OK Kommirat, what would you do?

Given that I am so hostile to the dominant ideology of free market neoliberalism and active in its denunciation, friends frequently challenge me to provide an alternative. When I give them my thoughts on that they then ask me why I have never written of this in this blog. They are of course correct, and, until recently, it had never occurred to me. People like me should be tasked with providing alternatives given that there are none being provided in mainstream society. Many of my following thoughts are also applicable in the United States, although the average American will be horrified and immediately condemn me for communism, which of course is nonsense. As I keep telling you, I am not an 'ist' and have never advocated any form of 'ism'. In addition, it is no use simply condemning the following as socialist or communist because they are no such thing and indeed much of what I will advocate can be found in Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, so, if I am a socialist so are they. 

There is no doubt that we are in a crisis, and my arguments are designed to address this crisis, they should not be interpreted as an ideological position. They are what I feel are necessary in the short to medium term to recover some form of civilisation and decency. I will not rehash all the statistics about poverty, foodbanks, malnutrition, inequality etc. as you are all very aware of them yourselves, even though some of you may be indifferent to them, but will merely give you some of the things that
I would do as social and economic imperatives were I given the opportunity. My proposals are not in any particular order of either merit or necessity as I have not planned this post and am simply making it up as I write. If I were to do this properly I would take far more care. Anyway, the immediate priority of any recovery is a massive and significant redistribution of resources in tandem with the creation of jobs, homes and an efficient welfare system. A low wage multiple job economy is stupid and I don't apologise for reminding you that Adam Smith also condemned a low wage economy as economically nonsensical. If the bulk of your population has little income, who are you going to sell your goods to?

As the biggest potential employer in any nation is its local government I would free local government from the shackles of the pigsty and allow them to create jobs and local opportunities for their own communities. They must be given powers of local taxation for which they will be responsible to their local electors and by which they can recoup the functions they have been forced to hand over to a rotten and corrupt private sector. That criticism of the private sector is not ideological, it is empirical given that the private sector has abysmally failed in almost every area it has been given responsibility for. There cannot be, nor ever should be, a profit impetus in public service, all surplus that may be, or can be, generated within the public sector must be immediately reinvested. We must have a radical change in taxation and divert much of our tax away from indirect and onto direct. I would immediately reduce VAT for example and put the reduction onto income tax. I would immediately outlaw the bonus system. I find this system abhorrent and completely insensible. People get paid for a job and the incentive for you to perform that job to the best of your ability is to avoid the sack if you don't, that is how 'normal' workers live. I would severely restrict corporate salaries and transfer the money saved to the workers in such corporations as it is they who actually create the wealth and their increased wages will stimulate economic activity instead of that money disappearing into foreign banks where it does no good.

There must be large-scale public spending on job creation, paid for largely out of taxation instead of borrowing. Firms that we all know pay no or little tax would be immediately billed for their deficit and if they still sought to avoid taxes their licence to operate in this country would be immediately withdrawn and all their assets nationalised. Councils would be required to embark on large-scale council house programmes and the bulk of the managerial staff in all public sector services, but particularly the NHS, would be replaced and their salaries downgraded. If they don't want to do the job there are plenty of people who will, and, given the persistent negative reports we get about the efficiency of such managerial staff they will never be missed.

I could obviously go on, but these are just some of the things I feel must be addressed as a matter of priority. I could tell you so much more I would do politically, but that is for another time.  If anyone wishes me to expand on this please ask, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Free Market Economics - The Abomination that Maketh Desolate

I do not wish to give the impression that I have gone quite mad and taken up religion, but there is a very interesting passage from the Bible that I wish to use as a metaphor for neoliberal free market economics, and this is neatly complimented by criticisms levelled at this economic model by religious leaders. I am doing this because the situation we find ourselves in as a result of the neoliberal market experiment is moral and political as well as economic. In chapter 11 verse 31 of the Biblical Book of Daniel, we read,

“And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate”.

The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us that this verse refers to a historical incident in 168 BC when on Kislew (Nov. – Dec.) 25, under orders from the Greek king of the Seleucid Empire Antiochus 1V Epiphanes, the Temple of Jerusalem was desecrated when ‘the abomination that maketh desolate’ was set up on the altar of the burnt offering and the Jews were required to make obeisance to it. My 8th Edition copy of Young’s Analytical Concordance published in 1939, tells me that the word ‘abomination’ in Daniel 11.31 comes from the Hebrew word ‘shiqquts’ which means, abominable, a detestable thing. This particular abomination was reputed to be a statue of either Zeus or Jupiter. Thus, the abomination that maketh desolate was an idol, a false god that brought desolation to the very core of a people’s culture and directly attacked their fundamental belief system. It was designed to humiliate and subjugate them under an alien set of beliefs and norms, to destroy their existing society and culture. Thus, to the Jewish people this representation of a false god, implanted at the very heart of their most holy place, was a pollutant, an abomination, a detestable thing, designed to render the Jewish way of life desolate. I find this description of a historical catastrophe for the Jewish people a very suitable analogy for the desolation caused by the abomination that is modern free market neoliberal economic and political theory and practice. Neoliberalism is an idol, a false god that has attacked and transformed traditional British cultural norms and values, and, as our very own Antiochus Epiphanes, the blessed Thatcher so brutally told us, was an instrument for the destruction of our society. It is a pollutant that was designed to corrode and eat away at our modern sanctuary of strength, the Welfare State, with the ultimate goal of destroying it. It is an ideology that has brought desolation to British society, that seeks to destroy that society leaving a remnant collection of individuals and families with little or no social ties to each other, with no meaningful norms and values other than those prescribed by the neoliberal political and economic elite and who are motivated solely by the selfishness and greed that is promoted by a particular type of market individualism that elevates injustice to a moral imperative. And, as I continually tell you, all this was quite deliberate and unleashed upon us consciously by a corrupt gangster elite. 

