28 September 2017

NHS: A Sticking Plaster for Capitalism with the potential to be an Anchor of Socialism

The National Health Service is cherished throughout the U.K.  People from outside our country tend to look in with bemusement at what they may consider to be an almost religious devotion to free healthcare.  Americans in particular look at universal healthcare with distrust, considering it to be somehow a part of some communistic threat to all they hold dear.  Indeed, the current president, Donald Trump, was elected partly on a pledge to repeal Obamacare, which is the closest the USA has so far come to experiencing a socialised system of healthcare.


The NHS was created stage by stage with the Ruling Class resisting it at every step.  The major leaps forward came with free hospital provision being afforded to military personnel wounded fighting to keep the capitalist parasites in power over the people as a whole.  The carnage of two World Wars was the price in blood for the building of the Welfare State, with socialised healthcare forming a major part. 

The NHS was not given to the people by a benevolent establishment; it was torn from them by a people who had been subjected to the most horrific suffering; it was a reluctant compromise by the Ruling Class to keep the people from revolting.  By throwing a few easily afforded scraps from the table to a people who were so beaten down that they had become accustomed to living a life of hardship, the establishment was able to reap a fanfare of extreme gratitude from a  people who could not see that they had a right to be treated as human beings, and that universal healthcare was but a part of a better world which was kept away from them by the people they were cheering.

The existence of the NHS is an affront to capitalism. The Ruling Class allowed it to be formed as a sticking plaster for an economic system in its death throes.  The NHS has been under attack since its foundation, with the attacks increasing over time until it is now beginning to collapse.

The most common criticism of the NHS is that it is an economic blackhole, which no matter how much money is thrown at it, will never reach a point where it can balance the books.  This criticism at a simplistic level is correct. However, what is omitted is any consideration of why the NHS wastes such a vast amount of money. When that is examined, it becomes clear that the Service is the victim of capitalist machinations and liberal obsessions, which together are tearing it apart.

The capitalist assault on the NHS is so obvious that it is only through the collaboration of the mass media that the assault is kept hidden. 

In a Socialist Society, prices and wages are fixed. This basic action ensures that there is no such thing as inflation.  The NHS operates within a wider capitalist reality, meaning that year on year costs increase, as medicines, wages, equipment and all manner of other costs rise. As long as capitalism exists inside the UK, this problem will also exist.  The  false solution of increasing the amount of money taken in taxes to fund the NHS, allows the capitalists to use statistical data to 'prove' that the Service is failing, and to blame its Socialist ethos for this problem.

The economic drain has reached critical point due to external influences exacerbating financial issues.  These are not looked into deeply, for to do so would expose the deliberate abuse of the NHS by those who fund and direct it.


The NHS employs a vast number of people.  Those at the bottom are generally paid a pittance, while those at the top receive incomes which are obscene.  Directly aping the capitalist system itself, there is a management structure in which the lazy and overpaid bourgeoisie are set apart from the hardworking and cash-strapped Proletariat.  This situation is greatly worsened by the use of agency staff, who at the bottom level receive such little money that they are barely able to afford to pay their rents, bills, taxes and basic living costs.  The employment agencies suck money from the taxpayer, creaming off an indefensible percentage of the wages of the staff who keep the NHS running. 

Government legislation protects the employment agencies, allowing them to hire and fire at will. Crippling anti-Union legislation keeps the full time staff in fear for their jobs, with job insecurity for all but the upper management being a key factor in allowing the anti-human employment practices to go unchallenged.

At the upper end of the scale, the bloated higher managers are paid disgustingly large salaries, which they receive regardless of their workload.  We are told that upper management must be paid salaries which are in line with the private sector so that the best minds can be enticed to work for the public good.  This is frankly bullshit.  Capitalism is built of the need of people to stab each other in the back in order to rise to a position where they accumulate great wealth, while those who are less mercenary eek out a meagre existence.  This thinking has no place in the NHS - in truth it has no place in a sane society, and to find it lauded in the NHS is disgusting.

The NHS hierarchical system has been twisted and distorted to ensure that whereas the Proletarian staff can be sacked with the flimsiest of excuses, the Bourgeois managers and directors are harder to get rid of, and when they are dismissed, are let go with golden handshakes of sums of money which are totally unjustifiable.

The NHS management system is set up to stop the incompetent being punished.  A truly useless lower manager can be pushed higher and higher up the ranks, to become an absolutely pathetic upper manager, while those who are capable, efficient and good at their jobs at kept in place, barely progressing, if at all.


The government of the U.K. is pushed by those who control it, to privatise everything.  The NHS has been divided into rival bodies which have to compete for resources.  These bodies pull in different directions, and increase the drain on resources by duplicating staff - especially overpaid management - for no good reason. The lapdog media dutifully reports on this absurdity, albeit omitting to discuss the corruption which is the government interference behind it all.  This is then used to justify introduce the private sector into the NHS via many points of entry, with a not-for-profit Service becoming a business, funded by taxpayers, with profits going into the coffers of greedy parasites. Richard Branson (the UK version of George Soros) has secured contracts to run Hospitals, with vast sums in kickbacks going to government people as a reward for putting profits before people.

Another factor which is wrecking the NHS is the spiralling cost of medicine. Pharmaceutical companies make drugs at very little cost, and then sell them at exorbitantly inflated prices. Quite often the drugs do not even work, and in all too many cases, they are harmful to patients.  The drug companies have a vested interest in pushing their chemicals. If products which prevented ill health, were widely used, the pharmaceutical corporations would see their profits vastly cut. It is in their interests to keep us sick. A healthy patient does not consume expensive drugs. A healthy patient does not make profits for the chemists.


There are alternative remedies and therapies which the NHS is discouraged from allowing patients access to.  A whole range of chemical treatments are ethically questionable, but are used routinely due to the subjugation of healthcare to profit-making.

In a Socialist society, all businesses, all amenities, all infrastructure is socialised. The NHS suffers greatly because it is at the 'mercy' of the private pharmaceutical companies. This issue requires the total socialisation of medicine. When treatment does not generate profits for anyone, there will be no incentive to produce treatments which do not help the patient. When medicines are produced and transferred to the healthcare providers at cost price, a key financial hole will be plugged. The only people who will lose out will be the capitalists who have made profits from medicines, some of which could not reasonably be referred to as such.

The waste of resources and money which has blighted the NHS is not the only aspect of its downfall.  Liberal politics have played their part too.  Employment quota systems which see people recruited with reference to factors which have no relevance on ability to do the job, have wreaked havoc on the NHS.  Matters which are entirely private, such as sexuality, religious beliefs, coupled with other irrelevant factors such as ethnicity, disability status, age, gender, have become key factors in recruitment.  When people are  recruited to generate statistics pertaining to diversity, rather than according to ability, people who would be an asset to the NHS, and most importantly to the patients who literally put their lives in its hands, can be denied the possibility of employment due to less suitable people being short-listed.  People should not be denied employment because of factors which are personal to them, but nor should they be able to use those factors as if they were some form of qualification.

The NHS has been ruined by successive governments who do the bidding of the Ruling Class and are purposefully undermining it as a healthcare provider.  Quota employment systems and salary scales to mirror private corporations (salary scales note, not wage scales) have given the NHS a sick ethos of "from each according to identity, to each according to greed"

SWPE opposes all Identity Politics.  We don't care what a person's sexual preference is, what his/her spiritual beliefs are, what his/her ancestry may be. We care about the quality of the individual and how he/she may contribute to the greater good of society in a way which is fulfilling and beneficial to all. 


Identity Politics is a bane on society. Whether it is racial supremacists who see the world in terms of their skin colour, or people who make their sexual desires into an obsession which they mistakenly see as the most important aspect of their characters, we reject all of the Identity movements.  Identity Politics is divisive. It creates false divisions, with people working against each other, to the detriment of society. It has become endemic in the NHS, and it has to be rooted out there as well as everywhere else.

