NDC Begins Re-organisation

Former President John Mahama

By Benjamin Mensah

The Volta Region Caucus of the Minority National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Parliament has begun interactions with constituencies in the region to brace themselves up for activities to reorganise the party.

The caucus, led by Dr James Klutse Avedzi, the Deputy Minority Leader and Member of Parliament of Ketu North, said the caucus had been divided into four groups who visited 18 out of the 26 constituencies in the region from April 19 to April 21.

Dr Avedzi’s group visited Akan, Buem, Biakoye and Ketu North constituencies.

In all the constituencies visited the outcome was positive as people were happy that the Members of Parliament (MPs), now on recess, had taken personal interests in the affairs of the constituencies.

“They expressed happiness and were very grateful to the caucus for the tour to make the party bounce back to victory in the next elections,” Dr Avedzi said.

In an interview with journalists at the Parliament House, Dr Avedzi said the NDC Minority Caucus would ensure that the party rebounded and worked itself to victory in the next elections.

“We know very much that we’ll come back to power in 2020, but that has to start with internal re-organisation,” he said.

He said members were awaiting the outcome of the Kwesi Botchwey Committee and expressed the hope that they would agree with decisions that would be taken.

“All is not lost because we could not make it as expected in 2016. We have hope, and we’re re-energising the party, starting with Volta Region which is described as the World Bank of the NDC,” he said.

Dr Avedzi said the leadership of the NDC had proposed early elections at the branch level where nine executives would be elected in each branch.

“For a party to win elections, the branch must be very strong,” Dr Avedzi said, adding that there were 29,000 branches in Ghana where the party needed to mobilise effectively for victory.

He said nominations would open in July for two weeks for the nine positions including chairman, vice chairman, secretary, organiser, women’s organiser, youth organiser, treasurer, communications officer and one person who would be a member, to be contested for.

The election of these officers would be supervised by the constituency executives to ensure that “true members” and qualified persons are elected at the branch levels.

They would be vetted and cleared after which a date would be fixed, somewhere in October.

Editorial

DID HE FORGET?

At the May Day parade in Accra, the Secretary-General of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) claimed that all African countries have gained their independence and we wondered whether he had only forgotten about the African reality.

Of course we were alarmed because the leader of the Trade Union movement in Ghana or anywhere else ought to uphold the principles of self-determination for all people.

The right of self-determination is one which has been fought for by numerous trade unions including even those in the West.

The reality in Africa today is that there is one country which is still under the colonial yoke and its people are engaged in a heroic struggle for freedom.

The country is the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SARD) and its colonial occupier is Morocco.

Dare we ask? Is the Trade Union Congress of Ghana in solidarity with the people of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic?

There is work to be done in the Ghana TUC or perhaps the Secretary –General just forgot his facts.

Local News

Retired Auditor calls for recovery of all misappropriated funds

By Solomon Naambir

Mr Philip Kofi Ntiamoah, a retired Principal Auditor has appealed to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, to ensure that all public funds misappropriated were recovered.

He said it would be prudent that supplementary budget was prepared in addition to the recoveries and made public as well.

Mr Ntiamoah, who is a former Assemblyman for Bonsu in the Nkoranza South Municipality, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that the PAC ought to also ensure that public officers who misappropriated or embezzled state funds were prosecuted.

He observed that the general public would develop interest in the work of the PAC if the outcome of its audit reports were made available to the public.

Mr Ntiamoah commended the PAC for its work, and was optimistic that recommended sanctions and prosecutions would be meted out to culprits.

GNA

Innovative solutions needed to transform healthcare – Dr. Elikem Tamakloe

The Chief Executive Officer of Nyaho Medical Centre, Dr. Elikem Tamakloe, has said that Ghana needs innovative solutions to surmount the numerous constraints that plague its healthcare service delivery.

Speaking at a medical symposium organized by the Centre, under the auspices of its Corporate Social Responsibility arm, the Nyaho Dove Foundation, he said understanding patients’ needs is fundamental to providing creative solutions and the level of quality care patients expect.

“We need to seek to understand exactly what the problems are, to address them squarely. It’s not enough to be just creative – medical facilities have to be reliable and continually review processes to improve on service delivery,” he noted.

Dr. Tamakloe reiterated that “with the right technology and innovation in place, society will identify medical facilities who are doing the right thing and catch up with non-professionals” to improve on the quality of healthcare. The medical symposium was in honour of the Founder of the hospital, Dr. Kwami Nyaho Tamakloe.

The event which was aimed at promoting quality health outcomes for patients and positively influencing policies in Ghana’s private and public sector healthcare delivery systems, was under the theme, “Improving the Quality of Healthcare in Ghana.” It featured key stakeholders including Dr. Albert Akpalu (Consultant Neurosurgeon, KBTH) Dr. Lydia Dsane-Selby (Head of Claims, National Health Insurance Authority) Dr. Eli Atikpui (Registrar, Medical & Dental Council, Ghana) Dr. Ken Sagoe (Head, Faculty of Public Health, Ghana College of Physicians & Surgeons) Dr. Gloria Quansah Asare (Ag. Dir. Gen. – Ghana Health Service), a visiting Team from The Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals, NHS Trust, UK and Dr. Elikem Tamaklo, Managing Director, Nyaho Medical Centre and Host of the event.

The Symposium also attracted a representation from Government, Civil Service Organisations and Private Sector Healthcare Institutions including the Ministry of Health, Ghana Mental Health Authority, The National Health Insurance Authority, Ghana College of Physicians & Surgeons, Accra College of Medicine, The Trust Hospital, 37 Military Hospital, University of Ghana, Ghana Health Service, mPharma and East Cantonments Pharmacy Ltd – a sponsor of the event. Participants at the Symposium had meaningful interactions related to best practices in clinical care and alternative models of providing quality healthcare.

