ALB
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Fair enough but you said that the “strike” was being called because the Sunak government had said it was to end the energy price cap from April next year (though they had they were going to replace it with something targetted on just the poorest).
They have extended it, for everyone not just the poorest, but have raised the cap by £500 to £3000 until April 2024.
I am not a Don’t Pay strategist but I would have thought that would undermine to some extent potential support for the “strike”. When you go on a proper strike you don’t necessarily expect to get all you initially say you want.
Anyway, we will see what happens on 1 December. Do it if you want to. I wouldn’t want to stop you or anyone else, even though I can’t see how it can achieve much.
Will Dont Pay be calling this a “victory” and calling off their 1 December “strike”:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/20446961/energy-bills-capped-april-autumn-budget/amp/
Mick Lynch was in Ealing, London, yesterday evening so I went to hear him. He expounded his plan for a “new workers movement” based on the trade unions but bringing in identity groups and climate change activists. It is to be a broad church (he was as dismissive of the Trotskyist paper sellers at the door as he was sceptical about the Labour Party). The strategy seems to be to built up this movement and that will bring the Labour Party to take it and its demands into account.
He said that he and some other union leaders are trying to get the TUC to coordinate action on a single day of all unions in dispute with their employers or the government. In effect, a stealth general strike. Why not? It might work. If you don’t test what the labour market will bear, you will never know. But of course it would be defensive trade union action.
Although none of the speakers (he wasn’t the only one) thought much of the Labour Party, the enemy was seen as “the Tories” and “the Establishment”. One of the speakers, from the teachers’ union, called them “bastards”. He also claimed, to widespread applause, that austerity was a political choice not an economic necessity, implying that it could be avoided if there was a different government.
But could it? If a Labour government is elected it will have to preside over the operation of the capitalist economy and prioritise profits and profit-making, including limiting spending on education, health and other public services let alone not paying public sector too much. Then he can call them “bastards” instead of realising that capitalism cannot offer anything to the wage-working class.
The problem is not the Tories, it’s capitalism.
There is something very suspicious about that missile that killed those two poor sods in Poland. Why is Zelensky denying that it came from Ukraine when everybody else (the US, Poland, Russia) is saying that it did and could only have?
We know that Zelensky makes things up and tells lies to put pressure on NATO to supply his armed forces with more and more powerful weapons, but why would he fall out with his masters over this? Why continue to lie when his masters know he is lying? Why upset them when he knows or should know that without NATO military and US financial support his regime is nothing?
Zelensky caught making things up again just as he was in his notorious “babies under the rubble” claim when a Russian missile damaged a hospital in Mariupol in which no babies died.
Now he has claimed that a Russian missile killed two people in Poland:
It turns out that they were killed by a Ukrainian missile. A case of friendly fire then, if not a Ukrainian false flag operation. Or maybe it was Russia but NATO wants a pretext not to respond.
In any event, the lesson is: Don’t believe a word the man says or what Ukrainian propaganda machine churns out (any more than what the Russian propaganda machine does).
Meanwhile on the other side of Ukraine just over the Russia side of the border three other members of the working class were killed by NATO-supplied missiles fired from Ukraine.
https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/11/15/three-people-dead-after-shelling-in-russia-s-belgorod-region
This is what Wikipedia has on him:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Oliver
He seems a bit of a controversialist (eg over covid restrictions). Not surprising that he has a slot on GB news (“the Farage channel”) given what we know about it and the audience it seeks to cater for, to make profits for those who have invested capital in it, from propagating views these might not necessarily agree with and probably don’t. But it’s a niche market no other profit-seeking enterprise is seeking to profit from.
Their goal is to disrupt narratives and mobilise resistance. That requires building consciousness among those parts of the populace more receptive to their message, swelling the ranks of activists prepared to take part in civil disobedience, and making life ever harder for things to continue as normal.’
That is precisely their strategy. The aim of their campaign is not to stop oil but to build up their following. Their leaders and ideologues (as opposed to their foot soldiers) have the same mindset and approach as the Trotskyists — put forward a slogan that cannot be achieved with a view to those who fall in behind it turning, when it’s not achieved, towards more radical action. In some respects their vanguardism is even more extreme than that of the Trots as their leaders think that they can change the world through the action of 3 percent of the population.