Freedom dictates that people must have the freedom to be who they are, but this has been hijacked by liberal bigots and capitalist profiteers for purposes which are far from wholesome. 

The current Transgender phenomenon is a part of the Identity warfare on humanity.  Children are being made to feel that they are trapped in the wrong body, if they happen to enjoy playing with toys/clothes which are associated with the opposite sex.  This is a tragedy for an increasing number of children and adults who are undergoing dangerous cosmetic surgery to align their external genital features with their emotions.  These operations are being pushed politically, with operations relating to physical illness being pushed further down the queue in order to accommodate them. Financially it is a burden on the NHS which is adding to the undermining of the Service.  More importantly, people are having care delayed or not receiving care at all - people are getting sicker, people are dying, to appease a liberal obsession and to make profits for capitalist filth which have no problem in making money from human misery - misery which is more often than not the result of political pressures to generate problems which have to be cured.

The pushers of expensive surgery should be seen as equals to the pushers of expensive drugs. They do so because there is profit to be made. They do not care about human suffering. They make money from suffering. They relish suffering.

The NHS is under attack. To save it requires a complete overhaul in thought. Throwing money at it is not a viable long term solution. It was set up as a sticking plaster for capitalism. It has the potential to be a first rate system in which those best suited to providing medical care can thrive, with the whole of society benefiting.

The NHS has to be overhauled with management structures streamlined, with those who are not suited to such work replaced by those who are, with all profit-making abolished, with the entire salary/wage differential ended. None of this can happen within the confines of a capitalist economy. To save and grow the NHS, the country has be be brought over to Socialism. 

Capitalism is a disease which spreads disease. It is the mother and father of human misery. Socialism is the cure of the capitalist sickness. Socialism is the  bringer of health and happiness to replace cruelty, sickness and misery.


The plight of the NHS is the plight of the nation. Capitalism is destroying everything. When Capitalism is destroyed, everything will be better, every thing will be possible.

27 September 2017

Socialism in an Era of Social Psychosis (Wilberg on Wednesday)



In the Communist Manifesto, written over a century ago, Karl Marx predicted the inexorable globalisation of capitalism. In the opening lines of Das Kapital, Marx speaks of capitalism presenting itself primarily as an accumulation of commodities – and of the defining feature of capitalist market economy being that human labour – and with it the human being itself – is itself transformed into a commodity to be bought, sold and used.




Marx’s analysis of the inherent contradictions of capitalism have become more evident today than at the time he wrote. We all see today that the interests of global capital and its ‘bottom line’ are irreconcilable with the need to protect the earth from climate change, to reduce the gulf between rich and poor countries and strata of society, to eradicate the roots of crime and terrorism, to overcome the epidemics of ‘stress’, ‘mental illness’, ‘anti-social’ behaviour, to prevent cultural degeneracy and ‘dumbing down’, to halt the decline in verbal and emotional literacy, and with it, the growing incapacity of human beings to experience deep spiritual intimacy with others.




The result is an era of ‘globalisation’ which Teresa Brennan has correctly characterised as one of social psychosis. This social psychosis is the direct result of the total commodification, consumerisation and marketisation of all aspects of human life, together with the total devaluation of all deep human values, their transformation into subjugation to ‘shareholder values’, and their transformation into brand values attached to things – consumer commodities.

The subject as producer sells himself and his energy to the system (and the given) without care and concern for the products, which somehow have their own life, prostrating himself as a slave to their production, while the worker as consumer buys and takes the products from the system (and the given), telling the system to “go screw itself”. Alienation as self-alienation takes the form of setting one aspect of consciousness against the other, giving rise to a dynamics of alternately using and being used, exploiting and being exploited, … objectifying and being objectified. Michael Kosok.

Where life is reduced to using and being used, no wonder that social psychosis manifests itself in every conceivable variety of ‘abuse’ – whether through violence and war, individual and state terrorism, torture and physical abuse, religious and sexual abuse, drug and the abuse of psychiatry and medicine to suppress all the individual symptoms of a sick society. All this is backed up by a constant abuse of education, marketing and the media to turn human beings into culturally ignorant wage slaves on the one hand, and autistic consumers or ‘users’ on the other.

In the era of social psychosis that has resulted from the globalisation of capitalism, it is no longer possible to achieve revolutionary social change or revolution through political means alone. For politics itself has become marketised – resulting in a situation in which political ideologies and parties of all colours are themselves marketed and sold as commodities. As a result:

One either functions within the system, accepting it, or one functions outside the system, rejecting and attacking it, but the system itself remains un-transformed. Ibid.

As a result, revolutionary socialism, in the era of social psychosis, can no longer take the form of political activism, for in this situation:

….any one-sided action is always a passive reaction to a given.
Conformity means simple acceptance of the given while rebellion means simple rejection of the given; both are therefore reactive mechanisms to the given.

Indeed the highest form of normalcy functions by simultaneously permitting both acceptance and rejection, conformity and rebellion, playing off one against the other without transcending either. Ibid.

What is required is a ‘socialism with soul’ – a socialism that rescues human subjectivity from the essence of ‘abuse’ – the alienation of alternately or simultaneously using and being used, exploiting and being exploited, objectifying and being objectified, violating and being violated, terrorising and being terrorised, persecuting and being persecuted, attacking and being attacked, judging and being judged.

The revolutionary must always attempt to overcome one’s continual tendency to simply react passively and one-sidedly in the static and contradictory modalities of mere acceptance versus rejection, or the mechanical game of either conformity or destruction, of judging either true or false. A revolutionary transcends judgement as an end in itself and is concerned with transformation, conversion, salvation and resurrection in the deepest sense.

The only truly revolutionary means to the overcoming of social psychosis is the deepening and expansion of what Mike Kosok, like Martin Buber, termed ‘inter-subjectivity’ – a deepened recognition of and relation to the other as a subject or soul and not as an object or thing. Paradoxically, this deepening of inter-subjectivity – of the immediate relations between one human being and another - can only serve as a means to a revolutionary ‘end’ as long as it is not itself reduced to a mere means to any end but instead valued as an end in itself – as the very essence of ‘revolution’ in the age of social psychosis.

20 September 2017

The Empire of Money (Wilberg on Wedesday)

