IT WAS asserted by economists long ago that labour is the source of all wealth, and Federick Engels – the lifelong friend and collaborator of Karl Marx – wrote during the heyday of capitalism: ‘It is just this – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth.’
But Engels also added: ‘It is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.’
No ‘magic tricks’ in the City of London can alter this fact. In fact, the gentlemen of the City realise only too well that it is the labour of the world’s workers that keeps them alive.
But for this labour, most workers barely exist on a dollar a day, whilst in the City of London the bonus culture is reinventing itself, despite the ‘anti-banker rage’ that followed the collapse of the world banking system in 2008.
The latest report from the TUC on directors’ pay bears this out: their eighth annual Pensions Watch survey, which analyses the pension arrangements of 329 directors from 102 of the UK’s top companies, shows that the average transfer value for a director’s pension is £3.8 million, an increase of £400,000 since last year. This provides an ‘average’ pension of £227,726 a year.
The largest pension pot in this year’s survey was worth over £21 million and would pay out an annual pension worth over £1.3 million. There is certainly no ‘austerity’ going on here!
Pensions Watch shows that the average director’s pension is now 26 times the average occupational pension (£8,736) – a fall on last year but still higher than the pre-recession gap, says the TUC.
This is at a time when workers are having their pension agreements ripped up, destroying their plans for retirement, as a result of the activities of the City, which have left a gigantic ‘black hole’ in pension schemes following the 2008 stock market collapse.
The TUC also points out that, whilst millions of ordinary workers in Britain will be forced to work even longer when the government raises the state retirement age to 66 in 2016, most directors in ‘DB’ schemes have a pension age of 60 or even 55.
The TUC’s response to ‘bankers greed’, however is pathetic, if not laughable. It is not demanding that the bankers have their multi-million-pound pension pots taken off them, it is certainly not calling for these directors to be dismissed or for the expropriation of the bankers and bosses.
Instead, the TUC pleads for a mandatory disclosure of accrual and contribution rates, so that shareholders are able to scrutinise directors’ pension arrangements and ensure that they are fair and reasonable!
The TUC also believes that directors and employees should be members of the same schemes and enjoy the same benefits, as is the case in the public sector.
Companies should make clear any preferential treatment for directors so that staff know about the pension arrangements of their bosses, the TUC pleads.
This is incredible. As if the whole world doesn’t know what goes on and how capitalism runs!
But it is also not surprising. The TUC leaders are not in favour of ‘anti-banker rage’. In fact, after failing in their attempts to get David Cameron to be the special guest speaker at next week’s TUC Conference in Manchester, they have instead invited the Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
The TUC wants to maintain this vile system, in which bankers have enriched themselves on the sweat and blood of the world’s labouring masses to such a degree that their pensions alone dwarf the wages of their workers.
In fact, the bankers and the Tory-Lib Dem government are relying on the TUC leaders to try and keep the working class at bay, whilst the bankers and their government demand that workers make the ‘necessary sacrifices’ for capitalism to stagger on.
Not only must capitalism be swept away, but a new revolutionary leadership must be built urgently in the working class and amongst its youth, to lead the struggle that is now fast developing to bury capitalism, through the world socialist revolution to expropriate the bankers and bosses, and put the wealth created by the labour of the world’s workers in the world’s workers’ hands.
In Britain that means building up the Workers Revolutionary Party. Join us today and join our lobby of the TUC on Monday in Manchester to demand a general strike to bring the government down and go forwards to a workers government and socialism.
