Workers Resistance

Author: Richard Mellor

  • Is America’s profit explosion over?

    by Michael Roberts

    US GDP figures were revised down last Friday to -1% annualised growth from -0.1% on the first estimate.  This was mainly due to inventories.  Inventory depletion contributed -1.62% points to growth, compared with the advance estimate of -.57% pts.  In other words, American businesses reduced production and ran down their stocks of unsold goods in early 2014 instead to meet demand.  The consensus view is that businesses will have to restock this quarter and so the US growth rate will pick up now that the terrible winter is over.  We shall see.

    Even more interesting was the data released on profits. US corporations have enjoyed an explosion in profits since the Great Recession ended.  Corporate profits as a share of GDP reached all-time highs (both before and after tax) in 2013.  But in the first quarter of 2014, that changed.
    US profits to GDP
    Before tax corporate profits in Q1 fell absolutely on a year on year basis for the first time since the Great Recession. After tax, there was still some rise in profits but at one quarter of the pace of 2012.
    US profits
    I have argued before that there is a good correlation between the movement in the mass of profit and business investment (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/profits-and-investment-in-the-economic-recovery/).  Indeed, US corporate profits growth began to slow before US business investment way back in 2003 and fell absolutely towards the end of 2005, while business investment did not drop until the Great Recession began in 2008.  Also profits started to recover one year before investment did.  Since the end of the Great Recession profit growth has dropped from its heady heights at the end of 2009 and has steadily slowed towards zero now.  Business investment growth has followed a year later.  So profits lead investment – they call the tune under capitalism.  If that’s case, business investment could also start falling absolutely by this time next year.

    US profits and investment

    Now it may be that the drop in profit recorded for Q1 2014 is just a blip caused by the bad weather that hit the US during the early part of 2014.  This is what mainstream economists say.  The consensus is that growth will recover sharply in the current quarter that we are now in and the second half of this year will see 3%-plus annualised growth. Again we shall see.

    Since the Great Recession, American corporations have sucked up all the new value created by the labour force while average American households continue to take a hit on real income levels.  The purchasing power of the majority of Americans has not only stagnated since the recovery began five years ago – it has actually declined.  At $53,000, the median US household is more than $4,000 – or 7.6% – poorer in real terms than it was at the start of the recession in 2008, according to Sentier Research.
    Real median household income
    The great debate about inequality of income and wealth provoked by the book from Thomas Piketty
    (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/piketty-data-and-the-scientific-method/)
    has recently centred on whether inequality of wealth and income really has risen in the last 3o years in the US.  It seems that Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, reckons it has: “Within societies, virtually without exception, inequality of outcomes both within and across generations has demonstrably increased.”  Whatever the evidence, it is clear that US inequality of income has sharply risen since the Great Recession ended, with the profit share rocketing and average real incomes falling.

    The US now has a lopsided economy similar to that in the UK.   During the first four months of this year, the sales of the top 1% most expensive US homes – those worth $1.67m or more – have increased by 21%, according to Redfin, the real estate group. It followed a gain of 35% in 2013 – led by the gilded San Francisco Bay area, where the priciest homes start at $5.35m.  But sales of the bottom 99% of homes have fallen by 7.6% so far this year. The fall in average household incomes is reflected in falling sales at shops for the majority.  At Walmart, the supermarket chain, revenues dropped by 5% in Q1 2014.  At Sears Holdings, sales are down 6.8%, while the discount stores are getting higher sales as Americans search for bargains: the leading retail discounter’s sales rose 7.2%.

    The US stock market hit yet another all-time high last week as cheap money from the Fed and expectations of further increases in profits encouraged rich investors and institutions to plough more cash into stocks and bonds.  That will change if America’s profit explosion has really ended.

  • Santa Barbara massacre: “Misogynist” Violence?