THE EMPIRE OF MONEY
…and the myths that underpin it

INTRODUCTION
“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”
Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild
Where money and wealth rules politics, geo-political empires have become a mere instrument and façade for one empire that rules over all others – ‘The Empire of Money’.  This has been the case since the plutocracies of imperial Greece and Rome, since the abolition of ‘tally sticks’ as debt-free money in England, the deliberate use by the English of counterfeit notes to undermine the debt-free forms of ‘scrip’ or paper money issued by the colonists in American, the creation of the Bank of England and funding of King George’s war against the colonists by the Rothschild banking empire.  And today it is the likes of Goldman Sachs that rule – not Europe and not the United States empire.
The Empire of Money would have us believe that nation states are long out of date and is all in favour of ‘Unions’ of all sorts, not just the ‘European Union’ but the once free Union of States it turned into ‘The United States’ – now nothing but a military and police state serving the Empire.   On the other hand, any nation or union of nations that seeks to be or once again become an imperial political power is immediately targeted by the Empire of Money – not for the purpose of political but of financial ‘liberalisation’ i.e. monetary and political subservience to the Empire of Money. Hence the recent liberalisation of private banking in both China and Russia.   The Empire of Money is what the German thinker Ernst Jünger would have called ‘the Leviathan’. Political and military-technological empires are merely its titular ‘Titans’ – creations of the One God it worships – Money.
As with other religions, along with the religion of money – what Marx called ‘The Monotheism of Money’ – goes a mythology. The Empire of Money however, is based on a religious myth different from that of other religions in a most fundamental respect. Why? Because it dare not even speak its name lest it be recognised as the monumental myth that it is. The concealment of this myth is therefore truly a ‘conspiracy’ in the root sense of the word – for only the rulers of the Empire of Money recognise it as a myth. The truth it conceals is ‘breathed together’ (con-spirare)  behind the closed doors of bankers’ boardrooms and invisible financial cabals.
THE MONUMENTAL MYTH
What then is this monumental myth – a myth that underpins the entire Empire of Money. The myth is a mythical belief – a belief that is so ubiquitous and so ingrained in the minds of economists, the mass media and political parties of all colours that it is never even formulated outright, yet alone questioned. It is the unquestioned belief that the public spending of governments is dependent on either taxation or on borrowing from private bankers. With this belief firmly in place, and to meet their ever-growing debt obligations, governments either have to tax more, borrow more, and/or impose draconian cuts in public spending on their people. For once in the grip of debt ever more government taxation and/or ever more brutal public spending cuts are  required merely to repay the interest on accumulated debt to the Empire of Money.
For the Lords of the Empire of Money demand their money back – even if they themselves have lost it through their greed to extend loans to individuals and nations who need them because they can no longer afford to ‘live within their means’.  This is the new, neo-feudal face of capitalism – the Lords demand their tithe of the Gross National Product of nations – and ensure they get it because it is built on the quicksand of loan money. They do so through means of a Big Lie – one necessary to support the basic mythical belief on which the Empire depends. This is the lie – also believed and propagated by the press, media and political parties of all sorts – that the only way of reducing a country’s ‘national debt’ is through massive cuts in public spending and in people’s incomes, pensions, public services, benefits etc. 
MAKING MONEY FROM NOTHING
Where, one may ask, does this loan money that is so generously offered to individuals or businesses by the banks – or else forcefully imposed on whole nations –  come from in the first place? Herein lies yet another unquestioned myth whose hidden and secret truth is  known only to the few – the 1% that rule the Empire of Money. As mere serfs or slaves we are led to believe that banks lend money that we, as savers, deposit with them. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.  Banks quite literally create money from nothing – simply by keying any figure that is desired into a borrower’s electronic computer account. Once keyed in however, this figure counts as money belonging to the bank – allowing the bank in turn to demand that borrowers pay that sum of money to the bank out of their earnings and their savings, and that along with a nice bit of interest on top. The bank itself does nothing to earn money except by making money from nothing – as fictitious loan money for which it then demands hard-earned money from the borrower.
What if you could use your personal computer to digitally key in any figure they wanted into other people’s computer accounts as a ‘loan’ – and then demand that they pay you back this money at interest – even though the money itself was created from nothing – just through a few strokes on a keyboard? If this sounds like a dodgy scam, then it is no wonder that The Empire of Money doesn’t want us to know that this is exactly how the entire banking system works.
For when you take out a loan from a private bank what you are really doing is giving the bank permission to create the very money you borrow from nothing, after which they then claim it as theirs  and demand you to give it back to them – at interest!
To add insult to injury – if loans that private banks use to ‘make money from nothing’ turn out to have been too risky, then governments spend billions or even trillions of pounds of our money to bail these banks out.  The banks on the other hand, begin to hoard their money – no longer lending to individuals, small business or even to each other, but raising bank charges and interest rates and refusing mortgages.
The real reason why so many countrys’ national debt is so high is because they long ago surrendered a basic national right to international bankers. This is the sovereign right of a nation to directly create and issue its own publicly-created money instead of:
(1) borrowing money from private bankers, and
(2) using public money not just to pay off the ever-spiralling interest on our debt to them – but also spend trillions to bail out the Big Banks!
Another reason is that more than 90% of the entire money supply of nations is not created as paper money or coins, but exists in the form of electronic or digital money created and owned by the banks as ‘debt’. The Big Banks therefore wield an all-powerful ‘Sword of Damocles’ over governments. For were these banks to collapse so would virtually the entire money supply of nations. That is the real reason why the banks are seen as ‘too big to fail’. They would collapse also if all debts to them were paid off in one go – for their financial ‘assets’ consist of nothing but debts.
THE HIDDEN TRUTH
Behind the myths and big lies on which the Big Banks depend however is a basic hidden truth – one which no one in the Empire-controlled media or political and economic debate is aware of or would  dare to speak of.
This hidden truth is that if private banks both can and do ‘create money from nothing’ then so also could states and governments – not as debt to private banks but as public money created and spent for the benefit of the people and not the bankers i.e. for the benefit of  the ‘99%’ and not the ‘1%’ who rule the Empire of Money.
To ward off and counter this truth yet another Big Lie is propagated and yet another myth accepted as fact. This is the myth that publicly created money would lead to ‘hyperinflation’. Yet if government treasuries could directly issue and create the money supply of nations directly, they could also decide how much money to inject into the economy during any given period in order to avoid inflation.
The task of governments would then only be to decide what that money is spent on i.e. anything but paying off vast quantities of debt and interest to private banks – which is what most public money is currently spent on.  Thus countries would be better off no matter how much money they issued.  The ‘hyperinflation’ myth arose from the example of Germany, which was deliberately saddled by the Allied powers – in reality the Empire of Money – with crippling debt and reparation payments after the 1st World War.
“The Treaty of Versailles had imposed crushing reparations payments on the German people, who were expected to reimburse the costs of the war for all participants — costs totaling three times the value of all the property in the country.” Ellen Brown It was precisely because the then bankrupt Germany did not default on its debts to the Allied powers and did not seize the opportunity to issue public money directly that it left the Deutschmark open to  financial speculation – the real reason for the hyperinflation. Ellen Brown: “….it was the privately-owned Reichsbank, not the German government, that was pumping new currency into the economy. Like the U.S. Federal Reserve … it was operated for private gain. What drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation was speculation by foreign investors, who would sell the mark short, betting on its decreasing value. In the manipulative device known as the short sale, speculators borrow something they don’t own, sell it, then “cover” by buying it back at the lower price. Speculation in the German mark was made possible because the Reichsbank made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing, marks that were created with accounting entries on the bank’s books and lent at a profitable interest. When the Reichsbank could not keep up with the voracious demand for marks, other private banks were allowed to create them out of nothing and lend them at interest as well.” As a result, “People were living in hovels and starving. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before – the total destruction of the national currency, wiping out people’s savings, their businesses, and the economy generally. Making matters worse, at the end of the decade global depression hit. Germany had no choice but to succumb to debt slavery to international lenders.”
SUMMARY
One need not take the arguments of this article alone as proof of what it claims to be the monumental myth and Big Lies underpinning that global financial system which I call ‘The Empire of Money’ – a system which allows a minority of bankers to rule the politics of nations and political empires and to ‘make money from nothing’ through debt. Instead one need only take heed of those rare confessions which have come from the bankers themselves – in the full recognition of the fact that: “The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863
CONFESSIONS OF THE BANKERS
The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys, which it creates out of nothing.”
William Paterson, director of the Bank of England
“I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people.”
Reginald McKenna, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders in 1924
 “The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.”
“The bankers own the world. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control over that money, and they will create that money right back again. Take this power away from bankers and all great fortunes will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this then would be a happier, better world to live in … But if you want to continue to be slaves to the banker and pay the cost of your own enslavement, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England during an informal talk to about 150 history, economic, and social science professors in the late 1920′s at the University of Texas.
“The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn’t realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it.”
H.W. White, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand, to the New Zealand Monetary Commission, 1955
“Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.”
Ralph M. Hawtry, former Secretary to the Treasury
“Commercial banks create check-book money whenever they grant a loan, simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower’s IOU.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York
“This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are, absolutely, without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse, unless it becomes widely understood, and the defects remedied very soon.”
Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia
Congressman Patman: “How did you get the money to buy those 2 billion dollars’ worth of Government securities in 1933?”
Governor Eccles: “We created it.” Patman: “Out of what?”
Eccles: “Out of the right to issue credit money.”
Patman: “And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government’s credit?”
Eccles: “That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.”
Dialogue notated during hearings of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941. Members of the Federal Reserve Board call themselves ‘Governors.’ Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time.
IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE?
Is there an alternative to the rule of ‘Wall Street’ and the entire global Empire of Money. Yes there is – but only if the unquestioned myths and big lies that underpin it are exposed. Only then can the central goal of a people’s revolution be defined i.e. to re-affirm and re-institute the sovereign right of all nations and states (including the states of the U.S.A.) to issue their own publicly-created money without borrowing from private banks and for the benefit of the people and not the bankers.  The institution of public money creation and public banking through ‘People’s Banks’ – communal, regional, state and national, must be the key aim of ‘Occupy’ movements or movements of resistance to ‘debtocracy’ such as those in Greece and Spain. To achieve this aim many or all of the following steps will be necessary, albeit not necessarily in the order listed:
  • Organisation of Local People’s Councils in different regions, town and enterprises.
  • Creation of a National People’s Militia to arrest all puppet politicians serving the Empire of Money and prosecute criminal bankers for dealing in fraudulent debt assets and derivatives.
  • Election of new National People’s Assemblies from these Councils.
  • Creation of new People’s Currencies in different regions and municipalities.
  • Creation of a single new National People’s Currency to unite these local currencies.
  • Centralisation of money creation and money supply in the hands of National People’s Banks.
  • Rejection of all so-called ‘rescue packages’ from international banks such as the ECB and IMF – which just impose yet more debt to the banks – and debt can’t be paid with more debt!
  • Defaulting on all ‘national debt’ to the international banks,
  • Halting all cuts in public spending and ‘austerity measures’ – using publicly created money to aid the people and restore the economy – not to put billions back into the banks.
  • Cancellation of all privatisation programs and monetary outflows from the nation.
  • Promotion of ‘inter-nationalist’ cooperation and trading agreements with other states, nations and peoples who win back power and sovereignty from the international banks.
  • Bringing down the Dollar and Euro i.e. calling upon the Greek people to restore the Drachma, the Germanic to restore the Deutschmark – and the people of the United States to restore an equivalent of the Greenback (the first paper currency to be issued as publicly created money).