Source:citifmonline

Ecologist calls for national research strategy

Dr Benjamin Delali Dovie

By Laudia Sawer

Dr Benjamin Delali Dovie, a lecturer and researcher at the Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana, has called for a national research and development strategy to provide the needed data for policy making.

Dr Dovie said such a strategic system must be initiated and funded by the Presidency to promote and perpetuate the use of scientific research to arrive at a comprehensive solutions to the country’s perennial development problems as it pertains in developed countries.

He made the call on Friday during a one-day workshop on an upcoming research project into cities and change in the Tema Metropolis and other districts within the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA).

He noted that due to the unavailability of such a strategy, there was a huge gap between research and development in Ghana as the state put very little into the promotion of research.

Dr Dovie, who is an Ecologist and an Environmental Change Scientist, added that its introduction could then cascade to the Regional Coordinating Councils and to the various district assemblies as they use science to inform the needed development in their areas.

He stated for instance that scientific research conducted by his outfit indicated that climate change would increase the intensity and frequency of floods in Ghana especially in the urban areas.

He therefore called for a comprehensive preparedness by policy makers especially the district assemblies to manage its consequences.

The urban areas, he observed, were more susceptible to floods due to planning challenges; limited resources for green development, springing up of industries, haphazard physical planning, among others.

Dr Dovie stated that the flood challenges at the Odawna area and its environs needed to be tackled using scientific research to understand its complexity explaining that no amount of money being quoted by Ministers would solve that problem permanently.

“This is not time to be quoting figures for Odawna but rather understanding the issue scientifically”, he stressed.

He revealed that some research carried out by his team on the issue showed that until government changed its policy direction for the area, the problem would continue to exist as according to him policy makers had failed to understand the totality of the Odaw challenge.

Highlighting on the challenges, he said planning for the GAMA area must include consultations with other regions especially the Eastern Region where most of the rain water coming into the Odaw area flowed from.

He stressed that any attempt to solve the flood problem must consider the Akwapim area, effects of deforestation in that area, transformation of mountain land areas, promotion of farming in the area, rain harvesting, among others.

World Common Ownership

By common ownership we don’t mean state property. We are not proposing the science-fiction nightmare of all the Earth’s resources being owned and controlled by a single World State. We mean the opposite: that there should be no private property or territorial rights over any part of the globe. The Earth and its natural and industrial resources should not belong to anybody – not to individuals, not to corporations, not to states. They should simply be there to be used by human beings to satisfy their needs.

World Common Ownership is not a new concept. When in the 1970s they were discussing dividing up the seas amongst States and individuals in the same way that the land has been, the idea of ‘global commons’ was put forward. And you had, of all people, President Nixon talking about making the seas ‘the common heritage of all mankind’. The idea was that there should be no private property and territorial rights over them. The same has been proposed for Antarctica and the Moon.

What we are proposing is that this should apply to the Earth as well – that private property rights and territorial rights over any part of the planet should be abolished. This is the only basis on which we as the human species can set about arranging our relationship with the rest of Nature in a rational and ecological way so that the planet becomes a habitable place for all of us.

Due to the development of the world market economy, the relationship between humans and the rest of Nature has now become a relationship between the whole human species and the biosphere as a whole. Which is a point that some Greens overlook when they propose going back to local small-scale self-sufficient communities.

Just look at the sort of problems that have been discussed at the various Earth Summits that used to be held: global warming, tropical deforestation, the thinning of the ozone layer, acid rain. All these are world problems – problems that ignore the artificial frontiers which crisscross the globe, problems which concern the whole human race.

The calling of so-called Earth Summits and other meetings to deal with climate change are a recognition that there are no national or local solutions to these problems. But these meetings have been failures, and were bound to be, because solutions were sought within the framework of the present, profit-driven, capitalist world economic system. The leaders of states, driven by the system to engage in a competitive struggle for profits against each other, were expected to co-operate to solve ecological problems – problems caused by the competitive, profit-seeking system they support and uphold.

While it is clear that a question which concerns the whole world such as the possible consequences of global warming can be effectively dealt with only by unified action at a world level, it is equally clear that this is not going to happen under the profit system. The different states into which the world is divided have different – and clashing – interests. At most, all that can happen under the profit system when a global problem arises is ‘much too little, much too late’.

The profit system, the world market system, must go before we can tackle these problems in a constructive and permanent way. It must be replaced by a global system of common ownership and democratic control. We must organise to take the Earth back from those who currently own and exploit it, and must make it the common heritage of all.

Africa:

Israel’s Scramble for Africa

World's dangerous criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu

By Yael Even Or

Israel has eleven embassies in Africa. Last week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met the ambassadors in Jerusalem. He had a clear message for them: “The automatic majority against Israel at the UN is composed – first and foremost – of African countries. There are 54 countries. If you change the voting pattern of a majority of them you at once bring them from one side to the other. You have changed the balance of votes against us at the UN and the day is not far off when we will have a majority there.”

Netanyahu was, of course, talking about UN resolutions against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Israeli officials, followed by Israeli media, have made it a habit in the last few years to declare time after time on the flourishing relationship between Israel and Sub-Saharan African nations.

In the latest instance, in September 2016, Netanyahu met with President Macky Sall of Senegal in New York and announced: “Of course we have great relations between Senegal and Israel, and we’ll make them greater.” (At the meeting Netanyahu reminded Sall that Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s first post-independence president, had once visited Israel. What he forgot to mention to Sall was that in the end Senghor felt Israel wasn’t serious about peace with the Palestinians.)