We were greeted this week with the revelation from Parliamentary archives that, despite Thatcher endlessly claiming that the NHS was safe in Tory hands, she actually provoked what was described as a riot within her Cabinet by her insistence on the privatisation of both the NHS and our education system. Her crusade to destroy the welfare state and reduce the working class to the level of a modern form of slavery was relegated, because of opposition to its brutality (from which the modern day Tory party has recovered), from an imperative to a long-term strategy that we see beginning to reach fruition with the NHS reduced to such a crisis that privatisation will be presented as the only alternative. Thatcher's planned destruction of British society and state was only delayed, not abandoned. With your permission I will continue with some religious observations because on many things I find myself in the unusual position of being at one with the Catholic Church. I know you may find this strange coming from me, but, as I have told you, I am not an 'ist' and do not believe in 'isms' and am quite prepared to give credit wherever it is due, whether that is Adam Smith, Karl Marx or the Catholic Church etc.  On 29th June 2009, the Catholic Church published a Papal Encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" by Pope Benedict XVI. In it he wrote
"Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution."

This was an early criticism of the free market from the Church and was followed in November 2013 by a ringing denunciation of neoliberal ideological theory and practice in an Apostolic Exhortation published by Pope Francis entitled "Evangelii Guadium" in which the Pope said

 “Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape……Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

He continued

“One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”

I welcome such comments, regardless of who makes them. This post must surely be self-explanatory and I will end here as it is already too long, but as usual, you have been warned, and I have powerful allies now, though the papacy may not welcome me, I welcome them to a good cause, the ultimate end to the poison that is the free market, a poison that is economic, political, moral and spiritual.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Impoverishing the middle classes is just not cricket

My apologies as I have been away and have not posted for a week. I am spoiled for choice about subject matter as the British press are today full of reports on the state of the economy. After six years in office, and after assuring us that they would have the British economy in surplus by 2016, the Tories are presiding over a £1.9 trillion national debt. This is actually a meaningless sum for ordinary people for whom £1 million is a lifetimes fortune. What it does highlight is the proof how your Kommirat has been warning you how spectacularly incompetent the Tories are. However, even I have underestimated them, this is Olympic gold medal incompetence. What it also highlights is how I have been warning you that the long-running saga of free market economics is now in its death throes. The papers are also reporting the growing disillusionment with Theresa May, our running joke of a Prime Minister. Remember, you read about her unsuitability for the job here first.

People occasionally take me to task for my assertions that the British ruling class are quite deliberately and systematically reducing the working people of this nation to a state of modern slavery. Such people mean well and feel that I am being unnecessarily dramatic and alarmist. In addition, most people feel that their country would not do that to its own people, they are, by different degrees, patriotic and don't want to think ill of their own nation, the 'it couldn't happen here' syndrome. The first thing I do with people is ask them to reflect on the gains that working people made following the Second World War and how, since Thatcher came to power, they have been systematically removed. I ask them to reflect on the gradual descent of Britain into an uncivilised society where working people and the disadvantaged have been systematically impoverished and deliberately made to feel that they deserve their fate and should know their place. I have written before how I consider one of the fundamental benchmarks of a civilised society is its housing conditions and how this country's housing situation is now in permanent crisis. However, the pigsty passed into law the Investigatory Powers Act last Thursday making Britain the nation labouring under the most comprehensive surveillance in the western world. This Act requires search engines to record every site visited on the internet by everyone living in Britain for government information. In other words, the British now, by an Act of Parliament, have no privacy whatsoever. In addition, Brexit is now estimated to cost every household in the country £1,250 per annum for the foreseeable future, whilst by 2021 real wages will be below where they were in 2008. That is what the British voted for last year. They voted for a pack of lying incompetents, their own impoverishment, levels of surveillance Goebbels would have been proud of and increasing poverty. But good luck to them, because after all this is all the fault of immigrants isn't it?.

Britain is a shockingly exclusive society, it is a class society. We had a short history of some thirty years after 1945 where efforts were made to be an inclusive society and care for all classes through a meaningful distribution of resources. This took the form of council housing, free further and higher education, a serious pension scheme for the elderly, welfare benefits for the disadvantaged, occupational pensions, steady and permanent employment, apprenticeships for the young, and protective employment legislation. On top of the heap was an inclusive and embracing health service. This was paid for by taxation, primarily direct taxation. But then Thatcher came in with her ideological hatred of the state and taxation. She conclusively won the battle of ideas and so people like me became oddities and an anachronism, and so, rather than raise taxes on income, we have run up a £1.9 trillion national debt. That's what ideology does to you.

In those thirty years of attempting a more just distribution of resources, Britain still had its monarchy, its upper classes, still had wealthy people and the sky did not fall, nor the world come to an end. But this redistribution of wealth and resources enraged the elite, particularly those people, championed by Thatcher, for whom enough is never enough. It also irritated the middle classes who resented uppity working people, and particularly their representatives in the trade unions, getting above themselves and demanding to be treated as human beings instead of cattle. As Thatcher declared war on workers, the poor and the disadvantaged, the middle classes cheered to the rafters, they are not cheering now. They have seen the elite turn on them once they had soaked the workers for most of what they had, well you get what you vote for. This post has been a bit general but Britain is in a crisis and I wish to give you something to think about that you may not get in the media. Brexit has been, and will continue to be, a disaster, the free market has always been a disaster but was able to appear a boon to many people for a long time before its inevitable repercussions came home to roost. At the end of the day however, the only people to blame are the British electorate, as a wise man once said, never underestimate the stupidity of the average voter. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Boris, it's getting beyond a joke

I just had to update you on The Spider's latest demonstration of his grasp of his remit and his grasp of politics in general, which is indicative of the general level of incompetence of the British government. At first I thought I had misread the latest reports because even I did not believe that he could be so stupid, but on a visit to the Czech Republic Boris stated that the idea that free movement of people is a founding pillar of the EU is 'bollocks'. That was the word the British Foreign Secretary used in an interview with a national newspaper in another nation state (you can of course do that if you went to Eton and Oxford, because those Europeans are obviously lesser beings). He then went on to claim that the Treaty of Rome does not mention the free movement of people. He told the Czechs that