    Facts For Working People received the following article from Susan Rosenthal.  Comrade Rosenthal is a physician and socialist living in Canada. You can read her bio The Doctor’s Dilemma Resolved here.  Her website is here.
    Tue, May 27, 2014

    Elliot Rodger clearly hated the women who rejected him. However, portraying the Santa Barbara massacre as “misogynist” violence minimizes the problem and makes it harder to solve. Rodger stated that he wanted respect as an “alpha male,” and he chose to establish his masculinity by killing people – women and men. Such twisted thinking is cultivated in a society that depends on the oppression of women and on gender stereotypes that help trap women (and men) in an oppressive family system.

    The concept that real men are aggressive and real women are submissive is not based on biology. These gender roles are imposed by a capitalist family system that relies on women’s unpaid labor in the home – financially valued at more than $11 trillion world-wide. That’s 11 trillion reasons to keep women oppressed. The family system also traps men in the home with the legal obligation to financially support women and children, a responsibility that the ‘real man’ does not shirk.

    Violence against women takes two forms: inside the family and outside the family.

    The family is the most violent social institution for both women and men, caused by unrelenting stress that builds to the point of explosion. A 2010 survey found that 1 in 4 American women and 1 in 7 American men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner at some point in their life, that means being hit with a fist or something hard, beaten, or slammed against something. Sons of violent parents are 1,000 times more likely to batter their partners. Daughters of violent parents are 600 times more likely to batter their partners.

    Violence against women outside the family is part of the widespread violence that is directed towards members of all oppressed groups. Capitalism grinds us down, and our anger is misdirected against those who are weaker, not against the system itself. That is why we have a ‘culture’ of violence, sexism, racism, and war.

    Rodger could have turned his rage at being a social failure against any oppressed group: Blacks, gays, immigrants, Muslims, etc. Failing socially is not a personal problem, nor is it caused by women. In a class-divided, hierarchical society, the majority are set up to fail.

    Rebecca Solnit     is wrong when she states, “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

    Violence certainly does have a class, the capitalist class. The process of capital accumulation results in hazardous working conditions, environmental pollution, poverty and war – all of which kill  women and men.  Class inequality on its own is a major killer of both sexes.

    Violence does not have a gender. In Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, James Gilligan dismantles the myth that most perpetrators of violence are men and most victims are women.
    More men and women kill men than they kill women. Overall, men die violent deaths from two to five times more often than women.

    Inter-personal violence is a social problem, a sign of how desperate life is under capitalism, so desperate that 800,000 women and men kill themselves every year. Far more women die from suicide than from murder.

    Dave Zirin     is wrong to argue that men have a “collective responsibility” to end violence against  women. Men, on their own, cannot solve a problem that is embedded in capitalism. And not all men have an interest in solving it. Men (and women) in the capitalist class enrich themselves by perpetrating all kinds of violence on the rest of us.

    During times when the working class is gaining strength, inter-personal violence diminishes because people are working together to solve their common problems. During times when the working class is weak and divided, inter-personal violence increases.

    The only effective solution to ending violence against women is for working-class women and men to unite against a capitalist system that immerses our lives in violence.

  • Don’t mention the war

    by Michael Roberts

    As President Obama announced the final phased withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, I was reading The Second World War, a Marxist history by Chris Bambery   It is a very succinct account of the war, showing that it was a continuation of the cynical and intense rivalry between imperialist powers that had culminated in the 1914-18.  That useless and violent Great War did not resolve who would be top dog among the imperialist powers.  That required another terrible war before American imperialism became the hegemonic power.  But the second world war was different from the first in that it was also a fight by working people to defeat the rise of fascism and dictatorships that destroyed all independent class action with genocide, racism and permanent militarism.  Bambery’s book reminds us of just how many millions upon millions of all races, nationalities and creeds perished under jackboot of dictatorship as well as during a war for markets and global power.