Israel’s recent rapprochement to African states is part of a coordinated effort by the government to get close to African countries. On the sidelines of that United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in September, Netanyahu also met with the President of Togo, and Israel’s UN ambassador organized event with 15 African leaders for Netanyahu. A few months earlier, Netanyahu traveled to four countries in Africa and met with seven African presidents, including Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

Netanyahu’s trip to East Africa came after a 30-year hiatus in which no Israeli Prime Minister visited Africa.

During the 1950s and even well into the 1960s, Israel established relationships with at least 35 African countries. The strong ties included help with founding Nahal-like settlements, bringing about 7,0000 students for training courses in Israel, sending nearly 2,000 physicians, agricultural and economic advisors, and a large diplomatic presence to these countries. The 1967 and 1973 wars brought an end to those relationships (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) – and they never returned to what they were.

But in the last few years, there was a feeling of optimism among Israeli officials. When a reporter from the newspaper Israel Hayom, in effect Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, praised the Prime Minister’s trip to Africa back in July, he explained the diplomatic importance of the visit by saying: “Africa has 54 countries; that’s 54 votes in the UN.”

Given the early meeting between Netanyahu and Sall in September, it came as a shock to Israel that one of the sponsors of the UN Security Council resolution passed in December last year criticizing Israeli settlements, was Senegal. Another African state, Angola, voted in favor of the resolution. Israeli officials claimed it had assurances from Angolan diplomats they would oppose the resolution.

Netanyahu retaliated by canceling a visit by the Senegalese foreign minister to Israel, banned visits of the non-resident Senegalese ambassador to Israel and ordered all planned aid to the country (though it’s unclear whether such aid even exists) voided. He also ordered the Israeli ambassador in Dakar back to Jerusalem. (That ambassador has not returned since.)

The Angolan ambassador was called for a meeting at the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry to reprimand him for his country’s behavior. (When he left the Prime Minister’s office, the ambassador found he had been issued a parking ticket. Jerusalem municipality said his car was simply disrupting traffic flow).

Then the Israeli government announced that the activities of Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation with Angola would be halted. But once again, that seems to be more of a symbolic act then one with significant practical meanings. But there’s a major Israeli presence in Angola, and it is important to distinguish between what official Israel does (guided by a foreign policy), and what private contractors (or mercenaries) do, even if they very often overlap.

The 1990s were characterized in Israel as the (neo) liberalizing decade its relations with Africa. Post-independence African countries were eager to do business and in the absence regulatory relationships between Israel and these countries many private Israeli companies and investors flocked to the continent. The result was unregulated, unsupervised business relationships, which often entailed direct involvement in military and governmental affairs.

Angola for example, has a significant Israeli business presence. But Israel’s government doesn’t often blend its strategy towards African countries with the business affairs of some of the country’s corporations and businesspeople. If it did, it would have to admit to interfering with arms deals between Israel and South Sudan, (which perhaps ironically in this case included a Senegalese middleman) or agree to expose the Israeli arms shipments to the Rwanda militias in 1994, a fight that was still taking place in an Israeli court just last year.

So if the official Israel hasn’t been there for Senegal, Angola and other African nations when they colluded with Israel – why would they now defend Israel openly?

Why Netanyahu is Taking Israel Back to Africa

Jul 4, 2016 … Five reasons why Israel’s PM is doing a tour of East Africa.

Source: African is a Country

China Disburses $30bn to Africa

By Elita Chikwati

China has disbursed nearly $30 billion to assist African countries in different projects as it pledged to be the most reliable partner in speeding agriculture modernisation and industrial development. The major developing nation in 2015 announced $60 billion funding support for Africa at the Sixth Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation that was held in Johannesburg, South Africa in December 2015.

Addressing journalists at a Press conference on Chinese foreign policy and foreign relations at the ongoing Fifth Session of the 12th National People’s Congress here yesterday, Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Wang Yi, said his country would continue to strengthen its relations with Africa and support the continent, even under harsh economic or world situations.

Mr Wang said China had set aside $60 billion for development in Africa and had already disbursed nearly half of the money.

“Since the Johannesburg summit, $60 billion was set aside by government to support Africa and nearly half of it has already been disbursed or arranged,” he said.

“China and Africa are a closely knit community with a shared future. The cooperation is mutually between two brothers no matter how the international situation or world economy may evolve, there is no weakening in China’s support for Africa. What distinguishes China-Africa cooperation is that China always keeps its words.” Mr Wang said some of the projects that had already been undertaken since the Johannesburg summit included the completion of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway line.

He said completion of the Mombasa-Nairobi railway was also expected soon and some projects were underway in Congo and Tanzania, among other countries.

“Steady progress is being made in the building of a number of industrial parks across Africa,” said Mr Wang. “We need to speed up work and undertake more cooperation work. China will be Africa’s most reliable partner in speeding up agriculture modernisation and industrial development.”

Mr Wang said China-Africa relations gave the continent an opportunity to achieve sustainable development.

Source: All Africa

United States:

The Return of Commercial Prison Labour

By Anil Shah and Christoph Scherrer

Prisons are seldom mentioned under the rubric of labour market institutions such as temporary work contracts or collective bargaining agreements. Yet, prisons not only employ labour but also cast a shadow on the labour force in or out of work. The early labour movement considered the then prevalent use of prison labour for commercial purposes as unfair competition. By the 1930s, the U.S. labour movement was strong enough to have work for commercial purposes prohibited in prisons.

