New Brunswick

All CUPE locals in wage talks with province vote overwhelmingly to strike

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At least one local has already started job

action

Mia Urquhart · CBC News · Posted: Oct 06, 2021 2

Support for strike action ranged from 83 to 98 per cent across the 10 locals negotiating with the province. (Hadeel Ibrahim/CBC)

All 10 CUPE locals who were in wage talks with the province have voted in favour of a strike.

Results for the final two votes were announced by CUPE officials in a news briefing on Wednesday morning. 

Local 5026, which represents francophone community college workers, and Local 1190, general labour and trades, both voted 96 per cent in favour of strike action. 

The ten locals represent approximately 22,000 workers around the province. 

Nearly every one of the locals voted overwhelmingly for a strike. Percentages ranged from 83 to 98 across the 10 groups. 

Steve Drost, the president of CUPE New Brunswick, said the average was 94 per cent. He said the results send a clear message to government and Premier Blaine Higgs. 

CUPE New Brunswick president Steve Drost said 94 per cent of 22,000 workers from 10 locals of the Canadian Union of Public Employees have voted in favour of a strike. (Jacques Poitras/CBC News)

"So, Mr. Higgs, you've got 10 locals that have taken very, very strong strike mandates. Let's not go down that road. Don't force us down that road, but our members have given us a very, very clear, strong message."

Talks between the province and CUPE members broke down on Sept. 3 when an agreement over wages couldn't be reached and the province stopped negotiating.

Drost said the union wrote to the premier last Friday, asking the province to come back to the bargaining table. So far, he said, they haven't received a response. 

The union is asking for annual wage increases of five per cent over the next four years. 

Last December, Higgs asked public-sector unions to agree to four-year contracts with no wage increase in the first year and increases of one per cent in each of the three remaining years.

Higgs said wage restraint was necessary because COVID-19 had pushed the province into a precarious financial position.

The province's most recent offer was for annual increases of 1.25 per cent over four years, then two per cent in the fifth and sixth years.

But the government wanted CUPE to agree to concessions, including converting members' pensions to the shared-risk model used elsewhere in the civil service and transferring about 100 union members to management positions.

Court stenographers counting votes in Moncton last month. 96 per cent of the local voted in favour of a strike. (CUPE NB )

There have also been complaints of bad faith bargaining filed by both sides with the province's labour board.

"Let's get back to the bargaining table and let's settle this and bring some labour peace to this province," said Drost. 

Here's a breakdown for each local that voted in favour of strike action: 

• Local 1418 – Rehabilitation, therapy and RCPO - 92 per cent
• Local 1251 – Institutional services and care -  98 per cent
• Local 1253 – School district unions -  97 per cent
• Local 2745 – Educational support staff -  91 per cent
• Local 1840 - Court stenographers - 96 per cent
• Local 1866 - WorkSafe NB - 83 per cent
• Local 5017 - Community colleges - 93 per cent
• Local 1252 - Hospital workers - 94 per cent
• Local 5026 - Collèges communautaires du NB - 96 per cent
• Local 1190  - General Labour and Trades  96 per cent

Eight of those 10 locals are in a strike position right now and by next Tuesday, all 10 "will be in a  legal position to take job action," said Drost.  

One local started last week and another is planning to start. But Drost declined to give any details about what that means or how it might impact the public. 

He said union members "will be doing exactly what is required in the collective agreements," but said members are committed to being "socially responsible" and will not do anything to endanger the public. 

"Again, we're reviewing this extremely closely. We don't want to put our members at risk, we certainly don't want to put the public at risk, and we are looking at everyone's safety and well-being."

Some deemed essential

Each local has a number of "essential" positions that cannot walk off the job. The numbers vary depending on the classification within the local. 

In the case of hospital workers, for example, there are more than 140 classifications in Local 1252, explained CUPE spokesperson Simon Ouellette. 

He said at least 50 per cent of the positions are deemed essential, but the percentages vary depending on worker classifications. Ouellette said it's about 75 per cent for those directly involved in patient care and significantly lower in others, like administrative/clerical positions.

The president of Local 1252, the New Brunswick Council of Hospital Unions, said the numbers are adequate to ensure public safety. 

Norma Robinson, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 1215, said the number of hospital workers designated "essential" during strike action is adequate to ensure public safety. (CBC)

"The one thing that we really view when we do essential service designations is public safety," said Norma Robinson. 

"So yes, we feel that they are more than adequate and they were agreed to by the union and the employer, so both parties agree they're adequate."

The question, Robinson said, is how service will be impacted in six weeks when the government is set to suspend without pay all workers who are not fully vaccinated. 

Drost said workers would prefer to get back to the bargaining table instead of taking job action. He said some employees have been without a contract for five years. 

He also said CUPE expects a level playing field when talks resume. He said the government was offering concessions to other groups that were not being offered to his members. 

"How can you bargain with a bunch of other unions in this province and offer them one thing, but come to the table and offer our group something else?" asked Drost. 

But he declined to give specifics about what concessions he was talking about and to whom they were offered. 

Higgs said he was aware of the results of the CUPE votes. 

"It is unfortunate they feel they must go on strike, but we remain confident that a deal can be achieved at the bargaining table. We are willing to return to the table as soon as CUPE is prepared to come forward with revised wage proposals," Higgs said in an emailed statement.

"With respect to working to rule, it is very unfortunate that CUPE is sanctioning this action while the province is immersed in the fourth wave of the COVID pandemic."

Germany puts 100-year-old on trial for Nazi crimes

Issued on: 07/10/2021 - 

Josef Schuetz, stands accused of "knowingly and willingly" assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945 

Tobias Schwarz AFP/File


Brandenburg an der Havel (Germany) (AFP)

A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard became the oldest person yet to be tried for Nazi-era crimes in Germany as he went before the court on Thursday charged with complicity in mass murder.

The suspect, Josef Schuetz, stands accused of "knowingly and willingly" assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.

Allegations against him include aiding and abetting the "execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942" and the murder of prisoners "using the poisonous gas Zyklon B".

More than seven decades after World War II, German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice, and have in recent years increasingly focused attention on lower-ranking Nazi staff.

The case comes a week after a 96-year-old German woman, who was a secretary in a Nazi death camp, dramatically fled before the start of her trial, but was caught several hours later.

She, too, has been charged with complicity in murder. Her trial resumes on October 19.

Despite his advanced age, a medical assessment in August found that Schuetz was fit to stand trial, although the Neuruppin court will limit his hearings to a couple of hours a day.

Schuetz arrived with a walking aid for the proceedings, held in a sports hall given the huge interest in the case. The trial is scheduled to last until early January.