“Everybody now has it in their head that every human being has some fundamental God-given right to move wherever they want. It’s not true. That was never the case. That was never a founding principle of the EU. Total myth,”

Now, that was a quite astonishing thing for any politician to say, let alone the third ranking politician in the United Kingdom and betrays a complete lack of understanding of the EU that he spent over six months during a referendum campaign assuring the British people he was expert in and must be listened to. He is, in the proper definition, ignorant of a fundamental understanding of the most important area of his political remit as Foreign Secretary. What I cannot understand is why he has not already been sacked. If any worker in any organisation displayed such a blatant ignorance of their job they would not last five minutes. I went back to the Treaty of Rome and simply cut and pasted some of it for your convenience. For example in Part 1 of the Treaty it says

Treaty of Rome - Part 1 Principles

Article 3. For the purposes set out in Article 2, the activities of the Community shall include, as provided by this Treaty and in accordance with the timetable set out therein:

(c) an internal market characterized by the abolition, as between Member States, of obstacles to the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital;

If we move to Part 3 which sets out this principle in detail, covering ten different articles of principle it includes

Part Three - Community Policies

Title Three - Free Movement of Persons, Services and Capital

Chapter 1 - Workers
This Chapter then details the ten different Articles that I have just spoken about and I will not bore you with details, I will simply reproduce the first of the ten Articles contained in Part 3 Chapter 1. This begins with Article 48 which reads

Article 48.
Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Community by the end of the transitional period at the latest.
Such freedom of movement shall entail the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment.
It shall entail the right, subject to limitations justified on grounds of public policy, public security or public health:
(a) to accept offers of employment actually made;
(b) to move freely within the territory of Member States for this purpose;
(c) to stay in a Member State for the purpose of employment in accordance with the provisions governing the employment of nationals of that State laid down by law, regulation or administrative action;
(d) to remain in the territory of a Member State after having been employed in that State, subject to conditions which shall be embodied in implementing regulations to be drawn up by the Commission.

Believe me there are another nine Articles expanding on this concept of the free movement of workers and the British Foreign Secretary is blissfully unaware of their existence. This Treaty has been in existence since 1957 by the way, before he was born, and it is even more telling given that he was based in Brussels for a time as EU correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Now, I have frequently referred to how I categorise many so called experts as well-schooled but not well educated. Here we have a graphic example of someone who can attend the most prestigious educational establishments in Britain, if not the world, pass through them with full honours, rise to the highest offices in the land and not even reach the level of well-schooled, never mind educated. This is the British class system. Is it any wonder that real intellects like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham called Oxford a complete waste of time. David Hume spent six months in Cambridge and asked for his money back.

Now in the Bible the proverbs tell us to answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. I recount this matter to you, not as a jibe at Boris Johnson, but as an example of the kind of people who rise to the top in our societies because they belong to an elite, attend elite schools and universities and think that rules, regulations, decency and dignity are for other people, because they have a sense of entitlement that absolve them from the constraints that apply to the rest of us. Johnson is an opinion former and was one of the chief advocates of Brexit, demonising the EU and persuading enough people that he knew what he was talking about. He was listened to because in class ridden Britain his background ensures that his opinions will be listened to and respected, even when they are (and I will use his own language here) bollocks. His class position even absolves him from the need to do his homework and apply a bit of diligence to his job. Johnson is a product of a sick society. This man is making a fool of himself throughout the world and the rest of the world is now seeing the imbecile that we have all witnessed over the past ten years in this country, but, he went to Eton and Oxford, was a member of the Bullingdon Club along with all his other Tory mates who went on to become Prime Minister and Chancellor and who brought Britain to a crises in both political and economic matters, and must be treated different from the plebs, even allowed to insult other nations and their elected representatives. I will end here but trust this will give you a flavour of the corrosive poison that is the class system and the damage it can wreck on society, giving us a ruling class that are simply appalling. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

 

Turkeys voting for Christmas? How dare the British insult turkeys!

In the aftermath of the Brexit shambles and Trump's electoral victory, our news is now full of our beloved experts writing how both these events mark the beginning of the end for free market liberalism. I do not share their optimism, but they are at least beginning to place the blame for our misfortunes where it should lie. We may even see the beginning of the end of the tedious and sinister narrative that it is all the fault of immigrants, the EU, the unemployed, the disabled etc. If that is true then both events may turnout to be a blessing in disguise. As a result, I returned to my first post on this blog in August 2012 where I wrote
"What I hope to achieve in the future is a clear recognition amongst people with a scintilla of intelligence that the neoliberal free market experiment has been well and truly demonstrated to be a disaster and is both practically and intellectually dead. Free market economic theory is a fraud and is based on flawed intellectual and theoretical assumptions, it is, if I may be allowed to quote Engels, ‘a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.’"

Another persistent theme of this blog has been to catalogue the continuing descent of Britain's working class into a condition of virtual slavery. It is now evident that the same phenomenon has been occurring in the United States. This of course is a direct and quite deliberate result of free market economics and is the principal driver of both Brexit and Trump. The tragedy is that both the Brexiteers and Trump himself, have successfully convinced enough people that the cause of their misery is still the immigrants, etc. 'the others' of popular mythology, with the result that the mass of the people themselves have still to understand the poisonous legacy of neoliberalism and therefore the true source of where their anger should be directed. Thus, those who voted Brexit and Trump have once again put their faith in false prophets, in fact the same kind of people who caused their woes in the first place.

