17 July 2017 — Investigating Imperialism
Image by Julian Stallabrass via Flickr. Thank you Dandelion Salad
London has become “a desert of wealth“. Comment by a former planning officer for London heard on TV yesterday in a movie made by the BBC that managed to spend an hour on the destruction of London without mentioning capitalism once!
It’s all that ‘surplus’ cash the pirates have stolen from us (trillions) and put into luxury apartments that stand empty, monuments to greed. It’s simply an investment, a way of banking stolen wealth. It’s destroyed the London I grew up in, made a misery of all our lives, forced an estimated 200,000 people out of London, denuded entire neighbourhoods of shops, restaurants and services simply because nobody lives in them anymore, so no customers, no neighbourhood and definitely no community!
And the source of this ‘investment’ is endless, it comes from the global super rich, the 1%. It adds nothing to the wealth of society, in fact masks the reality that we are becoming poorer and poorer whilst these transnational parasites live it up in the city of my birth.
Every day, London grows to look more and more like the old Johannesburg under Apartheid capitalism, with the peons making their daily trudge into the city to serve their masters and then trudging back out again. A trudge by the way, that costs on average £3000 a year if you live outside London! A monthly travel card for bus and tube is now £135 or over £1600 a year.
The average rent for an apartment in London is now £1500 a month. In my neighbourhood, it’s £2500 a month! That’s £30,000 a year without adding in council tax, energy and transportation, or food and clothes, let alone books or movies or any kind of fun.
This is parasitical capitalism. It produces nothing and consumes everything! No wonder people think Corbyn is a Godsend, yet it’s his Labour Party that has contributed directly to this situation. Will we never learn?
We here publish the video footage of the debate between Alan Woods – editor of www.marxist.com and author of “Bolshevism: the Road to Revolution” – and Orlando Figes – Professor of History at Birkbeck University and author of “A People’s Tragedy” – on the true nature of the Russian Revolution, and what it meant for the people of Russia and the class struggle internationally.
