ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Yes but TASS doesn’t seem to be being censored. I have always had access to it. Just checked I can get Sputnik again too.
We know that they are putting out Russian propaganda and so need to be taken with a pinch of salt but they do provide leads to follow up. Like this one from Sputnik:
But then the BBC, the Grauniad, etc are pumping out NATO propaganda and need a pinch of salt too.
Something has gone wrong with the Western censors. I can get RT again on my phone. I wonder how long this “freedom of the press” that is supposed to part of “Western values” will last.
After coal mines, now it’s wind farms. What will be next? hydro-electricity? Here she is protesting against these in Norway.
By coincidence I am in the middle of scanning a series of articles from the Socialist Standard of 1914 on “The Purpose and Method of Colonisation”. The basic argument was that this was not motivated simply by wanting to gain control of resources but also a labour force that the inhabitants potentially were. The author was Rudolf Frank. As he came from Austria (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he was a native German-speaker and in one of the articles he records the argument amongst German colonialists about how best to get the native habitants to work on their plantations. Some favoured direct force. Others favoured hunger:
“The majority of our colonial enthusiasts, of course, would rather see more indirect methods, notably hunger, permanently established amongst the natives, and so get the (sufficient) supply of “motive-power” (at home known as “hands”) into that automatically working way which, as Marx says, is the great beauty of capitalist production. They know that direct and legal forms of compulsion are “attended with too much trouble, violence, noise” and, last but not least, expense; while hunger, for example, is a “peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure,” just as Woermann realises what a great blessing is the existence of a large industrial reserve army.”
The British colonialists faced the same problem but they hit on a third method – a hut tax that had to be paid in money, thus forcing the inhabitants to work for wages in the mines.
The whole article will soon be available on this site.
But isn’t that the basis of capitalism? The means of production monopolised by a minority class, meaning that the rest are forced by economic necessity to work for them to get money to buy what they need to live — or go hungry.
Bijou, another parallel would be Ireland a hundred or so years ago when a substantial proportion of the population in the North considered themselves British rather than Irish and didn’t want to be included in an Irish state.
The outcome was Partition, which is probably the only realistic outcome of the present conflict in the Ukraine. Which, having failed to re-install a pro-Russia government in Kiev, is what the Russian rulers seem to be prepared to settle for.
The Ukrainian rulers would just have to put up with it, though no doubt there will plenty of revanchists who will want to re-incorporate the “Five Oblasts”.
We have been aware of Neurath’s view for 40 or more years, as in this passage from an article published in 1984:
“There were three possible reactions to Von Mises’s criticism:
1. To accept that money would have to continue to be the unit of economic calculation in “socialism”;
2. To argue that labour-time could be the unit of economic calculation “in an economy where neither money nor exchange were present”;
3. To argue that in socialism “calculation in natura [in kind] can take the place of monetary calculation”.(….)
Otto Neurath (later prominent as a logical positivist philosopher) argued that even labour-time accounting would be unnecessary in socialism (state capitalism). In an “administrative economy” production plans could be drawn up and executed directly and solely in real physical quantities:
‘The theory of the socialist economy knows only a single economic agent — society — which without profit-and-loss accounting, without monetary circulation — whether metallic money as now or labour-money — and on the basis of an economic plan, organises production without using a unit of account and distributes the means of subsistence according to socialist principles.’ (O. Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung, Berlin, 1925, p.84)
As the last part of this passage indicates, Neurath too argued that consumer goods could be directly allocated to people in kind.
(…)
In the end, then, it was Otto Neurath, with his view that socialist society could organise the production and distribution of wealth directly and solely in kind, who was on the right track.”
Having said this, Neurath did seem to have a rather centralised view of how production and distribution would be organised, with free distribution rather than free access.
I see Starmer is making wild and extravagant promises as to what a future Labour government under him is going to achieve, the best being this one:
“Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 by the end of a Labour first term.”
This assumes that his government can control the way the capitalist economic system works – that it can bring about not only “growth” but “sustained growth” for a period of 5 years, ie, that the graph of Britain’s GDP will be a straight upward line with no ups and downs.
But no government can “secure” that. And of course his government will have no control either over how the economies of the other 6 members of the G7 will perform.
Everything will depend on world market conditions and no government can control or even predict what these will be over the next 5 years.
Only a fool — or someone who takes the rest of us for fools — would claim that they could. We know he’s just making another empty, politician’s promise. He probably does too.
Putin doesn’t half talk crap as well when he departs from the real reasons behind the war, as when he depicts it as a conflict between Traditional Religion Russia v. The Decadent West:
“They distort historical facts and constantly attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church, and other traditional religions of our country,” Putin said of Western nations supporting Ukraine.
“As it became known, the Anglican Church plans to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God … Millions of people in the West understand they are being led to a real spiritual catastrophe.
“Look at what they do to their own people: the destruction of families, of cultural and national identities and the perversion that is child abuse all the way up to paedophilia, are advertised as the norm … and priests are forced to bless same-sex marriages.“Those two were grandstanding too but, to be honest, Putin sounded more plausible (in capitalist terms of course) when he spoke of Russia defending itself against the US and EU’s attempt to deprive his state of its “historic lands” than Biden’s crap about the war being between “Democracy v. Autocracy”.
Ukraninian “democracy” at work. Opposition party banned and its assets seized:
Looks, then, as if Labour is not going to have too much trouble winning back its traditional Catholic vote !
Revealing interview in today’s Times with Beata Javorcik, the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. She said that:
“Ukraine was ‘not a model of governance prior to the war’ and would need to carry out deep-rooted reforms to weed out corruption and create independent democratic institutions”.
So all that propaganda we were told about the need to support Ukraine as part of the democratic world from attack by an authoritarian regime was just a lie. She is admitting that even today Ukraine isn’t that, but the US and the EU are still pouring in weapons to help this corrupt and undemocratic regime, weapons which will be used to bomb the civilian population of the Donbass and Crimea. They don’t care because what they want to is to anchor Ukraine into their sphere of influence as opposed to Russia’s.
Well, well. It’s all over. Sturgeon has resigned, apparently under pressure from her MPs who feared for their seats if the SNP made the next general election a referendum on independence.They know this is a loser as so-called “independence” is not what most workers in Scotland can be persuaded to vote for.
So hopefully that’s the last we will hear of the completely irrelevant – in fact crackpot — idea of Scottish separatism. It’s not going to happen and workers there are not going to be led to argue against other over the issue. It’s dead. Good.
The Fire Brigades Union has won an improved offer through the threat of strike action. Which confirms the view that the best strikes are the ones that don’t take need to take place.
https://www.fbu.org.uk/news/2023/02/10/fbu-leadership-recommends-acceptance-revised-pay-offer
Strikes are a trial of strength to test what the market for a particular kind of labour-power will bear. In this instance both sides have worked out what this is without the need to test it.
I suspect that the RMT are holding out for the employers to drop the strings attached before they accept the pay part of the deal on offer.
The government is obviously going to have to back down over the nurses. Fancy the “Royal” College of Nursing being forced into industrial action. This could be what their patron, King Charles, is hinting at their weekly meetings that his Prime Minister does.