    But wars are not only a terrible product of capitalist rivalry, they are often necessary for capitalism to recover from the depths of recurrent recessions and depressions.  Outdated and loss-making capital is destroyed; governments and the taxpayer come in to revive industry’s profits through building war machines and labour accepts worse conditions, longer hours and rationing for the ‘war effort’.  It took the second world war to enable profitability to be restored in the US after the Great Depression.  The New Deal failed to do so.

    So wars can be beneficial to capitalism when it is on is knees.  But wars are also expensive and are waste of resources (labour and capital) that could have been applied to productive investment that creates more value and surplus value.  The strategists of capital in the White House, Downing Street, the Elysee and the Kremlin may reckon that going to war is sometimes necessary to preserve markets and future profits and power. But wars come at a financial cost, especially ‘small wars’ that the major capitalist economies have conducted at various intervals since 1945 under Pax Americana and the New World Order with the collapse of Soviet Union after 1989.

    The financial cost of these small wars of 21st century so far (Afghanistan and Iraq) continues to mount.  The cost to the US economy is now put at $6trn, which I estimate is a deduction of about 0.3% of national output every year since 2001 and 1.5% points off annual ‘productive’ business investment

    We also have a new report on the cost to the UK economy of Britain’s support to the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Wars_in_Peace_Foreword_and_Intro is a semi-official study produced by the Institute of Strategic Studies, the research front for British intelligence.  According the report, so far, it has cost £40bn, equivalent to the sort of cuts in the social welfare budget that the current government has imposed on the poorest Britons.  It is enough to recruit over 5,000 nurses and pay for them throughout their careers. It could have funded free tuition for all students in British higher education for 10 years.  It’s a sum equivalent to more than £2,000 for every taxpaying household.

    These are the examples used in another study by Frank Ledwidge, Investment in Blood, published this week by Yale University Press. Ledwidge was a civilian adviser to the British government in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan,,  According to Ledwidge, since 2006, on a conservative estimate, it has cost £15m a day to maintain Britain’s military presence in Helmand province, Afghanistan. The equivalent of £25,000 will have been spent for every one of Helmand’s 1.5 million inhabitants, more than most of them will earn in a lifetime.

    Ledwidge estimates British troops in Helmand have killed at least 500 non-combatants. About half of these have been officially admitted and Britain has paid compensation to the victims’ families.  The rest are based on estimates from UN and NGO reports, and “collateral damage” from air strikes and gun battles. Ledwidge includes the human and financial cost of long-term care for more than 2,600 British troops wounded in the conflict and for more than 5,000 he calls “psychologically injured”. Around 444 British soldiers have been killed in the Afghan conflict, according to the latest official MoD figures.

    And it has been all for nothing.  Ledwidge says Helmand is no more ‘stable’ now than when thousands of British troops were deployed there in 2006. Opium production that fell under the Taliban, is increasing, fuelling corruption and the coffers of warlords.  Though British and other foreign troops were sent to Afghanistan to stop al-Qaida posing a threat to Britain’s national security, “of all the thousands of civilians and combatants, not a single al-Qaida operative or ‘international terrorist’ who could conceivably have threatened the UK is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand,” Ledwidge writes.

    The real beneficiaries of the war, he suggests, are development consultants, Afghan drug lords and international arms companies. Much of British aid to Afghanistan is spent on consultancy fees rather than to those Afghans who need it most. The real reason Britain has expended so much blood and money on Afghanistan is simple: “The perceived necessity of retaining the closest possible links with the US.”

    ADDENDUM:
    As the fest of criticism and counter-criticism of Thomas Piketty’s book continues in the economics media and elsewhere, just a note to say that I have written a new review of his book for Weekly Worker (http://weeklyworker.co.uk) that should be published in the next week or so.

  • US capitalism in decline is a dangerous animal.

    by Richard Mellor

    If we wonder why our services are being cut,  or why our streets and social infrastructure are falling apart we might consider that sending troops all over the world and supporting every element that might lead to opportunities for US corporations to expand their business interests might cost money.  The Obama administration is now about to train Syrian opposition forces as a  counterterrorism challenge.  The War on Terror! What a great deal for the defense industry because there is no such adversary or nation as “terrorism”.  Terrorism is a tactic and any form of resistance can be labelled such. The War on Terror is a term for war without end. The US has troops in Northern Nigeria as well.  Then there are those in Poland.  There are the almost 300 bases around the world.  All this has to be paid for.