"He is not accused of having shot anyone in particular, but of having contributed to these acts through his work as a guard and of having been aware such killings were happening at the camp," a court spokeswoman said.

Holocaust survivor Leon Schwarzbaum attended the trial of Josef Schuetz 

Tobias Schwarz AFP

Thomas Walther, a lawyer representing several camp survivors and victims' relatives in the case, said that even 76 years on from the war, such trials were necessary.

"There's no expiry date on justice," he told AFP.

One of his clients is Antoine Grumbach, 79, who hopes Schuetz will shed light on the methods used to kill people in the camp, but also that the accused "will say 'I was wrong, I am ashamed'".

- 'Symbolic' -

The Nazi SS guard worked at the Sachsenhausen camp which detained more than 200,000 people between 1936 and 1945, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people.

Tens of thousands of inmates died from forced labour, murder, medical experiments, hunger or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.

Little is known about the accused, beyond the fact that he was released from captivity as a prisoner of war in 1947 and went to work as a locksmith in the Brandenburg region of what was then Communist East Germany, the Bild newspaper reported.

The file against him was transferred by the central unit investigating Nazi crimes to the state of Brandenburg, where he lives, in April 2019, and charges were eventually filed on January 26 this year.

Co-plaintiff Christoffel Heijer, 84, told AFP his father was shot dead in the camp in May 1942.

"My mother received a letter from him on May 3, 1942, before he was shot. When she learnt a few days later that he had died, she cried a lot and went grey almost at once," he said.

The Nazi SS guard worked at the Sachsenhausen camp which detained more than 200,000 people between 1936 and 1945, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people JOHANNES EISELE AFP/File

The accused's lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, said his client "has stayed silent" so far on the charges against him.

Schuetz remains free during the trial. Even if convicted, he is highly unlikely to be put behind bars given his advanced age.

- Race against time -

Germany has been hunting down former Nazi staff since the 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he served as part of Hitler's killing machine, set a legal precedent.

Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.

Among those brought to late justice were Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz.

Both were convicted at the age of 94 of complicity in mass murder, but died before they could be imprisoned.

Most recently, former SS guard Bruno Dey was found guilty at the age of 93 last year and was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Prosecutors are investigating eight other cases, according to the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.

© 2021 AFP

French police cause misery for migrants in Calais: HRW

Issued on: 07/10/2021 -

French police evacuating hundreds of migrants last week after dismantling their camp near a hospital in Calais

 Bernard BARRON AFP

Paris (AFP)

French police are inflicting misery on migrants in the northern port of Calais, routinely tearing down their tents and forcing them to wander the streets as part of a deterrence policy, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report Thursday.

The 75-page report documents methods used by authorities to prevent the emergence of another major migrant settlement in Calais, five years after the demolition of the sprawling "Jungle" camp which housed up to 10,000 people at its peak.

Calais has for years been a rallying point for migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa trying to sneak across the English Channel to Britain.

Faced with growing public anti-migrant sentiment, President Emmanuel Macron's government has waged a campaign to prevent new camps emerging.

Police tactics include systematically tearing down migrants' tents in the woods, on wasteland or under bridges, regularly confiscating their belongings and harassing NGOs trying to provide them with aid, according to New York-based HRW.

"The authorities carry out these abusive practices with the primary purposes of forcing people to move elsewhere, without resolving their migration status or lack of housing, or of deterring new arrivals," it said in the report entitled "Enforced Misery: The Degrading Treatment of Migrant Children and Adults in Northern France".

- 'Harass and abuse' -

NGOs estimate the number of migrants currently living around Calais at between 1,500 and 2,000, including numerous families. Local authorities estimate that only 500 remain in the area.

Last week, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin ordered the eviction of a camp housing 400 migrants near a hospital in Calais, which was presented as a danger to the hospital's patients and staff.

On that occasion the migrants were taken to temporary shelters but often they are left to wander the streets.

“When the police arrive, we have five minutes to get out of the tent before they destroy everything," a Kurdish woman from Iraq told HRW.

The interior ministry did not respond to AFP's request for comment on the report.

The government argues that the camps are havens for people smugglers, who command extortionate fees to help migrants cross to Britain, either in a small boat crossing the Channel in the dead of night or stowed away on a truck crossing by ferry or through the Channel Tunnel.

Migrants attempt to board a truck bound for Britain 

DENIS CHARLET AFP

NGOs argue that the tactics do nothing more than make migrants already difficult lives even more miserable.

The report quoted the Calais-based Human Rights Observers group as saying that in some cases cleaning crews cut migrants' tents while people are still inside, in order to force them out.

15,400 people attempted to cross the Channel in the first eight months of this year, a increase of 50 percent over the figure for the whole of 2020 

HO Prefecture maritime de la Manche/AFP

"If the aim is to discourage migrants from gathering in northern France, these policies are a manifest failure and result in serious harm," Benedicte Jeannerod, France director at Human Rights Watch, said.

French authorities "need a new approach to help people, not repeatedly harass and abuse them," she added.

A total of 15,400 people attempted to cross the Channel in the first eight months of this year, a increase of 50 percent over the figure for the whole of 2020, according to French coast guard statistics.

"Exiles aren’t travelling to northern France because they’ve heard they can camp in the woods or stay under a bridge...They come because that's where the border is," Charlotte Kwantes, national coordinator of the Utopia 56 charity was quoted in the report as saying.

© 2021 AFP

Saudi takeover of Newcastle set to go ahead despite rights concerns

Issued on: 07/10/2021

A Saudi-backed takeover could make Newcastle a Premier League

 force to contend with

 Lindsey PARNABY AFP


London (AFP)

A Saudi-backed takeover of Newcastle is set to get the green light from the Premier League despite warnings from Amnesty International on Thursday that the deal represents "sportswashing" of the Gulf kingdom's human rights record.

A consortium featuring Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), PCP Capital Partners and billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben struck a deal worth a reported £300 million ($408 million) to buy the club from unpopular owner Mike Ashley in April 2020.

However, the controversial takeover bid hit the rocks last year after an outcry from Qatar-based beIN Sports, a major television rights holder of the Premier League.

The broadcaster, which extended its rights to the English top-flight for the Middle East and North African region earlier this year until 2025 at a cost of $500 million, was banned by Saudi Arabia in 2017 at the start of a diplomatic and transport blockade of Qatar, which ended in January.

Tensions between the states have eased significantly this year and Saudi's ban on beIN is set to be lifted, with Riyadh also seeking to settle Qatar's $1 billion arbitration claim over pirate broadcasts to Saudi audiences by the BeoutQ network.

