ‘act out’ this passive aggression the positive feedbacks keep burning us up.

‘Total Revolution’ also means going beyond Green Socialism (or ecosocialism) which claims that socialism can be achieved by redistributing the world’s wealth and imposing sustainable growth without smashing the capitalist state and creating a centralised workers’ government. This is Green capitalism with a socialist gloss. It deludes workers into the belief that capitalists can be made to forgo their carbon burning destructive profiteering without making workers pay dearly with loss of livelihoods and loss of lives. A prominent advocate of Green Socialism is John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. Foster shares with the Green capitalists the belief that we have the time to mobilise to stop climate change by pushing for reforms. 

He critiques Hansen et al for failing to see that capitalism will repress any direct action to enforce a carbon tax yet still pins his hopes on such reforms leading to the development of revolutionary consciousness. Such reforms include a carbon tax, opposition to capitalist waste and capitalist growth that does not meet real needs and so on. The problem is we do not have the time to struggle for reforms that may lead to revolution. Marxists have always argued that reforms only result when the bosses want to head off a revolution. We have to take action now to shut down oil and gas plants as well as the major industries that rely on them such as the auto and plastics industries. We also have to warn that mass direct action targeting the ruling class right to rule will bring down the spy, anti-terror state forces on activists and make it necessary to abandon the reformist road for the revolutionary road.

‘Total Revolution’ and Survival Socialism

For Marx the forces of production included nature (importantly the labor-power of workers) that was subordinated to capitalist production for profit. The capitalist exploitation of nature did at that time not pose Climate Catastrophe. Today we are faced with consequences of centuries of capitalist plunder – a blowback by nature. This is not anthropogenic but capitalogenic Climate Collapse. For thousands of years before capitalism humans had to coexist as part of nature. So it is not ‘human’ agency but capitalist agency that destroys the forces of production in its mad rush to exhaust millions of years of stored up carbon. For revolutionary Marxists capitalism is lived past its due date. A socialist revolution is long overdue to stop the massive destruction of the forces of production (nature).

Yet while socialist revolution is necessary now there can be no immediate transition to a socialist society in which newly invented technology will allow the forces of production to develop in harmony with nature allowing a reduction in labor, a conservation of energy and basic need of all met. First, the destruction of nature has to be stopped. The immediate priority will be the conservation of resources while a transition to new technology is developed along with a global plan that reorganises production on the basis of meeting the basic needs of all. For revolutionary Marxists then, ‘total Revolution’ means overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a transitional workers government that acts to stop the carbon burning feedback loops. Only if and when that has been achieved can production be planned sustainably to meet the needs of the 7 billion earthlings.

Climate change demands a ‘total revolution’ to dump corporate capitalism. ‘Anarchism’ is not sufficient. Anarchism is premised on the petty bourgeois individual who is a creature of capitalism. The proletariat is also the creation of capitalism but it is also the progressive class within capitalism whose historic mission is to be the ‘gravedigger’ of capitalism and the builder of socialism. The proletariat needs to control and conserve its productive forces to survive as part of nature. Grass roots movements like Idle No More, trade unions and community activists etc., need to join forces as the universal struggle of the proletariat. This is class war. We need to organise democratically but act globally. This requires an international organisation – a world socialist party. We must take the power and wealth off the ruling class – take over the Banks and all the big business.. We must smash their state apparatus that indoctrinates us, spies on us and represses us.

The positive feedback revolution can stop is the capitalist exploitation of nature as the source of corporate profits. We as workers are the source of those profits. Our labor-power (along with the rest of nature) is the source of all wealth. We need to mobilise our own class power. We have to build a system of workers power to defeat the state power of the ruling class. That power has to be based on its source – our labor. We need to withdraw our labor in many strike actions that build into a General Strike that shuts down capitalist production world-wide. To hold onto this power we need to occupy the workplaces and defend them against the armed forces of the state. 

All of this will mean a program for an alternative society. This will start with local strike committees and defence committees that coordinate nationally and internationally. Here the various currents of anarchism, socialism and Marxism will debate strategy and tactics to win support for the best course of action. Arising from such committees will grow councils or communes where the working people will debate political tactics and plan the production of the good and services that we need to survive. There is no guarantee that we can do this, or that it will be enough to stop Capitalist Climate Collapse. But there is no way that generation Zero will go quietly into the night. And for revolutionary Marxists there is no question that we go with a bang and not a whimper!