19 September 2017

Israeli manipulation of Kurdistan

SWPE has long had a policy of supporting the right of all people to their own homelands.  This is a central part of the ideology of Socialism in One Country.  Because of its very close association with Global Capitalism, Zionism is a very serious problem which has to be addressed by all anti-Capitalists.  Our own policy of National Zionism seeks to offer a solution which does not pander to anti-Semites, but does not allow for the Capitalist butchers to go unchallenged.


The proposed referendum in Iraq by the Kurdish people in the north of the country, highlights the need to stop Zionist Imperialism.  What should be a simple referendum for independence and sovereignty - something we naturally support - has become marred by Zionist interference, with the Kurdish Israelis plotting to use a free Kurdistan as a means of creating a second Israel.  It is obvious that this is a way of creating a Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates, subjugating all who fall between the two rivers.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called for the establishment of Kurdistan as a new country.  His motivation is further division in the Middle East, and the creation of another Zionist country, adding to Jewish Zionist Israel and the Salafi Zionist country of Saudi Arabia.


Zionism does not equate to Judaism. It is an oddity to be sure.  Zionism was put forward as an alternative to the demise of the Jewish religion, culture and people through Assimilation with Europeans, and was the justification for the confiscation of land in Palestine for the creation of Israel. The term Zionism is still associated with the Jewish nation, although this is now nothing other than a smokescreen to keep people focused upon the territory of Israel and away from the reality of a criminal network of Capitalist exploiters who operate globally, controlling the money system, stock markets, military and governments of nearly every country in the world, as well as the corporations which operate with no regard for borders.


The meddling by Israel in the affairs of other countries, is not due to a belief in the myth of the Jews being chosen by their god to rule over humanity.  Religious Jews reject the State of Israel as a mockery of their faith - although there are still Orthodox Jews who manage to live in Israel in spite of their own religious texts forbidding them so to do!  The sincere Neturei Karta actively oppose the Zionist ideology, especially what they see as the theft of Palestinian land.


The 'meddling' by Israel takes the shape of instigating fake revolutions, conducting military operations which destabilise entire countries, creating the circumstances in which the mass migration of 'refugees' leads to unrest in far away lands, with mass unemployment undermining wage demands and over-population pushing up the cost of rents / housing prices.  The meddling of Israel boosts the coffers of the arms industries and allows for the USA to build permanent bases in country after country, while oil/drug revenue and other wealth is concentrated in the hands of the criminal corporations and the piles of bodies of people murdered to gain said wealth grow higher and higher. Its convenient and simple to blame Israel for all the woes of the world - and for anti-Semites it is easy to add the Jewish diaspora into the equation to give the Jewish people as whole responsibility for all that is wrong with the way global events are unfolding.  Anti-Zionist Jews are ignored by the media. Non-Jewish Zionists are treated as if they are not Zionists at all.  All focus is aimed on Israel, because in this way, the global capitalist system can be upheld as the saviour of humanity, not as the real villain of the piece.  Israel is a scapegoat by design.  Of course there are Zionist Jews in Israel!  But there are far more non-Jewish Zionists than Jewish ones, and without the entire Zionist network, the global crimes against humanity would not be possible.


SWPE's National Zionist policy would only work if Jew and Zionist were interchangeable words, but they are not.  It should really be a National Jewish policy, which as we can see with the Orthodox NK, is a self-contradiction.  We refuse to play the Zionists' game of painting 'the Jews' as a monolithic people hell-bent on global domination.  The closest that the National Zionist idea has come to actualisation was with Comrade Stalin's Birobidzhan project.  If this had been allowed to grow into a genuine homeland for the Jewish people on land which was free for everyone to use, then the capitalist crime state of Israel would never have come into existence.  Anti-Stalinists ensured that the project came to nothing.

As we can see with the failure of the US-created Islamic State to break up Syria, the Zionist machine is not all-powerful.  Its next ploy is to push for an 'independent' Kurdistan, which although officially sovereign, will belong to the Zionist network, alongside Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the USA, UK, EU amongst many.  The leaders of Kurdistan are Zionists. They are utilising Kurdish Jews to keep the anti-Semites excited and screaming about Jewish power.

SWPE supports a free Kurdistan, not a Zionist criminal operation.  We call on Kurds to throw off the corrupt Ruling Class and make their homeland a Socialist State answerable to the Kurdish people only.

The National Zionist ideal is a worthy ideal, but it is one which cannot work until the poison of Global Capitalism is gone.  Zionism needs to be seen for waht it is - the war against humanity for the acquisition of wealth and power, by the greedy capitalists who have no allegiance to any religion or culture, and to no people except their own class - a multiethnic global parasite class.  It is not for us to answer the 'Jewish Question', if there is even such a thing.  We would advise Jewish supporters to examine the ideology of Bundism as a possible way of breaking the propaganda of anti-Semites and Zionists alike.  As long as the Jewish people (especially Israelis) are portrayed by capitalists and anti-capitalists as the epicentre of capitalism, they will be useful to the enemies of humanity as human shields, targets, distractions.  We call on all Jews to expose the wicked lies of the Zionist terrorists and to break the link which unjustly makes them the focus of the ire of the world.