The PIF, chaired by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS, is reportedly set to take an 80 percent stake under the proposed deal.

The takeover could transform the Magpies' fortunes -- despite regular attendances of 50,000 at St. James' Park, Newcastle have not won a major trophy since 1969.

Current owner Mike Ashley has been deeply unpopular in his 13 years in charge, during which time the club have twice been relegated from the Premier League before bouncing back into English football's lucrative top flight.

- Rights record -

But Amnesty has urged the Premier League to consider Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

"Ever since this deal was first talked about we said it represented a clear attempt by the Saudi authorities to sportswash their appalling human rights record with the glamour of top-flight football," Amnesty International's UK chief executive Sacha Deshmukh said in a statement.

Newcastle have not won a major trophy since 1969

 Lindsey PARNABY AFP/File

Saudi Arabia faced international condemnation following the brutal murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom's Istanbul consulate three years ago.

In February, US intelligence released a report that accused MBS of approving the murder, an assessment strongly rejected by the Saudis.

Newcastle, currently managed by former Manchester United defender Steve Bruce, are without a win in their opening seven games of the Premier League season and sit second-bottom of the table.

"Under this ownership there has been no ambition, effectively no investment and no hope for a sporting entity that hasn't been a sporting entity. It's been there to survive and nothing more," a spokesman for the Newcastle United Supporters Trust (NUST) told AFP.

A recent poll by the NUST found 93.8 percent of fans were in favour of the takeover.

The transformation of Manchester City since a 2008 takeover from Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, is the template for Newcastle to follow.

Prior to Abu Dhabi's investment, City had not won a major trophy since 1976 but the English champions have now won five of the past 10 Premier League titles.

Huge investment into Newcastle would only intensify the battle at the top end of the Premier League for the title and lucrative Champions League places.

A competition tribunal case brought by Ashley ruled last month that the Premier League had been "improperly influenced" by other clubs when rejecting the takeover last year.

© 2021 AFP

PROMOTED CONTE

China kicks off UN biodiversity summit, virtually

Issued on: 07/10/2021 

Destruction of ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest in Brazil also threatens human lives and health 

MAURO PIMENTEL AFP/File


Paris (AFP)

China will on Monday launch a crucial biodiversity summit to build political momentum to halt and even reverse the destruction of nature by man.

As the human population climbs toward nine billion by mid-century, animals are being crowded, eaten, snared, poisoned, poached, hawked and hunted out of existence.

Forests have been burned to the ground to grow commercial crops, and ecosystems that sustain life on the planet ravaged.

The virtual opening of the COP15 summit will transfer leadership from Egypt, which presided over the last gathering in 2018, to China.

During the talks, Beijing will orchestrate high-level online meetings with ministers from scores of countries in a drive to build political momentum.

China -- by far the world's biggest emitter of carbon pollution that drives global warming and harms the environment -- will also issue a "Kunming Declaration" that will set the tone for its leadership, observers say.

"This declaration, we hope, will further underline and recognise the importance of biodiversity for human health," said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union.

"It will also recognise the importance of mainstreaming biodiversity in decision-making and will serve also as a tool to create the political momentum," she told AFP.

Since gathering in person in Rome last year, delegates have negotiated across cyberspace.

- Urgent targets -

Next week's online meet will be followed by in-person talks in Kunming from April 25 to May 8, with an intermediate session, also face-to-face, in Geneva in January.

The November COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, meanwhile, will seek to tame the increasingly devastating effects of global warming.

Discussions will focus on a negotiated draft text called the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

Published in July, its stated goal is "living in harmony with nature" by 2050.

That "harmony" will be defined by mid-century goals with 2030 reality checks in the form of 21 "targets for urgent action" over the next decade.

Targets include declaring 30 percent of land and sea as protected areas, the end of plastic waste in the oceans, and sustainable management of agriculture, aquaculture and forestry.

Financial targets include boosting investment in biodiversity protection to $200 billion per year within a decade 

SAEED KHAN AFP/File

Financial targets include boosting investment in biodiversity protection to $200 billion per year within a decade, while reducing subsidies for environmentally harmful industries by "at least US $500 billion per year".

It asks that individual governments implement strategies and devise reporting methods to make it easier to measure progress.

The document insists that follow-up is crucial to ensure targets do not remain a list of empty promises.

- 'Sad truth' -

Sharp divisions remain.

France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30 percent of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030.

But when scientists called for more ambitious protection of half of Earth's biodiversity, Brazil and South Africa strongly opposed.

Other sources of tension surround financing, with developing nations asking rich countries to foot the bill for their ecological transitions.

France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30 percent of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030

 Ezequiel BECERRA AFP/File

These issues will be at the heart of negotiation sessions set to take place in Geneva in January 2022.

"It is concerning that these issues have not been dealt with sufficiently," said Li Shuo, global policy advisor for Greenpeace China.

"The sad truth is countries simply don't care about biodiversity in other countries as much as they do for emissions others pump into the air," he told AFP, referring to the carbon pollution that drives global warming.

But while the protection of nature isn't getting the kind of buzz the climate has been able to generate, biodiversity has gotten more visibility than it used to.

At the end of September Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg joined other philanthropists in pledging $5 billion by 2030 for biodiversity restoration and conservation.

© 2021 AFP

UN summit to tackle 'unprecedented' biodiversity threats

Issued on: 07/10/2021 -

The UN's COP15 summit beginning next week aims to tackle the fight against pollution, protecting ecosystems and preventing mass extinction 

Pablo PORCIUNCULA BRUNE AFP/File


Paris (AFP)

Just weeks before the crucial COP26 climate conference, another global UN summit -- this one tasked with reversing the destruction of nature -- officially kicks off next week in Kunming, China.

Focusing on biodiversity, COP15 is less well known than its sister climate summit but deals with issues that are no less vital to the health of the planet, such as fighting pollution, protecting ecosystems and preventing mass extinction.

The online session beginning on Monday will be followed by a face-to-face gathering in late April, where a final pact for nature will be hammered out.


- Who is involved? -

Discussions at the COP15 are grounded in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union -- but not the United States, the world's biggest historical polluter. Parties meet every two years.

The CBD was drafted in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio. Its stated goals are to preserve the diversity of species on Earth and set guidelines on how to exploit natural resources sustainably and justly.

This year's gathering, originally set for 2020, was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

- Why does nature need protection? -

Plants and animals are disappearing at an accelerating rate due to human activity -- habitat encroachment, over-exploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species and, more recently, climate change.

"Biodiversity is declining at unprecedented rates," CBD executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema told AFP in an interview.

