100 years on from WW 1, have we learnt anything?

It was today 100 years ago in 1914 which signaled the start of World War 1 which was to change the face of the world as all wars do. ‘War is organised murder and nothing else....politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder’ Harry Patch, last surviving British soldier from the First World War (who passed away in 2009, aged 111) One hundred years ago World War One (WW1) began, unleashing slaughter on an unprecedented scale. It was dubbed the 'Great War', the 'war to end wars'. For the ten million killed and more than ten million seriously injured it was certainly not great. The battles fought saw some of the bloodiest human slaughter in history. We remember all who lost their lives all those years ago. But sadly war is something which humans are constantly involved in it seems. Never learning the lessons and continuing national antagonisms and feud’s that in allot of cases’ go back years if not decades. So this war which was meant to be the "war to end all wars" was nothing of the sort. As subsequent conflicts have erupted, it is self-evident that it did not mean an end to war. In the current carnage in Syria, 6.5 million people have been internally displaced and a further three million driven into external exile. Human suffering and killing have been repeated again and again since this 'war to end war'. World War One ended one historical era, opened another, and reshaped international and class relations. In its wake, empires collapsed some rapidly, while others took a slower, more inglorious decline. It opened the way for the USA to replace Britain as the world's leading imperialist power. Above all, it acted as the midwife to the greatest event in human history: the Russian revolution in 1917. There, the working class was able to take over the running of society for a time. At the same time, a revolutionary wave engulfed most of Europe. The trigger for the carnage was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Yet could this really be the cause of such a global conflict? Although centered in Europe, the war drew in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and, of course, the USA. While the shooting of the archduke may have been the excuse to unleash the dogs of war, the real underlying causes lay elsewhere. The war erupted as a massive struggle in defence of economic interests, markets and political power and prestige. The trigger for the carnage was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Yet could this really be the cause of such a global conflict? Although centred in Europe, the war drew in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and, of course, the USA. While the shooting of the archduke may have been the excuse to unleash the dogs of war, the real underlying causes lay elsewhere. The war erupted as a massive struggle in defence of economic interests, markets and political power and prestige. Eventually, this competitive struggle brought the main imperial powers into horrific conflict, as each tried to secure bigger markets or to defend those threatened by emerging powers. If new markets cannot be found, capitalism is driven to a destruction of value in order to begin the productive process anew. The price was to be paid by the working classes of all countries in this power struggle. So today the situation is still largely the same nations competing over markets and market share in the global race. Today the lessons are still not being learnt the leap towards nationalism is still around today. We must always warn against this having solidarity with our fellow workers across the globe is key. Not bowing to support for your nation over others remembering the great phrase that Karl Marx once said in his communist manifesto. The working class have no nation they are linked by a common struggle to over throwing the existing order and to build a more just and fair society based on the needs of the many over the few.

Outsourced Britain

As austerity continues to bites one of the big features before and now very much more so after the great recession is the idea of outsourcing and it is really happening on a huge scale lets be frank. Outsourcing is a good way for capitalist to drive down labour costs during times of austerity. Take N Power this week. "Npower is to cut 1,400 UK jobs. PA Npower is to close offices and outsource work to India in a move that will see 1,400 UK staff lose their jobs at the energy supplier. The announcement is expected to intensify public anger around the activities of the Big Six power companies and raise the political heat in Westminster where energy has risen to the top of the political agenda. Trade unions accused npower of serving up a "Christmas nightmare" by planning to offshore 1,400 jobs to India and transfer a further 570 to another British firm, probably Capita. It is understood that frontline call-centre operations will be outsourced to a third party in the UK, with back-office work moved to India. Union leaders warned the moves would backfire and further tarnish the reputation of npower which came bottom for customer service in a recent survey and which told a parliamentary committee earlier this year that it had paid almost no corporation tax for three years. Npower, the energy supplier of Germany's RWE, hit gas and electricity customers with a 10.4% rise in fuel bills earlier this month and its central London offices were the target of fuel poverty demonstrations earlier this week. The company declined to comment on the planned office and staff cuts but well-informed sources told the Guardian that npower staff would be informed of the changes at 9am on Thursday. Npower said in a statement: "As we announced a couple of months ago, npower has been undertaking a major review of sites, operations and people across the UK. "We've been doing this to improve our customer service and keep our costs down, at a time of external pressures on customers' bills. As we've always said, we'll tell our people first and then inform the media," it added. Npower and the other big six firms such as SSE and Centrica insist that they have to raise domestic bills and trim their costs in a bid to counter the impact of rising wholesale prices and green levies for home insulation. Npower's parent RWE said earlier this month that 6,750 jobs would need to be cut across Europe as it tries to reduce a debt mountain of over £28bn, partly caused by the Berlin government's decision to phase out nuclear power stations." The key bit that jumps out at me in that piece in the Guardian was the cutting costs line. This is clearly not to cut costs for the customers and those who use Npower but to keep costs down for the business and to maintain profits and raise profit levels if possible. With Britain being the second biggest nation for outsourcing we will see in time if its allowed to happen a huge wave of outsourcing to other cheaper nations and to areas where the labour costs are cheaper. In an excellent piece on Open democracy Stuart Weir writes "The government has put a huge FOR SALE sign over the country’s public assets and services. According to the sharedserviceslink.com website, the bulletin board for “leaders in finance shared services”, the United Kingdom is the world’s largest out-sourcing market after the United States. The number of contracts in the UK has increased sharply by 47 per cent to 148 contracts a year since 2010. The annual contract value for this country jumped 16 per cent in 2012 to $3.75 billion! All this before the major sale drive about to take place in the NHS. The International Services Group (ISG) states that the UK accounted for 80 per cent of all contracting out across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, making our government alone among the major European economies in using out-sourcing as a key element in its response to austerity. Richard Vize, of Outsourcer Eye, says that the application of cuts is dominated by “short-term thinking”. The effects of all this activity on quality or cost is unclear and there is no reliable information on the impact of cuts or out-sourcing – though these effects are visible, for example, in local government, the NHS and government agencies such as the Inland Revenue. The government’s “short-term” thinking is of course, as Polly Toynbee warned recently, part of a determined and reckless long-term drive to reduce the public sector to a mere rump. Social security is gradually being outsourced to charities and food banks, while services and assets are increasingly handed out to private firms to operate at often extortionate prices (like the trains), described by George Monbiot as the 'toll booth economy'. The effects on ordinary citizens will be far-reaching and devastating, the more so for the vulnerable people whom the state has long acknowledged a responsibility to protect. The state is being fundamentally transformed before our eyes. This is a phase or a form of capitalism which is turning public service’s into money making enterprises and this will stop at nothing. From our energy sector to our schools and hospitals nothing is sacred when it comes to capital's drive for greater and grater profits. With thanks to open democracy link to article at http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/stuart-weir/uk-becomes-worlds-second-largest-outsourcing-market