13 September 2017

Capitalism's Big Lie (Wilberg on Wednesday)

1. Competition generates jobs. Right?
WRONG! Competition may initially create jobs but leads inevitably to over-production of the same commodities or over-provision of the same services by competing companies, resulting in takeovers, redundancies or export of jobs to countries providing cheaper labour. This is what is casually accepted as ‘the economic cycle’.
2. Competition offers greater choice and diversity. Right?
WRONG! Everyone knows that the multiplication of television channels just creates more of the same. Similarly competition among manufacturers of cars and most other commodities leads not to greater diversity but to greater standardisation. That is why vast sums of money need to be wasted on ludicrous advertising – to create a grand illusion of distinctiveness between virtually identical products and services. ‘Brand identity’ replaces true diversity and choice.
3. Competition results in cost-efficiency. Right?
WRONG! The pursuit of profit and low-cost production results in the greatest imaginable wastage of natural resources and human potentials. For example the production of one ounce of gold produces thirty tons of toxic waste and depends on labour so cheap it is a form of slavery – thus also wasting the productive human potentials of every worker involved.
4. Capitalism can create full-employment. Right?
WRONG! Capitalism can only ever create anything near full-employment by massively under-employing the potential skills of its employees – instead employing ever-more workers in exportable, low-skill, low-paid work – and employing even university graduates in ‘McJobs’, call-centres and the like. And when capitalism is in crisis the first thing it slashes is jobs – except those of corporate bosses.
5. Capitalism protects women’s rights and the family. Right?
Wrong! An economy such as America’s, in which millions of mothers have to leave their children alone and travel often long distances to do two or more minimum-wage shift jobs – and still not afford decent housing or even medical care – is hardly ‘family friendly’. Protecting ‘women’s rights’ and the family means protecting the right of women to be minimum-wage slaves.
6. Capitalism values the individual. Right?
Wrong! Capitalism buys the individual, and values them according to their market value alone. What made capitalism different from earlier forms of market economy is that people don’t sell products they make themselves, they sell themselves as employees – they sell their bodies, brains and time to be ‘employed’ as instructed by their employer. Capitalism is economic prostitution of the individual.
7. Capitalist societies are mostly democratic. Right?
Wrong! The most politically powerful and important institutions in capitalist states – and the ones in which most people lead their lives – are private companies in which there is no democracy, no elections of any sort and rule is principally by management decree – it is determined by financiers and corporate shareholders.
8. Capitalism could reduce its energy needs and cope with ecological problems with the right will. Right?
WRONG! Firstly, no gas, oil or nuclear energy corporations would ever tolerate losing their profits to community groups or towns that decided to declare energy independence – to go ‘off-grid’ and generate energy from their own wind generators, solar, wave or waste-generated energy sources. Secondly, capitalism relies on increasing economic growth for its own sake – irrespective of the waste produced by industrial production and over-production. Thirdly, the greed for short term financial gain from exploiting natural resources will lead inevitably the total devastation of the oceans, forests, water supplies and farming land of the world.
9. Capitalism means a free trade and a free market. Right?
WRONG! Capitalism just can’t cope with global free trade, and ‘globalisation’ is the biggest attempt to restrict it – for example by imposing unfair trading agreements and by subsidised agriculture which restrict imports from and impoverishes developing countries. Capitalism certainly can’t cope with a global ‘free market’ economy – for that would mean free movement not only of capital but free movement of labour (‘immigration’) across countries and continents. Not even the European Union can allow a free market – ever tried getting low-cost mortgages or loans from Germany or lower-cost cars from Europe?
10. Capitalist societies are free societies. Right?
WRONG! Capitalism forces individuals to sell their time to their employers. Freedom means being free to use one’s time to engage in freely chosen creative activity that fulfils an individual’s unique potentials and allows them to contribute to society through them. But the only types of productive, creative activity or work allowed in capitalism are those with market value in the creation of profit for employers. Education in capitalism does not cultivate each individual’s gifts so that it can transform them into a valuable contribution to society. Instead its focus is only on skills with a market value in the creation of profit. The capitalist press and media are no more ‘free’ than those in so-called totalitarian societies, all disseminating the same ‘news’ and ‘issues’ and never questioning the ‘Big Lies’ which shape how they are analysed and interpreted.
11. Capitalism is wealth creating. Right?
WRONG! Not only is more than 90% of the wealth of capitalist economies owned by less than 10% of the population, but is gained by creating general time-poverty and by exploitation of low-wage labour, both here and in developing countries. The type of labour that has the market value to create most monetary wealth tends to be of a purely self-serving, calculative or mind-numbing type that impoverishes the soul and distorts, demeans or denies time for human relationships. Wealth in capitalism is a ‘Faustian’ bargain – selling all richness of soul to the Devil in order to attain material gain. Yet throughout the ‘boom years’ of the Western capitalist economies the income of the majority effectively fell by 30% – except for the richest 10% of the population.
12. Markets are needed to know what people want. Right?
WRONG!  How about just asking them? Today’s information technology provides the perfect means of finding out what sorts of products people want, in what variety, with what new features or changes, and at what sort of prices. Markets only offer them ranges of products to choose from over which they have no democratic choice. Worse still, it uses advertising to make them think they can fulfil their deepest spiritual needs by buying material commodities.
13. National governments depend on taxes or borrowing from banks to finance public expenditure. Right?
WRONG! This is one of the biggest lies of all. National governments could, as Lincoln attempted to do, issue their own money, interest-free, to pay for public expenditure – were it not for the fact that they are effectively puppets of international banks and banking cartels, and forever afraid of upsetting what they call ‘the financial markets’.
14. National governments accumulate financial deficits through overspending on public services and investment. Right?
WRONG! This is part of the same Big Lie. Financial deficits arise principally from ever-increasing debts to the private banking sector, a problem which could be overcome by nationalising the banks, re-establishing control of the nation’s money supply and funding industry itself directly.

Hurricane Irma and the rump of British Empire


Natural disasters which destroy lives, livelihoods and living conditions, are of course a tragedy. Such is the case with Hurricane Irma.  However, there is another aspect to the devastation of the hurricane; it has exposed the dirty hidden rump of British Imperialism in the Caribbean.

Using the euphemism of British Overseas Territories, the Imperialist regime in London is the controlling authority over the remnants of the British Empire.  The territories globally include:

Akrotiri and Dhekelia; Anguilla; Bermuda; British Antarctic Territory; British Indian Ocean Territory; British Virgin Islands; Cayman Islands; Falkland Islands; Gibraltar; Montserrat; Pitcairn Islands; Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha; South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; Turks and Caicos Islands

The Caribbean islands smashed by the Hurricane included many of the outposts of the British Empire.  The islands suffered the impact of the weather, but their problems have been exacerbated by the economic system.  The islands are operated as Tax Havens, with the result that money passes through the islands into the coffers of greedy unscrupulous capitalists, leaving the bulk of the islanders in absolute poverty, living in buildings which have no chance of withstanding harsh weather, and certainly not a hurricane of the magnitude of Irma.  The rich may have been inconvenienced by the hurricane, but the Working Class have lost everything - precious little that it was to begin with.


Tax havens are a Capitalist's wet dream.  They allow for the vilest of exploiters to squeeze the Workers out of every ounce of sweat, and make an obscene profit without having to return anything of worth in taxation.  With a competent accountant, tax havens can become places where literally not a penny is lost in tax to the foul exploiter.



But there is more than 'just' unbridled exploitation involved in the economic piracy of the British Overseas Territories.  The UK government is a front for the Ruling Class.  It does not operate for the People, but for the criminals and corporations who operate outside the law.  The British Empire was allowed to mutate into the Commonwealth to give the appearance of the people getting back control of their own lands (they didn't really, the new countries are still owned by the same 'elites'), and the British Overseas Territories were kept under more direct control to ensure the continuation of money-laundering without the hassle of having to go through allegedly independent nations.