"About one million animal and plant species out of 8.1 million are threatened with extinction -- more than ever before in human history."

Humanity's expanding footprint is also undermining the ecosystems that produce the clean air, drinkable water, food, medicine and raw materials we need to survive.

"Our relationship with nature must change," said Maruma Mrema.

The Covid-19 pandemic, thought to have originated from a virus in wild animals, is a "brutal reminder" of the price we can pay for neglecting or abusing nature, she said.

- What has the CBD achieved? -

At the 2010 biodiversity summit in Aichi, Japan, CBD member states laid out 20 goals to preserve biological diversity and reduce human pressures on the environment, setting a 2020 deadline for achieving them.

None of the objectives was fulfilled by that deadline, and -- with a few exceptions -- conditions are generally worse today than when the goals were first set.

This year's negotiations will likely see a new set of targets designed to allow our species to "live in harmony with nature", with a 2050 deadline and 2030 checkpoints.

- What are this year's goals? -

The draft text under negotiation, the Framework Biodiversity Convention, provisionally sets 21 "targets" for 2030.

These include according protected status to 30 percent of lands and oceans, a measure supported by a broad coalition of nations, including France and Costa Rica.

Another goal is to halve the use of fertilisers so that less of the nitrogen-rich substance leaches into fresh and ocean waters.

The draft pact also calls for reducing pesticide use by at least two thirds, and for halting the discharge of plastic waste entirely.

Another measure would see subsidies for environmentally harmful industries reduced by "at least $500 billion per year".

Without money and enforcement, however, these measures risk becoming empty promises, experts warn.

- Are COP15 and COP26 linked? -

Yes and no. Negotiations under the two conventions unfold on separate tracks and do not intersect. But parties to both treaties are increasingly looking for overlapping solutions.

"We cannot solve climate change without biodiversity and we cannot solve biodiversity loss without climate change," Maruma Mrema said.

"They are two intertwined crises and they need to be addressed together."

Healthy ecosystems -- especially forest and oceans -- make better carbon sinks to absorb CO2 pollution.

These in turn are vital to keep global warming down to levels that are survivable for humanity and other species.

- What is China's role? -

Maruma Mrema says that China's status as host for the negotiations means the world's top carbon polluter and most populous nation will be "taking global leadership on the biodiversity agenda".

A statement known as the Kunming Declaration to be unveiled at the opening next week will set the tone for China's leadership, said Li Shuo, global policy advisor for Greenpeace China.

"Beijing has the task of rescuing a weak environmental convention from the verge of a reputational collapse," he said.

"It carries the mission to boost biodiversity protection to the same rank as climate change, a task that has proven beyond its reach so far."

© 2021 AFP

Behind a ‘green façade’, Modi expands coal mining on India's tribal lands

Issued on: 07/10/2021 -

File photo taken in April 2018 of Indian coal loaders at a mine in

 Dhanbad, in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. © AFP

Text by :Leela JACINTO


The Indian government’s push to increase coal production to 1 billion tonnes in response to energy shortages has sparked a protest march by tribal villagers from forested areas up for coal mining. But their voices are being drowned out by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s green messaging, which obscures India’s dark addiction to coal.

Hundreds of tribal villagers began a long protest march against government plans for a major coal mining expansion on their lands on October 2, an important holiday in India marking the birth of Mahatma Gandhi.

“This land is our land! This land is our land!” chanted the men and women in Hindi as they navigated forest tracts, village paths, and state and national highways on a 300-kilometre (186-mile) trek to make their voices heard.

The villagers – from India’s indigenous, or Adivasi, communities – hail from the Hasdeo area in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest on the subcontinent, which is rich in biodiversity and wildlife, including elephant corridors that are critical for forestation.

But the Hasdeo Arand forest is also rich in coal – and it’s a resource India can’t seem get enough of these days.

Earlier this week, India’s energy and power minister sounded the alarm when he warned of acute coal stock shortages. Monsoon flooding of domestic coalmines, coupled with a global energy crisis that sent coal prices spiking due to increased demand from China, had seen a reduction in Indian coal imports. Power outages were in store, warned Minister R.K. Singh.

“It's going to be touch and go," he said.

The crisis comes as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies emerges from the pandemic with soaring energy demands.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made self-reliance a central plank of his pandemic recovery plan. In a televised speech last year, Modi pledged to oversee an economic “quantum jump” so that “India can be self-sufficient”.

But critics warn this leap is being made on the backs of India’s most marginalised groups at enormous environmental cost and with little in the way of social safeguards.

Boosting coal production to 1 billion tonnes

Coal still accounts for nearly 70 percent of India's electricity generation. While the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter is committed to transitioning to renewable energy, India’s quantum, self-reliant growth will be largely powered by the “dirtiest fossil fuel”.

On the international stage, Modi touts Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of a “trusteeship of the planet with a duty of caring for it”. But even as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pleads for an end to the “deadly addiction to coal”, the Modi administration is committed to an aggressive expansion of coal production to 1 billion tonnes by 2024.

And while Modi’s green commitments and speeches make headlines, the ramping-up of coal production in rural areas is overlooked by a national media under pressure to “toe the Hindu nationalist government’s line”, according to Reporters Without Borders, with expressions of dissent treated as “anti-national”.

Much of India’s increased coal production will come from the “coal-belt” central and eastern states of Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where Adivasi communities live in areas rich in biodiversity and wildlife.

“Nationally, there are 55 new coal mines planned and there are expansion plans for 193 existing mines. Eighty percent of the new expansion is on Adivasi land and they are going to bear the brunt of it,” said Jo Woodman, senior researcher at Survival International, a UK-based tribal rights group.

Mining companies enter a once-protected zone

The Adivasi communities of the Hasdeo Arand forest have been waging a decades-long struggle to protect their ancestral homelands and their way of life, which is guided by indigenous belief systems that attach spiritual value to every feature of the forests – from fruits and flowers to the grains and seeds that sustain their livelihoods.

Once designated a “no-go area” that was off-limits to mining, the Hasdeo Arand forest’s status has been steadily undermined by complex legal and administrative manoeuvers by successive governments and state bodies handing out major contracts.

In the absence of foreign takers for contracts in a shrinking sector plagued with regulations on environmental clearance and land ownership issues, the coal block bids have been scooped up by Indian private corporations.

In 2011, India’s then environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, cleared three coal blocks in the no-go zone for mining. They were “clearly on the fringe” of the Hasdeo Arand forest, Ramesh told reporters. “But they are the first and the last” to be opened for mining, he vowed.