In the decades following, the number of prisoners decreased to a historic minimum. But with cutbacks in the welfare state, the prison population exploded from about 200,000 in 1975 to 2,300,000 in 2013 (Scherrer and Shah, 2017: 37) and prison labour for commercial purposes became legal again. Today, about 15% of the inmates in federal and state prisons perform work for companies such as Boeing, Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret. Migrants detained for violating immigration laws are one of the fastest growing segments of prison labour. Under the Trump administration, their numbers are most likely to increase.

Using the example of the U.S., we will discuss drivers of the return of commercial prison labour.

Neoliberalism: From Mass Incarceration to Commercial Exploitation

The drastic expansion of the penal state was driven especially by the widening of statutory offences for non-violent delicts – such as drug abuse or public urination – and increased minimum penalties. The conservative administrations’ ‘war against drugs’ reveals the racist dimensions of the mass incarceration. The people imprisoned because of substance abuse did not at all reflect the actual proportions of drug consumers. Whereas the Afro-American population constitutes only 13% of drug consumers, roughly corresponding to their demographic weight, they represent three quarters of all those who were imprisoned because of drug-related offenses (Wacquant, 2009: 61).

The transition toward a penal state is closely linked to cuts in state welfare spending. The U.S. prison population is especially large in U.S. states with traditionally lower social security benefits or with big cuts to the social security net (Beckett and Western, 2001). While social programmes aim at social peace, the objective of prisons is disciplining. The prison is an expression of ‘social disapproval’ toward groups with little success in the labour market. It degrades them morally as well as factually to second-class citizens (Alexander 2010: 208). To date, more than 6 million people in the U.S. have lost their right to vote due to a police record. The deterrent, disciplining moment of this policy of mass incarceration lies in demonstrating the lack of alternatives to precarious work and living conditions, which cannot be circumvented either by hanging around in the streets or by profitable illegal deals such as drug trafficking. Those who resist the discipline of the work society have to expect prison.

The consistent disciplining of ‘superfluous workers’ (Gans, 2012) through mass imprisonment resulted in a steep rise in expenditure on security and prisons. In addition to overcrowding, opportunities for training and rehabilitation were cut to reduce costs. From there it was only a small step to propose using prisoners’ labour power as a source of income. The discourse on financing prisons and detainees moved from ‘public assistance’ to ‘self-financing’. Under neoliberalism, detention itself is becoming a self-inflicted penalty for which the prisoner and the prisoner’s relatives literally have to pay: processing charges for visits, rents for beds, and co-financing for medical care. In many cases, prisoners are released with bills for prison services of several thousand dollars (Levingston, 2007).

By the late 1970s, federal and state legislation provided legal frameworks for private companies to contract with public prisons to exploit inmates’ labour. Work programmes at the federal level are rather transparent and trade unions as well as local companies are consulted, but state run programs overall employ a much higher share of inmates under undisclosed and highly exploitative conditions. In past decades, a patchwork of decentralized governmental, profit-oriented prison industries has developed. In Colorado, for instance, about 1,600 prisoners were employed in 37 different industrial sites in 2014 (Scherrer and Shah, 2017: 41). That was approximately 15% of the prison population able to work. Production ranges from manufacture of furniture and dairy products to services such as car repair or landscape gardening. Workers received an average daily wage of $3.95 (U.S.) in 2014. Thus the hourly wage, assuming a four-hour working day, remains under $1 (Scherrer and Shah, 2017: 41).

The commercial exploitation of prison labour, although growing, only affects parts of the prison population. The majority of prisoners work on the preservation of the prison itself – for example in the laundry, the kitchen or food distribution. Without this work, the system of mass incarceration would hardly be operable, financially as well as organizationally.

Private Profiting from Migration

The privatization of prisons proceeded in parallel to the recommodification of prison labour. The private prison sector now guards about one tenth of all prisoners. Government agencies pay private companies per prisoner. Unsurprisingly, privatization has not resulted in savings for tax payers despite the paring down of personnel, declining wages and lower fringe benefits – circumstances which have been criticized by trade unions for years.

Migration in particular has developed into a profitable branch for private companies. Mandatory detention for migration offences, which was introduced in 1996, resulted in a rapid expansion of deportation centres. By 2011, the daily average population of 32,000 detainees were kept in more than 200 detention centres. Just less than one tenth of all prisoners serve time in private prisons, but 40% of all immigration detention prisons in the U.S. are privately operated. Two major corporations – CoreCivic and the GEO group – provide one third of detention centre capacity. In 2012, these two companies concluded contracts worth $738-million (U.S.) with federal authorities for detention jails. The government pays for the prisoners as long as the companies meet a minimum quota (34,000 detainees at any moment, since 2013). Thus there is an incentive to detain as many people as possible, for as long as possible. Information about the working conditions in immigration detention prisons are provided solely by newspaper reports. Repeatedly, cases have emerged where migrants were forced to work without payment. About 60,000 migrants are estimated to be working in ‘voluntary’ labour programmes for a daily wage of less than $1 in privately and publicly operated institutions (Urbina 2014).

Overcoming Exploitative Prison Labour

Changes in prison labour practices might be brought about by the inmates themselves. Recently, several attempts at organizing have been reported. In September 2016, the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People and Families Movement (FICPFM) and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) hosted a conference on mass incarceration and exploitation of prison labour. At the same time, prisoners required to work went on strike in a number of prisons. Unfortunately, they failed to get the topic of prison labour on to the agenda of the presidential elections. The media mostly ignored the strikes.