    There is an increased presence in the Black Sea as US warships are sent there. That’s not provocative is it?  Help matter does it? Of course not, it’s not supposed to. Wait and see what happens when a Chinese or Russian nuclear sub floats around in the Baja.

    Obama the anti-war president. Wait, isn’t the white man making him do it?  Of course, it’s not a political question at all. He’s not the leading figure of a social class is he? He represents us all and is fighting for the workers rights against the tide. If only they’d let him do what he wants.

    US capitalism in decline is a dangerous animal and it is the leading force pushing the world in to increased conflict. I recall the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya that took place when I was a child. It was perhaps the last gasp of a dying British colonial power.  But despite being at the end of its colonial rule and most of the British ruling class knowing their days at the top of the pecking order were numbered, British imperialism waged a most violent war against the Kenyan’s struggle to oust them and have some control over their own destiny. Some murderous bastards these people are.

    We hear of the backwardness and brutality of slavery and feudalism but capitalism is unsurpassed in its brutality and the US bourgeois the most ruthless of all.  As I sit in this motel in a small rural community in Utah I realize how detached a huge section of the US population is, they link life will go on like this forever. 

    They’re in for a rude awakening.

  • Santa Barbara Massacre: Gun ownership an issue but Capitalism the cause


    Seven people including the killer are dead after a mass killing in Santa Barbara, California this weekend. This one is specifically aimed at women. In the various videos and manifestos he left behind he calls the coming killings his "retribution”. He writes about his life of "loneliness, rejection and unfilled desires" specifically blaming women for not welcoming his advances. His reasoning is textbook misogynistic anti-women propaganda of the vicious right wing anti-women group, the Men’s Rights Activists.
    Also in his manifesto he writes: "You girls have never been attracted to me. I will punish you all for it. I'm going to enter the hottest sorority house of USCB and I will slaughter every single spoilt, stuck up, blonde slut that I see inside there. All those girls that I have desired so much, they would've all rejected me and looked on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them. I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one. The true, alpha male. Yes...After I have annihilated every single girl in the sorority house I will take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure..." 
    According to his Facebook page, this killer is the son of “Hunger Games” assistant director Peter Rodger and grew up in wealthy Calabasas, California. He lived a more privileged life than many college students, driving luxury cars and flying first class. He was a member of an anti-pick up artist forum called PUA Hate, a breeding ground for angry males who have tried and failed to use pickup artist techniques to get women and have felt ripped off as a result. This disturbing thread shows other commentators discussing Rodger’s shooting spree.
    In the video above that many of you have probably seen he talks of the  “brutes” they’re interested in instead of him, “the perfect gentleman.” His final video is horrific but it is worth watching as it does show a not all-together uncommon point of view held by some men who think women owe them sex, love, their bodies and their lives.
    So many of these deranged young men are form the middle and upper middle class.  He is also a spoiled individual.  He is what most working class men would call a pretty boy.  It was obviously not his looks that might have kept Sorority women at bay or his money.  He attacked his own class primarily. This was “his” milieu he waged war on so there’s a class orientation to it.
    And while misogyny is undoubtedly deeply ingrained in him, so is his hatred for “humanity” as he puts it. He is a product of US society.  In no other industrialized capitalist society do we experience this sort of mass murder on an almost daily basis. 
    Alienation and psychological damage is the result of the ideology pushed in US society that the individual is responsible for everything that happens to him or her.  It’s all out there if you only work hard. You’re in control of your own destiny. When the reality hits, when events beyond one’s control casts one down in to the pit, then self-blame, despair, anger at others and extreme alienation follows. This all takes place in a society that tells us 24 hours a day what we should buy, own and wear. If we don’t have it all, we only have ourselves to blame. This kid had it all, but he lost his humanity, that’s what capitalism does. It is an inhumane system.