Those were infamous last words, according to Woodman. “There has since been a weakening and auctioning, and there’s more mining to come due to the lack of policy to protect such areas and the pressure from mining companies,” she noted.

Corporations get contracts, Adivasis bear the costs

By 2013, the Adani Group, one of India’s largest and richest companies, had begun coal production in the Parsa East-Kente Basan (PEKB) mine in Hasdeo. The Modi government has since approved more mines, putting forests and villagers at risk, according to activists.

In a statement released at the start of the latest 300-kilometre march to the Chhattisgarh state capital Raipur, Hasdeo protest leaders claimed the Modi government "has illegally allotted seven coal mines in our region to state government companies. The state governments have, in turn, appointed Adani to develop and mine these blocks”.

The Adani Group – run by the country’s second-richest man, Gautam Adani – has come under international media scrutiny since environmentalists and indigenous rights activists in Australia started a campaign against the group’s Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.

Noting the close links between Adani and Modi, the Financial Times last year reported that, “Since Mr Modi came into office, Mr Adani’s net worth has increased by about 230 per cent to more than $26bn as he won government tenders and built infrastructure projects across the country.”

As the government attempts to accelerate growth by increasing resource extraction, critics note that the concentration of capital in a few favoured hands comes at the expense of minority rights and national well-being.

“The Adivasis are viewed as superstitious, primitive, backward, their connection to the land is belittled, and their lives and lands are treated as disposable. They are expected to bear the costs in this massive ramp-up of coal mining in the so-called national interest, which is seen as making it as lucrative as possible for Indian private companies,” said Woodman.

Over the past few decades, the climate change crisis has upended the modernisation model of heavy industrialisation and resource extraction powered by cheap fossil fuels such as coal. But for countries such as India, China and Brazil that are attempting to get millions of their citizens out of poverty, an environmentally sustainable alternative to growth remains prohibitively expensive.

As the international community prepares for next month’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, environmentalists believe the focus should be on helping developing countries shift to a greener model of modernisation.

“Rich countries have to step up and help India wean itself from coal and get on the path to a true green transition,” said Woodman. “What’s worrying is that Modi seems to be hiding behind this green façade and promoting himself as a green leader as we run up to the COP26 discussions. But at the same time, he’s having this massive push for coal – and that’s simply not viable in the world we live in today.”

Marx vs. the Machine

Kate Milberry

I'm going talk more about Marxs contribution to the study of technology, as well as his ideas on the relationship b/w sociological and economic analyses of technology. But I'm going to do this with the help of Donald MacKenzie. Just so  you know.

MacKenzie, in chapter 2 of his book Knowing Machines, details Marxs account of the way the machine was made stable, highlighting how social relationships (within which production occurs) impact production technology  indeed are a major factor in the shaping and success or failure of technical systems. This jives with Marxs insistence that, when analyzing markets, one must remember capital is not a thing, but a social relation b/w persons which is mediated thru things.”

One of Marxs big ideas is this: with the advent of large-scale mechanized production, social relations molded technology, not vice versa. The determinist reading of Marx views the forces of production as technology itself. But the forces of production also include labour power, people, skills, knowledge. Indeed, Marx always afforded agency to workers, stressing that what was specific to human work was that it was conscious: people as much as machines make human history.

Marx defines the machine as a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs w/its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did w/similar tools.” With the machine began the Industrial Revolution: it undermined the basis on which manufacturing workers had resisted emergent capitalism. Whereas in manufacture, the organization of the social labour process was purely subjective (a combination of specialized workers), the machine system of large-scale industry was a totally objective organization of production, which appears to the worker as a pre-given material condition of production.

The machine contributes to valorization via correlative surplus value the reduction in labour time required to produce the equivalent of the workers wage generates an increase in surplus value accruing to capitalist. Thus the machine liberates capital to accrue absolute surplus value; by undermining skilled workers, by drawing new sectors into the labour market, by threatening/generating unemployment, the machine “is able to break all resistance to lengthening the working day. Alienation of the collective and intellectual aspects of work achieves its technical embodiment in the machine. Further, the machine embodies the power of the capitalist: science + natural forces + mass of social labour converge in the system of machinery, which represents the power of the master. Thus, capitalist social relations achieve technical embodiment in labour process

For Marx, the conditions of work represent the means of production in their social form as capital; the means of production therefore employ the worker instead of the worker employing the means of production. This was the goal under manufacture and handicraft labour BUT its only w/machinery that this inversion acquires technical reality. Not surprisingly, then, the worker regards the machine is a direct threat; it is capitals material form. Indeed, the connection b/w class struggle and technical innovation was part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution in 19th c. Britain. Skilled labour, especially, stubbornly resisted the discipline of factory work. Marx links worker recalcitrance directly to technical innovation, which was a response to and a weapon against working-class revolt. New machinery did not always increase efficiency or profit but DID reduce the capitalists dependence on highly skilled and paid labourers with minds of their own. Marx thus concludes that Luddism was, in fact, a working class critique of machinery.

Marxs account of the machine is an attempt to theorize the social causes of organizational and technical changes in labour process (how perfect for a “social shaper” like MacKenzie!). For example, technical changes in the steam engine resulted from shifting relations b/w capital and labour as a result of new labour legislation that shortened the working day. While machines were more efficient than human muscle power, there was still the need to squeeze more from the worker during the shortened period

Again, Marx stresses that capital is not a thing (e.g. not a sum of money or commodities) but comprises social relations b/w persons mediated through things. Thus the relation b/w capitalist and worker consists of wages, hours of work; the law and the state; supervision discipline, culture, collective organization, power, conflict and so on. Here MacKenzie points out a weakness in Marxs understanding of this: the social relations of production (w/in which technology develops) are not just b/w worker and capitalist but also worker and worker. That is, relations b/w men and women workers, older and younger, workers, and likely immigrant and native workers must be accounted for.

He lists three ways the split b/w male and female workers influences technological production: 1. New machinery caters to highly unskilled and low-paid worker, always women (and children), who initially displace the highly skilled male workers (left over from days of manufacture). 2. Some skills, like sewing, were considered womens work, and learned at home. There was no need, therefore, to automate this process. Such work was entirely unregulated and devastatingly underpaid and because in the home, isolated, with little to no chance for workers to organize. 3. Skilled, all-male unions marshaled their power to keep at least some control over the new technology and defensively keep women out of their organizations.

At this point, MacKenzie asks a Feenbergian question: Does the design of machinery reflect the social relations w/in which it develops? Marx equivocates on this, he says, sometimes treating machines as victims of capital and not in their design inherently capitalist. Nonetheless, a specifically capitalist form of production emerges, including at the technological level. This is a rather orthodox interpretation, then, one that accepts that social relations impact the pace of technical change (e.g. mechanization was spurred by valorization-imposed needs to displace skilled workers and their power to resist) BUT denies that those relations influenced the design of technical artifacts.

