alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
“We’re getting more and more used to a situation in which private money can buy everything, from political parties to media to individuals,” he says, noting that the very people who offer hundreds of thousands of euros for an hour-long lecture are also those who, in the name of “economic rationality”, refuse to pay their cleaners a living wage.
The central thesis of his earlier book was that private wealth was destined to outstrip economic growth, meaning that, without progressive taxation, the rich were bound to get richer and richer, leaving the rest of society ever further behind. Some of his assumptions and conclusions had their critics, but the quality of writing and breadth of vision was almost universally admired.
Piketty is not a Marxist, though it’s untrue, as is sometimes said, that he has never read Capital. Whereas Marx believed that the history of society is the history of class struggles, Piketty argues that human progress is the product of the struggle for equality and education in which ideology plays an instrumental role. “What I mean,” he says, explaining his differences with Marx, “is that your class position is not enough to determine your view of what’s the best system of property, education, taxation. We need ideas and ideologies and we need to take them seriously.”
The problem with many leftwing ideas is that they have often been wonderful in theory and rather a letdown in practice. Piketty notes that not only was Soviet communism a disaster in itself, but it also undermined the appeal of leftwing thought in general. Just about its only success, he suggests, was in helping to contain capitalism. He attributes the fall of the Soviet Union to the unleashing of “hypercapitalism” across the globe, though in truth that development had already been under way for a decade before the USSR’s demise.
The point that he repeatedly comes back to is that between 1950 and 1980 nearly all western democracies had high levels of taxation, and yet it was a period of economic growth. While this may be true, recent attempts to impose high tax rates have not enjoyed success.
One notable failure was Francois Hollande’s imposition of a 75% supertax in France, which was said to have led to falling tax revenues, capital flight and a brain drain before being withdrawn. “They did not really try it,” he says with a dismissive Gallic shrug.
Iranian society is physically and politically sick, the youngest son of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the principal architects of the Iranian revolution has said. Yasser Rafsanjani reflected on the sweeping gains made by the conservatives on a record low turnout of 42 % at the weekend’s parliamentary elections.
Yasser Rafsanjani said: “People vote when they think it will create change. The people felt they kept sending a message to the government but they are not heard. In the last elections, people voted for a parliament to bring change, and it did not happen but there are forces outside the parliament – politicians, military guards – that limit the power of the parliament.”
He added: “Democracy has become a eunuch. It has been castrated. Our society is somehow sick. We are infected by viruses … such as coronavirus but also a societal virus where people do not respect others.”Yasser said throwing people into jail for their beliefs was not the answer. “My father always said you can eradicate bodies but you cannot delete ideas.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/23/iranian-society-is-sick-says-son-of-former-president
Sturgeon said there was “not a shred of evidence” to support the idea that Scottish jobs had been undercut and called for more powers over employment law to ensure fair working conditions.
She said: “There is much evidence to the contrary including the views of the migration advisory committee – that immigration and EU immigration in particular does not drive down wages, either in the Scottish economy or in the UK economy.
“Migrants make a net contribution to our economy. If we have a problem of low wages or working conditions not being what they should be, that’s about poor regulation in the UK economy.”https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-51600062
The Sanders “Zinoviev letter”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/21/bernie-sanders-russia-aid-campaign
twc, you will have to address these comments to the Socialist Standard and enquire if the present editors stand by that 1987 reply.
Not all those involved in the production of the Socialist Standard bother to visit this forum so you may well have to submit a formal letter to the Socialist Standard
The gunman who shot dead at least 10 people was a far-right eugenicist
The justification for killing entire populations was made in “explicitly eugenicist terms”
The red scare
Sanders = “communism”
“I can’t think of a way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation,” Bloomberg said. “It’s ridiculous. We are not going to get rid of capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It’s called communism. It just doesn’t work.”
I previously predicted Bloomberg to come storming through. On his debate performance, that will not be the case.
So we will indeed find out if money spent on campaign staff and clever ads can win out in the end.
“Of course, the precise details of the revolutionary change will differ from country to country depending on the political conditions (where legal ballots do not exist or cannot be trusted the workers must create our own) and it will also differ in accordance with different creative ideas about what needs to be done before the establishment of socialism which will emerge as the socialist movement grows. In this sense John Crump is quite right to say that “the millions of men and women who will be the architects of the new world” will decide the exact means by which the revolution is to occur…
… We should build on whatever ideas we have in common. It is pointless for workers who share a vision of a stateless society based on the uncompromised principles of socialism to be endlessly squabbling over the texts of the nineteenth century. If the ranks of the revolutionary movement can be swelled on the basis of principled unity it would be wrong for anyone to delay the process…”
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/02/debate-is-there-common-ground-between.html
I read this critique of co-ops and found it of interest (the format requires fixing unfortunately)
“If this Proudhonist brand of “market socialism” were to somehow come into existence, it would probably degenerate into a hierarchical, class-stratified set-up. The losers in the market game would be stripped of their means of production by bankruptcy — maybe they made mistakes, didn’t innovate, got too far into debt, etc. Once a class of propertyless people emerge, there would be nothing to keep the remaining co-ops from exploiting them as wage-labor”
“…in Scotland, which is projected to have more deaths than births over the next 25 years and whose population growth over the next two decades has been expected to come entirely from migration, industry leaders say people already in the country won’t be able to fill roles that would otherwise go to migrants…”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-51550421
But of course, the seasonal employment of farm labourers which has had its numbers raised recently. The existing agricultural worker scheme will be quadrupled to 10,000 a year to bring in temporary foreign workers at harvest-time.
As well as “youth mobility arrangements”, which allow 20,000 young people to come to the UK each year.
And again with little or no protection explained
“We need to act on it”
Is the “we” the collective we as in the working class as a whole
Or is it the “we” as in the SPGB/WSM
And, of course, we have to wait until either of the “we” decide upon just what sort of action.
Yes, and Dietzgen and Pannekoek suggested much the same that ideas are as part of the material world as physical matter. Or am i mistaken?
But to stick to the point…we don’t have socialism because people don’t want it because they are imbued with the capitalist ideology, ruling class ideas prevailing …and so far the contradictions created by the capitalist system which TWC expects to break down this hegemony of ideas are not sufficiently experienced or expressed enough. So do we wait?
All very interesting, TWC, but I will put to you the same question I left for those in the anarchist and left communist groups to answer.
“We no longer are communicating with our audience. We aren’t connecting with people. Tell me why. Tell me how we can.”
I’m not an economic determinist but believe that people make their own history, albeit “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” and “…conjure up the spirits of the past to their service…” and that “…the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue…”
We have all the objective material conditions for socialism. What is missing is the will to establish it and that has become even more remote even though the necessity for socialism has grown even more imperative, in fact some would say socialism is now an existential need for humanity.
All I am doing is searching for an answer to why the world socialist movement has not developed and progressed and is very likely disappearing.
I exclude no possibility and that includes that perhaps we have been mistaken in some particular aspects of our analyses.
Am I wrong in trying to identify the reasons for the very obvious failure of the Socialist Party to convince our fellow-workers of the need for socialism, and our failure to explain how capitalism’s innumerable contradictions as a socio-economic system has not produced a working class with the socialist consciousness required to end it.
Our D of P may well be an wonderfully worded document, but “The social revolution…cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The revolution…must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.”