The British Empire Overseas Territories are kept under the control of London because by so doing, all the bribes from the Arms Industry, Oil Companies, and Global Corporations in general, can be washed through the banks and into the coffers of corrupt politicians, without a trace.  The illegal wars of aggression against Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, and countless other countries have brought in vast revenues for the politicians who have okayed them (look at the millionaire Tony Blair); the highly lucrative trade in Heroin (from Afghanistan through Kosovo and onto the streets of the UK) has been made possible through tax haven laundering; the vastly profitable paedophile slave trade which the Ruling Class indulge in to levels which make the Rotherham tragedy pale in comparison, has been made possible due to tax havens laundering money for the procurement of children, as well as money to the media to buy their silence.

The Hurricane has brought the tax haven status to light, but of course, the media has failed to look into it, preferring to concentrate on 40 high risk of convicts who have escaped from prison in the British Virgin Islands!  No matter what crimes they have committed, the real criminals are walking large, making money out of human misery on a horrific scale.

A UK liberated from capitalism by a Socialist Republican Revolution, would see the end of tax havens as a priority.  SWPE would ensure that all the British Overseas Territories became Socialist Republics, with the same economic system as the UK.  Ultimately, we would like to see the end of British Overseas Territories and the ridiculous Commonwealth (the latter which we would end immediately), but we are aware that in a capitalist world, the territories would immediately fall to the likes of the USA which would subjugate them and continue using them as the corrupt UK does at present.  Reluctantly, it has to be accepted that it would be better for the Territories to remain part of the UK until the demise of global capitalism would make total independence a safe reality.


One Country at a time, Socialism will liberate the people.  A Socialist UK could use the British Overseas Territories to push the Revolution further and faster, and with a great poetic justice in that the territories which are at the heart of the capitalist system, would be the first to be liberated.

6 September 2017

The ‘Scientific’ and ‘Spiritual’ Annihilation of Philosophy - Wilberg on Wednesday

A philosopher would already see in the title of this essay a presupposition and a question. The presupposition is that we already ‘know’ what ‘philosophy’ is. The question related to this: what is ‘philosophy’? To this question no simple answer can be given, because the question is itself a philosophical question - and therefore one that cannot be answered by some ‘definition’ of philosophy. Philosophy, by its nature, does not lend itself to definition, for among other things, it is a mode of thinking that questions all ready to hand ‘definitions’, just as it also questions the presuppositions contained in many commonly accepted uses and forms of language. With this statement we have by no means fully answered the question of what philosophy is, and yet we have already suggested something that comes close to its essence. This is a relation to language (including everyday language, the language of the sciences or religion, the language of the media - and of course the languages of different philosophies themselves) that not only sees and questions hidden presuppositions that can be concealed within language - but also sees and questions the way these presuppositions may be concealed - and the possible reasons for or motives behind this concealment. From this perspective, what does it mean to speak of ‘the annihilation of philosophy’? It means to speak of the very opposite of ‘philosophy’, i.e. the total annihilation or incapacitation of people’s ability to see or question presuppositions contained in language - or worse still, an incapacity to see how, in the absence of philosophy, language is violated or dumbed-down - all too often in the name of truth, even supposedly ‘higher’ truths.

Before we proceed to give examples of this concealed violence, a few more things need to be said about philosophy itself. One is that philosophy cannot, in principle, be reduced to a philosophy or to a set of ‘philosophies’, because its task is to question all philosophies - in particular through questioning the presuppositions contained or concealed within their language. Secondly, ‘philosophy’, being itself a word of Greek origin, is essentially a Graeco-European tradition. Therefore we cannot speak of any such thing as ‘Indian philosophy’, ‘Egyptian philosophy’ or even of European or ‘Greek’ philosophy - because when we do so we are effectively reducing philosophy to a mere geographic or historical spectrum of philosophies - rather than doing philosophy itself - which means principally to question philosophies. For the same reason we cannot speak, for example of ‘political philosophy’ or ‘social philosophy’ etc. - unless by this we mean a questioning of political, social and other types of philosophies. Thirdly, philosophies themselves cannot be reduced to theories or worldviews that claim to be philosophical or to offer philosophical solutions to big questions. The natural sciences for example no longer call themselves ‘natural philosophy’, and science makes great efforts to even distance itself from philosophy - and yet it is riddled with philosophical presuppositions and claims, and therefore also with philosophical questions that it fails to even recognise as such - let alone address in a philosophical way. Fourthly, philosophy cannot be reduced to an academic discipline, and most certainly not one which merely educates people in different philosophies however valuable and important this may be for the survival of philosophy. Fifthly - and here we return to something close to the essence of philosophy - philosophical debate, or even questioning, is not reducible to a clash or questioning of philosophical concepts or propositions but has to do with questioning the language in which those concepts or propositions are couched.

The violation of language commonly takes the form of a flattening out of all historical differences or changes in word usage in order to assure the dominance of modern ‘scientific’ terminologies. A historically most significant example of this is the term ‘psychology’. Let us look at the Wikipedia entry for it, and first of all take note of the following paragraph:

“...The word psychology derives from Greek roots meaning study of the psyche, or soul ( ψυχή psukhē , "breath, spirit, soul" and -λογία -logia , "study of" or "research"). The earliest known reference to the word psychology in English was by Steven Blankaart in 1694 in The Physical
Dictionary which refers to "Anatomy, which treats the Body, and Psychology, which treats of the
Soul.”

In other words, the first use of the term ‘psychology’ was founded on a dualism of body and soul, and is hardly more than three hundred years old. Yet Wiki then informs us that:

“The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia all engaged in the philosophical study of psychology. Historians note that Greek philosophers, including Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (especially in his De Anima treatise), addressed the workings of the mind. As early as the 4th century BC, Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that mental disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes.”

The statement here may appear to most readers to be an entirely unproblematic one. Or is it? For having already admitted that the very term ‘psychology’ - let alone the modern Western notion of psychology as a ‘science’ - is hardly more than 300 years old, we are now informed that engagement in “the study of psychology” goes back as far as ancient, mostly, non-Western civilisations.

This is a blatant historical retrojection or back projection in time - of a modern Western concept. But it gets worse. For the text speaks of the philosophical study of psychology, ignoring the fact that ‘philosophy’ is itself a Greek term, if not a fundamentally Greek concept. Given this, there is simply no way in which one can speak of Egyptian, Chinese, Indian or Persian civilizations engaging in the “philosophical” study of “psychology” - except in so far as these cultures were influenced by Greek culture and thought.

We are then told - and again in a way that may all too easily appear on the surface to be entirely unproblematic - that:

“Historians note that Greek philosophers, including Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (especially in his De Anima treatise), addressed the workings of the mind”.

Having already used the English language to superimpose modern Western concepts of ‘philosophy’ and ‘psychology’ rooted in ancient Greek language and culture onto other past civilisations with entirely different languages, cultures and traditions of thought, we are now informed that the workings of the ‘mind’ (“mind” being a Roman word and Roman concept ) was already addressed by Greek “philosophers” such as Thales. So now three languages and cultures have effectively been brought into play in a wholly concealed way - English, Greek and Latin - with any differences in their historical use and understanding of terms such as ‘philosophy’ or ‘psychology’ totally flattened out.

Furthermore, Thales is taken as an example of a Greek “philosopher” when, at his time, there was still no such compound word as “philosophy” ( philosophia ) or “philosopher” ( philosophos ) even in the Greek language itself - or among so-called “Greek philosophers”!!!

