Cost of living crisis

March 2024 Forums General discussion Cost of living crisis

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 319 total)
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  • #232589
    Lizzie45
    Participant

    Biggest squeeze in living standards for a century as millions more face absolute poverty.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cost-of-living-energy-inflation-resolution-foundation-b2156826.html

    #232603
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Just watched a report on worldwide civil unrest set to expand in 2023 over cost of living and energy.

    With the world’s capitalists on the brink of world war, might they not trigger it to offset any chance of the workers getting together against them (the capitalists)?

    #232604
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Doesn’t the UK get most of its gas from the North Sea instead of Russia? The French workers are not facing the extortionate costs we are. So obviously, the British state wants us to hate “the Russians” rather than our masters here.

    #232606
    Lizzie45
    Participant
    #232607
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Thanks.

    #232608
    ALB
    Keymaster

    A Tory ex-minister, Neil O’Brien, has come up with a more radical idea than “A Fair Price for Power” — allowing households to use energy up to given amount free:

    Give households a free fuel quota, ex-minister urges

    #232619
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    I wonder how long it will be before Brits are given the same advice instead of being referred to food banks

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/02/let-them-eat-bugs-uk-urges-hunger-stricken-african-nations-to-farm-insects

    Fiore said he and his team concocted a formula that combines locally farmed mopane worms with cereals and fruits…He said he was sure the dish was palatable, with his research team having conducted consumer taste tests in Scotland, a country long associated with porridge.

    #232622
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Even if the proles here were told to eat bugs, they’d just do it, and blame it all on Russia.

    #232623
    ALB
    Keymaster

    I see you have a high opinion of your fellow proles, but if you write them off you write socialism off too.

    #232624
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Well I don’t see it (socialism) happening, although I still think it our duty to promote it for as long as we live.
    It isn’t that everyone doesn’t have the rational tool for it, but I don’t see it being used, because reason isn’t master, and I think the party is naive in its, well, 18th century-like view of the primacy of reason.

    Why are the poorest and most deprived also the most adulatory and reactionary?

    #232625
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Getting on for 150 years since the party’s founding, and membership has remained the same or less, mostly kept to the offspring of members.
    And today, thousands more flat earthers than there are socialists!

    I also seem to remember a trades union rep rejecting Corbyn’s anti-militarism by saying the British workers’ priority has to be defence of the realm!

    #232626
    robbo203
    Participant

    TM: “It isn’t that everyone doesn’t have the rational tool for it, but I don’t see it being used, because reason isn’t master, and I think the party is naive in its, well, 18th century-like view of the primacy of reason”.

    There is some truth in that Thomas but what is the alternative? We cannot abandon a rational analysis of capitalist society but we can perhaps supplement – or complement? – it with other methods of promoting socialism or, at any rate, values consonant with a socialist outlook.

    Perhaps we need a new thread devoted to exploring what these methods might be

    #232627
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    I agree. There is no alternative. It remains our duty to persist.

    #232628
    ALB
    Keymaster

    “Why are the poorest and most deprived also the most adulatory and reactionary?”

    I am not sure that this is true. According to this book, The Pound and the Fury, reviewed in the March Socialist Standard those in the sink estate the author interviewed thought that the economy was a conspiracy of the rich and powerful to keep them poor, admittedly they didn’t think anything could be done about it.

    https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-pound-and-the-fury/jack-mosse/9781526158802

    I agree with Robbo that this is not the thread on which to discuss how supposedly demoralised and useless the working class are just as the biggest fightback since the miner’s strike is about to kick off.

    #232629
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Being put in “jobclubs” etc. several times for us unemployed “scroungers”, I found my fellow jobless, much worse off than me, very very Tory.
    And every homeless man i’ve met has boasted of his military exploits and told me we need the draft back.

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 319 total)
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