In August 2016, the Department of Justice announced that it would end the use of private contractors to run its federal prisons after a report by its independent inspector-general highlighted massive safety and security problems in private prisons. Civil rights activists hailed the decision and already foresaw the end of an era. Less than half a year later, the Trump administration instructed the Department of Homeland Security to “take all appropriate action and allocate all legally available resources to immediately construct, operate, or control facilities to detain aliens at or near the land border with Mexico” (Hamilton 2017). The decision placed $40-billion (U.S.) for the fiscal year 2017 into the service of privately operated detention centres. Within hours, the stock prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic soared.

Trump’s victory is likely to intensify the corporate takeover of prisons, exploitation of inmates’ labour, and profiting from criminalizing migration. These policies will also cast a shadow on labour: their disciplining force will be felt by marginalized segments of the labour force, and their dividing powers by organized labour. Therefore it is vital to join forces against neoliberalism, racial oppression, immigrant baiting and mass incarceration. Labour’s role should be to foster solidarity amongst social movements involved in these struggles.

Christoph Scherrer is Professor for Globalization and Politics at University of Kassel, Germany. He is also executive director of the International Center for Development and Decent Work and a member of the steering committee of the Global Labour University. Forthcoming publication: Public Banks in the Age of Financialization: A Comparative Perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Anil Shah was a research assistant at the subdivision Globalization and Politics of the Department of Politics at the University of Kassel. He has an interest in theories of global political economy and socio-ecological research. He recently published his master’s thesis, “Destructive Creation: Analyzing Socio-Ecological Conflicts as Frontiers of Capitalist Development” as a working paper.

***

This is a short version of Scherrer and Shah (2017), first published on the Global Labour Column website.

WHO THE HELL WAS KARL MARX?

Karl Marx

"Prepare to meet the greatest, perhaps the only, genuine philosopher of our times, who will soon attract the eyes of all the world. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel, fused into one person—I say 'fused', not juxtaposed—and you have Karl Marx."

That was written by Moses Hess to his friend, Feuerbach, at the time when Marx was only twenty-four years of age. By that time, he had already attracted the attention of most of those people in Europe who were interested in formulating socialist ideas. He had made the acquaintance of the leading radical democrats in Germany; and, of course, he had met with the one person who, before Marx had been writing about communist ideas, had been producing work advocating a communist society in Germany, namely, Moses Hess, whose work, The Sacred History of Mankind, put forward ideas later to be adopted in Marx's writings.

That is one, very complimentary, statement about Marx. Here is another:

"Marx was the best hated, and most lied about, man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Capitalists, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him; and he died, beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers—from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America—and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages; and so will his work!"

That was, of course, the speech at his graveside on the 14th of March 1883 by his lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels.

Here is just one other comment which tells you something about the personal qualities of Marx, personal qualities that are often somewhat overlooked. "Of all the great, little, or average men that I have ever known, Marx is one of the few who was free from vanity. He was too great and too strong to be vain. He never struck an attitude: he was always himself." That was William Liebnecht's comment in the biographical memoirs of Marx that he wrote.

I want to begin by saying, not simply, "When Karl Marx was born…" but that Karl Marx was born. In other words, he was a human being. Unlike many great figures of history and of philosophical thought, whom people gather to remember and to think about, Karl Marx is not some kind of miraculous, messianic figure who came down to earth in order to produce some sort of miraculous picture of the future. He was not someone from whom works of genius emanated because he was, himself, some extraordinary genius. He was not somebody who was out of this world; he was somebody who was of this world. He made mistakes: he was born at a certain time; he reflected that time; he transcended many of the conventions and errors of that time; and he was to make errors of his own which would contribute, to some extent, to the understanding of Marxism in our own time, and that is a very important point, because I think that, at the outset of a weekend of talking about Marx and who he was and what he did, it is extremely important that we don't push ourselves into this rather dangerous ghetto of turning Marxism into a figure of religiosity and Marx himself into some kind of extraordinary, non-human, prophetic entity.

So, Marx was born, Marx died, Marx left us a legacy of ideas that we must now build upon; and I propose to deal with those ideas (and a huge number of such ideas) in four categories. Marx started off in his writings in the 1840s by addressing himself to the problem of human alienation. Marx did not discover the alienated position of human beings in society. Human beings in property societies have always felt alienated. They have always felt to some extent separate from themselves; mediated in their social activity through the channels of property; limited and constrained in their development because of the particular class they were born into; capable only of that which was historically possible at any one time. And there has always been an element of frustration and constraint within the human condition as long as people have been divided into classes in society.

Marx started off in the group around the philosopher Hegel, and particularly the radical disciples of Hegel, who looked at the problem of society as being the expression of alienation through religion, and who questioned religion as being a means of salvation from alienation. Marx went on toproduce his own critique of their anti-religious position, because what he said is that to simply secularise what had hitherto been seen as religious problems is in fact to fail to understand why a society requires illusions in the first place in order to sustain it.

Marx says, "The real happiness of the people requires the abolition of religion, which is their illusory happiness. In demanding that they give up illusions about their conditions, we demand that they give up a condition that requires illusions."

There is something fundamental in the methodology of Marx's thinking inherent in that statement. It is that illusions themselves are not simply errors of judgement. They are not simply failures to grasp what sensible people would understand. They are, in fact, the reflection of a condition in which the only way that you are going to be able to develop yourself—the only way that you are going to be able to reflect the social situation that is around you—is by building illusions that will protect you.

In a capitalist society of the kind that we have now, the illusion that, not only do we have to go to work to earn a living, but that there is some sort of innate freedom in going to work and some choice in whom we work for, is precisely a reflection of a condition in which we do not have those choices. In fact, in any society, the more that people talk about choice, the more you can be certain that choices simply do not exist. It is only a condition where there is an absence of choice that makes choice such an important part of the lexicon of self-delusion.

