The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 5th February 2016
DAVID Cameron has returned from negotiations with European Union leaders boasting that he has won vital concessions, parading these as some sort of triumph for British democracy and culture. But these concessions of which he is so proud give the British government the right to refuse in-work benefits to European migrants until they have been here for some four years.
What does that really mean? What sort of migrants would want to claim in-work benefits? It would be those who are young, possibly with children, who have jobs but low paid ones, part-time or zero-hours jobs where they cannot be certain of their income from one week to the next.
Cameron is proud that he is now free to let these people starve. What sort of pride is this? Proud to be mean and cruel to vulnerable people!
It is the same sort of pride that refers to “swarms of migrants” — the refugees from Africa and the Middle East camped in Calais — as though these desperate humans were rats.
We see this attitude reflected in the open Nazism of a large section of the racist right-wing protest against the refugees in Dover last Saturday. It is reflected in the callous cruelty of the Department of Work and Pensions towards the sick, the disabled, the long-term unemployed and single parents. There is now a sickening pride in being cruel to people who cannot answer back.
And it is not just in Britain. We see the extreme versions of it in the Middle East, where the state of Israel no longer bothers to hide its plain intention to commit genocide against the Palestinians.
We see it in Ukraine where open Nazism is terrorising the whole population and is out to kill and murder those who would make a political stand against the regime.
In the United States, time after time, black people, men, women and children are murdered by police officers for no other reason than their colour yet the police officers are never brought to justice. People are forbidden to feed the homeless because it attracts them to a particular place, as though they were vermin.
At the heart of all this is the yawning wealth gap with the billions of poor and working people on one side and the tiny fraction of billionaires who are at some level realising that this situation is getting dangerous for them.
They are dropping all their pretences and excuses, and openly declaring a pre-emptive war on the majority of the human race. They are like Macbeth, having committed so many bloody crimes that they are “in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more returning were as tedious as go o’er”.
This is the capitalist class at its most desperate and most dangerous — and at its last gasp. It has become completely psychopathic. The global anti-fascist forces have been slow to waken but it is happening. Increasingly throughout the world Israel is being censured, opposed and boycotted. As with apartheid South Africa, its days are numbered.
The resistance to Ukrainian fascism is strong and building in the break-away republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Throughout Europe and the United States anti-fascist and anti- austerity movements are growing faster than those of the fascists.
In Britain Jeremy Corbyn has become leader of the Labour Party and could well become Prime Minister in a few years. In the US left-winger Bernie Sanders is running neck-and-neck with Hilary Clinton to become the Democrat presidential candidate later this year. And in the rest of the world things are improving faster — though we rarely get to hear about it. Poverty levels in Africa are declining sharply since China started investing heavily in the continent, doing deals with local governments that are genuinely beneficial to the local economy and the people.
Latin America is also seeing a rise in living standards as countries there band together to resist the worst of finance imperialism.
The Brics countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are overcoming the dollar dominance in the world economy. They are not necessarily what we would think of as socialist but they are certainly not the dangerous rabid imperialist psychopaths that Cameron, Netanyahu and the entire Washington ruling clique are. And they see the danger and are working to disarm the psychopaths.
Global society is reaching a point when it can no longer go on in the same way. There is going to be a big upheaval. And we communists have a big role in this to ensure that it turns out in favour of the workers, of world peace and socialism.