ALB
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This sounds as if it might offer sone hope too from the point of view of bringing the killing and destruction to a quicker end, but then it could be just another politician’s promise:
I don’t know how reliable these figures are (or could be under the circumstances) but if they are, they offer sone hope, with a quarter wanting negotiations to bring the war to an end as soon as possible — higher for women and for those living in the fighting zones.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/403133/ukrainians-support-fighting-until-victory.aspx
I thought allowing the market to operate freely was what Truss, Kwarteng and their advisers from the Institute for Economics Affairs wanted. It did and trashed their economic nostrums.
So now we have the proof that freemarketeers are no more capable of making capitalism work the way they want than are the interventionist reformists. Capitalist market forces, not governments, decide what happens. They control what governments can do, not the other way around.
Here’s another Tory, the MP Robert Halfon, telling it as it is or at least as it appears to him. Accusing Truss and her freemarketeers of trashing “blue collar conservatism” (whatever that is, but it doesn’t sound worth preserving), he said:
“I worry that over the past few weeks, the Government has looked like libertarian jihadists and treated the whole country as kind of laboratory mice on which to carry out ultra, ultra-free market experiments.”
Actually, at the time the Party gave Lenin full credit for realising — and saying — that in the circumstances capitalism was the only way forward for Russia. It showed that, on this point, he did understand Marx’s theory of history (as opposed to many of his admirers in Britain and other countries that what was being established in Russia was socialism).
Where we criticised him was his illusion that a socialist revolution had been imminent in Europe immediately after the first world slaughter and the undemocratic, dictatorial nature of Bolshevik rule.
His obituary in the March 1924 Socialist Standard was more nuanced than some of our later articles on him:
When they sent Head Office a copy, they added a covering note:
“Hi there,
We assume (and reference in the piece) that you’d disagree with this piece. Let us know if you’d like to discuss this disagreemnt. FWIW We don’t think it is terribly important politically, but clearly cared enough to write up our thinking, so happy to discuss 😄
Cheers”.”Not read it yet, but they seem to think that there is a difference.
“Mohammed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser at Allianz, the asset manager, said the UK’s mini-budget was an example of a country exacerbating existing market volatility via misguided policies.” (Times today)
“Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis. But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis.” (Marx, Capital, Volume 3, chapter 30)
Do we need to revive this thread as another one possibly hits the dust?
At least it shows that freemarketeers are equally at the mercy of how capitalism works as leftist reformists. The Institute of Economic Affairs, from where Truss got her ideas, is just as unrealistic in thinking that capitalism can be controlled as Labour left wingers.
The present fiasco is further confirmation that governments can’t control capitalism, but that they are just navigating by sight in the choppy waters of capitalism..
Using inflation to mean an increase in consumer price indexes (rather than its original and more helpful meaning if an over-issue of the currency), he is right. The increase in the rate of increase of these indexes did start before the Ukraine war and was attributed mainly to supply problems in the aftermath of the covid epidemic and was expected to slow down and stop when these supply problems were overcome. But the Ukraine war, and the economic war the West declared on Russia has made it worse and longer lasting.
The US has raised its interest rates which has attracted more lenders. This has led to the dollar (which is the main currency in which states now hold their reserves) going up in value compared with other currencies.
The revaluation of the dollar means in effect a devaluation of all other currencies and so makes the imports they have to pay for in dollars (such as oil and gas) more expensive. So the “Global South” is being affected in the way Ross says. But not just them.
Incidentally, he is wrong about Keynes when he writes:
“As John Maynard Keynes explained, it is much easier to cut real wages by high inflation than by directly reducing money wages.”
Keynes did not advocate high inflation but a mild inflation that workers wouldn’t really notice. Obviously workers would recognise a high inflation and react, as they are now.
Jeremy Corbyn is the only British MP to speak out against the government’s war policy in Ukraine. In every other NATO country, including the US, there is a significant minority of parliamentarians opposed (except in the revanchist Baltic states who now have a free hand to oppress their 20-25% Russian-speaking minorities).
“Well, for what it’s worth, Truss says she remains “absolutely” committed to not making public spending cuts.”
Oh yes?
Was just reading about that myself. More backtracking. It was the obvious thing for a capitalist government to do (most others have). It has even been suggested that the energy companies concerned prefer a temporary windfall tax to signing unfavourable longer-term supply contracts.
Another obvious thing to do, to assuage ‘the markets’, is to cut back government spending on social “benefits” and other reforms. I doubt they will abandon increasing military spending or removing sanctions on Russian oil and gas. So Guns before Heating is the most likely outcome. We will see.
I thought I would check what the Socialist Standard of the time said about that demonstration on 18 November 1910 on which the musical is based.
Nothing as it happens because the December 1910 issue was taken up with the general election that month. There was an answer to a question about the franchise, saying that enough workers already had the vote for a socialist-minded working class to win control of political power, prefacing this with “The Socialist Party is not opposed to Adult Suffrage”.
The demonstration was not in favour of votes for women but for votes for rich women only (Votes for Ladies, as it was known as). Here is how Wikipedia describes the Bill they were demonstrating in favour of. The MPs behind the Bill
“proposed legislation that would have enfranchised female householders and those women that occupied a business premises; the bill was based on existing franchise laws for local government elections, under which some women had been able to vote since 1870. The measure would have added approximately a million women to the franchise; it was kept to a relatively small number to make the bill as acceptable as possible to MPs, mostly Conservatives.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1910)
I wonder if the musical brings out that point.
It is probably not without significance that after the much wider but still limited extension of the vote to women after the War, Emmeline Pankhurst became a Tory and had been adopted as a candidate for them just before she died in 1928.
That the Suffragettes struggled for votes for women is one of the biggest political myths of our time. Their official policy was votes for women on the same conditions as men. At the time about a third of men didn’t have the vote either. So perhaps as much as half of adult women would still have been left without the vote.
Sylvia, on the other hand, was for a while a Left Communist who clearly understand what socialism was. Even before that, unlike her mother and sisters, she campaigned for adult suffrage.
A well-argued case on behalf of the “isolationist” section of the US capitalist class that Bijou mentions:
https://www.newsweek.com/us-needs-change-course-right-now-ukraine-opinion-1749740?amp=1
Musk, too, seems to be talking sense for once.
Will the currently politically dominant section of the US capitalist class really allow — and arm — the Ukraine regime to ethnically cleanse Crimea and the Donbass, with the massacres and streams of refugees this will involve?
Interesting, even intriguing, thesis. That it’s a conflict between two different models of capitalism — classical Western-style capitalism and “political capitalism” where the ruling capitalist class use the state to further their own personal interests (and so have an interest in extending the state’s borders and so a bigger state to feed upon).
I am not sure it works as an explanation of Russian expansionism. There are obviously geo-political and economic factors involved too.
And Putin as a Bonapartist like Louis Napoleon in France in the 1850s and 1860s?
Stephen says Ishchenko has moved to Germany. A wise move as the regime in Kiev is unlikely to look favourably on the view that the war there is a conflict between two different models of capitalism.