Finally we are informed - again in seemingly clear and unproblematic language, that:

“As early as the 4th century BC, Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that mental disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes.” An absurd linguistic, historical, cultural and conceptual confusion reaches its apogee here, and this for several reasons.

Firstly, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary the first recorded use of the term ‘physical’ was in 1934. But Hippocrates, the supposed Greek “physician”, is already supposed to have “theorised” about the “physical causes” of “mental disorders”. This despite the fact that the word ‘physician’ was only first coined in the 16th century.

Then again, the meaning of the Greek word theoria , from which the terms “theory” and “theorised” is derived, is far more problematic than supposed. For in its original Greek use it does not refer to any form of intellectual activity, but rather to experiencing something directly - like a spectator (Greek theoros ) at a drama or sports event. Aristotle could be interpreted as having changed the common meaning of theoria to viewing something like a spectator, but, this time through the lens of words or language ( logoi, logos ).

Where there is absolutely no question however, is that the Latin notion of causa from which the English word ‘cause’ first came into use in the 13th century, bears little or no relation to either its Greek antecedent ( aitia ) or to mechanistic concepts of ‘causality’ - the Greek aitia coming far
closer to the modern meaning of ‘theory’ as some form of intellectual ‘explanation’. In this context, simply to refer to the “physical causes” of “mental disorder” - as Hippocrates is supposed to have done, would - in early Greek terms, be meaningless. For the very term ‘physical’ derives from the Greek phusis, a word which, in Aristotle’s time was not in any way opposed to the ‘psychical’ or ‘psychological’ but referred simply and purely to anything and everything that is and that stands forth in our awareness.

At this point you might already be tiring and forgiven for thinking: “All very interesting (or not) but
so what? What significance does all this etymological tracing and tracking of language hold for us today?” To begin to answer this question it is worthwhile to once again return to Wikipedia and consider now its opening definition of ‘psychology’ - the underlinings are mine:

Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, embracing all aspects of conscious and unconscious experience as well as thought. It is an academic discipline and a social science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.

Merely to speak of “ exploring the physiological and biological processes that ‘ underlie ’ ‘cognitive functions’ and behaviors” is no mere ‘definition’ of ‘psychology’. Instead it asserts an outright philosophical presupposition (but one that does not openly declare itself as such) as truth. The entire definition is not actually a definition at all, but a programmatic expression of a project that began to reach its critical point in the early 20th century - and had triumphed by the end of that century.

What project? Nothing less than complete elimination and marginalisation of philosophy - previously considered as the most fundamental and foundational science , and its replacement instead by ‘science’ in the form of a multitude of discrete ‘sciences’ and academic disciplines. Henceforth ‘philosophy’ was to be seen as merely one academic discipline among countless others - but not in any way a strictly ‘scientific’ one in the modern sense. This triumph of modern science over philosophy did not however, come without a final struggle or Endkampf. This found expression in the later work of Edmund Husserl, in particular his lectures in Vienna and Prague in the mid-1930’s and particularly in his final work entitled “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”.

“In it, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western
philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly (one-sidedly) empirical and naturalistic orientation. Husserl declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis, and that a science of the mind ('Geisteswissenschaft') must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences have managed: "It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge."

Husserl argued for a different understanding of ‘science’ and of ‘rationality’ itself - one still rooted in philosophy and the work of thinkers such as Schelling, but now taking the form of a new philosophical paradigm of science that he called ‘phenomenology’. This was a precursor of what I call ‘The Awareness Principle’, albeit one not by any means fully carried through in principle . Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger, took up Husserl’s critique of the anti-philosophical and thereby also essentially anti-scientific nature of the sciences themselves - which do not even recognise let alone question their own philosophical presuppositions - and went so far as to assert that the understanding of science and the truth of the sciences constituted a new religion, if not the new religion.

But Husserl himself had already and necessarily devoted particular attention to the new so-called ‘science’ of ‘psychology’. This was because he recognised that by reducing mind or consciousness to something merely to do with the subjective ‘inner’ consciousness of human beings, ‘psychology’ played a central role in concealing a most basic philosophical understanding: namely that the supposedly ‘real’, ‘objective’ or ‘natural’ world surrounding us - our ‘outer world’ or ‘life world’ - is also first and foremost a field of consciousness , i.e. something no less subjective than the inner world of the ‘psyche’. In the so-called ‘science’ of ‘psychology’ therefore, one can see the basis of the final triumph or Endsieg of the ‘natural’, ‘physical’ or ‘social’ sciences over philosophy and phenomenological science’. I understand ‘phenomenological science’ as a philosophica l science: one which begins with the recognition that the most basic ‘scientific fact’ of all is not the existence of a universe of a pre-given cosmos of ‘physical’ objects and events, but rather a universal field of subjective consciousness from and within which all things and all beings come to exist or stand forth ( phusis ) - not only in and for consciousness but as manifestations of consciousness. In other words the worldly or ‘objective’ side of phenomenal consciousness is nothing ‘noumenal’ or inaccessible to consciousness, but is consciousness itself in all its infinite manifestations. This is the new form of philosophical ‘pan-psychism’ I articulate as ‘The Awareness Principle’ - a unified field theory of awareness which does not reduce subjectivity or awareness as such to either the private property of individual subjects (their ‘inner’ psychological world) or to a product or epiphenomenon of any externally perceived phenomenon in the form of a ‘physical’ thing or ‘object’.

The banishment of this most basic understanding through the invention of ‘psychology’ as a ‘science’ - one dealing purely with a realm of ‘inner’ subjective experiencing or else with ‘outer’ or ‘objective’ forms of human behaviour - and the subsequent proliferation of different schools and methodologies of ‘psychology’ - was thus a decisive historic step in ‘the global annihilation of philosophy’. So also was the loss of an authentic and aware relationship to language - and its replacement by a memetic use of words (including words such as ‘psychology’ and ‘science’) in which their meaning is taken as ‘given’ and not in need of deeper questioning which transcends their consensual and memetic use - something which cannot be achieved by the creation of neologisms or new linguistic ‘codes’ but only by ‘bracketing’ otherwise unquestioned words and terms in inverted commas.

It was only in psychoanalysis, despite its creation of multiple new terms or neologisms, that some resonance was maintained of the root meaning of the word ‘psychology’ itself, i.e. understood not merely as some scientific domain with the soul or psukhe as its theoretical or introspective ‘object’, but rather the soul’s own speech or logos - expressed for example in the speech or ‘word’ of our dreams.

Heidegger was aware also of another dimension to “The End of Philosophy” advanced by the sciences - namely a geopolitical dimension aimed at the total eclipse of all historical traditions of thought - in particular, but not only the European tradition - and/or their colonisation and commercialisation by a totally a-historical language, one that purports to be scientific or even
spiritual (New Age spiritual pseudo-science) or even ‘universal’ - but in essence serves a global
agenda . This agenda can be thought, as Alexander Dugin does, not just as the end of thinking
but the end of historical-temporal awareness per se . In other words the term ‘Endtime’ can be
understood here as the End of Time , to be replaced by the New Age ‘Power of Now’ (for which
one should read: ‘The Ruling Power of Now’, i.e. the hegemony of U.S. military, financial,
corporate, cultural and, above all, linguistic imperialism.

The centre of resistance to the global hegemony of the New Age ‘Church of Science’ (of which
‘The Church of Scientology’ was the most perfect trans-national and corporate symbol ) has now
shifted from Germany to post-Soviet Russia , from Catholicism (which has now succumbed to
the Big Bang theory and other such scientific nonsense) to Orthodox Christianity - and from a
long-dead and purely European past to a new Eurasian future . That is why the proposed subject of Husserl’s Prague talk in 1935 - “The Mission of Philosophy in our Time” - must now necessarily have a geopolitical dimension. For if thinking does not have such a dimension, it has already taken sides with Oceania (NATO and the crescent of Atlantic sea-powers including Britain and the U.S.) in opposition to Telluria (the land power with Russia as its heartland) and Eurasianism.

