KitNotes

As regular readers of this blog may well know, I am a contributor to Solidarity, the newspaper of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. I have already had published a fairly contraversial piece on ‘Ashley’, the American girl who will undergo surgery so she remains nine years old (physically) for the rest of her life. I say ‘contraversial’ because nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about it thinks I am very, very wrong. You can read it here.

I am also reviewing “Skins”, the new E4 drama series which looks at the life of youth in modern Britain. Teasers that I’ve seen lead me to think it’s Hollyoaks meets Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but I’ll reserve judgement until after I’ve seen the first epidose, this Thursday, 9pm, on E4.

Below is a short piece on the new neo-conservative plan for Iraq. It will be published alongside an article on the privatisation of oil in Iraq (not by me, though). The new issue of Solidarity should, I believe, be out later this week.

An Iraqi Social Contract: Labour for benefits, but labour doesn’t benefit

Two of America’s leading neo-conservatives, former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani and former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, have decided that what Iraq needs is a new social contract. Of course, those two words for any working class socialist should send a shiver down their spine as memories of wage controls spring forwards. Imagine that, then times it by ten, and this is what Giuliani and Gingrich’s ides will do for the Iraqi people.

Their piece for the Wall Street Journal tries to give a progressive gloss over it all, even invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Keynesian measures during the Great Depression. But the reality of what they propose – an “Iraqi Civilian Jobs Corps”, overseen by the US military (because ‘private contractors’ would be seen as cronyist, apparently), which would force Iraqis to work on reconstruction projects in return for a daily wage. These wages, according to Newt and Rudi, will “be used to purchase goods and services that will employ other Iraqis.”

Giuliani has some form here. His ‘Workfare’ (or ‘Work for Welfare’) schemes saw the 1.1 million New York City welfare claimants slashed as people had to work 20 hours a week in order to get their welfare checks. They had no other choice; it was either work for it, or you don’t get it. Of course, the benefits didn’t add up to 20 hours of pay at the minimum wage, and the tasks undertook by ‘Workfare’ claimants were jobs already being done by New York City workers, in the Sanitation Department, Parks Department and other public works. The real effect of Workfare was to shunt hundreds of NYC workers onto welfare, where they would end up being forced to do the same job they were doing before, but at an obscenely reduced rate. It is Marx’s view of the unemployed as a “reserve army of labour” for capital taken to it’s logical conclusion.

Newt and Rudi’s plans for Iraq would have a similar effect, but it will be much worse. It will involve forcibly privatising currently idle Iraqi factories and plant in order to produce materials for ‘reconstruction’. While the duo mention the fact that the median Iraqi monthly income before the invasion was US$700, they do not mention whether or not they will actually pay this. If Giuliani’s track record with Workfare is anything to go by, they most certainly won’t. Of course, because it is just the right moral side of slave labour, there will be no labour rights – no strikes, no pay rises, no unionisation. In short, neoliberalism’s dream; a smashed, atomised workforce, highly flexible, low paid.