    But I can guarantee that the 1%’s mass media will not make the way society is organized, the capitalist system, the issue.  Their media will now focus on the issue of gun control and the liberals, particularly the rich one’s but also well meaning people will take this argument up.  But we must not allow the inevitable discussion about gun control in general, or the obvious need for sensible restrictions to obscure the fact that the cause of this behavior is the extreme alienation of the individual in US society.  After all, those that advocate more guns and the right to carry them openly have a point; he could have been stopped early on.  But this isn’t the answer either; it doesn't deal with the cause. The violent nature of US society is also seen in its foreign policy.  Its response to the events in the Ukraine, more firepower, warships in to the Black Sea, troops in Poland, missile defense (offense) has roots in the same mentality, more weapons and bigger ones.
    Most American workers, patriotic or not, would agree with one thing, in this country if you have no money you’re worthless.  You’re a failure. The flag waving when they send our youth to fight the corporation’s wars is noticeably absent when they return damaged.  You’re as likely to see a psychologically damaged veteran in jail, or homeless as in a hospital or care center.  As one veteran described it one time, after running over an Iraqi child in his Humvee as a matter of policy, he was supposed to come back to the US and head on down to the mall with the wife and kids as if nothing happened.
    The liberal politicians will clamor for more gun control as well as they preside over savage attacks on worker’s living standards.  The same politicians that cry crocodile tears for the massacred as Obama did after Newtown did nothing as whole families were thrown out of their homes. The same politicians that spy on us, that have more than two million people in prison, that cut health care and aid to the poor, that refuse to allocate the massive wealth we have in society toward social needs, these same people will be calling for gun control in the interests of public safety. Yet if my memory serves me right, I think Canada has more guns per capita than the US and we see much less of what we witnessed Friday there.  But Canadian society has less alienation, it is more human friendly.  They have that communist institution a national health system there for example.
    We can argue all we like about the number of guns in US society and the pros and cons of that.  The reality is that there are some 400 million of them out there. Having said that, this does not mean guns should be handed out like candy. It is completely unacceptable that people like this young man and other mentally deranged individuals can possess weapons of this nature. We have to deal with this.
    Workers must rely on the organized working class to defend our right to own a gun not the NRA that is dominated by the ruling class and the gun manufacturers.  We should not welcome the same politicians that think nothing of taking away our privacy, our jobs and our livelihoods taking away our right to own a firearm. No worker should belong to the NRA any more than we should belong to the Chamber of Commerce, another organization that is against our self-interest.
    We all want a peaceful existence but capitalism is not a peaceful system, it is a violent and oppressive one; it makes us ill. Let the kind of social system we live in dominate this debate. Let discussions about society and how it is organized, who owns the wealth and who creates it, how it is distributed and used, let let this be the topic of debate as to why madness becomes the norm and how we can change it. Afternote: I just watched one of the victim's fathers on the Internet.  As a father I feel for him. It is every parents' worst nightmare, losing one's child. I cannot bare the thought of it happening to me and hope I am spared it.  But were this parent to have condemned society and it's warped values; greed, competition, selfishness and individualism, the rapacious pursuit of profits and called for a re-evaluation of our society and how we must change it, his remarks would not be so popular with the owners of the mass media and would have received very limited coverage. Had he condemned and blamed the mass media, Hollywood and capitalism as much as simply the prevalence of guns, we would have to search harder for his remarks. This would have been the case without a doubt were he to have talked of system change and the collective ownership and control of the resources of society, from education to the mass media.  The prevalence of guns is a problem.  That an insane person can easily get them is a problem.  But the bigger problem and the real cause of this madness is society and those that govern it. "When will this insanity" stop, the father says.  The truth is that it will not stop until we change society, until we take control of society from the unelected clique that run it.

