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Although he’s a prize bastard the leader of the Wagner gang of mercenaries has made a telling response to the US government’s plan to list them as a criminal gang:
“Entrepreneur and founder of the Wagner private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin ironically commented on the US statement that the country is going to impose sanctions against his PMC due to its qualification as a “serious transnational criminal organization.” This is reported by his press service in Telegram.
“FINALLY, NOW PMC WAGNER AND THE AMERICANS ARE COLLEAGUES,” THE BUSINESSMAN SAID.
According to Prigozhin, the relationship between his PMC and the American side can now be called “showdown of criminal clans.”
https://earlybulletins.news/politics/226765.html
Yes, (like all armies) the US army is a gang of mercenaries.
The Labour Party is now openly pro-capitalist and proud of it. In a declaration of political bankruptcy Starmer is on record as saying:
“When Labour held a conference for business leaders at Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial hubs, last month, Starmer said the party wasn’t just pro-business but “proudly pro-business”.
He also told world capitalist business leaders and politicians at Davos:
“that ‘the British economy will be open for business again’ under a Labour government.”
https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/959345/is-labour-now-the-party-of-business?amp
Despite all this, leftwing union leaders like Lynch and Graham will still be calling, even if lukewarmly, for workers to vote for the Labour Party in the coming general election. They must know that they will live to regret this as, sooner or later, they will come into conflict with a Labour government over their members’ pay.
The business elite in Britain too want a change of government as the Tories have run out of steam. They are quite prepared to let Labour, as their alternating government party, have a go instead.
Workers should have nothing to do with this. They shouldn’t vote for British capitalism’s other party. In fact they would be well-advised to get their unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party and, in the absence of this, contract out of paying the political level (as we do).
It appears that Russian-speakers are not the only linguistic minority being discriminated against by the Ukraine regime. Hungarian-speakers seem to be getting it too:
Govt official: Anti-Hungarian decisions, actions in W Ukraine unacceptable
People are missing the point the New Scientist writer was making — that the worst case scenario of business as usual and emissions continuing at their 2014 level is now off the table, precisely because business has not continued as usual as governments have taken some steps to try to reduce them.
In other words, average global temperature will not rise to 5 degrees about the pre-industrial level. It still might rise to 3 degrees above it, but that’s not the same. Even so, as he says, a “warming of around 3°C by the end of the century” is “still dangerous, but not hellish.”
To accept that the worst case scenario is not going to happen doesn’t weaken our case against capitalism that, by its nature as involving a competitive struggle for profits between capitalist enterprises from different states, it is unable to deal with global warming and the climate changes it brings in a rational way, and that only socialism, as a world of common ownership and production directly to satisfy people’s needs, can.
It does, however, weaken the case of XR and others that the problem is so dangerous that we should forget about socialism and make trying to deal with it (in effect within capitalism) the over-riding priority.
Apparently, the situation is bad but not as dire as is sometimes claimed:
Here’s is an extract from the article:
“Ten years ago there was a genuine fear that we were heading forcatastrophic warming of between 4°C and 5°C by 2100. Today, those worst-case scenarios are no longer plausible.
The story goes back to 2014, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. To make this baggy monster tractable, the scientists boiled themdown to four: one very high scenario, one very low and two in between. The very high one assumed that there would be no climate action whatsoever and that use of fossil fuels would continue on an upward trajectory until 2100. It became known as the business as usual scenario, or BAU.
BAU quickly garnered more scientific and media attention than the other scenarios, in part because it extrapolated the situation at the time, but also because it made for sensational scientific papers and apocalyptic newspaper headlines. A BAU world would have been a “truly catastrophic hellscape of a planet”, says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of NGO Berkeley Earth in California.
In the years since, however, the world has changed dramatically. Progress on renewable energy technology and implementation of climate policies have bent the emissions curve downwards towards warming of around 3°C by the end of the century. Still dangerous, but not hellish. And further progress isn’t just possible, but promised. Recent analyses show that, if countries achieve the net-zero pledges that they have already put on the table, warming will stay under 2°C.
As a result, the BAU scenario is no longer even remotely plausible, says Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nor is the next-worse of the four. “It looks like the apocalyptic scenarios, as of today, are off the table,” he says.
