The combined punch of a Guardian Leader on May 22 [see 1. below], the spring edition of Red Pepper, [see its editorial 2. below] and 3. a c1990 poem 3. by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, are all clear about how radical democracy able to bridge the local and the global must be kept in the front of our minds and so determine our actions. These are the issues we have been trying to face and to which we are contributing. Your views or reports would be welcome.
1. Leader in The Guardian Saturday 22 May 2021
The Sunday Times rich list provides a useful social X-ray of Britain. It is a journalistic tool that looks inside high society without damaging its subjects. However, the findings of the latest survey – that the richest have got even richer – have been released when many people have endured a Covid year of hardship, loss and boredom. A preview released on Friday reveals that there are now 24 more billionaires than 12 months earlier, a greater increase than in any year since the list was launched 33 years ago. To have created such a concentration of wealth during a pandemic is an indictment of an economic system that has gone badly wrong.
Earlier this year, the Resolution Foundation revealed the shocking size of the wealth gap in Britain. In 2016-18, some 40% of the population had zero accumulated net wealth. The foundation calculated that if the median household saved all disposable income, it would take at least 400 years for it to reach the average wealth of the richest 1%. Yet this was not the whole picture. The thinktank used the rich list to work out whether the wealthiest people had given national statisticians a full account when itemising their affluence. It turns out that they had not. That meant the top 1% share of wealth in 2018 was not, as officially claimed, 18% but at least 23%. The wealth gap has only yawned wider since.
The rich list highlights the pandemic’s business winners – such as the owner of the online retailer Ocado – and its losers, like the Duke of Westminster’s property empire. Corporate rise and fall is not an explanation for what is going on, however. Much of the gains in household wealth are down to rising financial asset prices rather than business acumen. Thanks to the government’s actions, owners of assets have had a very good pandemic. Shares in London are 17% higher than a year ago, driven up by the search for yields in a low-inflation world. House prices rose by 10.2% in the past 12 months, the highest annual growth rate for 14 years, helped by the chancellor’s stamp duty holiday. There’s no need to do much to increase the value of one’s wealth if one is lucky enough to be well-off.
Adam Smith, paraphrasing Hobbes, wrote that “wealth is power”. The rich in a liberal democracy can buy “friends and servants” to prosecute their interest above all others. Such a person did not have to play an active economic role; they only needed the power that money could buy. This is a bad place for Britain to be headed. Little wonder that half of UK voters believe the economic system needs either major changes or to be completely reformed.
Thomas Piketty, the French economist, argues that if the rate of return on assets exceeds the economic and population growth rates, then the wealthiest, and the elderly among them, race away from the rest. His work has the answer to the question posed by today’s economic model. In the decades after the end of the second world war, the spoils of a growing economy were more evenly shared out. Such a desirable outcome was down to policy choices. Helping to spread out the fruits of growth were high levels of unionisation and strong worker bargaining rights; progressive income tax schemes; and the nationalisation of key industries.
To tackle today’s problems, Mr Piketty suggests adding expanded welfare programmes, a job guarantee scheme and mechanisms to reduce the advantage in inherited wealth. These are ideas whose time has come. A growing wealth gap and increasing inequality has many causes, but one surely has been an economics discipline that disparaged the importance of government. It’s time to rethink that for the good of society.
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2. RED PEPPER Spring 2021: Editorial – KNOWING OUR PLACE – Bertie Russell
This issue marks two historically important moments: a century since Ireland’s partition by a colonial British Government, and 150 years since people of Paris rose up against a collapsing French empire to establish the Commune. Although UK has now left the European on, it’s clear that questions over territory — the place where we both make and do our politics — have only not gone away but remain more pressing than ever. Independence movements are continuing to gather steam across nations, while the emergence of the Northern Independence Party is questioning the coherence England itself. A recent report by Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford has called for a ‘radical federalism’ to stem the increasingly likely tide towards breakup of the union. While internationalist left opposes reactionary nationalisms, we must not avoid exploring which spatial forms — from municipalist movements to independence parties — are most appropriate in our present times.
This issue renews our focus not only on the `constitutional question’, which fellow editor Rhian E Jones [p22] engages with, but political question of space more broadly. As Mathijs Van de Sande and Gaard Kets argue (page 14), one of the core legacies of the Paris Commune is to force us to question the place and scale at which radical democratic, anti-capitalist, feminist struggles can take hold. As the Kurdish democratic revolution in Rojava (page i8) and municipal democratic innovations in Brazil (page 20) demonstrate, the spatial forms through which the left organises for liberation are neither given nor impartial but themselves are the object of struggle.
Bringing this topic literally closer to home, there is a long feminist tradition of seeing the domestic sphere — broadly speaking — as an essential site of struggle. Ursula Huws (page 26) explores how the pandemic has brought the gendered social relations of domestic labour sharply into focus. Yet the work of social reproduction can also be the basis of social solidarity, as our articles on Chile’s `communal kitchens’ (page 36).
Greece’s solidarity schools (page 34) and the gathering energy behind student rent strikes (page 38) demonstrate. Feminist analyses run through the issue, tying together municipalist perspectives with Irish struggles for abortion rights and book reviews on care work and the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s.
The `home’ and the `commune’ may be unconventional spaces to bring into a debate on the constitutional question, but the focus of socialists should not be fighting over the world as it is but building the world we want to see. As Pâdraig O Meiscill demonstrates with regard to Northern Ireland (page 40), colonial governments have long understood that space itself is an object of political struggle. Similarly, Ola Majekodunmi (page 46) accounts for how the `divide and rule’ logic of empire applies not only between but within nations, while Sophie Long demonstrates that it will never be enough to `liberate’ ourselves from a conservative British state (page 44). The left must have a political project of the world it seeks to build in its place.
www.redpepper.org.uk
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3. This frank poetic evocation of around 1900
PROTEST
To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes Cowards out of men The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and child-bearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.
Therefore, I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labour, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1850-191