If technology is neutral, and the system of social organization corrupt, then progressive social change will occur simply by changing how society is organized. No need to worry about the technological infrastructure, which can, apparently, be coopted, adapted and reconstituted. Substitute a workers government for the capitalists government, add water and presto! A workers utopia.

MacKenzieâs social shaping self concludes by suggesting that understanding how social relations interact with technical design turns on the contingency of design, and the need to identify where and how things could have been different. This leaves only one (albeit burning) question: why one design was chosen over another. Indeed.

So… is this enough Marx for you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Comps, Feminist critique, Marx. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Marx’s Capital: Chapters 15 - The Machine
ADAM BOOTH 
Socialist Appeal - the Marxist voice of Labour and youth.

Having discussed how the capitalists are able to increase profits by improving productivity through the application of new organisational means within the workplace, Marx now turns his attention towards the most revolutionary of developments within capitalism: the machine.

Whilst the development and application of machinery within the productive process was a revolutionary step forward, Marx begins Chapter 15 of Capital on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” by explicitly stating the purpose of the application of such machinery on a capitalist basis: to increase the profits of the capitalists.

“Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value.” (Marx, Capital, Volume One, Penguin Classics edition, p492)

The focus of the capitalist when introducing machinery into the workplace, therefore, is not to lighten the load of the worker, nor to reduce the hours of the working day for his/her workers, but to increase the productivity of labour within the workplace and thus be able to substitute workers for machines.

The effect for the individual capitalist is to reduce the cost of his/her commodities that are being produced, with the hope of thus being able to reduce prices below that found on the market. If this feat can be achieved, then market share can be captured by the capitalist and super-profits can be earned.

The laws of competition within capitalism, however, force every other capitalist to follow suit; each capitalist must attempt to keep up with the pace of technology in industry or face extinction. Thus, the application of pioneering machinery within the workplace becomes generalised, and the effect is a general increase in productivity across industry, which in turn results in a general cheapening of commodities – i.e. a reduction in their values due to a reduction of the socially necessary labour time needed to produce them.

Whilst this is not the starting aim of the individual capitalist, this general result means a cheapening of the value of labour power, which is determined by the value of those commodities needed to maintain the working class and their families: food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, etc., etc. This, then, is the how the application of machinery leads to a general increase in surplus-value for the capitalist class: by cheapening commodities in general, the value of labour-power is reduced; relative surplus-value is thus gained by reducing the part of the working day in which the worker must perform necessary labour, thereby increasing the part of the working day in which surplus labour is performed – labour that is performed for free from the perspective of the capitalist.

From the beginning, therefore, Marx makes clear the contradiction of machinery within the confines of a system of production for profit: the development and application of technology and technique – that is, the development of the means of production – no longer translate to improved living standards for the vast majority of society, but are merely a means by which a tiny minority enriches themselves. The application of machinery and new technology under capitalism does not liberate us, but enslaves us.
The dialectical development of machinery

Marx begins his analysis of machinery by outlining its general historical development. The question of machinery is, in essence, a question of automation – of reducing the socially necessary labour time required for any given process. “The machine, therefore, is a mechanism, that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools.” (p495)

The spread of machines in one industry, in turn, paved the way for – and indeed required – the use of machines in others. Eventually, the size and scale of the machines used necessitated the development of machines that were themselves produced using other machines.

The Marxist method of historical materialism, as outlined by Marx and Engels, explains that the motor force of society is the development of the means of production – the development of industry, science, technology and technique. If any given society cannot do this, then it will – eventually – be overthrown, conquered, or replaced by one that can.

At root, the development of the productive forces is a process of humankind’s mastery over nature, of harnessing the forces bequeathed to us by our surroundings. In relation to industry, Marx explains that it was not the invention of the steam engine that enabled the Industrial Revolution, but rather it was the revolutionary development of machinery that made a similar revolution in the source of power necessary.

Here we see the dialectical materialist method of Marx fully at work. In many versions of history, the improvements of the steam engine by Scottish engineer James Watt are painted as being the fundamental cause of the Industrial Revolution, and, by extension, the primary factor behind the rise of British capitalism and the ensuing industrial and economic dominance of British imperialism. Without the individual genius of Mr Watt, it seems, the whole of history would be different!

But the improvements made to the steam engine by Watt were merely an historical “accident”, in that they might have easily have been made by anyone else. Behind this accident, however, lay the driving necessity to develop machinery and liberate industry from the confines imposed by nature in terms of a power source. The development of steam power removed the reliance on water power and thus enabled industry to be moved to other locations more freely; with steam power, the primary factor became access to coal, the source of the energy needed to generate steam. Today, with the development of electrical power, industry has been even further liberated from these natural restrictions, and is frequently moved – with the rise of globalisation – to wherever the cheapest labour can be found.

As the dialectical Hegelian saying goes: necessity expresses itself through accident. In the case of the steam engine, we can see that it was not the development of steam power that paved the way for a revolution in industry, but that the revolutionary development of machinery in industry necessitated a revolution in the source of power. Indeed, the origins of the steam engine can be traced back to the ancient Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria; but within a system of slavery, which is based on the application of a human labour, not of machinery, the steam engine was nothing more than a toy and could not be applied in the productive process.

“The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period at the close of the seventeenth century, and such as it continued to be down to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam-engines necessary. As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.” (p496-497)

Labour and machines

The role of the machine is to amalgamate the various tasks and processes that are found in a given industry; to combine the functions of the different tools held by different workers within one body.

“The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, replaces the worker, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power. Here we have the machine, but in its first role as a simple element in production by machinery.” (p497)

Having discussed the role of the co-operation and the division of labour within manufacture in chapters 13-14, Marx now explains how, with the application of machinery, this organisation of workers within the factory is now internalised within the workings of single machine or set of interconnected machinery. “Here we have again the co-operation by division of labour which is peculiar to manufacture, but now it appears as a combination of machines with specific functions.” (p501)

Such a transition from labour to machinery is, in turn, a transition from the subjective variation of efficiency and skill amongst workers to an objective level of efficiency within the productive process. The pace and rhythm of the productive process, once dependent on the random variations of the workers and their various caprices, is now replaced by the definite order and speed of the machine, which presents itself as an objective fact to the worker.