As I frequently write, this situation is the result of enough people in both nations voting for their own impoverishment and slavery, all I can do is warn them what they are doing and hope that they are misguided and not doing it deliberately. I find it hard to have sympathy for people who are so wilfully blind to their own predicament and willing to place their faith in people who are so demonstrably stupid, incompetent and disgustingly venal as the elites in both our benighted nations, but recognise that they are not the majority, just the enough. I also recognise that me, my family and all my friends are on the sharp end of the gangsters who run our world, and so I continue to highlight their criminality as long as someone is willing to listen. At least there are some people in our societies, ironically called experts, who are at last beginning to realise what I have been telling you for the past four years. I have already written that Brexit and Trump are the natural consequence of the free market, of Thatcher/Reaganism and the institutionalisation of greed and selfishness as deliberate public policy in both societies, and that another natural consequence of this is the continuous war against working people. This has resulted in Britain becoming quite uncivilised and descending into a form of barbarism, and following on from the US election, it is evident that these conditions also apply in the USA. As of this September, there were 903,000 people in the UK on zero hours contracts. There are now more than 7m Britons in what is designated as 'precarious employment'.

Precarious employment is jargon for people who can lose their job at very short, or no, notice. That is one in five of the British workforce and is getting worse all the time. It has grown by two million in the past ten years. Thatcher, Reagan, and their acolytes laid all the foundations that allow such working conditions. In Britain this meant destroying the union movement, making industrial action almost impossible and convincing a gullible British public that trades unions and workers, particularly in the public sector, were the devil incarnate. It also involved the destruction of employment rights and law, and deregulating bullying and harassment by managers and corporations. It is now the norm for employers to utilise self-employed workers and increasingly recruit on temporary and zero-hours contracts. The Tories boast about the rise in the number of self-employed, but over fifty percent of such workers are in low paid poverty wages and take home less than two-thirds of median income. The Chairman of the government's own commission into social mobility, Alan Milburn, one of Mad Tony's cronies, stated that

“There is something profound going on and all of this poses a potential risk to social cohesion and a risk to the potential for social mobility”

It must be bad when even the vilest of the pigsty reach such conclusions, he being of course one of the authors of this situation. He reported that self-employed workers typically earn about half the wage of permanent employees, zero-hours contractors about 40% and temp workers around two-thirds. These are the same people who voted Brexit and so voted to entrench their own misery. You genuinely could not make it up.

Ps. For those of you who feel that I am too harsh on Boris the Spider, I trust you are following his fortunes as Foreign Secretary. It is wonderful to watch him demonstrating every day and with every utterance that he is an even greater imbecile than I gave him credit for. The man is a disaster and will surely need to be sacked as a matter of priority, he is so useless and so obviously mad that I am beginning to develop a fondness for him. This is the sort of person that the British placed their faith in as their future. We can never criticise the Americans over Trump when we have the Spider. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

 

The Unthinkable has just been thunked

Well, it's happened, the unthinkable has been thunked (I know there is no such word because I've just made it up). The Anglo-Saxon world is now dominated by the forces of reaction and irrationality. Both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote were purchased by appealing to our lowest common denominator, by fostering bigotry, a corrosive and divisive xenophobia, appealing to the huge racist underbelly of both Britain and the US by the demonising of immigrants, Muslims and foreigners in general. This highlights in graphic detail the nonsense of seeing human beings as fundamentally rational beings aware of their best interests, the bedrock of free market economics.

I know there will be endless speculation as to the reasons for these quite revolutionary changes, but let me give you Kommirat's. These will be familiar to you if you read this blog, but they will be quite different from anything you will read from your British and US established commentators because in order to properly understand it you will have to connect with the big bogeyman, Karl Marx, whose name is never mentioned by commentators in either nation as a source of information or enlightenment, he being of course the ultimate demon. It was Marx however who showed us how the political and social superstructure of any society is built upon, and is a reflection of, its economic base. I argue that Marx's description of the relationship of base and superstructure has become so obvious in our modern societies that I find it difficult why anyone would question it, but of course the answer is self-evident, it's by Marx and so must be wrong. However, as Marx shows us, erected upon the economic base of a society, are all the legal, political and social structures within that society that are required to maintain, sustain, protect, nourish, expand and develop the full potential of the economic infrastructure. As a result, in a slave economy for example, the legal system will produce laws to protect the ownership and exploitation of slaves. The belief system will produce a set of beliefs that justify slavery (God meant certain racial and ethnic groups to be slaves and white people to be the masters). The education system will promote these ideas to the young people and teach them that the law, and therefore the system of slavery, is good and just, and the political system will be designed to protect all of the above, with only the ‘correct’ people being allowed decision-making powers. For example, when the Founding Fathers sat down in Philadelphia to design the American political system, they had to decide how to elect a government. This required them to decide who should have a vote. This was a slave economy, and so the same people who had just written in the American Declaration of Independence that “It is self-evident that all men are created equal” decided that, for electoral purposes, a slave only equaled three-fifths of a human being. Ironically, the man who wrote that it was self-evident that all men are created equal was himself a slave-owner.

Similarly, in a capitalist economy such as ours, the legal and political system will be structured to protect, sustain and expand an economic system based on private property. All of the social institutions will similarly reflect that. The belief system will teach that this system is right and proper and good. It will also teach that any beliefs that challenge these assumptions are dangerous, wrong, misguided etc. Such sentiments will be portrayed in the mass media, and the whole political, legal and social system will be structured on a system of social class. This class system will also reflect the ownership and control of the economic infrastructure and the education system will design the curriculum around all of the latest technology in order to prepare young people to enter the world of work and meet the needs of the system, whilst the political system will provide the schools, colleges and universities with the technological equipment necessary for such training. In this way Marx showed us how society reflects the system of economic production upon which it is erected.

The superstructure also reflects the ideology of the economic base and thus it is the dominant ideology of free market neoliberalism that has produced both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote. The economic model of the free market has determined the ideological approach to all public policy for the last forty years and so our political structures must be designed to support this model regardless of whether it is fit for purpose or not. That is the principal reason for the British Labour Party embracing the free market. All the standard explanations we are getting are actually manifestations of and the consequences of, free market neoliberalism, because the exclusivity of our societies have also scrupulously excluded any other possible narratives. As I have been warning you for years, this is an ideology that is first and foremost exclusive, designed to reward a small sector of society at the expense of the rest. Significantly, the most excluded have been the working classes in both societies along with their representative organisations, the unemployed, the sick and disabled, but, as the greedy got greedier and the exclusive nature of public policy got more intense, a greater proportion of society, particularly the middle classes, found themselves being excluded as well, as the rapacity of the elite and their policy making lackeys broke all bounds of decency. These were people who had hitherto applauded the exclusion of the workers and the destruction of the union movement, but now found that they had unleashed forces that were out of their control, protected by a political class that had lost all sympathy with the rest of the nation, driven by a malignant ideology that told them that the poor and disadvantaged deserved their poverty, it was their own fault.