Marx is therefore saying that to seek happiness—and one can actually find enormous reservoirs of happiness in illusion; in self-deception; in the belief that life might be miserable, but heaven will be wonderful; in the assumption that, if you work hard now you will have a horrible time and you will be paid very little and perhaps your family and your immediate circumstances will suffer, but think of what life will be like in ten years' time when you are one rung up the ladder of wage slavery. These illusions are part of a necessary superstructure which exists to reflect a society that requires illusions in order to tolerate it.

The essence of these illusions, for Marx, is not simply metaphysical or about philosophical apprehensions of existence, but it is, in fact, rooted in the most material activity of human beings—arguably, apart from speech, the most unique capacity of human beings—and that is the ability to work. Work, says Marx, is the basis of alienation in a property society, because property is, in fact, merely the accumulation of appropriated—or, if you like, stolen—work from other people. So, in his earliest writings about alienation, Marx says:

“The worker does not affirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. His work is not voluntary but coerced, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy other needs. Its alien character is obvious from the fact that, as no physical or other pressures exist, labour is avoided like the plague.”

And, of course, we see that today with the distinction that arises in our vocabulary between work and employment. When people say, "I hate work!" They don't hate work: they need to be physically and mentally energetic. They will very often return from their jobs to work very hard, to have hobbies, to go to places, to help other people, to do things which are going to be of benefit to themselves and those they like; but what they hate and what they regard as some sort of fearsome plague is the coercion of having to work for somebody else, of having to be employed, which after all comes from the French verb 'to be used'—to be used up—by somebody else.

Marx went beyond what most philosophers start and finish with, which is a position of human beings alienated in society, and an attempt to enquire as to the cause of that alienation. Marx said, not only is the position of human beings as, at worst, an unfree people within a productive environment which does not allow them to be free, which necessitates illusions as a source of happiness; but all of this is historically rooted.

Here is a second, broad theme of Marx's outlook in relation to human development. He sees history as a dynamic force. "In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will." The first, very important, point: people do not enter into relations with one another in society because of choice—again that important concept which is always there as a delusion where you don't have real freedom. There is no independence from ones social environment. There is not a choice about whether you are rich or poor, whether you are born into the aristocracy or whether you are a peasant. There is not a choice as to which part of the world you are born into and what kind of historical developments have occurred before you are born. These relationships are inherited as a result of the position of classes that have gone before you and the formation of society into a pattern which is independent of you. These relations of production, says Marx, correspond to a particular stage of development of the material forces of production.

So here Marx juxtaposes two approaches to production: the relations of production and the forces of production. Broadly speaking, we can say that the forces of production are the means whereby wealth is produced, services are produced. The factories, the mines, the offices, the transport systems, the communication systems—these are forces of production, and they develop at a particular rate and in a particular way; but they develop within the context of particular relationships, and those relationships are relationships of class: who owns them; who doesn't own them; who has power over them; who doesn't have power over them; who has access to the people with power; and who is disempowered entirely. The forces of production and the relations of production are the two key concepts. The sum total of these relations constitutes the economic structure or, you might say, the system of society, the real foundation upon which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond particular forms of social consciousness.

Two points here: the first one is that there is a social system. Marx is moving beyond this idea that society is simply a set of relationships which are developing independently of people's wills, and a set of forces of production which have their own independent momentum. He is saying that there is, in fact, a systemic whole; there is a structure; there is something which is beyond exit if you are going to be part of society, and that is the system of society in which you live. You cannot live as a person of capitalist society in a feudal society. You could not live as a feudal landlord in the classical antiquity of slave ownership. You are entrapped within that system of society as long as those particular relationships exist. And, secondly, Marx is saying that the ideas which support that society, the laws, the political ideologies, all of the social consciousness, is in fact an ideology. It is, in Marx's own terms, a false consciousness which is there in order to bolster and maintain and concretise those relationships of society and make them in fact appear as if they will always exist.

"The mode of production in material life determines the social, political and intellectual life processes in general"And then Marx says, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." And here, again, Marx is saying something extraordinarily important, and something that nobody had said before: that the way in which people think is not, as the idealist philosophers had imagined, the process of the production of ideas independently of the material environment within which the humans live. The mind does not have some life of its own. Ideas do not have some capacity to uproot themselves from the world around them, but, in fact, the basis of all social consciousness is the existence of human beings in a material world. And most importantly here—and here is where the concept of dialectic, very often associated with Marxist thought, is so important—the thought of human beings is itself part of the material environment. The material environment is not separable from thought. And, similarly, thought is inconceivable outside of the material environment. So, in fact, the material determination of thought means simply that ideas cannot emancipate themselves independently from the social environment that they are in. (They cannot meaningfully do so, at least. One could conceive of a situation where people fantasised within a particular material environment about that which is, in reality, materially quite impossible.)

What Marx was not saying here—and he had been frequently accused of saying this—is that economics determines everything. What he is not saying when he talks about the forces of production and how those forces of production, in developing, set the scene for particular relations of production to develop, and then break the boundaries of existing relations of production, he is not saying that there is nothing in life apart from production, and nothing aside from a rather vulgar, reductionist, economic analysis that one needs to think about. He is not saying that the music of any period or the artistic production of any period or the philosophical creativity of any period in contemplating the times in which people live is something aside from and irrelevant to what is happening in society. What Marx is saying is that there is something fundamental, there is a primacy, about the economic drive of the development of society which means that all of those other factors, artistic, political, legal, become secondary in relation to it.

Engels, in a letter of 1890 clarifies this: he says, "The determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase."

