alanjjohnstone
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Small family farmers may well use landless casual seasonal workers at sowing and harvest times. But i doubt they are farm labourers in the sense of wage workers. And they are most likely non-unionised.
Nor can we ignore the caste system which is reflected in ownership of land with dalits being without. Nor the imbalance in gender, too.
There deep strutural problems with Indian farming – productivity with other comparable countries shows how bad it is. But the problems are very much infrastructure…transport, storage, wastage but perhaps the most crippling is never-ending debt.
This is a useful over-view of capitalism operating within Indian farming by some group called the Progressive Organization of People
https://countercurrents.org/2020/12/make-victorious-the-historic-farmers-struggle/
It is a complicated issue with ramifications. I’m not sure how informed our Indian companion party may be as it’s presence is in Kolkata and i’m not sure what rural contacts it has.
Is the 19thC definition of peasant the same as for today where the Indian small farmers are resisting their full integration into the world economy of food commodities?
As much as 67 percent of India’s farmland is held by the marginal farmers with holdings below one hectare, against less than 1 percent in large holdings of 10 hectares and above, the latest Agriculture Census shows. The average size of the holding has been estimated as 1.15 hectare.
Some would say this is India’s Enclosures and the increased financialisation of farming where corporations have the advantage is a disguised land-grab.
Or is it their version of the repeal of the Corn Laws? If so, will it lead to lower prices for food? The argument has not been made that it will. In fact the danger is increased costs of living.
Legislators in Honduras are pushing a constitutional reform through Congress that would make it virtually impossible to legalise abortion in the country – now or in the future. The measure is called a “shield against abortion.” The new measure is likely to pass within the next week. In 2017, legislators voted on a reform that would have decriminalised abortion in the case of rape or incest, when the mother’s life is at risk and when the foetus could not survive outside the womb. But only eight of 128 legislators voted in favor.
Honduras is one of four countries in Latin America that prohibits abortion under any circumstance, and the only one to also prohibit emergency contraceptives, even in the case of rape.
In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Hillary Clinton called for “new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable and tracking the activities of extremists such as those who breached the Capitol”.
However,
“…to expand the government’s national security powers once again at the expense of the human civil rights of the American people would only serve to further undermine our democracy, not protect it,” Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said.
The first of many studies i expect tobe forthcoming.
“Our evidence indicates that – from a sport psychological perspective – the absence of supporters has a substantial influence on the behaviour of players, staff and officials. Without the external factor of supporters, players and staff stayed calm more often and got less carried away with arguments and discussions, which decreased by 4.7% and 5.1%, respectively.”
19.5% fewer “emotional” incidents, such as arguments or altercations, in matches without fans. The results also showed a stark decline in interactions involving the referee. In the pre-pandemic half of the study, the official was dragged into 39.4% of emotional incidents, but with no incitement from the stands, that number fell to just over a quarter, 25.2%.
It found that “self-reproach” after a player missed a goalscoring chance went up in games without fans.
A response on our blog
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2021/01/freedom-of-speech-belongs-to-whoever.html
Matt, recriminations about our ineffective committees has been raised many times before in all the appropriate places and until our circumstances change such short-comings will sadly persist. I mentioned it here to remind forum contributors of the blog’s availability, which too often is over-looked and not linked to as often as it should be.
Many of us have been warning that the fall-out over the Capitol riot would spill-over on to the left-wing’s freedoms to protest.
We see here that the campaign to de-platform the Right on social media poses a threat to all political activists.
Yet again the ‘liberal’s’ self-righteous indignation leads them cutting their own throat.
Once more our ‘rights’ and ‘liberties’ are merely at the convenience and the whim of those who hold the real power.
Again, shame we do not have an effective media committee to issue a press statement to take advantage of this event. The blog will have to be an unsatisfactory substitute with a post, based on this thread.
“it’s interesting how much emphasis there is in the article on negative aspects of population reduction”
For capitalism a fall in numbers but accompanied by an ageing population is a problem.
Less people means a smaller market to sell to but it also means less people of working age supporting more who aren’t being productive.