  • Michael Bloomberg in Israel touting Zionist values.

    Reprinted from MondoWeiss 

    Bloomberg has “Jewish values”?  What sort of values are those?  The art of plunder and thievery?  Bloomberg is worth some $30 billion, he’s the antithesis of what the vast majority of Jews have given to human history.  How could any human being go to Israel and not visit Gaza or at least try to; it’s one of the world’s largest outdoor concentration camps. Jews in history have played the most progressive roles. They have fought for oppressed peoples throughout history. They have led revolutions and fought despotism. Jews have played a role far greater than their tiny numbers would suggest making the world a better place for all workers. They have led unions and workers’ struggles. They have contributed to the artistic, cultural, political  and scientific history of the world perhaps more so than any other people considering their numbers. The racist policies of Zionism are the values of Jewish extremism and imperialism, not the values of Jews we see throughout history.

    After reading this article perhaps take the time to watch Norman Finkelstein’s talk on the one year anniversary of the Gaza invasion.  Norman Finkelstein: Israel’s Disgrace in Gaza

    Israelis and Americans are ho-hum about Palestinian children’s deaths

    on May 23, 2014
    Bloomberg with Danny Danon

    Bloomberg with Danny Danon at Israel Day Parade a year ago
    Two years ago Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times got in trouble when she observed that Palestinians in Gaza were “ho-hum” about their children’s deaths. Well it turns out she was warm: Israelis and Americans are “ho-hum” about Palestinian children’s deaths. Former NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg went to Israel to accept a “Jewish values” prize and in a long article in the New York Times, there wasn’t one word about the killings of two unarmed Palestinian youths a week before at a demonstration, a story that has gone round the world.
    From the Times, the award:
    Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman who served three terms as mayor of New York, was the one receiving — and then returning — the first-ever Genesis Prize, which honors achievement steeped in what it calls “Jewish values.”
    Instead of pocketing what to him might be considered pocket change, Mr. Bloomberg and the Genesis organization announced a global competition with 10 prizes of $100,000 available to entrepreneurs ages 20 to 36 with big ideas, also based on Jewish values, to better the world…
    What are Bloomberg’s Jewish values?
    Mr. Bloomberg, 72, visited Israel frequently while in office, and he has donated millions of dollars to Jerusalem institutions, financing a hospital wing named for his mother and an ambulance center named for his father…
    Mr. Bloomberg said his religiously observant parents had inculcated Jewish values around the dinner table, and he identified those qualities Thursday night as “freedom, justice, service, ambition, innovation.”
    “The values I learned from my parents are probably the same values that, I hope, Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists learned from their parents,” he said at an earlier appearance. “They’re all centered around God put us on Earth and said we should take care of each other. We have an obligation not to just talk about it but to actually do it.”
    Freedom and justice? But that’s what those young men want who were at the Nakba Day demonstration last week. Shouldn’t Jews be talking about that? I think they should.
    Jay Leno was there too. Hosting the prize ceremony. I guess Americans are ho-hum about Palestinian children’s deaths, too:
    Mr. Leno, 64, is not Jewish and had not been to Israel before Tuesday, when he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
    “This is just like a Hollywood awards show but with fewer Jews,” Mr. Leno cracked Thursday night. Taking note of the preshow buffet featuring falafel, gefilte fish, goulash and roast lamb, which was billed as “Jewish cuisine from around the world,” Mr. Leno said it was “what is known in New York as a deli.”
    He made light of the recent sentencing of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to six years in prison for taking bribes, but avoided the political minefield of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians except to say that the “least popular boys’ name” is “John Kerry,” a reference to the secretary of state.
    More Jewish values:
    Candidates for the $100,000 prize [announced by Bloomberg with his prize money] need not be Jewish, though the video promoting it showcased an all-Jewish cast of achievers, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Marc Chagall, Levi Strauss, Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Silverman.
    Again: not a word about the killings of two Palestinian youths protesting an illegal occupation, days before. A shame.

