alanjjohnstone
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Gandhi had a saying “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.”However, it is how you define greed that is the questionThere is a Situationist-influenced pamphlet called the Right to be Greedy (word-play on Paul Lafargue's Right to be Lazy)https://libcom.org/library/right-be-greedy-theses-practical-necessity-demanding-everything"Greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of communist society. The present forms of greed lose out, in the end, because they turn out to be not greedy enough."Free access and the accompanying argument that distribution will be to each according to self-defined needs, i think has been pointed out by Robbo and others on another thread that this is not actually literally true.It will be society as a whole which will define what needs are that are to have free access, not the individual. What is consumed will be socially decided in what and how much and even where production of various things will take place.We are of course not talking about a central command economy imposing limitations but social democracy being applied to allocation of necessities.
It is very strange how Israeli jet crashes according to the media but every other country's plane that is hit by AA fire are shot down.
Wolff from my reading of him has always relied upon the State supporting his Workers Self Directed Enterprises for it to "supplant" capitalist private-property society yet as a Marxist academic he fails to acknowledge the class basis of the State – that it is the executive committee of the capitalist class which means it will defend and protect their interests.For it to become an organ of the coops, fostering and nurturing the WSDEs, means the workers capturing the control of the State – a pre-requisite for building socialism and that means most likely an intense bitter class war if the workers' will is to prevail and they are to succeed. If this is so, then why does he believe we should make all this effort and sacrifice for a half-measure. If we can take political action to dislodge the capitalist class from power, why do we stop short by leaving intact the main foundations of their system? Does he lack confidence in the workers capability to run society as a whole, but hold to the idea they can only run one producing unit of it?Surely he understands that his "transitional" system will itself become its reason to be, a bulwark against any further progress towards socialism. Just as the conservative Catholic Church and the Franco fascist government intended for his pet-hobby-horse Mondragon.There are a myriad of issues with cooperatives under capitalism but i merely wished to raise a problem that i have not seen Wolff address. It is as if he thinks WSDEs will arise in a political vacuum, much like the technocrats of Zeitgeist.
A serious development?Israel V. Iranhttp://www.dw.com/en/israeli-warplane-crashes-amid-cross-border-escalation-with-syria/a-42527757
August 1968
Quote:Is Britain overcrowded? This is a big myth. In any event, the figures for population per square mile do not allow us to say that an area is inhabited by too many people because it cannot sustain them. There is another factor which must be taken into account: the man-made means of production. In 1801 there were 12 million people in Britain, in 1851 22 million, in 1901 38 million and today about 54 million (of whom less than one million are “coloured”). Britain has been able to sustain an increasing population because of the ever-increasing productivity of the man-made means of production. In fact, of course, it does not make sense to take one part of the world in isolation from the rest. Britain, through the international division of labour, is part of the world economy and the earth could sustain many times its present population. If the politicians who talk about Britain being overcrowded really believed it they would also be advocating increased emigration, birth control, abolition of family allowances, the end of tax discrimination against single people and childless couples, and so on. They would also be instituting internal migration controls (giving us all “passes” as in Russia and South Africa): if Wolverhampton or London were overcrowded then they would be trying to stop people moving there from Glasgow and Wales as well as from overseas. But they are not, are they? This “overcrowded” argument is pure nonsense. It is only in vogue because it appears to be a respectable, rational argument for an immigration colour bar.http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/02/letters-should-immigration-be.html
Another's misfortune is always an opportunity for others in capitalismhttps://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/feb/09/how-artemis-hit-bulls-eye-by-betting-on-stock-market-collapse
Sorry, but it has to be said.After espousing democracy for over a hundred years, it is yourself who should be taking lessons from ourselves. A search of our archives will confirm to you that democratic control of society is our goal.However, be aware that political democracy is not in itself our aim but as a tool to establish what was once called industrial or economic democracy
"All seven indicators are consumption-based measures that account for international trade."So it isn't actual consumption needs. As someone said…if it can't be quantified it isn't counted. They are conting import/export totals. Their figures includes all the waste built into the operation of capitalism.For instance, the US armed forces alone consumes the same energy as Nigeria. That is an easy figure to get. But what about the energy, the extraction and delivery of ores to the smelters to get the steel for the tanks and armoured vehicles etc etc and that's before their manufacturing of them.But we aren't just talking about the military but the whole buying and selling system with its duplication of products and duplication of effort.What happens if all those numbers are taken out their sums. I'd guess that sustainability is redefined at a higher level of living standard than Vietnam. Private Fraser is only an optimist if he thinks we can achieve socialism before the whole capitalist edifice takes us to the abyss…
I also read this article and took it as a warning that capitalist expansion will be unsustainable. Another gloomy confirmation for Private Fraser that the world is doomed.How it applies to a socialist society is moot, for the study authors' did not include such a system in their remit.
Justin Trudeau has told a woman at a university event in Edmonton to say "peoplekind" rather than "mankind." http://www.dw.com/en/justin-trudeau-criticized-after-telling-woman-to-say-peoplekind-rather-than-mankind/a-42474955
“Over the next 25 years, Scotland’s working age population will grow by only 1 per cent, compared with an increase of 25 per cent in the pension age population. It is welcome that people are living longer but this underlines the importance of migration to our economy." – SNP minister Fiona Hyslop
Rather than start a new thread, does this news item suggest that we will see divestment from fossil fuels and leave the oil in the soil that the envirronmentalists so wishBP's annual profits more than doubled in 2017, largely thanks to the global increase in oil prices. The oil giant made $6.2bn ($4.4bn), up from $2.6bn made during the previous 12 months. Chief executive Bob Dudley hailed it "as one of the strongest years in BP's recent history". BP opened seven new oil and gas fields during 2017 and its oil production rose 12% to 247 million barrels of oil per day…The company's ability to generate cash remains prodigious.http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42957685
As someone who experienced several strikes against Total Quality Management (TQM) i don't think this is what is being saidCost-benefit analysis, surely, will have a part to play in allocating resources, including labour.As first suggested in Buick's and Crump's book, some kind of “points system” might be used to evaluate different projects facing society – cost-benefit analysis which is not dependant upon dollars and cents calculations. Under capitalism ( also read Parecon) the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs advantages and disadvantages of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms, but in socialism a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead. The points attributed to these considerations would be subjective, in the sense that this would depend on a deliberate social decision rather than on some objective standard. In the sense that one of the aims of socialism is precisely to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time/money, cost-benefit type analyses, as a means of taking into account other factors, could, therefore, be said to be more appropriate for use in socialism than under capitalism. Using points systems to attribute relative importance in this way would not be to recreate some universal unit of evaluation and calculation, but simply to employ a technique to facilitate decision-making in particular concrete cases. The advantages /disadvantages and even the points attributed to them can, and normally would, differ from case to case. So what we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value but one technique among others for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.
Don't teach your granny to suck eggs, LBird.I do respond to such replies in a similar fashion as yourself but i will heed your particular phrasing of it and hope it resonates better than how i say it.I merely wished to point out that despite the statement's sentiment, our position itself is accused of passivity and always has been.
Erin Gibbs, portfolio manager for S&P Global Market Intelligence, said: "This isn't a collapse of the economy. This is concern that the economy is actually doing much better than expected and so we need to re-evaluate."http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42956234Don't ask me to explain that.
