alanjjohnstone
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Here’s the audio recording of the SPGB debate with an Anarcho-Capitalist
Hosted online by ‘Blue Politics’ on Discord
Bill Martin (SPGB) and Keith Knight (an anarcho-capitalist YouTuber)
Turkey and Greece have announced they will conduct rival naval exercises off the Greek island of Crete. Turkey sent out an official warning to other vessels to avoid the area.
Biden’s presidency
“Two things I would say if I was advising an administration,” Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, said during an interview with CNBC Friday. “One is there’s no new Green Deal, there’s no Medicare for All”
A useful
overview of hinduism
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/making-hindu-india-200820104806024.html
Equally, we should also ask why many former Eastern Bloc countries have adopted right-wing nationalist views.
The ex-GDR regions of Germany have now a larger proportion of neo-fascists than West Germany.
We have Hungary’s Orban.
In Russia, there has been a return to the Eastern Orthodox Church and the canonisation of Putin and Stalin.
Or Poland’s return to Catholic Church conservatism.
I find it interesting though that despite the State’s rapprochement with the Pope, Cubans have not flooded back to the chapel (but i might be wrong so i stand to be corrected)
Kamala Harris’s father, Jamaica-born economist Donald Harris taught for most of his career at Stanford.
He had some insight into society
“It stretches the imagination to see why,” he wrote in 1972, “black workers should in any way be better off under black owners than under white owners.” If radicals did not work to dismantle or reform the capitalist system, Harris argued, they would accomplish little for black people. “The colonial analogy might be seen as playing a useful ideological role for those who stand to benefit from the ‘transfer of power’ which this is expected to bring about,” he wrote. “It plays another role also for those whites who see the black struggle as a vicarious means for waging their own, failing thereby to understand the nature of their own struggle as well as that of blacks.”
Obama’s Kenyan father too had a wider understanding of the world
As a young government economic planner in Jomo Kenyatta’s postcolonial administration in Kenya, Obama Senior issued a withering report claiming that the government was simply replacing foreign elites with Kenyan ones, expropriating the land for its private use, and paying lip service to “African socialism” when it intended to pursue nothing of the sort.
It seems indeed in both these families, the apple did fall well away from the tree
Despite the risks, tens of thousands took to the streets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53882062
Lukashenko takes a leaf out of Trump’s book
“The defence ministry issued a statement saying the army would take over the protection of war memorials.”
Be careful for what you wish for. When Facebook commenced to ban the right-wing, the liberals and progressives did not protect free speech.
Now Facebook is turning on the Left.
https://truthout.org/articles/facebook-has-begun-purging-accounts-tied-to-anti-fascist-groups/
When about to lose power, play the foreign enemy card,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53877953
He said troops in Poland and Lithuania were readying themselves, and that he was moving his armed forces to the country’s western border.
Having suggested that the Democratic Party used quasi-religious images in Biden’s speech, it seems that he was not religious enough for the Republican. Trump falsely accused the convention of dropping the name of God from the pledge of allegiance,
I don’t know how we jumped to horse-drawn buggies
There is a debate on the over-consumption of goods in one part of the world and the deprivation effecting the reduced consumption in other parts. There does exist an unequal carbon foot-print between the developed world and the undeveloped one.
We have a throwaway consumerism contributing to the excessive use of resources and an increasing amount of waste, much that is not capable of being recycled or reused.
Then we have many people who cannot access even the most basic necessities of a decent life. We can divert the resources expended in the military and other purely capitalist industries but is that going to be suffice to level up much of the world…without some levelling down…such as different diets, less changes in clothes fashions, and dare i say it, less need for electronic gadgets.
There is a debate on economies of scale and localism, that cannot be fully decided in advance.
The link Matt provided doesn’t call for the rejection of technology. But even if it did, there is a good case against the personal ownership of cars and for public transport. As we say, to those who argue what if i want a yacht … only if the community permits its construction and time-sharing one is a lot more logical. Some things people just won’t get.
What is annoying is it is a confused analysis of the global economy, given justification for local capitalism to exploit local resources (deforest the Amazon). Evo Morales of Bolivia used similar arguments as does Bolsonaro of Brasil
Not sure what it meant in Point 3 the privileges of formal employment V. informal employment but it is still thinking within the parameters of a capitalist welfare state.
But i think we should focus on the essay’s main point, and the one i was drawing attention to, there are different approaches to get the appropriate fit. We can’t shoe-horn every tradition into the one universal model. There will be local and regional differences and initiatives happening.
The USA becomes isolated. But the extent of its economic power to go alone should not be underestimated.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/socialism-or-capitalism-heres-the-truth-about-chinas-economy/
Wolff on China and state-capitalism and transitions
Is socialism really centred on management as Wolff concentrates upon
“The dichotomous employer/employee relationship inside enterprises must give way to a democratically organized community of workers who collectively employ themselves as well as direct the enterprise. That economic foundation—what communism concretely means—offers us a better chance to realize the goals of liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy than capitalism or socialism ever could.”
Isn’t socialism about society directing production?
I’m sort of surprised by what Wolff leaves out. If state-capitalism was a transition, then so are corporations (joint-stock companies) according to Engels.
