ALB
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Yes, to give the old witch doctor his due, he’s put his finger on it again, just as when last June he said that the Russian invasion was “perhaps somehow provoked”:
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops
I wonder if US is plotting to overthrow him.
RT are running this news item. Reproducing it in full for those subject to censorship. Presumably it is true in the sense that he said and, hopefully also, in the sense that there are a growing number of people in Ukraine who want to stop the war.
Kiev security chief names ‘dangerous tendency’ among Ukrainians
More citizens want their government to sit down at the negotiating table with Moscow, Aleksey Danilov has admitted.
A growing number of Ukrainians would like to see Kiev launch peace talks with Moscow, the head of the National Security and Defense Council, Aleksey Danilov, admitted on Thursday. The top security official claimed the development was a “very dangerous tendency.”
“[One should] bear in mind that those [people advocating talks with Russia] are growing in numbers. It is a very dangerous tendency when even people in western Ukraine are starting to talk about such things,” Danilov said during a live appearance on the Ukrainian talk show ‘Greater Lviv speaks’, as cited by RIA Novosti. He also referred to a local politician in the western Lviv region who reportedly called on Kiev to sit down at the negotiating table with Moscow.
https://www.rt.com/russia/572725-security-chief-dangerous-tendency-ukraine/
The “West” seems to be trying to overthrow the government in Georgia and install a pro-Western one just like they did in Ukraine in 2014. If they succeed in doing that expect Belarus to be next on their agenda.
Couldn’t these also be stored on the World Socialism Movement site here:
More accessible there.
At the time they said it was Russia. Now they are revealing that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline was organised by some Ukrainian oligarch. I wonder why they are revealing it now.
I notice from those world bank stats that Ukraine at number 118 was behind Russia in 2019 ie before covid. Bangladesh was 108 and Haiti 163.
To tell the truth, I am dubious about that claim by the Economist. Do they give a source? Why do they say “young men” rather than “males”? Are there stats by age? If so, where? And March 2023 seems rather early to have stats on the year 2022 ie to take into account the war.
Anyone know?
I notice from those world bank stats that Ukraine at number 118 was behind Russia in 2019 ie before covid. Bangladesh was 108 and Haiti 163.
To tell the truth, I am dubious about that claim by the Economist. Do they give a source? Why do they say “young men” rather than “males”? Are there stats by age? If so, where? And March 2023 seems rather early to have stats on the year 2022 ie to take into account the war.
Anyone know?
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.