The free market is an ideology that is devoid of any moral content and has no ethical boundaries, producing a class of elite gangsters for whom enough is never enough. This has had profound implications for the moral and ethical structures in both the USA and Britain. It is an ideology that promotes greed and selfishness as 'goods' with social concerns for other people as 'bads' because such concerns require resources to be raised and distributed to what this ideology labels the undeserving, the shirkers and scroungers of Tory and Daily Mail mythology, but most importantly, immigrants and refugees. Trump and Brexit are the logical conclusion of Thatcher/Reaganism and the spread of the free market poison that has been destroying our respective societies slowly from within for the past forty years. This has resulted in the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the excluded, reacting as all such groups have done throughout history. They have turned to a messiah, a saviour that is going to lead them to the promised land of milk and honey. In Britain it was 'taking back control' 'sovereignty' and looking to the prophets who were promising that once this was achieved everything would be alright whilst salving their conscience with a scapegoat propaganda that their misfortunes were the fault of 'the other'. In America it is the same message, this time labelled 'making America great again'. My complaint is that if these people have pinpointed not only the solutions, but the original problem, why did they have to gain their victories by barefaced lying, bullying, demonising and creating fear and hatred? Answer, because they are false prophets, a fraud.

The source of their problems are not of course immigrants, Muslims etc. it is an ideology, an intellectual disease, and there can be no solution unless we inoculate the body politic against this poison, provide an intellectual antidote, and look to people who not only understand this, but can articulate solutions. There can be no solution within Britain because we are trusting in the biggest set of free market imbeciles imaginable, people who are intellectually incapable of seeing the problem, let alone attempting to solve it. However, I see a couple of potential silver linings in Trump's victory. His campaign and his proposals to make America great again contain hints that he may be prepared to abandoned the free market model. He does not understand the problem, but appears to be hitching his wagon to a solution similar to Roosevelt's approach to the Great Depression. I hope I am right. In addition, he actually seems to take a far more sane view of relations with Russia than our dominant western narrative, discarding the traditional 'he's a bad man' approach to Vladimir Putin, although I suspect he is doing it for the wrong reasons. Regardless of his motives this must surely lessen tensions and the possibility of conflict. I apologise for the length of this post, and if you have read this far you have my sincere gratitude. There is obviously much more I could write on this subject but trust that I have given at least a flavour that will make you think. In any case, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Someone in the UN has been reading Doktor Kommirat

I think someone in the United Nations has been reading Doktor Kommirat. A UN Report, published in Geneva yesterday afternoon has concluded that the pigsty's austerity measures amount to what it called 'systematic violations' of the rights of people with disabilities. Importantly, in support of Ken Loach's accusation of conscious cruelty, the Report also says that the government knew that their policies would be harmful and damaging to the most disadvantaged. This is a quite devastating indictment of the British government, who, without a scintilla of shame, have responded by saying that “While the government continues to improve and build on the support available to disabled people, it stands by and is proud of its record.” This from a government that the UN has just accused of deliberately and systematically dismantling those supports, an accusation Kommirat has been making for years. The pigsty accused the UN of providing a quite inaccurate picture of life for disabled people in the UK, despite the fact that the UN's evidence comes from those same disabled people as the Report was the result of an eleven day inquiry tour by two UN envoys who met over 200 people, officials, MPs and academics. They are indeed despicable. The UN accuses the Tories on the grounds that their measures 'have disproportionately and adversely affected disabled people'. Importantly, the UN argues that this involves disabled people's human rights, and accused the pigsty of creating a climate where they were portrayed as 'lazy and putting a burden on taxpayers'. In addition disabled people live in a society where they experience 'increasing hostility, aggressive behaviour and sometimes attacks to their personal integrity', and concludes that 'There is reliable evidence that the threshold of grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities has been met.' I await the response of the Mail and the Express with interest who have been in the forefront of the demonization of the disabled reported by the UN. As a result of tabloid journalism and the pronouncements of Tory MP's the disabled in Britain are routinely the victims of hate crime.

Of all the disabilities that we see around us, a mental illness must be amongst our greatest curses. It would therefore be fitting that society takes greater care of the mentally ill than most other sections of society, as these are people who quite literally are incapable of looking after themselves. Not according to the British government however. It is perhaps the greatest indictment that can be levelled against the pigsty that their treatment of the mentally ill is a national shame and humiliation, and that. rather than doing everything in our power to alleviate these poor souls, the British spend their time looking for as many ways as possible to cut as much of the resources available to them as they can. Don't take Kommirat's word for it, I have the support of the United Nations. This is modern free market political economy, which I continually remind you, considers anything, including the disabled, who appear to have no economic benefit, to be valueless and worthless, they are considered, as the Nazis called them, 'useless eaters'. Let us consider the thoughts of Adam Smith, who is supposedly the theoretical inspiration behind the free market. He wrote

"Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other".

Am I being unkind if I interpret Smith to argue that the denizens of the pigsty, but particularly the modern Tory Party, do not possess the least spark of humanity? Who is higher on the Tory ladder of priorities, a disabled person, or a failed banker? I leave the reader to fill in all of the other Tory priorities that take precedent over the disabled and disadvantaged as to do so would turn this post into a book to challenge War and Peace. With what commiseration does the Westminster Parliament behold the disabled, answer, none. People look at me in silent disbelief when I tell them I no longer regard myself as British. Britain has become a shameful place characterised by hate, greed and contempt for the unfortunate and anyone they consider 'the other.' Adam Smith was not British, he was a Scot, a civilised man. He was most certainly not the author of the intellectual filth that poses as free market economics. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

The Kommirat Thesaurus

I appear to have been read by some people who have never read this blog before and for that I am very grateful and I welcome you. However, it also appears that I am confusing some of them with my language. People who read this blog regularly will be aware that my reference to 'the pigsty' is a reference to the Westminster Parliament that is staffed by a set of political charlatans and scoundrels who are only in politics to get their noses in the trough as deep as they can before they are found out for their incompetence and sacked by their constituents. Unfortunately, the British electorate seem to be quite happy to be ruled by gangsters who are enriching themselves at their expense.

