Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Peter Gowan and Thomas Hanna write about the urgent need to free people from the market forces which currently trap them in precarity and debt:

A flourishing and prosperous society that works for all, not just a privileged few, requires a foundation of universally accessible goods and services. For generations, this concept appeared to be gaining traction in the UK and around the world. Popular demand and tireless organising led to the introduction of education, healthcare, and other universal services, as well as infrastructure and facilities that were publicly owned and accessible to all.

However, in recent decades these gains have been under attack. The neoliberal experiment holds universalism and public ownership in contempt. It envisions a world in which the market is embedded in every aspect of people’s lives and everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. As part of this experiment, some public services have been dismantled and sold off to the private sector. Others have seen steep rises in user fees and means testing for access. The results have been both predictable and devastating. Rising economic and social inequality, entrenched poverty, deteriorating infrastructure, and environmental devastation to name but a few.

...

(T)he bedrock of Universal Basic Services also provides protection for the unemployed by ensuring that, even when someone falls through the cracks, they have access to the same basic services as everybody else. Its message is: we must decommodify the things people need to survive.

The vision of Universal Basic Services necessarily involves an increase in the size of the democratically planned and publicly owned economy. A truly socialist policy cannot allow the rich to pay for better services than anybody else – which is why the Labour Party is now also committed to ending the educational privileges of the obscenely wealthy through nationalising and integrating private schools.

- And the BBC focuses in on Labour's plan for free personal care for people over 65 as an important element of the basic services which everybody should be able to expect.

- Meanwhile, Leslie Young reports on a new poll showing 9 out of 10 Canadians support a national pharmacare program. But Gamechangers warns voters not to settle for the Libs' pale imitation of full pharmacare.

- Jane McElevey discusses the need for climate justice to be built on an alliance between the environmental and labour movements to ensure workers share in the benefits of a just transition. And Sharon Riley reports on the challenges facing communities which have been built around fossil fuel production.

- Finally, Ronald Wright comments on environmental excesses as just the latest in a series of progress traps - and warns of the consequences of relying entirely on unsustainable systems.