ALB
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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.
This is the wing of the old Militant Tendency that stayed in the Labour Party after the other lot left and tried to steal our name and who are now appropriately known as SPEW. But they were prescribed by the Labour Party last year after Starmer revived the “bans and proscriptions” of a previous Labour Party era.
Might be interesting to go along to see what they are up to but not sure about paying to hear Trotsky regurgitated.
Judging by their paper sellers at demonstrations, they seemed to have attracted quite a few young people. I can’t think why. But as somebody once quipped, “left to themselves, students can’t develop beyond a Leninist consciousness.”
Thanks for sending me a copy but what has happened to Ishchenko? Has he been rounded up or forced into exile?
Trump agrees with the Pope:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-blames-us-almost-forcing-putin-invade-ukraine-1750145?amp=1
I must confess that I am surprised at the extent that the US-led capitalist bloc is prepared to go to weaken capitalist Russia — besides imposing pain on ordinary people, they are sacrificing the “neo-liberal world order” by abandoning free trade and disrupting the international payments system. It doesn’t make ordinary capitalist profit-making sense. They are imposing pain on themselves too.
I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that it has to do with the US capitalist state wanting to maintain its world domination. I say reluctantly because this is what the “anti-imperialist” left say. But they seem to be correct on this point, even if their support for any capitalist state opposing US imperialism is wrong.
Can anyone think of some other explanation for the capitalist West apparently acting irrationally from a capitalist profit-seeking point of view?
I would expect more and more people in this country to come to realise what Patrick Cockburn says in today’s i paper (and which many in other European countries already have):
“Liz Truss and her ministers keep saying that the worldwide cost of living crisis is the result of ‘Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine’. But it would be truer to say that the economic turmoil is the result of an ill-considered decision to wage economic war against Russia which was never likely to work”.
In other words, we are suffering a cost of living crisis because of the West’s deliberate policy. We are collateral damage in the struggle between the capitalist West and capitalist Russia over into whose sphere of influence Ukraine should fall. The government thinks that this pain is worth us suffering so they can achieve their aim. And we are expected to put up with it.
Here is quite a good summary of Gesell’s views, from which it is clear that he had nothing in common with socialism. He wants “stamped money” while we envisage a social system in which money would be redundant.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-strange-unduly-neglected-prophet
ps PeterFrank, we ourselves are not “Marxist-Leninists” (which we regard as a contradiction in terms as the two had quite different views about politics). We are, if you like, simply “Marxists” who don’t accept Lenin’s “additions” to Marx such as the need for a “vanguard party” and the conclusions he drew from his particular theory of imperialism.
Sorting out some old leaflets I came across one from the Labour Land Campaign which campaigns within the Labour Party and trade unions for a Land Value Tax. They say that it is “a fair and just tax” because
“It recognises that every individual helps create land values through their work, their community activities and their spending — so why should it be only owners of land who reap the financial reward.”
and that it is
“part of the solution to the inequalities in life that exist because of a fundamental flaw in our economy; a denial of the importance of land in the economy, the undeserved and unjust power in its ‘ownership’ and the acceptance of land wealth being given as unearned income to owners of land rather than being returned to those that create it — that is all of us !”
I suppose you could be right, PeterFrank, that in arguing with someone with this approach we could point out that increases in land value in not the only source of “unearned income” or that gives “undeserved and unjust power to ‘ownership’”. So does the ownership of ‘capital’ with its unearned income in the form of profits derived from the unpaid labour of those who produce wealth.
Another fact about Gesell is that, although he made his money in Argentina, he was born in St. Vith which was then part of the German Empire. After the defeat of Germany in WW1 it was transferred to Belgium and is in the small German-speaking part of that country. Not a lot of people know that or that they speak German in a part of Belgium where it is an official language. Certainly the makers of the film The Battle of the Bulge didn’t as they have the locals wearing berets and carrying a baguette under their arms, as if they were stage Frenchmen (but I don’t think they had them selling onions hanging from their bike). In fact they would have been Germans as Germany took the area back in WW2.
Of course this doesn’t make Gesell’s idea on how to reform capitalism any more relevant. But it does allow you to answer the pub quiz question: Which famous currency crank was born in the German-speaking part of present-day Belgium?
It was in TrueRussian’s post of 12.17 today. Here it is again:
I am surprised the Daily Mail published that exposé of just how nasty the Ukranian ethno-nationalists are. And the West are backing them.
Imagine the massacres and ethnic cleansing that will take place if the Ukranian nationalists do manage to reconquer Donbass and Crimea, with Western arms and money. Would Biden, Truss and the others then be put on trial at The Hague as war criminals? Silly question.