So Engels himself, reflecting everything that Marx also wrote about historical materialism, is saying that history is something greater than economics but not extricable from the economic process.

What Marx particularly turns to in understanding the relations of production is the manifestation of these relationships in broad social terms in the class position of human beings. What is the class position of human beings? It is the relationship in which any one of us stands to the means of production. Is it a relationship of ownership and control or is it a relationship of disempowerment, of dispossession, of having to sell ourselves in one form or another physically in the form of a slave for eight hours a day and forty hours a week in the form of a wage-slave to an employer?

Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, put the position of classes as a manifestation of social relationships over and above anything else. In a very famous opening to the very first section of the Manifesto he says (and he wrote it together with Engels), "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Straight away, that means that when you go back to that first notion of alienation: the single, frustrated, self-deluding, constrained individual in society and you look at this notion of history and forces and relations, you now have a concrete, historical picture. You start to have something which is empirically testable. You can look at history and say, is it the history of class struggles, or is it the history of great men, or evil, or moral goodness, or creative ideas, or sublime imagination, or the will of God? Is it any of those things, or is it, as Marx says and as I think the historical picture shows, the history of class struggles, between free men and slaves, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, all standing in contrast to one another.

Modern capitalist society, said Marx, which has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. That is very important because, bear in mind that Marx was writing at a time when capitalism was new. That is probably one of the biggest differences between Marx and us. Marx was writing at a time when capitalism was new, confident, and asserted all kinds of illusions which had yet to be tested, but which people like Marx could see to be untrue. We are at a time when capitalism is old, sterile, used up. Unconfident in its own programmes for change; lost for any kind of ideological direction; and no longer open to be tested in terms of its promises to be about liberty and fraternity and classlessness—all of the promises of the early capitalist system, from the French revolution and the American revolution onwards.

So it is a class society, capitalism, and it has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in the place of old ones. Our epoch has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps into two great classes directly facing each other: the capitalists and the proletariat, or the working class.

Is this true? Well, let us look at those excellent figures that Adam Buick produced for the Socialist Standard a few years ago which went into this in great detail, because one can not simply assert these things: one has to analyse them; one has to investigate them; one has to find out from the very authorities of capitalist economic control— the Inland Revenue, the Treasury—are these figures true or not? What we were able to show was that the top one per cent in British society—where there is a more even spread of wealth than in the vast majority of countries in the world at the moment—the top one per cent of the population owned 18 per cent of the marketable wealth, nearly one fifth. The top two per cent owned a quarter of all the wealth; the top ten per cent, fifty-three per cent of the wealth, more than half the marketable wealth so it would seem that what Marx was saying about the significance of class in understanding history is still extremely important. How could you understand the Gulf War; how could you understand the Second World War; how could you understand the conflict between one party and another, or the imagined religious difficulties between one group and another without understanding it in terms of the real underlying class conflicts?

Marx, in a letter to Annenkov in 1846, says something which, I think, helps us to move on to the next theme and helps us also to understand the very essence of why history is at the heart of Marxism: "A man who has not understood the present state of society may be expected still less to understand the movement which is tending to overthrow it." And I think that what Marx is saying there is that the movement to overthrow society is not something which stands above history, as an ideal, as a dream, as a transcendent force rejecting history because history is something too messy and horrible and divided and antagonistic. It is actually born from within history. It is a process of history. That which it leads towards is itself historical in its very essence.

Then Marx gets into perhaps the most complex investigation of his life. Perhaps the one that is overstated in relation to his historical investigation because of its unique brilliance. That is the understanding of the economics of commodity production. First of all, Marx makes a distinction between that which is produced for use and that which is produced as a commodity. A baker bakes bread all day in order to sell it. He doesn't care if it is stale; he doesn't care if it tastes good; he doesn't care if it contains all kinds of things that make people sick. And then he bakes one loaf of bread, not to sell, but to eat, for himself, to share with a friend, to pass on to somebody who is not well in hospital, let us say; and that is the distinction between the production of commodities and the production for ones own needs.

But what is it that makes a commodity have a value? Commodities derive their value from social labour. And Marx considers it important to talk about the crystallisation of social labour, not simply an individual making one particular thing in separation from everyone else, but socialised labour. The value of a commodity, for Marx, is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it. But part of the quantity of labour in any production of commodities is unpaid labour, because labour power, that commodity which the working class has under capitalism, that commodity which defines the working class, is in fact a quite unique commodity. It is the only commodity which has the capacity to produce values over and above itself. It can, by being applied to other wealth, make more wealth than it can be sold for on the market.

So when one talks about the application of capital as a relationship which is there to produce more and more and wealth (that is the function of capital—wealth which is there to produce more wealth) that is to say everything which is not part of the human labouring process in production; the fixed machines, the dead labour embodied in those machines; the electricity and other energy sources that are used; the lighting that is used during the production process—all of that is constant capital. It starts out with one value; it finishes with one value, and that value has to be embodied into the commodity that is produced.

But then there is a second form of capital, and Marx recognises the importance of this in terms of the trickery of capitalist production. That is variable capital, the human labour power which goes into the production of all commodities. And the importance of human labour power is that it produces value greater than itself and it is paid, therefore, less than the value of what it produces.

So commodities can be sold at their value, whilst at the same time labour power in being paid its own value is always producing more and more and more than that value. And the moment, of course, that labour power does not produce more than its own value it becomes redundant. It becomes dispensable. It can be thrown on to the scrap heap of unemployable labour power, as, of course, has happened to millions of people here in Europe at the moment and millions more throughout the world.