I am a Scot, and the other reference that confuses people is 'a midden.' I explained before in another post, that a midden is a Scottish word describing a communal garbage disposal area. Thus midden is used to describe a mess, a shambles, a collection of refuse. In my opinion Britain has become a midden and Westminster is self-evidently a midden as it is the best example of a collection of human detritus imaginable. The inhabitants of the pigsty are bereft of decency, morality, ethical behaviour, and above all, intelligence. They display neither dignity nor self-respect. On national television a Cabinet Minister, the appalling Sajid Javid, whom I warned you to keep an eye on as he is one of the worst examples of the pigsty mentality, announced that the decision of the judiciary to maintain the principal of parliamentary sovereignty over an overweening executive was unacceptable. This is from a creature who voted to refuse entry to 3,000 refugee children, from a member of a government who have been rightly accused of practising conscious cruelty in their public policies. The honourable Sajid Javid is himself a member of a family of refugees, of immigrants. But of course he is a Tory, so that's different.

Under Westminster's care, the British have descended into a place where it is OK to demonise the judiciary for simply doing their job and raising the spectre of homophobia by telling the world that one of the judges who made the decision that so enraged them was gay. What on earth that has to do with anything remains a mystery, but for the British right-wing press it seems important. UKIP has been encouraged to flaunt its fascist tendencies and demand that the judiciary are taken under political control as a matter of urgency. Their leader, Nigel Garbage, has called for demonstrations outside the Supreme Court in order to intimidate the judges who will hear the government's appeal, and is encouraging civil unrest if their decision does not please UKIP. It took this government three days, under pressure from all areas of the nation, including some of their own people, to speak out in support of the judges. They of course do not mean one word of their weasel words and that must raise serious alarm to their intentions to uphold the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law once we have left the EU and its protection of our rights.

As evidence of this, only today, the British government flatly refused to protect working people's basic rights once we have left the EU. I have been warning for years that this is one of their primary goals, the enslavement of working people and reducing them to poverty. Perhaps people will now start taking notice. However, my sympathies principally lie with the Scottish working class, because the workers in England and Wales were at the forefront of the Brexit campaign and so I respect their decision to vote for their own future state of slavery. If that is what they want, who am I to argue? It must not happen in Scotland however.

Under Westminster's care the British tabloid press have ceased reporting the news and exist solely to propagate outrageous lies, propaganda, and above all hate. Like their friends in the pigsty they wallow in filth. Even some of the Broadsheet papers like the Daily Telegraph (described as the Conservative Party house journal) joined the chorus of hatred for the judiciary, but the tabloid press sustain a relentless campaign of hatred and denigration for anyone who seeks any kind of moderation and compromise. Their hatred for all things Scottish is visceral as anyone who ever reads them will find. I am sorry if this post has resembled a rant, but we are indeed heading into dark waters and, paradoxically, I am motivated by one of Toryism's foremost philosophers, Edmund Burke. I disagree with Burke on most things, and advise you all to read Thomas Paine who simply fillets him and dismantles his philosophy. But on one thing he warned us of, we can all agree, when he warned us that 'all it requires for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.' Evil is indeed prospering in this sorry nation. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

The Daily Mail resurrects its fascist leanings

I have been warning you for years now that Britain is in danger of descending into fascism. Today the Daily Mail has a front page that demonises the three high court judges who ruled that the Brexit legislation should be debated in parliament as enemies of the people. I remind you that this is the newspaper that openly supported Hitler. This has to stop and it has to stop now. What these three judges did was give a legal ruling on a constitutional matter, a ruling that I have argued in my last post was so obvious that it was impossible for the judiciary to do anything else. The rest of the British gutter press, led by the Daily Express are in universal condemnation of the judges for attempting to block Britain's exit from the EU. That is either a barefaced lie or the inability to understand the English language, and as the tabloid press in Britain exist by serial lying then I suspect the former. The one thing Britain's press and politicians can be relied upon is to never allow facts to interfere with a good theory. As I argued yesterday, all that the judiciary said was that the government does not have the authority to arbitrarily overrule parliamentary legislation. As it was parliament who took us into Europe, then it has to be parliament who takes us out. Nothing in their ruling remotely resembles any kind of attempt to block, slow down or put any sort of barrier in the way. It is a matter of constitutional law. The attempts to argue that the courts were making a political decision with respect to the Brexit situation are not merely irresponsible, they are sinister. They are also an example of the breathtaking hypocrisy of the right-wing press and their fellows in the political circus. We have had another Tory MP resign today because of the lies and hypocrisy of the government, that is not Kommirat's interpretation, it is the reason he gave himself. 

All of the leave people parrot that if you seek to criticise the referendum result you are somehow subverting the will of the people, that wonderful phrase that sustains every scoundrel and mountebank. Yes, 17,410,742 people, 51.9% of votes cast, voted to leave, but 16,141,241, 48.1% voted to remain, hardly an overwhelming mandate. These votes represented a 72.2% turnout and so the leave vote represents 37.47% of the electorate, whilst the remain vote represents 34.47%. Thus, whilst the leave vote was a majority of the votes cast, it was not a majority and so it is pushing it a bit to call it the will of the people. In addition, as I have spoken about in earlier posts, these are the same hypocritical liars who refused to recognise the legality of the Crimean referendum in 2014 that resulted in a 96.77% vote on an 83.1% turnout to join the Russian Federation in Crimea and a 95.6% vote on an 89.5% turnout in the City of Sevastopol. That means that the Crimean result represented 80.4% of the Crimean electorate and 85.56% of the people of Sevastopol. That must surely go some way to representing the will of the people, but not in Britain's eyes. The will of the people only applies if they decide it does.