  • UK Local elections: What a surge!

    The “No Vote” Party has a considerable following in the US as well.  About 138 million in the last national election cycle.

    by Michael Roberts

    I don’t usually comment on straight politics on this blog and hardly ever on local elections.  But of course we know that politics and economics are not divorced from each other, as mainstream ‘positivist’ economics thinks. It’s ‘political economy’, after all. So I cannot resist a few words on the results of the seemingly obscure UK local elections in some councils and districts in England.

    The UK media has gone berserk in telling us the the anti-EU, anti-immigration, right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) had a huge surge from nowhere in its vote.  All the talk was that UKIP was about to win the biggest share of the vote and seats in the European Parliament when the results come out on Monday.  It was now a ‘major threat’ to the centre-right coalition government and could even replace Labour as the main opposition and so on……

    Actually, the local election results do not bear out that conclusion at all.  It was Labour that polled the biggest share of those who voted in these minor elections, albeit only 29%.  The ruling Conservatives also polled more than UKIP at 25%.  UKIP was third at 23-24%, a leap up from last time, but hardly a victory.
    share of vote
    Indeed, this ‘Poujadist’ party will have no more than one-tenth of the council seats won by the two main parties, Labour and Conservative.  And nearly all UKIP’s seats will be concentrated in rural areas, particularly the better-off south-east and east of England (Scotland and Wales did not vote and UKIP is non-existent there).  In London, UKIP did poorly.
    UKIP
    Actually the real winners, as usual, were the NO-VOTE party.  The turnout for these elections was not more than 40%, so most people eligible to vote did not bother.  Translating the share of votes into shares of eligible voters, we find that the winners of these local elections, Labour, got no more than one in eight potential voters to support them and the ruling Conservatives managed only one in ten eligible to vote.

    The government has been crowing about the return of fast economic growth that the UK economy is now experiencing under its policies.  And there was apparently more good news in the this week’s retail sales figures, which showed a big surge.
    UK retail sales
    But it seems that the British electorate does not agree that all is rosy.  And we can see why when the latest data continue to show that average real incomes are falling as inflation outstrips wage increases (see my post,
    (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/britain-is-booming/).  Even now, Britain’s real GDP has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels, and with employment in badly-paid jobs and self-employment rising, the overall productivity of British capitalism has declined.  Indeed, Britons are working harder and longer for less money.
    UK GDP and employment
    UK business investment was up 8.7% in the first quarter of this year compared with a year ago.  That sounds good – until you see that investment is still some 18% below where it was in 2008 and this is nominal terms.
    UK business investment
    The latest data show that the top 10% of British households own 44% of all household wealth (to use Thomas Piketty’s definition) – they are not feeling the depression, only the ‘boom’.  And it’s their sentiments that the government expresses.

    The reality is that there is increasing disillusionment with the mainstream political parties as we shall see when the EU parliamentary elections are announced and I have commented before on the decline in voter turnout for elections in the major capitalist economies – Japan, the US, Germany and the UK.

    In the UK, the combined Conservative and Labour vote in general elections has fallen to 60% from 80-90% in the 1960s, while separatist and other parties have risen from nothing to 12%.  In this little local election, the combined vote of the top two parties was 54%.  Voter turnout has plummeted from 75% in the 1980s to about 60% now, as politicians become increasingly divorced from their voters.  Back in the 1960s, as much as 15% of MPs were manual workers, now it is less than 5% while those MPs who have never had a proper job and are just ‘career politicians’ is now 15%.  The rest had jobs in the ‘professions’ and business and finance etc, with many millionaires among them.

    voters

    The ‘surge’ of  support for parties like UKIP is a frustrated expression of people despairing at the main parties of capitalist democracy ever doing anything to improve their lot or even stop it getting worse.  We’ll see that sentiment expressed in the EU election results on Monday.  I’ll comment on the state of Europe’s economies then.