WORK and Pensions Secretary, ex-army officer Duncan Smith, yesterday addressed the world about ‘our broken benefits system’, when most people know what has broken, and broken most horribly at its weakest link, is capitalism which can no longer provide either benefits or jobs.
Launching a consultation document, Duncan Smith lays out the consequences of the busted capitalist system without even mentioning what is causing it.
He said: ‘More than one in four working age adults do not work. Five million people are trapped on out of work benefits. 1.4 million people have been receiving out of work benefits for nine out of the last 10 years.
‘We have one of the highest rates of workless households in Europe and a higher proportion of children grow up in workless households than in any other European country – some two million.’
This situation is an indictment of the capitalist system and its crisis, and not in any way an indictment of the working class.
He mentions ‘ghettoes of worklessness where generations have grown up without hope or aspiration.’
He quotes Beveridge who, in 1942 in the middle of the Second World War, ‘warned’ of ‘The danger of providing benefits, which are both adequate in amount and indefinite in duration, is that men as creatures who adapt themselves to circumstances, may settle down to them.’
This is something akin to the pigs to the trough mentality of the ruling class and its bankers, who consider that the earth belongs to them and that they are entitled to enjoy all of its riches.
In fact, in 1942 everybody was employed, and capitalism overcame the mass unemployment of the 1930s by putting everybody into uniform, and those that weren’t, like the ‘Bevin Boys’, were sent to work down mines or in the munition factories.
Tory statesmen, and their National Government members, were only able to overcome mass unemployment through engaging in a six-year imperialist slaughter!
At the end of the slaughter, the returning troops were determined that there would be no return to the 1930s. They dumped Churchill, elected Labour and demanded and won the Welfare State.
Benefits, like the unemployment benefit, were not meant to be paid out forever but only for the short period that people would be between jobs.
And it was like that during the post-war boom, which lasted for around 20 years, when unemployment at the most was a couple of hundred thousand and there were jobs aplenty.
By the 1960s Germany, Japan and Italy were back in the world market and decrepit, old, outdated British capitalism began to suffer, the first expression of its historic crisis was the rapid growth of youth unemployment in the 1960s.
Then in the 1970s, with the oil crisis and the three-day week, unemployment started to shoot up to reach three million under Thatcher. A permanent, massive army of unemployed was formed from the millions of people who could not get work and existed on one form of benefit or another.
The 2008 crash and the collapse of the banks broke the back of British and world capitalism with millions of unemployed, from youth right through all the generations.
Duncan Smith lashes out at the men and women who have no alternative but to get used to the benefits that the labour of the working class provides. Instead of indicting the capitalist system, which has created the massive reserve army of labour, Duncan Smith wants to end benefits and turn the unemployed into slave labourers to provide supeprofits for the bankers, who have already been subsidised by the state to the tune of £1.2 trillion.
The News Line does not call for the end of benefits. We call for a socialist revolution to put an end to capitalism, and its ruling class parasites, to bring in a planned socialist economy that will provide jobs, homes and a future for all.