China suffered it with their one-child policy and call it the 1-2-4 problem…one worker supporting his or her parents and also grandparents. It being made worse by the lack of an effective state welfare system in China to take up the burden of looking after the elderly.
Capitalism does offer solutions to this under-population. Increased productivity of those who are working. Reducing the dependency by raising the retirement age. Encouraging more immigration of younger healthier workers. To some degree or other, all three options are being introduced but not with equal priority. Japan, for instance, has done very little to invite immigration.
But we also have to note that even with fertility drop the population still grows because of what is called population momentum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum
Socialism will not suffer any unwelcomed consequences of a reduced population and we would welcome it, in general.
But our current political problem are those who wish to embark upon eugenic programmes supposedly to protect the environment. Delve a bit deeper and it is racist family-planning policies aimed at the undeveloped and developing countries with the purpose to protect the high levels of, and very profitable for capitalism, consumption and GDPs of the industrialised developed nations. Also with the land-grab and the mechanisation of plantation farming and high-tech extractive idustries, much of the labour-force is superfluous and surplus to requirements so push them into the mega-city slums and engage in service work.
Nothing changes
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-state-venezuela-idUSKBN29O2PE
Biden’s administration will continue to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the South American country’s president, Anthony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state told members of the U.S. Senate.
Meanwhile, the EU makes a face-saving distancing from that policy
The EU has dropped its de facto recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.
https://www.ft.com/content/aa372f3a-a1ac-41da-848a-46355fc3ec4f
An analysis of more than 11,000 extreme weather events showed nearly 480,000 fatalities since 2000, with Puerto Rico, Myanmar, and Haiti the worst-hit countries.
Just last weekend, central Mozambique was hammered again by another tropical storm, Eloise, which wrecked thousands of buildings, ruined crops and displaced almost 7,000 people.
Another instructive article.
Keep telling the white working class that they’re the victims of inequality, but fail to rectify the underlying structural problems, and frustration will legitimately spread. It’s time for this government to move beyond the rhetoric of levelling up, to invest in education, towns and new industries across the entire UK. Only then can the multi-ethnic working class even begin to believe Liz Truss’s claim that “equality is for everyone”.
The melting of ice across the planet is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speeding up the fastest.
Thomas Slater, lead author and research fellow at the centre for polar observation and modelling at the University of Leeds, warned that the consequences would be felt around the world. “Sea level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century,” he said.
It has been the same for more than 250 years and will remain like that for many more years, or decades. The USA working class is a clear indication that Marx overestimated the taking of class consciousness by the working class
In my dark moments of despair i agree 100% with your analysis. But when i’m more optimistic, i see progress if not directly towards socialism, at least indirectly contributing to the building of it.
We can see the weaknesses of our fellow American workers, as we can for British, European. But we can point to the the social movements that have arisen, yes, even the right-wing ones. Political dissent has been at the heart of America since 1776. Always it has been misdirected and manipulated, but it is there and it exists.
When socialists call for unity, we mean ALL workers. Our efforts are to educate not just those who call them progressive liberal leftists, but the 74 million who voted for Trump as an anti-Establishment symbol.
Perhaps it will take decades and as many scientists have said, time is not on our side. But the white nationalist christians are a declining percentage of the population, as i think you yourself have said in other posts. The demographic pattern of America is changing.
Assumed to be natural enemies, these groups united in their calls for economic justice.
And worth watch
The other scenario which the Guardian doesn’t discuss is the socialist one. That the division between town and country dissolves.
Every large city is made originally up of separate villages and hamlets. We can envisage the de-urbanisation. Isn’t there many town-dwellers who aspire to a cottage in the country? With industry more easily de-centralised in socialism, retail and commerce competition of the High St shopping reduced and more sustainable public transport links developed, concentrations of population can be avoided.
The greening of the cities with parks and gardens.
My home city had city-farms, sheep grazing in its centre. It also had a wide network of allotments. We already have urban foxes and a few badgers plus other wild-life. On more than one occasion while walking the dogs early morning i have come across deer.
We are often described as an over-crowded, crammed-close planet but when people and suitable land are looked at in proportion, there is plenty of room for all of us and plenty to spare.