Britain is a supposed to be a system of constitutional limited government in which the executive, which includes the monarchy, is subordinate to the elected parliament. The parliament represents the will of the people. The key phrase there is limited government which is designed to prevent centralisation and tyranny. As I repeatedly warn you, centralised and unrepresentative government breeds intolerance which is the abiding characteristic of modern Britain as exemplified by the Brexit vote, the tabloid press and the Tory Party. The whole purpose of government is to provide a stable, peaceful and ordered society that enables the people to pursue their own interests without doing harm to anyone else. The purpose of government is not to make people good or to preach to them, government is functional and should never be ideological. Its role is to provide the parameters within which people have as much freedom as possible without harming others. The executive can therefore only rule with the consent of, and for the benefit of, the people. The real ruler of a democratic nation is the law, and it is parliament that makes the law, not the executive. The executive may design the law, but it is the elected parliament that makes it. As a result, any attack on the judiciary is an attack on the law and therefore the rule of law. That an attack on the judiciary for exercising its constitutional duty is deemed acceptable is the result of how the forces of reaction and authoritarianism have been attacking the legal processes of the European Union for the past fifty years and getting away with it. Thus, the pigsty gangsters have not only demonised the judiciary in general, but whatever law they disagree with, and I remind you again, their target is our human rights with the goal of virtual slavery for working people. If they need to demonise the British judiciary then so be it. The Daily Mail is beginning to resemble Der Sturmer in its attitude to immigrants, foreigners in general and the rights of ordinary working people. Do not minimise the implications embodied in labelling people the enemy of the people. In a proper democratic system, government and the press must be subject to moral constraints. We have rights that are superior to parliamentary approval or disapproval, rights that exist prior to government, which I remind you is derivative, and any exercise of state power that threatens such rights is, by definition, illegitimate. Power must be constrained by such moral rights, by the law, and subject to both constitutional and traditional conventions. In the absence of a written constitution, governmental authority rests on trust, and that is what successive governments, beginning with Thatcher, has forfeited. We are indeed in perilous times, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat    

 

 

 

 

We have a serious crisis of government and politics

I have written here several times and do not apologise for raising it again, but it has become essential that we have a serious discussion about the roles and functions of government. I have told you since the start of this blog that the free market narrative is essentially totalitarian and that Britain is getting dangerously close, if not to totalitarian government, most definitely authoritarian. It is similar with the United States. A report today estimated that a candidature for the US Presidency, requires at least $500,0000. Think about that, half a billion dollars to attempt to become the leader of a country that claims to be a democracy, and there is not even a guarantee of success. That's worse odds than trying to win the lottery. As a result, what kind of people can launch such a bid? Answer, only those who are either one of, or capable of being accepted by, the one per cent. Some democracy!

Today the British High Court ruled that the government does not have the authority to trigger Article 50 of the European Charter announcing Britain's intention to leave the Union. That authority lies with the sovereign parliament. Imagine that we actually had to go to court to have that clarified. Kommirat has been telling you that for years, that in a liberal constitutional democracy, parliament must be sovereign as it is the elected representative of the people. That is so fundamental it is a very serious situation when that has to be decided in a court. No-one elects a government in Britain, we elect parties, and historical precedent has decided that the leader of the victorious party becomes the Prime Minister who then appoints a government team from whomever he/she wishes from within the parliament, and in Britain that includes the House of Lords. Thus, the Prime Minister is a party appointment, not the peoples, and therefore the rest of the government are in fact third party appointments. This is particularly relevant today when the present Prime Minister succeeded to her post in the wake of the resignation of the incumbent. Thus Theresa May is Prime Minister by dint of the votes of a majority of Conservative MPs, she hasn't even been tested in an election. Thus, it is essential that the executive is always subservient to the legislature. That is why Britain can no longer claim to be a democracy because that situation has not prevailed since at least the Second World War. It is also why parliament must reassert its authority, particularly when we have a government of such appalling personnel as we have today. There is not one intellect in the entire governmental machine, and it is doubtful if there is any intellectual capacity in the entire pigsty.

In the United States we have a candidate who has announced in advance that if he loses the election he will not accept the result because he has decided, before any votes have been cast, that the election is fraudulent. The USA is actually on the verge of voting in a person who will only accept the legitimacy of the electoral process if he wins it. In this country we have the entire governmental apparatus screaming for a penalty kick because the court has had the temerity to make a legal ruling that it so transparently obvious only a fool would challenge it, but the Tory party is indeed a ship of fools. This government was quite prepared to annul over forty years of parliamentary legislation on a whim, and are quite adamant that they have a right to do so. The court has simply ruled that only parliament can repeal its own laws, not the government. Thus, as with Trump, the Tories will only accept whatever rules and outcomes, legal, political or whatever, that they agree with. This is a big topic and I will end here, but with a familiar warning. This is the logical outcome of Thatcherism and free market neoliberalism. You must be alert to what these people are doing to your nation, your democracy and your future. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat   

Why there is no such thing as an individual!