Marx then says, well, what do you do in response to this sense of being a seller of labour power, of being forced into this position where you can do nothing else but go out and work for someone else by hand or by brain—in fact, by both. What do you do in relation to all of that? And what the trade unions were saying, even then, in the early days of industrial capitalism, is that, if you constantly push up the value of labour power—if labour power which is producing all of this surplus can claw back some of this surplus—then it will be able to bring dignity to labour. It will be able to provide the full fruits of labour and fair wages and decent jobs and all of the other things which, at that time, at least seemed like a radical proposition and now seems like a rather sterile and laughable trade union demand.

Marx put an extraordinarily radical and revolutionary position in relation to that trade union attempt to keep your head above water within the market. First of all he said, do it, because if you don't do it you will be stamped on and degraded to the lowest possible position. So Marx had no argument with the need for strike action, for trade union organisation, for workers to try to get as much as they can. But he said:

Quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects. They are retarding the downward movement but not changing its direction. They are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system."

I want to say two things about that. First of all, that what Marx was saying here was that there is essentially a choice, a fundamental political choice that you have in any position confronted with any power that you don't like to be up against. One is to constantly try to drive back the malignant consequences of that power that you don't like. One is to constantly find yourself on this treadmill of resistance against the awful developing and ever more sophisticatedly original ways of making your life difficult and exploited and oppressed. But the other, and the revolutionary one, says Marx, is to actually see the system as a system; to recognise that there will never be such a thing as a fair wage, because wages are, by their inherent nature, legalised robbery. They are taking from the workers that which produces profit by denying the workers the ability to have all of the fruits of their labour. And secondly, what Marx is doing here is positing the possibility of there being an alternative to the current system. This leads to the final section of what I have to say: the necessity of revolutionary action, the necessity of revolution.

Returning to the earlier quote that I gave from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, there is a point there where Marx is talking about how the relations of production change. He says, "At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution." Now, actually, that epoch of social revolution existed when Marx was writing. It was inherent in the very birth of industrial capitalism; the very contradictions between the ability to produce an abundance and the lack of access to wealth by so many people who were in positions of poverty; the capacity to create enough for everybody to have harmonious and peaceful lives and the inherent drive towards competition and its ultimate manifestation: warfare and mass murder; the ability of human beings to become creative and ever more intelligently in control of their environment and the crushing control of the social system as an environmental force upon people, surrounding people, entrapping people within the system. What Marx was saying is that there comes a point where these contradictions become such manifest fetters on development in society that the epoch of revolution begins. Well,we are now in the epoch of revolution. Of course, it is a very long epoch of revolution, but then all of history has been an epoch of revolution, because history is itself a constant state of motion. History is not something which is a final situation; it is a dynamic and dialectically developing process.

So to the necessity of revolution: in the Communist Manifesto, Marx says, "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The working class movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority." Two very important points, here: one is that when you come to look at the historical movements, however grand their rhetoric, however much they talked about fraternity and liberty and equality; however much they talked about national liberation and the rights of man, and so on, they were essentially, all of them, movements of minorities to take power at the expense of the majority. The significance of the development of the working class is that the working class is the first class in history which is a majority class. It is not a minority. When the working class becomes aware of its position, it becomes aware of the position of most people, and it becomes aware of the audacity, the exploitation, the oppressiveness of only a minority of people.

Secondly, the working class movement, when it becomes a movement for itself, not simply an unthinking movement but an intelligent movement, is a self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, for the immense majority. It is, in other words, a movement directed by the members of a class because they are members of a class, in order to end the system of class relations. They have understood the relations of production in which they find themselves, and they have decided to end that as a majority—not to become a new ruling class, but to end class.

Marx became involved in the 1860s, in 1864, at the very time when he was struggling with this huge economic effort of trying to produce an analysis of commodity production, with an organisation called the International Working Men's Association, which is now known as The First International. His life at this time was really divided, split between three things: first of all the struggle for his own survival that was often not an easy one with a large family, frequent problems of intense deprivation for members of his family, certainly the early death of at least one of his daughters as a result of poverty; certainly at least one of his children who died soon after he was born died as a result of poverty and the absence of health care; and the early death of his wife—all of those things Marx was struggling to deal with.

Secondly, he was struggling, very much on his own, very much as an independent scholar, looking at the economics of capitalist society; and then, thirdly, he was involved in this new international social organisation of the working class, which he was desperate to try to move, politically, in the direction of understanding the economics and historical dynamic of capitalist society, rather than planning to reform that society or reconstitute it as another kind of capitalism or co-operative capitalism or more trade unions within capitalism.

In drawing up the rules for the First International, Marx sat on a committee with two other people and established as the very first principle of the working class movement internationally that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class themselves. The working class cannot, in other words, rely upon others to change society for them, leaders to do it for us, and, above all, cannot be a movement which is outside of this idea that he puts in the Communist Manifesto of being a majority, independent, self-conscious movement.

I began by saying let's not turn Marx into a heroic suprahuman figure of history. He wasn't. He made mistakes. He didn't always apply the theories that I have outlined here to everything that he looked at practically or participated in. He didn't always manage to see what was ahead of him, and he didn't always fully understand the history of every part of the world that he wrote about, because he had an immense determination to write about countries, not only that he lived in, but that he didn't live in, and he actually taught himself languages at a speed that would certainly be beyond most of us here.

That was Marx, the man. What we are left with is Marx, the legacy: the legacy of a theory of society which is fundamentally revolutionary, which is absolutely pertinent to the kind of society we are living in today (which is still a capitalist system of society) and a theory which will simply not go away, much as it is derided or declared dead, as long as there is a capitalist society to be analysed, fought against and replaced by socialism.

S.C.