alanjjohnstone
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Israel “reserves the right” to act against Iran, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has said, suggesting that “force” may be necessary to stop the Iranian nuclear programme.
Israel plays the Holocaust card
“Secretary of State Blinken and I are sons of Holocaust survivors; we know there are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil,” Lapid said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/13/israel-reserves-the-right-to-act-against-iran-yair-lapid
Cuba accuses the USA of inciting subversion
The Cuban government on rejected a request by opposition groups to hold a protest on November 15. Officials accused organizers of being backed by the US and of seeking to overthrow the regime.
“The reasons given to protest are not considered legitimate,” the government said in its statement, adding that the new constitution adopted in 2019 states that the socialist system is “irrevocable.”
https://www.dw.com/en/cuban-government-bans-upcoming-opposition-protests/a-59486385
Never read any of her books but she has stirred up a hornet’s nest by supporting BDS and denying an Israeli publisher the rights to translate her latest book into Hebrew although she had permitted earlier works translated.
Now she is being described as an anti-semite by Israeli officials
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-58886915
I half expect that there will now be a call in future for her books to be withdrawn from bookshops and libraries etc.
TS, you have had the last word.
I feel that there is no longer any worthwhile purpose in continuing exchanges with yourself.
I endeavoured once before to withdraw from any engagement but was drawn back down the rabbit hole warren. This time I will remain committed to my intention.
““These islanders have been subject to colonisation and invasion by the Dutch, the Mainland Han, the Japanese and then the Kuomintang army.” Not by the communists. And how many people are we talking about? A few tens of thousands? A couple hundred thousand?.”
Hear yourself, for goodness sake.
And you have the audacity to throw about the word racism when you have just exposed yourself as utterly unconcerned by settler colonialism because they don’t count because they are no longer as numerous as the invaders.
Would you say such things to the First Peoples of America? To the Aborigines and Maoris? To the Hawaiians? The adivasi of India? To the Palestinians in Israel?
I never suggested the deportation of settlers. You made a claim for Taiwan being “rightfully” a province of Mainland China and
I showed that the Han, regardless of politics, hold no claim to Taiwan other than as conquerors and that it is bombastic jingoism for the PRC to assert sovereignty over Taiwan. Should the UK insist that the Irish Republic still be British?As for numbers, TS. I count only one of you. When asked to name any political party you would consider comrades, you came up with absolute zero. Zilch. Not one organisation could you name that you would join or attach yourself to.
Why else other than being a lonely outsider should you devote your time and energy to this forum? Perhaps it is if we accept you live in Japan and are unable to speak the language, you suffer from isolation and even this little contact compensates your alienation.
I don’t ignore history.
The Tsar was deposed by the people, not the political parties in a popular uprising that the Tsarist regime could not contain in
February 1917. Not by the Bolsheviks. They just finished off the job with the Romanov executions.During the crucial period your leader, Lenin, was thousands of miles away in exile ineffective and without influence.
From February to October there existed a transition called “dual power” between the soviets and the provisional government.
Pravda that had an editorial policy of critical support for Kerensky that lasted until the eventual return of Lenin and Stalin was one of the editors who refused to publish Lenin’s letters from Switzerland.
The Bolsheviks ended the influence of the soviets in a series of actions against their independence. It was not the fascists who defeated the workers’ soviets and hence the revolution, it was the Bolshevik Party, once they had no further use of them to camouflage their power grab.
I know my history only too well.
I should add that I had to spend years discarding the “inheritance” I received from my father regards football. He was anti-Catholic and so a supporter of you-know-who in blue, as was all his side of the family.
For your enjoyment, BD
Personally it always annoyed me that on a Saturday afternoon I would be trying to sell the Socialist Standard and hundreds of football fans rushed passed to cheer on 22 men kicking a ball around a field.
I have been to protests and demonstrations where a few hundred expressed their solidarity with others less fortunate, while a few streets away thousands of people, now paying thousands of pounds for season tickets, chanted their support for 22 privileged individuals who because of some talent have escaped poverty.
Oh, I agree on the emotionalism and the passion football stirs in people. I worked long enough and close enough to people not to be aware of it. I also recognise the tribalism and the latent aggression between rival fans involved. We have all witnessed the mindless violence and irrational hatred, particularly at local derby games.
Let’s be honest, sport is the gladiatorial games of bread and circus Rome.
And the pandemic has shown that for a year at least the fan at the stadium is unnecessary for the spectacle and profits.
Having said the above, I leave you with this
I think you don’t quite comprehend the Marxist conception of authority, TS.
Marx uses the analogy of a conductor of an orchestra. Engels refers to the captain of a ship.
We defer to the knowledge, skills and experience of others. We take doctors advice even if sometimes we seek a second opinion.
A teacher, a writer, an orator, is not a leader. The role of leadership is political one where we yield our power and control to others rather than retaining the final say and decision-making under a democratic process, which can be very varied and diverse.
I have already said that the biggest mistake has been having made the revolution, the masses permit the politicians and intellectuals to usurp and co-opt it for their own interests and agenda. It demonstrates that the level of consciousness has not been achieved.
Elitists like yourself, reinforce the bourgeois thinking that workers cannot liberate themselves and require a saviour from a-high for their salvation,
Blanqui said, “Revolutions must take place in the mind before they can be carried out on the streets.”
