ALB
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Fair enough. I see the point you were making. More generally, what we are talking about here is language not so-called “ethnicity” (the successor to the discredited term “race” and so objectionable on the same grounds). “Ethnonationalism” as promoted by both the governments of Russia and Ukraine is a species of racism.
I don’t think so. Most of them came from Scotland and spoke the dialect of English spoken in the lowlands. Some of them do consider themselves “ethnic Scots”.
Ulster Scots in fact has the same status in Northern Ireland as Irish Gaelic, so it does.
The voting papers in Donbass and Lugansk were in Russian only, but the ones in the other two regions were in both Russian and Ukrainian. I would guess that in Donbass and Lugansk the vote would be an expression of popular opinion as they have not been part of Ukraine since 2014.
What is “an ethnic Russian” anyway? Speaking Russian has got nothing to do with biology. Being “Russian” is a political identification and there are plenty of people in Ukraine whose mother tongue is Russian who don’t consider themselves “ethnic Russians”. Zelensky’s mother tongue is said to be Russian and he’s from the Zapo whatever you call it region (and it’s different in the two languages). He probably still speaks it in private with his wife and kids.
Next they’ll be referring to the Protestants of Northern Ireland as “ethnic Britons”.
Incidentally, Israel annexed the Golan Heights (from Syria) and East Jerusalem without even bothering to organise a referendum, sham or otherwise. But then it us “our” breaker of the “international order”.
Yes, she does and has to for the other reason you give (how are the Yemonon communities to get steel and MRI scanners). Since she rules out money these “exchanges” would presumably be in kind, like barter. But if production in socialism was organised at regional and world as well as local level (as envisaged in our “Socialism As A practical Alternative” pamphlet) then her communities could just order such things without having to offer anything in “exchange”.
It would be less of a problem for the larger, ecoregions (the size of a medium-sized country) envisaged by Murray Bookchin in his “Towards and Liberatory Technology”.
I would have thought that there would, even in the future she envisages, need to be some organisation above the local level and also on a world level. A permanent organisation like the WHO at world level would be useful to coordinate dealing with a pandemic, wouldn’t it? And what about the International Postal Union or the World Wide Web? Even Kropotkin envisaged the former continuing.
At one extreme of what socialist society could look like is Zeitgeist. At the other is this. Anitra doesn’t indicate how small the “Yenomon” (No Money, after Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” if you haven’t worked it out) communities are to be but the background music suggests smaller rather than even medium-sized, I imagine.
Given where we are in terms of societal development, technology, urbanisation and population density, I would have thought Zeitgeist were more in tune with the spirit of the time.
having said that, the thing about socialism is that, once humanity has got rid of capitalism and the operation of its economic laws acting on humans like uncontrollable laws of nature, humanity will be in control of its destiny and can decide what it wants.
Anyway, the idea of a future moneyless society is catching on. There’s not much that we could disagree with in the first couple of chapters of her book Beyond Money where she puts the case against capitalism and its production for trade (as she puts it). It’s reviewed in this month’s Socialist Standard here:
Looks as if I should have gone to Kings Cross. It seems that Enough is Enough rather than Don’t Pay has won the franchise to organise these protests. Predictable, I suppose, as the unions are bigger and have more experience at organising these things than community activists.
That’s what Wednesday’s paper said. I suppose the clue could have described them as “reformists” rather than “reformers”.
Went to the one in Windrush Square, Brixton. Have to report that it was a flop. Only 4 organisers turned up. No burning of energy bills. Maybe people in London went to the ones in Kings Cross and Lewisham instead.
Anybody go to one of the other ones?
Interesting answer to a clue in the crossword in Tuesday’s Times:
Russian reformer disheartened monk disturbed by even his reforming (9)
I don’t agree that a tax on land values is incompatible with capitalism. Hasn’t it been implemented in a number of places? The argument against it is not that it is a fantasy but that it wouldn’t make any difference to wage earners.
In so far as it replaced other taxes it would mean that capitalists would have to pay less tax and so keep more of their profits. More of the burden of taxation would have been passed on to landowners. It wouldn’t have any effect on wages.
I don’t disagree that it is a good approach to ask those who are against ground-rent because it is a property income why they are not also against profit.
According to this,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain_debates
we last debated them in August 1991 at the offices of their paper “Land and Liberty”. The subject was: “Who was right: Henry George or Karl Marx”. Their speaker was Fred Harrison of the “Centre for Incentive Taxation”. Harrison is still a leading propagandist for Georgism in Britain:
https://shepheardwalwyn.com/fred-harrison-author/
There was also a debate in November 1950 against the Henry George School of Social Science.
In that 1889 debate between Hyndman and George, Hyndman made some good points:
“The mean of production are monopolised by the capitalists, with the landlords as their sleeping partners, and those who have no other property than the force of labour in their bodies are compelled by that monopoly to sell it for practically a subsistence wage.”
“We do not particularly hate landlords more than capitalists, or capitalists more than landlords. The alligator and the crocodile; it matters not which it is from the point of view of those upon whom they feed (Laughter.) We wish to get rid of both, and what we are aiming at is the abolition of the wages system – (Hear, hear.) – and that aim can only be accomplished by the abolition of private property in the means and instruments of production including the land. (Hear, hear.)”
“The landlord, after all, in this country, and even in America, is but a sleeping partner in the process of expropriation which is carried on at the expense of the workers. (Cheers.) If you kill the sleeping partner and leave the active one at work what better are you? (Hear, hear.)”
George, on the other hand, looked backwards, promising workers that his Single Tax on ground-rent scheme would give them free access to land to work on their own. Mind you, at that time the radical wing of the Liberal Party thought promising “three acres and a cow” was a vote-winner.
Here (for those able to get round the censorship) is Putin this afternoon playing the anti-western-imperialism card:
For those who can’t get to read his speech, here’s an extract on this point:
‘The West is ready to go to any length “to preserve the neocolonial system which allows it to live parasitically – and factually to pillage the world thanks to the power of the dollar and the technological dictate. To collect tribute from humanity,” Putin said.’
I think we can guess how the government is going to get itself out of the hole they dug themselves into — they are going to cut back on government spending on social measures (it’s not going to be on spending more on the military). So it will only be a few weeks after promising to deliver “world class public services” that this has gone by the board. Normally it takes a little longer for such promises to be exposed as empty.
Fair enough but I am not sure that starting a conversation about Henry George would work today as a way of introducing socialist ideas to those only marginally interested in politics. At most it would be appropriate for discussing with Georgists. Most people today will have never heard of him.
In the last decades of the 19th century it was different. Georgism was a mass political movement. George himself got 30 percent of the votes when he stood for Mayor of New York in 1886. At that time it was useful to try to persuade his followers that his criticism of landlords also applied to capitalists. In fact this worked and many Georgists did become socialists.
Here is one of the debates that went on at the time:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hyndman/1889/07/tax-debate.htm
We have also debated them ourselves more recently. But today’s Georgists are not half so radical as George himself or his followers of years ago. They are more concerned with the minutiae of reforming the tax system so that land values are taxed without alienating those who are freeholders or leaseholders of the land on which their house stands.