“The collective working machine, which is now an articulated system composed of various kinds of single machine, and of groups of single machines, becomes all the more perfect the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one...in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not by the hand of man, but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each special process is a condition imposed by the division of labour itself, whereas in the fully developed factory the continuity of the special processes is the regulating principle.” (p502)

“As machinery, the instrument of labour assumes a material mode of existence which necessitates the replacement of human force by natural forces, and the replacement of the rule of thumb by the conscious application of natural science. In manufacture the organisation of the social labour process is purely subjective: it is a combination of specialised workers. Large-scale industry, on the other hand, possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organisation of production, which confronts the workers as a pre-existing material condition of production. In simple co-operation, and even in the more specialised form based on the division of labour, the extrusion of the isolated worker by the associated worker still appears to be more or less accidental. Machinery...operates only by means of associated labour, or labour in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labour process is in this case a technical necessity dictated by the very nature of the instrument of labour.” (p508)

Man vs. the machine

The application of machinery in the productive process is not automatic, however. The purpose of machinery, from the perspective of the capitalist, is to cheapen the commodities being produced. This can only happen if the cost of the machinery is less than the cost of the workers that the machinery is intended to replace, as Marx explains:


“The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product is limited by the requirement that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery...the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it.” (p515)

“Since the division of the day’s work into necessary labour and surplus labour differs in different countries, and even in the same country at different periods, or in different branches of industry; and further, since the actual wage of the workers sometimes sinks below the value of his labour-power, and sometimes rises above it, it is possible for the difference between the price of the machinery and the price of the labour-power replaced by that machinery to undergo great variations, while the difference between the quantity of labour needed to produce the machine and the total quantity of labour replaced by it remains constant.” (p515)

The use of machinery, therefore, is always dependent on the relative price of machinery versus that of wages. Where the labour movement is weak and wages are low, the relative cost of employing workers is less; investment in machinery will therefore be less also, keeping productivity at a low level. Hence the spread of globalisation, with capitalism taking advantage of the low-cost labour and paltry wages of textile workers in Bangladesh or factory workers in China.

Rather than developing the means of production by investing in technological research and new machinery, therefore, we see how capitalism – with its need to continuously increase profits – holds society back and keeps industry on a low level of productivity. This contradiction, however, is not confined to industry in developing countries, however, but can be seen today in advanced capitalist countries like Britain also: investment is at historically low levels, with businesses instead taking advantage of relatively low wages to employ many workers in jobs that could be automated. Whilst this may keep unemployment rates at low levels, the result has been a drop in productivity since the crisis, which in the long term can only mean stagnation in the economy and in the standards of living for ordinary workers.

On the other hand, where workers are organised and strong, helping to push up wages, investment in new technology will be greater. Hence the enormous development of machinery and investment in new technology during the Second World War and the post-war period, where the labour supply was limited, strengthening the hand of the workers and putting an upward pressure on wages. In such a situation, Marx explains, the threat of replacing labour with machinery is used by the capitalists to pacify workers:


“But machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him, and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it. It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital.” (p562)

Instead of seeing a harmonious development of workers and technology, therefore, we see how there is a constant race, competition, and antagonism between workers and machines under capitalism. “The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor to the worker himself.” (p557)

By automating the tasks of the worker, the machine replaces skilled labour with unskilled, stripping the worker of any privileged position he/she might have had as a result of education and experience. In place of specialisation and skill, we see the creation of a vast mass of homogeneous unskilled labour, intensifying the competition between workers, and placing a further downward pressure on wages.


“The division of labour develops this labour-power in a one-sided way, by reducing it to the highly particularised skill of handling a special tool. When it becomes the job of the machine to handle this tool, the use-value of the worker’s labour-power vanishes, and with it its exchange-value. The worker becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. The section of the working class thus rendered superfluous by machinery, i.e. converted into a part of the population no longer directly necessary for the self-valorisation of capital, either goes under in the unequal context between the old handicraft and manufacturing production and the new machine production, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and makes the prices of labour-power fall below its value...When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the workers who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and is felt by great masses of people.” (p557)

Today, with the development of new automative technologies, particularly in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and voice recognition, a similar process is going on in front of our eyes to that which Marx describes in relation to the 19th Century: the better-paid professions of the middle-classes and the more skilled layers of the working class are facing the threat of extinction due to automation. Indeed, a recent study by academics from Oxford University suggests that nearly half of today’s professions could be eliminated by automation over the next two decades, including many white-collar jobs, such as accountancy, legal work, and technical writing; hence why some commentators, such as MIT economists McAfee and Brynjolfsson, are talking about a new “race against the machine.”

“Creative destruction”

Historically, it is this race and competition between workers and machines that has led to movements such as the Luddites, who saw the destruction of machinery as the solution to this existential threat posed by new technology.


“Hence the character of independence from and estrangement towards the worker, which the capitalist mode of production gives to the conditions of labour and the product of labour, develops into a complete and total antagonism with the advent of machinery. It is therefore when machinery arrives on the scene that the worker for the first time revolts savagely against the instruments of labour.” (p558-559)

Today, as in Marx’s time, anyone who dares to mention the contradiction of how, under capitalism, the application of new technology leads to unemployment is labelled a Luddite who is against social progress and the use of technology in general. As Marx mockingly explains:


“And this is the point relied on by our economic apologists! The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist application of machinery do not exist, they say, because they do not arise out of machinery as such, but out of its capitalist application. Therefore, since machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers, the bourgeois economist simply states that the contemplation of machinery in itself demonstrates with exactitude that all these evident contradictions are a mere semblance, present in everyday reality, but not existing in themselves, and therefore having no theoretical existence either. Thus he manages to avoid racking his brains any more, and in addition implies that his opponent is guilty of the stupidity of contending, not against the capitalist application of machinery, but against machinery itself.

“No doubt the bourgeois economist is far from denying that temporary inconveniences may result from the capitalist use of machinery. But where is the medal without its reverse side! Any other utilisation of machinery than the capitalist one is to him impossible. Exploitation of the worker by the machine is therefore identical for him with exploitation of the machine by the worker. Therefore whoever reveals the real situation with the capitalist employment of machinery does not want machinery to be employed at all, and is an enemy of social progress!” (p568-569)

The argument of the capitalist apologists, therefore, is this: yes, the application of machinery and new technologies might displace workers in one industry; but this should only liberate workers to allow them to work in new, even more productive and technologically advanced industries. This is the argument of “creative destruction” – that old industries must be destroyed in order to allow new ones to flourish.

But, as Marx explains, under capitalism this process develops in a chaotic and anarchic way, due to the way in which it is driven forward, not by a rational plan of production across society, but by competition and thirst for individual profit. Instead of smoothly transitioning from the old to the new, with education and training provided to allow workers to develop new skills and move into new, emerging industries, workers in the old industries are instead thrown onto the scrapheap and forced into a bitter struggle for survival. Whole towns, cities, and regions are left blighted with a permanent scar of mass unemployment. One only has to look at the former mining areas in Britain, which today still suffer from the forced closure of the pits by the Thatcher government, to see the real effects of so-called “creative destruction”. There has been plenty of destruction, and very little creation.


“The real facts, which are travestied by the optimism of the economists, are these: the workers, when driven out of the workshop by the machinery, are thrown onto the labour-market. Their presence in the labour-market increases the number of labour-powers which are at the disposal of capitalist exploitation...the effect of machinery, which has been represented as a compensation for the working class, is, on the contrary, a most frightful scourge. For the present I will only say this: workers who have been thrown out of work in a given branch of industry can no doubt look for employment in another branch...even if they do find employment, what a miserable prospect they face! Crippled as they are by the division of labour, these poor devils are worth so little outside their old trade that they cannot find admission into any industries except a few inferior and therefore over-supplied and under-paid branches. Furthermore, every branch of industry attracts each year a new stream of men, who furnish a contingent from which to fill up vacancies, and to draw a supply for expansion. As soon as machinery has set free a part of the workers employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted into new channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile the original victims, during the period transition, for the most part starve and perish.” (p567-568)

From a revolutionary force to a fetter

In its heyday, capitalism was a revolutionary force. Competition and the drive for profits smashed through all the previous barriers to the development of the productive forces, playing an enormously progressive role in society from the perspective of creating the material conditions for socialism:


“Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical process and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another.” (p617)

Machinery played a vital role in this process, as Marx describes: not only by paving the way for large-scale industry with its economy of scale; but also by breaking down the physical barriers that stood in the way of increasingly profits by simply forcing workers to labour harder and longer. Now greater surplus-value could be extracted by increasing productivity without having to push workers beyond their physiological limits.


“At last the critical point was reached. The basis of the old method, sheer brutality in the exploitation of the workers, accompanied by a more or less systematic division of labour, no longer sufficed for the extending markets and for the still more rapidly extending competition of the capitalists. The hour of the machine had struck.” (p601)

At the same time, the development of machinery, new technologies, and large-scale industry, also created the conditions for a change in the superstructures in society – in particular, in the family structure and the relationship between the sexes:


“However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes.” (p620-621)

Under socialism, the technologies and large-scale organisation created under capitalism could be used to socialise the tasks of domestic labour – childcare, cooking, cleaning, and laundry – in order to liberate both women and men from these burdens. Housework would not have to be shared, but would be abolished altogether.

Under capitalism, however, such possible fundamental changes remain mere potentials. Working class women today under capitalism are doubly exploited, both for the surplus-value they produce during the working day and for the unpaid domestic labour they perform in the home. Nevertheless, by bringing women out of the isolation of the home and into the workplace, organised together alongside men under one roof as one class, capitalism has created its own gravediggers: the common struggle of working women and men, who will go about creating a society that is not only free of classes, but that is free of all oppression.

Whilst capitalism played a revolutionary role in the past, in terms of developing the productive forces, this always came with a human cost, as explained above, due to the contradictory way in which progress takes place within a system of private ownership and competition.

“We have seen how this absolute contradiction (namely the contradiction between the revolutionary technical basis of large-scale industry and the form it takes under capitalism) does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker’s life-situation is concerned; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands the means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his specialised function, to make him superfluous. We have seen, too, how this contradiction bursts forth without restraint in the ceaseless human sacrifices required from the working class, in the reckless squandering of labour-powers, and in the devastating effects of social anarchy. This is the negative side.”

Alongside this human tragedy that capitalism creates, there arise also contradictions within the system itself. All the forces that propelled society forward in the earlier period of capitalism – namely private ownership, competition, and the production for profit – turn into their opposite and become an enormous fetter on the development of the productive forces.

On the one hand, by replacing labour with machinery, capitalism kills the goose that lays the golden egg, for it is only the application of labour itself that can create surplus-value for the capitalism. The tendency for workers to be displaced by machines, therefore, gives rise to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

On the other hand, this same process of automation and the resultant unemployment that it creates means that the capitalists are also cutting away that the very branch they are sitting on, for it is the wages of those in work that form the demand – i.e. the market – for the goods that capitalism produces. Hence the viscous cycle that capitalism generates in times of recession, with unemployment creating a further lack of demand, which means a further curtailing of production, and thus a further reduction in jobs, and so on and so on.

At the root of this is the contradiction of overproduction, arising from the limits of private ownership and the production for profit. Since profits are nothing more than the unpaid labour of the working class – the surplus-value generated by the workers – there is a permanent contradiction within capitalism whereby the productive forces outstrip the market: the ability of the system to produce extends far beyond the ability of the workers to buy.

The capitalists temporarily overcome this contradiction by reinvesting their profits into new machinery – into new means of production. But due to private ownership and competition, this is done in a chaotic and unplanned manner, leading onto to further instability and even greater crisis.


“The factory system’s tremendous capacity for expanding with sudden immense leaps, and its dependence on the world market, necessarily give rise to the following cycle: feverish production, a consequent glut on the market, then a contraction of the market, which causes production to be crippled. The life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation.” (p580)

Alongside these crises in the economy, capitalism simultaneously destroys not only the lives of those who produce the wealth in society, the working class, but also the environment upon which we depend:


“Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasingly the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility, The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development...the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” (p638)

These words, written by Marx in the 19th Century to describe capitalism’s ruining of the soil, could so easily be used to describe the general ecological crises and destruction of the environment we see today due to capitalism’s insatiable desire for profits.

It every respect then, what economic progress we see under capitalism is accompanied by social contradictions and antagonisms. Whilst creating the potential for a fundamental change in society, the forces that push society forward become fetters – enormous barriers that prevent the fulfilment of this potential fundamental change. The task, therefore, is to smash through these barriers and remove these limits to progress; to abolish the system of private ownership and production for profit that stands in our way; in short – to fight for the socialist transformation of society.


“[Capitalism] destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of capital is still partially hidden, and replaces them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed. But by doing this it also generalises the direct struggle against its rule. While in each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order and economy, the result of the immense impetus given to technical improvement by the limitation and regulation of the working day is to increase the anarchy and the proneness to catastrophe of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of machinery with the worker. By the destruction of small-scale and domestic industries it destroys the last resorts of the ‘redundant population’, thereby removing what was previously a safety-value for the whole social mechanism. By maturing the material conditions and the social combinations of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.” (p635)

Part seven -->>