Letters: The true cost of capitalism

Dear Editor

According to the Tories, austerity has ended and, thanks to the imposition over the last eight years of wage freezes and drastic cuts in public services, we are now benefiting! 

How the Tories equate cuts and benefits I don’t know – neither do they – yet they continue to press the capitalist system as our salvation, conveniently forgetting that capitalism caused the worldwide financial crisis in 2008 that brought such great hardship to the working population. Now, we are supposed to thank the system and await the next crisis on the basis that ‘there is no alternative’.

But there is an alternative – and the Tories know it: it is called socialism, and this is why we have been bombarded over the last months and years by a continuous anti-Labour campaign.

The Tories know that the message from Labour, if heard, tells us that there is a better way to really benefit all working people – so great effort is being made to discredit Labour and to silence it. What the Tories will NOT do is alter the capitalist system where power, control and decision-making are in the hands of wealthy investors.

Peoples of these islands have experienced hundreds of ears living under oppressive systems of slavery, serfdom, feudalism and capitalism. These systems enclosed the land belonging to the people; excluding them, creating a pool of labour to exploit by working on the land stolen from them; or, in cotton mills or industrial mines of all kinds, this included using child labour.

The 17th, 18th ans 19th centuries were years of great hardship and semi-starvation; the population struggled continuously to improve working conditions but these were resisted by those in control. often by force.

The working population, skilled and unskilled aided by workers in administration, are the only people who create the real wealth: investors do not but will cream off millions of pounds called profit.

Capitalism, by it’s very nature, cannot survive – but it is capable of inflicting extreme damage on the population of the world.

A. Delahoy,

Silverknowes Gardens