As Marx said, “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.”
“Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.” explained Rosa Luxemburg.
As Gandhi once supposedly have said, “There goes my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
Another review
http://libcom.org/news/tv-series-review-squid-game-29092021
“Squid Game is a well-made, bloody and accurate indictment of capitalism. Watch it now.”
More Chinese floods, 2 million displaced
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58866854Not seen climate change attributed to the cause but only a matter of time before it is
BD, it is strange how different people perceive others on the internet.
You appear to have the impression that TS is some youthful student type who has adopted certain views that were once very fashionable but now viewed as redundant and superfluous.
Whereas I have the assumption that TS is someone getting on in years, unable to jettison his original entrenched position when they were superseded by improved analysis and new information.
The Left has always assumed that there will be counter-revolution by the threatened ruling class. It is propped up by something Robber Baron, Jay Gould, once suppose to have stated that he could hire one-half the workers to kill the other half.
Marx had observed how the slave-owners of the Confederacy resorted to armed resistance to the possibility of the emancipation slaves. Marx expected a similar “slaveholders revolt” once the working class began to use the political power they had captured peacefully to legally dispossess the capitalists and landlords. It was Marx’s view that, in the end. the working class would have to use the full power of the state machine, including actual physical force, against a recalcitrant capitalist minority, in order to establish socialism.
We do not dismiss such a rear-guard action by the ruling class as impossible but in the key countries, we consider such a counter-revolution as unlikely because our strategy is based upon a majoritarian principles as the CM explains.
“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
Our case is one that is based on the old Chartist axiom, “peacefully if possible, forcefully if necessary?
Our goal is a volutarist society which leads to the conclusion that the means cannot be coercive.
That is a very difficult concept for you to accept, I know that.
The position of the SPGB is that the control of the state neutralises the threat of a recalcitrant capitalist class thwarting the will of a class conscious majority, which is the precondition of establishing socialism. The SPGB reject ALL forms of minority action to attempt to establish socialism, which can only be established by the working class when the majority have come to want and understand it. Without a socialist working class, there can be no socialism. The establishment of socialism can only be the conscious majority, and therefore democratic, act of a socialist-minded working class. In many of the so-called revolutionary situations in the past that majority did not exist within the working class .
Can we prove that achieving socialism requires little bloodshed? The SPGB has perhaps the most thought out argument for maintaining that there is all possibility that socialism can be achieved by little violence. Its been discussed and debated within the SPGB since it began all through the various stands of popular contemporary political currents of the time, from insurrectionists to syndicalism. So far, it has been a matter of the Socialist Party unfortunately saying “we told you so” and that hurts and gives no satisfaction to most SPGB members. We want to be proved wrong and that somehow there is a shortcut to socialism. But we are a miserable lot of gloom and doom merchants, but again at same time, we are rosy eyed optimists too in our views that the workers are fully capable of eventually understanding socialism and organising for it with the minimum of social disruption and upheaval and chaos, normally associated with revolution.
The SPGB case is a valid proposition for the working class to choose or reject and it should not be denied to them though omission or by misinterpretation. The SPGB position is that we deem it as very unlikely that the capitalist class would be capable of resisting socialism violently and have argued that in my posts.
Our view is that the power of dictatorships ultimately comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern. All hierarchical systems require the cooperation of people at every level, from the lowliest workers to the highest bureaucrats. Despots depend on the population’s cooperation and submissiveness – and if the people effectively withhold their consent, even the strongest of regimes can collapse. Without the consent of the working class – either their active support or their passive acquiescence the ruling class would have little power and little basis for rule.
The only place violence comes into the revolutionary process is to defend the new revolutionary system from attack by the ancien regime. Similarly, the political content of a given struggle against capital does not rely on whether the working class has taken up arms against the State. Rather, the political content needs to be judged according to the social relationships forged in the struggle. The only violence in which we should engage is that which is reasonably necessary in self defence
Although we always have the right to use reasonable force in self defence, it is sometimes the wiser course not to exercise that right. Sometimes it’s better to take the hit and make our enemy pay by exposing them publicly. This can be especially effective when the perpetrator has a reputation to uphold. And sometimes the best response to violence is not counter-violence.
One argument in favour of minimising the resort to violence by our movement is that we take damage every time we use it. Even when the use of force is justified, we take damage – it’s just that, in those circumstances, we take less damage by using force than by not using it. We take damage because the use of force encourages the authoritarian idea that might makes right. It disorients people on our side and entrenches our opponents in their positions. The more force we have to use in the course of the Revolution to prevail, the more difficult will be our problems afterwards.
If we must use force in self defence, then let us do it without hesitation and with all vigour necessary to prevail in the concrete situation. But let us not use force to substitute for having insufficient numbers on our side, because that is a confession of political weakness.
What defeated the attempted Kapp Putsch in Germany 1920. The trade unions did. They downed tools. Folded arms rather than taking to arms is an option.
We do not envisage a Red Army or Workers’ Militia but that by holding constitutional power we state clearly in our Declaration of Principles Clause 6
That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.
The working class in possession of the State holds the ability of force to ensure the capitalist class gives up its position of privilege.