As I write these pages, an international congress on ‘Trans-Personal Psychology’ is due to be held in Prague [28th September to 1st October 2017] - the heart of Europe. Yet of the 100 speakers lined up, most of them hail from California - that well-spring of depoliticised New Age ‘spirituality’. And as shown by the main themes of the congress - they also clearly lack the slightest knowledge, not just of Husserl’s Prague lecture and of phenomenological science, but of the entire tradition of Graeco-European thought and philosophy. For them, the very term ‘trans-personal’ has no larger social or economic, political or geopolitical dimension whatsoever. As for the term ‘psychology’ it is almost certain that none of the attending ‘psychologists’ - or their audience - are even aware that the terms psyche and l ogos were first conjoined by Heraclitus in the 5th century BC - in what still constitutes the founding statement and founding truth of anything that may be called ‘psychology’:

You will not find out the limits of the psyche by going around it, so deep is its logos .”

The logos that Heraclitus refers to, however, is not any form of academic or theoretical verbiage, but more like a wordless ‘reverberation’ or ‘resonance’ of the psyche, like that of an earthquake or underwater depth charge. For according to Heraclitus this logos can be understood even before hearing it.

"Although this logos holds forever, men fail to comprehend it, both before hearing it and once they have heard."

Hence an important saying of Heraclitus: "Listen not to me but to the logos ."

Today, however, the logos that Heraclitus hinted at - the inner resonance and inner speech of the psyche - has been degraded into a set of ‘-logies’ (psych-ology, physi-ology, bio-logy, socio-logy etc), transformed into mathematical ‘logic’, commercial ‘logistics’, and trans-national corporate logos.

Such congresses and their like, together with the rampant invasion of Europe by Californian-style New Age ‘spiritual’ cults and pseudo-philosophies , serve a colonising, commercialising missionary purpose designed essentially to scientise all spiritual traditions and the entire spiritual dimension of human existence - with jargons based on terms such as ‘quantum consciousness’ etc. This is a mission running directly counter to Husserl’s own statements on the mission of philosophy, and his recognition - already in 1935 - that whilst philosophies still exist, philosophy as such has ceased to be. And since the end of the 20th century, it would be hard to name more than a handful of remaining and genuine philosophers, i.e. thinkers who continue to recognise philosophy itself as the most fundamental science - and, in the form of ‘phenomenology’ and ‘phenomenological science’ - also the most scientific of the sciences. As for the great philosophers of the 20th century, Heidegger himself was appalled to observe after the publication of Being and Time , that even his own questioning relationship to the history and language of philosophy - as well as his deep philosophical use of everyday German terms such as Dasein - led almost immediately to the reduction of such words to mere philosophical memes or catchwords, i.e. into a philosophical jargon associated or identified with his thinking - but requiring no deep or questioning study of it. Indeed, today the actual study of philosophy, by which I mean a deep and aware immersion in and engagement with the thinking and primary works of particular thinkers - has been rendered redundant. Instead Wikipedia and secondary academic works and writing about philosophy and philosophers have almost entirely replaced philosophy and philosophers. When students or casual inquirers think it enough to merely ‘look up’ a philosophy on Wikipedia to understands or ‘decode’ its language, then philosophy - as a questioning awareness of language itself - has indeed suffered its final, most ignominious and global annihilation.

A final but important question. What do today’s ‘spiritual teachers’ have to say about philosophy? Particularly those of an Eastern ‘spiritual’ persuasion (ignoring for the moment the fact that the very words ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality are Latin and have no equivalent in Eastern languages).

It is no accident that teachers of Eastern or New Age ‘spiritual traditions’ rarely mention philosophy at all - because their knowledge of philosophy and capacity for philosophical questioning is as low as that of today’s scientists. On the other hand, and unlike the scientists, they nevertheless presume to offer a whole variety of pseudo-philosophical worldviews and teachings. This is what makes philosophical questioning more of a threat to these ‘spiritual teachings’ and their teachers that anything else - and why they prefer to speak of such ‘spiritual teachings’ in the first place - rather  than philosophy. It seems philosophia - ‘love of wisdom’ - has become an ‘unword’ for teachers of ‘spiritual’ wisdom. Instead New Age teachings in particular pay homage to the assumed authority of modern physics and the sciences, making sure that they employ catchwords such as ‘quantum consciousness’ - and ubiquitous talk of the central concept of ‘energy’ and ‘energies’ - in order to make use of this authority to gain credibility and present themselves as ‘up to date’. As for leading physicists such as Stephen Hawking on the other hand, the position is much clearer. For him Philosophy is dead”, long supplanted by the sciences.

Caught in the annihilating pincer of ‘spiritual teachings’ and the sciences, philosophy has become unmentionable and its European tradition an object of annihilation. This position is often justified by claiming that philosophy and its tradition is merely to do with “pure thought”, i.e. without any philosophical question at all of what exactly is or could be meant or understood by the words ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’ - a question which is not only the subject of an entire book by Martin Heidegger but lies at the heart of his entire life work as a philosopher. Together with the annihilation of philosophy within and by the sciences, we therefore cannot overstate also its annihilation within or by so-called ‘spiritual teachings’ - whether of an Eastern or New Age variety. For whilst there can be no doubt that what are presented today as ‘spiritual teachings’, even if not philosophy , are indeed ‘philosophies’ - many of which even claim to present the ‘highest’ philosophical truth - even a cursory examination of the language of these philosophies reveals it to be based on philosophical presupposition long since questioned and undermined in the ṕhilosophical tradition itself. Thus, one often sees a concept called the ‘I AM’ raised to the status of an absolute reality - but without any awareness at all that it reduces Being as such (the ‘AM’) to a mere linguistic or proposition predicate or property of a subject, self (the ‘I’). Similarly, just as the concept of a universal spiritual ‘Source’ by-passes the fundamental philosophical question of Being - of why any thing or being ‘is’ at all - and instead answers it by reference to a being, for example by reference to the pre-given existence or ‘is-ness’ of this presumed being which is taken, as God is in the monotheistic religions, as a being which is the ‘Source’ of all beings. This is not philosophy, which Gilad Atzmon relates to what he calls Athenianism - questioning thinking and dialogue. Instead it is its opposite - a quasi-religious form of dogmatic Jerusalemism - even if under some Eastern or quasi-scientific guise. All this raises another, even broader cultural question. This question is: what is it in today’s ‘egalitarian’ culture that makes anyone, not just spiritual teachers or ‘gurus’, feel they can represent themselves as anything at all - whether as philosophers or as painters, scientists or artists, novelists or musicians - but without feeling any need or even taking any interest in first of all studying philosophy (...or painting, art, science, art, literature, singing, music etc.) and without first of all undertaking a long and studious apprenticeship in any of these disciplines? And let us not forget also that learning philosophy in particular is not the same thing as having studied a few philosophies or so-called spiritual ‘traditions’. Instead the main thing is that what is taught as spiritual teachings should make easy and uplifting reading, requiring not only no effort of thought or critical reflection, but also not even the most basic awareness of the primary philosophical significance of questioning the basic words and terms (most often mere standard jargons or phraseologies) in which such teachings and their concepts are couched. Instead such words and terms become spiritual catchwords such as ‘self-realisation’, ‘awakening’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘higher consciousness’ or ‘higher vibrational energies’ etc. - ad nauseum - with the meaning of all these catchwords being taken as given and self-evident to all, and therefore not even in any need of any deeper meditative questioning at all, i.e. not in need of philosophy at all.