If anything, says Hausfather, BAU was implausible in the first place. It wasn’t just a conservative extrapolation of current trends, but a turbocharged one that assumed, for example, that the use of coal would increase fivefold by 2100, with no climate mitigation action whatsoever.
And yet, the now-obsolete BAU scenario continues to dominate scientific discussions of our climate future. According to a recent analysis by Pielke, the two most recent reports by the IPCC actually increased their emphasis on that worst-case scenario.This bias is also reflected in scientific journals. An analysis by Pielke’s colleague Matthew Burgess found that in the aquatic conservation literature, over 90 per cent of papers published between 2015 and 2022 use the BAU scenario – and about a third use it exclusively. It leaks out into the news media too. “The picture that we paint in terms of science, assessment, journalism and policy is dominated by the most extreme scenario,” says Pielke.
This puts climate scientists on the horns of a dilemma. Do they admit BAU was never really that plausible and risk deniers saying “we told you so” and spreading further muck about climate modelling? Or do they keep pushing BAU and risk it becoming obvious they are hawking a straw man, opening the door to… deniers saying “we told you so”? ”
We face the same dilemma — of seeming to argue that capitalism (responsible for climate change) is not as bad as some people claim (because it can and is doing — in fact has to do — something about it).
Yes, looks like the Ukrainian lie machine has been caught out again. In any event, either he knew what had happened or his suggestion shows that there is some healthy scepticism even in Ukraine about what their lie machine comes up with.
Just heard on the news that a Ukrainian helicopter has crashed on a nursery. Be interesting to see what story they cook up to explain who caused that.
Here, for anyone who wants to go further into Marxism and Law, is a Party member (at the time) arguing with an SWPer on Pashukanis’s theory of law:
https://legalform.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/warrington-standing-pashukanis-on-his-head.pdf
For the record, here is the viewpoint of the exiled (on release from gaol in a prisoner swap) leader of the main opposition party in Ukraine (now banned) He says they’re a lot of people in Ukraine who want a peaceful settlement. That could be true but they will have to keep their heads down as calling for a settlement with Russia is a crime.
Anyway, here it is:
I have now got and read the new translation. It’s only a pamphlet of less than 40 pages. It has led me to revise my opinion of its content. It’s a brilliant satire, on a par with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon , of the obsession with work to keep the capitalist economy going and of the workers’ demand to be given work by capitalists as a “right”.
There are some mistakes in the translation, the worst of which is translating “femmes galloises” as “Welsh women” rather than “Gallic women”. Not sure if it is a complement or an insult to Welsh women to say that they are as fierce as Asterix’s female Gauls.
Also, the introduction takes too literally Lafargue’s description of what an “idleness regime” would look like, as if that was what he was advocating.
But anyway hopefully this will introduce more people to socialist/communist ideas (Lafargue uses the word “communist”).
He keeps on referring to the so-called National Debt being “our” debt and thst “we” have to pay the interest on it. But it is not our debt, something the working class owes. It is the debt of the capitalist state. Its function, within the capitalist economy, is to cover government spending which would otherwise have to be covered by higher taxation. Parenti seems to imply that it could be covered by the government simply creating more money. The government could do this — and governments have — but this doesn’t create any new wealth. If overdone it depreciates the unit in which wealth is expressed (inflation) and so causes a rise in the general price level. Which, if tax thresholds remain the same, amounts to an increase in taxation.
I have always thought that the best thing about this pamphlet was its English title. It was meant as a criticism of the “Right to Work” (The Right to be Exploited) rather than, as the article suggests, part of the campaign for an 8-hour day, which still wouldn’t leave much time to be lazy. Eight hours for the usual six-and-a-half days at the time = a 52-hour week.
We must get a copy of the new translation to see if reads better than the pre-WW1 one. Ordering it now.
This seems plausible (even if it comes from a Trotskyist site). Ukrainian nationalism has always been nasty and there’s nothing like a war for making nationalism nastier.
“…There is no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community.”
Somebody else who thinks that capitalism is the only game in town.
It appears that Just Stop Oil are going to continue their self-indulgent, irritating and counter-productive tactics — counter-productive because most people are already convinced that something needs to be done about climate change, so they are not even raising consciousness about the issue. In fact, as they believe that a way-out can be found without getting rid of the market system they are themselves contributing to the confusion about what needs to be done.