A friend asked me to explain what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as an individual and suggested I make my answer into a post on this blog. I am happy to do so, but need to apologise as it will necessarily be a long post which you may not want to read. I will however give my reasons as succinctly as I can to preserve sanity and you can accept or ridicule them as you see fit. The best description of the reality of individualism I know is to be found in Marx's publication The Grundrisse when he tells us that

"The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilised person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other". (a zoon politikon was Aristotle's description of the human being as a political animal)

I have discussed many times on this blog how neoliberalism and modern free market economics are grounded in the concept of the individual and individualism, on Thatcher’s dictum that there is no such thing as society. It is self-evident and hardly worth stating that each human being is a unique individual, but what does that actually mean? In order to understand the theories of modern economics it is crucial that we establish the significance of the terms of reference that motivate economic theory and policy-making in order that we can have a clear understanding of why they have failed so spectacularly and caused so much social damage. It is therefore necessary to clarify what I mean when I discuss the individual and the relationship of the individual with society. Let me be clear from the start, each person born is an individual human being; however, that individual human being is born into a social situation (the family) and a defined social structure (society). Regardless of whether the individual is born into a conventional family with a parent of each gender, a single parent family, a family with two carers of the same gender, or into a situation where the principal carer(s) is (are) not the parent(s) of the individual, the individual must be fed, nurtured and cared for or it will die. It is not self-sufficient. It is not an atomised individual. It is said that each human being is born an egoistic being motivated solely by egoistic sensations such as hunger and thirst. I would question that and argue that whilst each human being may be conceived egoistic, the socialisation of that egoistic individual begins within the womb. However, even if the individual is born a completely egoistic being, as that individual grows and develops, he/she grows and develops within a social situation and learns from other human beings. Thus, the life and development of each individual is externally provided for and a social consciousness develops within each human being in addition to their egoistic consciousness. As a result, the concept of an individual human being, self-reliant, independent of society and independent of a wider social framework of human intercourse, an asocial human being, is a ridiculous concept. It is not only ridiculous, it is impossible; such an individual would not survive a few days nor develop as a truly human being.

Now, as I continually ridicule the false assumptions of free market neoliberalism, it is interesting to note how Adam Smith viewed the individual. Smith was an empiricist whose writings were founded on empirical and historical facts and not on speculative reasoning. Thus if we contemplate the historical development of the human species and employ an empirical perspective as Smith did, it becomes self-evident that the human being is a social being and that the modern free market concept of individualism cannot claim reference from Adam Smith. Smith demonstrates how it is the social nature of the human being within commercial society that establishes their individual independence. It is only in commercial society, founded on economic and social interdependence through the mechanisms of production, trade, exchange and the division of labour that each individual is free from dependence on particular masters, free to move and sell their labour, to change jobs and location and control their own affairs in a way that was previously extremely difficult if not impossible. For Smith, it is the interdependence of the market social system, an interlocking system of production, trade and exchange that demonstrates both the social nature of the individual and their genuine independence as a human being. Thus, individuality, as Marx states, is only possible within a social setting, and Adam Smith is in complete agreement. Why, I have always asked, was I never taught, in six years studying politics, sociology and economics, that there is a great deal of commonality between Karl Marx and Adam Smith on the fundamentals of human nature? I now know why. Indeed it is the existence of such freedoms, the freedom to change occupation, location, to dispose of your own affairs etc. that Smith defines as true freedom and that characterises commercial society as so distinct from previous as such freedoms were not universally existent in earlier societies. Thus, for Adam Smith individuality is social and necessarily interdependent and interactive, but the crux of Smith’s argument is that in commercial activity the independent individual freely commits to the interdependent nature of commerce thus retaining his/her independent nature and social status. The key to this ability to retain individual independence in an interdependent environment is the ‘regular administration of justice’.
Before there is an individual human being, there is a collective society of human beings and the very act of human procreation is itself an interactive social experience. In addition we are all born into a society in whatever form it may take. There is a society of human beings in existence before each of us and we are born into that society, are nurtured within it and learn from it. If I am born a male I am not born with the knowledge that I am a male, I become aware that I am a male through interaction with other people. I am told I am a male by other human beings and learn what it is to be a male as distinct from a female. In other words, my consciousness of myself is socially developed; it is not innate but is an empirical process, that is, I learn from my experience as a male and become aware of my identity as a male from a recognition of other males. Thus, my consciousness of myself as an individual male is neither speculative nor psychological, it is practical and empirical. In addition, not only am I an individual in a social sense, but my consciousness is a social construct as well. Whilst society cannot exist apart from the individuals who compose it, the individual cannot exist apart from society. The individual may take a decision to remove him/herself from society, but by the time they take that decision they are a fully developed social being and the decision itself is, as Marx shows us in the above quote, a social decision, it is a response to particular social situations taken by a ‘civilised person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present’. In addition, their survival will be dependent on ideas and concepts they learned within society and carry from it. I have already noted how each individual human being can only be called truly human in a social situation, and how our individuality is shaped and developed by the nature and character of the society we were socialised in. As a result, the concept of the egoistic atomised individual posited by neoliberal and free market ideology is essentially anti-social, but more importantly is non-sensical, such people do not exist. This becomes evident when we actually examine the basic human biological drives such as eating, drinking, sexual activity, clothing and securing accommodation to protect us from the elements. All such basic motivations become transformed within society and develop their own social norms, customs and practices. For example, in Western society we eat with utensils and not with our hands, clothing is transformed into fashion, we devise many norms and values concerning sexual activities and practices, homes are transformed from being shelters to expressions of our own individuality etc. All of these activities are expressions of social and interactive living, as Marx writes in Wage, Labour and Capital
"Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature".
We therefore have the situation where social, economic, and national policy is founded on a completely unrealistic and distorted view of the human being and his/her place within society; based on the philosophical notion of a human being who does not exist in reality. Such policy is anti-social and motivated by a desire to cater for particular interests, as opposed to the interests of real empirical human beings. What is important to remember is that whilst we are all indeed individual human beings, our individuality is an expression of our social experience as we grow and develop, and that our individuality is dynamic, it alters and changes as we develop as a conscious human being. It is expressed through our experience in our family, education, community, social class, religion and all of the other external influences that have made us the individual person we are. People are inescapably interdependent, no man is an island. Any and every social and economic policy that fails to address this fundamental concept will also fail to address reality and real pressing human problems and needs. I repeat; the neoliberal free market form of capitalism that has held dominance within the UK for the last forty years is profoundly anti-social. It treats people as if they were all individual working purchasing and consuming atoms with no need to consider the needs and requirements of others. It ignores the multiple interdependencies of every human being and the multiple interactions of daily existence. As a result, we have an unstable economic and social system and an unstable state, because the dominant elite, pursuing free market ideological goals, fail to understand the nature of human individuality and therefore the nature of economic and social stability itself. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat