ALB
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Truss, in her speech to the UN yesterday, again openly stated that the the current payment-for-energy crisis for workers is due to the West’s siding with Ukraine in the Ukraino-Russian War:
“It’s a price worth paying because our long-term security is paramount. We cannot jeopardise our security for cheap energy.”
There you have it. It’s Guns before Cheap Energy.
I can get RT on my smartphone but not on my laptop. There are some good leads there, to follow up by checking elsewhere of course Like this one:
https://www.rt.com/business/563189-nouriel-roubini-predicts-recession/
If you can read it.
Not too sure about that. There have notoriously been rival Sikh and Muslim gangs in Slough.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/southall-sikhs-attack-muslims-in-feud-1269779.html?amp
Is it any different in principle from Rangers and Celtic fans in Glasgow?
Obviously playing the British “national” anthem was a provocation to supporters of an Irish Catholic football club (as it would be a crowd of socialists) but the reaction is a reminder that opposition to the British monarchy is not necessarily progressive. In this case it was an expression of support for Irish Republicanism, to which socialists are as opposed to as to British monarchism. Still, I suppose it is encouraging that even after a hundred years the British state hasn’t been able to brainwash all its subjects.
We are not the only people campaigning for socialism (as defined). See next month’s Socialist Standard (out next week but not on our website till 1 October). More people are coming to the conclusion that socialism is the way out.
Fortunately the spread of socialist ideas does not depend on our (or their) meagre efforts. Even if we or they disappeared the idea of socialism would still survive. Capitalism spontaneously generates the idea that socialism is the way out because objectively it is. The task of socialists (as those who have already come to recognise this) is to play their part in helping this understanding spread. It is not to convert people to the idea of some ideal society, but to encourage an objective tendency so that it progresses more quickly.
Reformists just muddy the waters. They might have a bit of a case if they combined reformism with propagating socialism (though this has been shown not to work) but they don’t even do this any more; they just accept — and even argue — that capitalism is the only game in town.
Remember, what we are talking about here is not a refusal to pay an unaffordable price increase but a campaign for a “fair” price for some commodity. The first is understandable, and unavoidable for some. The second is reformist and could only be implemented by a government; it certainly couldn’t be by some “grass roots movement”.
(I am assuming here that the demand and campaign is genuine and that it is not a Trotskyist-like “transitional demand”, ie a demand that those promoting it know can’t be achieved and are aiming that, when those they have got to support to the demand realise this, they will turn to something more radical. I could be wrong but we don’t know who or which group is behind it, so we can’t be certain.)
The other point is, if you are into reformist demands, why campaign just for a “fair” price for energy? Why not also for a “fair” price for bread or shoes or or a “fair” rent or even a “fair” mortgage repayment?
Reformism is just perpetually campaigning to try to get a “fair deal” for workers under capitalism but this is impossible because capitalism is based on the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value.
Far more useful is to campaign for socialism, as a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of society’s productive resources with production and distribution directly to satisfy people’s needs.
I see that Don’t Pay is now calling itself “a grassroots movement demanding a fair price for energy for everyone”.
So no longer just a protest against the current increase in the price of gas and electricity bills but a fully-fledged reformist movement.
https://dontpay.uk/articles/day-of-action-1-october/
Not paying the increase because you can’t afford to is one thing but campaigning for a “fair price for energy” is another.
I’m not sure whether that’s a red herring or a wild goose chase. Maybe it’s both.
So it’s true. I always assumed that it was something made up by some anti-socialist journalist trying to be witty.
Interesting that Marx should write of his mother calling him “Karell” which is the Dutch equivalent of the German Karl ( and English and French Charles). She did in fact come from Holland. So I suppose Marx might have been eligible for a Dutch passport. One of his sisters went to live in South Africa where I imagine knowing Dutch might have been useful.
By coincidence, looking for something for the 50 Years Ago column for the December Socialist Standard, there was an article (a reply to a letter) in December 1972 about a similar situation in the past when workers were faced with a huge increase in their cost of living that they could not pay — in this case sky rocketing rents during WW1.
Here what happened:
“On the question of what happened in Glasgow in 1915 having “nothing to do with house building having ceased”, we quote from Housing Finance and Development by A. J. Merrett and Allen Sykes (Longmans, 1965). In the opening chapter they say:
“House building virtually ceased with the advent of war and rents began to rise, particularly in munitions-producing areas. This provoked an outcry such that in 1915 the government passed the first rent restriction Act — the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, 1915. It froze the rents of all unfurnished tenancies (approximately 85 per cent of the total) below certain limits at the August 1914 level, and landlords were virtually forbidden to evict protected tenants save for obvious defaults such as non-payment of rent.”
This passage also makes clear that Braddock’s assertion in his second paragraph is untrue. It is correct only in the technical sense that — of course — tenants could not be forced to pay rent raised above the level permitted by their wages, i.e. to produce money they had not got. The alternative to the 1915 Act would have been for the government to let wages go up to meet increasing rents; instead, the Act restrained wage demands by keeping rents low — and provided also that workers, in Glasgow or anywhere else, were forced to pay them. Braddock appears not to realize that this “blow against landlords”, as he called it in his previous letter, was struck not by the workers but by the government in the wider interests of capitalism.“ (emphasis added).
The parallel with today is that, if nothing was done, workers would have been forced to cut back on food and thus would affect their working efficiency. To maintain this, employers would have to pay them higher wages.
There will be an element of this in the government lowering the cap on energy price rises — this will reduce the pressure on employers to pay higher wages. And it is by no means a blow against either the utility companies (their profit margins are maintained) or the energy producing companies (with no windfall tax they lose nothing).
This of course is not new but was announced by the previous Chancellor in May and will already have been paid to nearly all of those eligible.
It was partly financed by a windfall tax on the profits of some energy companies. In other words, it was partly paid for by that section of the capitalist class, as opposed to being borne by the capitalist class as a whole out of general taxation or borrowing.
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/26/sunak-announces-windfall-tax-energy-firms
Who should pay for further support measures was a big issue in the Tory leadership race with Truss making it clear that it should not be by the energy companies. It will be interesting — and perhaps revealing — to see, when the expenses for the campaign are published, exactly who financed hers.
Yes, Varouflakis makes a valid point. As there is only one electricity grid and only one gas grid (and we could add, only one railway network) creating a market to supply gas and electricity on which different private enterprise compete doesn’t make sense even from a capitalist point of view. That of course is why they were nationalised in the first place and run as a single state-capitalist concern (electricity by a Tory government in 1925).
Apart from that, there are some ideas in what he says that Don’t Pay might find useful in their quest for a “fair price for power”.
The Greens as war-mongerers. We knew they weren’t against capitalism but personally I didn’t expect they would go this far;
But there you are. Maybe they want the tanks to be powered by renewal energy.
Ps can’t we move the marginal (to this thread) dealing with TrueStalinist to a new thread of its own.
The proposal to change the British (or any other, for that matter) capitalist state from a constitutional monarchy to a republic is a complete irrelevance. In fact it must be near the top of the list of irrelevant reforms. Unlike Scotland breaking away (with or without the same king) which it also irrelevant, it wouldn’t even temporarily disrupt people’s life. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference to that whatsoever.
If republicans want a radical, revolutionary change, they should go for socialism where, of course, there won’t be a monarch if that’s their main concern.