Once again, Alan, you have posted something without introducing it. Anyone reading the post will think that the first two paragraphs are you expressing your own view. It is only because we regulars here know you are a socialist that we know that you weren’t😊
I see that Zelensky is pushing the “mass graves” propaganda again, this time in relation to Kherson:
The term “mass grave” suggests that people have been rounded up and shot. In fact most of the bodies in them will be people killed in the crossfire, including by Ukrainian shells and bullets; no doubt a few will be armed civilians shot by Russian soldiers.
But Kherson city — wisely — surrendered to the Russian forces without the armed resistance urged on by the Ukrainian regime. So nobody was killed in any crossfire. So there will be no mass graves there (unless the Ukrainian regime fakes one).
Nearer the front line and far from the city and on the moving front line there will probably be graves of those killed in the crossfire.
Note that even Reuters says that Zelensky’s claim is unverified, the nearest they can come to say they don’t believe him.
The Ukrainian regime exploits these “mass graves” to the maximum (one has even become a tourist attraction for visiting politicians), both to keep up the hatred of its own subjects for the Russians as sub-human and to win sympathy abroad to bring pressure on governments to keep sending arms — meaning there will be more mass graves.
I didn’t know he was a climate activist. I thought he was a simple anti-monarchist. Sounds as if the Times is using his case to discredit XR and Just Stop Oil. At least they can’t use his case against vegans if he eats eggs or even throws them at people.
Went to leaflet this. Their aim seems to be to build up a mass movement to bring pressure on governments to bring about “climate justice” by doing something to stop climate change.
Some agreed with our leaflet’s title — End Capitalism. One person was against the idea being raised as it might put off people who were for “climate justice” but not necessarily against capitalism. I guess this will be the view of the organisers too. But of course this begs the question by assuming that governments could do something lasting and effective about the threat of global over-warming.
Surprisingly radical leaflet from War on Want which said:
“People say our economic and social system is broken, but it isn’t. The system is rigged. It generates increasing wealth for the already rich and powerful at the expense of the majority of the people on this Earth.”
“Billionaires, corporations and oligarchs measure success by their bank balance, or by share prices, and by holidays in space. Where we see climate breakdown, poverty and injustice — they see nothing but profit.”
“It is the relentless pursuit of profit for the few which is causing the misery of the many, and pushing the planet to the point of no return.”
But then they fall at the last hurdle:
“Stand with us now, and demand a Global Green Deal for People and Planet.”
They are a registered charity. I wonder if at sone point they won’t get done by the Charity Commission for being political. But if they can away with this sort of language as a charity, good luck to them.
Let’s hope so but the Ukrainian nationalists are not likely to agree as long as NATO is arming them. Which means in practice when the US judges that Russia has been sufficiently weakened.
Actually I agree with you that Greta is alright. I wasn’t meaning to criticise her for not using the words “capitalism” and “socialism”, just noting that she hadn’t.
I can see why she would avoid the word “socialism” (and probably always will) because of the baggage that unfortunately has come to go with it. That’s why Peter Joseph explicitly avoids the word, though he doesn’t hold back on using “capitalism”. I wouldn’t be surprised if she uses it in private because that’s obviously what she means and maybe will in public at some point.
I agree that she has come a long way in coming to the conclusion that what is needed is a mass movement for change if there is going to be any change. At the moment she seems to envisage this mass movement as being to pressurise governments into doing something. But, as we know, they can’t because of the nature of capitalism as involving a competitive struggle for profits between corporations and between states and the consequent pressure to be “competitive” in terms of reducing the cost of production per unit of what they are trying to sell.
The Adam Smith Institute claims that she said this (two years ago):
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/greta-thunberg-is-of-course-entirely-correct?format=amp
I can’t find that she said that either. It seems to be what someone else said that she re-tweeted.
But according to this she did say, after being accused of saying “end capitalism”, that all the various isms had failed including socialism:
https://menafn.com/1105125007/Greta-Thunberg-demands-that-capitalism-end
I can see that she would not want to be associated with what “socialism” has come to mean (what we would call “state capitalism” and/or leftwing reformism). All the same, she is still rather vague as to what she thinks the present system should be replaced by.
