“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” It’s more than two years since the “great crash” of 2008. Henry Ford’s famous words are as pertinent as ever.
Apart from flashes of anger about bankers’ bonuses there has been no great social movement rising from the ashes of the financial system. Instead, the most articulate voices in response to the banking…
On 5 March, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, warned that there could be another major financial crisis and accused major banks of being keen “to make money out of gullible or unsuspecting customers”. He called for major reforms.
With contributions from fourteen campaigners and corporate practitioners, The Fair Trade Revolution is the Fairtrade Foundation’s official, if somewhat dry, history of the movement. It grew out of the grassroots activism of the 1960s, and editor John Bowles contends a “fundamental paradigm shift” has occurred in the last decade, with sales of Fairtrade goods in the UK topping £1 billion last year.
With fair trade guaranteeing producers in the developing world a minimum price for…
Your interview with Phil Thornhill (PN 2527) on “The capitalism question and climate change” shows a regrettable reluctance on his part to face the facts and a lack of joined up thinking.
Climate change is caused by capitalism. Organisations such as the World Development Movement, which is linked to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, have made this clear in their publications: eg The UK’s role in forced migration of climate refugees (2008) and The International Politics of Climate…
The overwhelming majority of people in Britain support the idea of a one-off 20% wealth tax on the richest 10% of the population that could pay off the national debt. The coalition government claims that the only way to start dealing with £800bn of national debt is through cuts in government spending (£64bn over the next five years).
Hitting the poor
Conservative prime minister David Cameron claimed on 21 October that the tax and benefit changes were fair, being hardest on the…
Back in June, the prime minister said that in resolving the country’s financial crisis, the coalition government would act “in a way that protects the poorest and most vulnerable in our society; in a way that unites our country rather than divides it; in a way that demonstrates that we’re all in this together.”
David Cameron said: “We are all in this together, and we will get through this together.” A noble sentiment shared no doubt by the other millionaires in the cabinet. The…
Climate scientists have reached an international consensus that devastating runaway climate change is inevitable unless significant changes are made. How radical do these changes have to be? Is it possible to make these changes within the current framework of industrial capitalism? Below are edited highlights of responses from a variety of activists from radical movements – the full text of the interviews are available on the Peace News blog.
PN: In your view, can we halt runaway…
A peaceful society can only be based on a peaceful economy. In this light, the recent deaths of Ken Coates and Jimmy Reid brought back memories of the 1960s and 1970s, and the high tide of workers’ control.
The first thing that sceptics say when they hear the phrase “workers’ control” is that most workers aren’t capable of managing their workplaces. They need specially-trained and educated people – more intelligent people, to put it bluntly – to direct them, regulate them.…
According to The Sunday Times Rich List 2010, the fortunes of super-rich have soared by a third over the past year of recession and increasing unemployment.
The 1,000 richest people in the UK increased their wealth by £77 billion last year, bringing their total wealth to £335.5 billion – equal to more than one-third of the national debt.
It was the largest rise in wealth since the list was first published in 1989, in part due to effects of “quantitative easing”, where the Bank of…
As politicians warn of post-election cuts in public spending, the question arises: how much could be saved by reducing Britain’s military presence worldwide?
This is what many Britons think the government should be doing. In a 2007 Daily Telegraph poll, 55% of respondents felt Britain should stop trying to “punch above our weight”, and reduce the country’s foreign military involvement.
In real terms, military spending – like public spending in general – has increased…
It is always much easier when the baddies are “over there”. This is especially true for those of us who like to think of ourselves as radical: challenging capitalism, the alienated society, the system, whatever we choose to call it.
That’s why it got uncomfortable when some women challenged radical men to look at our attitudes, values, behaviour. Yet this challenge can be applied across the board, not just to sexism. Why are we living against each other? Competing in the market…
These two books offer criticisms of capitalism from very different perspectives.
Shutt, a left-leaning economist, argues that the ongoing crisis within capitalism has arisen from the growing redundancy of capital since the 1970s. With too much capital sloshing around, the rich have found it increasingly hard to find investments that can deliver the profits they expect, resorting to taking high risks that make the whole edifice increasingly fragile.
Shutt attacks the laissez-…
Why should Peace News, a paper devoted to peacemaking, concern itself so much with economic issues? Over the period of our editorship we have come back to class politics again and again and again.
Dan Clawson’s wonderful essay “Fusing our power” back in May 2007, at the start of our editorship, showed how activists from the new social movements have begun to revitalise parts of the US trade union movement, turning them from narrowly-focused bureaucratic monoliths into whole-person…
To illuminate the credit crunch and to find a new way forward, Peace News has chosen four recently-published books about the financial crisis.
Charles R Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Perseus Publishing, 2008; ISBN 9781586485634; pp224; £10.99)
By summer 2007, the American banking policy of lending to house buyers with fragile repaying prospects caught up with itself, leaving American banks with up to $400 billion in lending commitments. Morris predicts that over…
The credit crunch exposed many of the failures of the capitalist system and made us question where to go from here to be rid of the free market’s stranglehold: it seems as if the “invisible hand” of the free market has broken a few fingers. So what other options are being explored? The co-operative movement is one means by which, some argue, workers may find labour equality: being one’s own boss and having equal ownership of an organisation.
To explore the co-operative option, Peace…
