ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
“If high wages mean high prices, then no wages should mean no prices. In other words, if the workers agreed to work for nothing they should be able to receive the fruits of their labour for nothing likewise.”
I am afraid that line of argument won’t work. It does not follow from “if high wages mean high prices” that “no wages should mean no prices”. This assumes that wages are the only element entering into the price of something whereas in fact there is also the cost of the materials, power, etc.
So no wages would mean only lower prices and if workers agreed to work for nothing they would not be able to buy anything and would starve. They would be renouncing even that part of the fruits of their labour that they do now get.
A better approach would be to say that wages are a price and, when prices are going up, why shouldn’t the price of labour-power go up too. And that talking of a “wage/price spiral” is begging the question by assuming that an increase in wages leads to a rise in other prices. If you want to talk about a spiral it would be more accurate to talk about a “price/wage” one.
You could make the point differently: if there were no prices there would be no wages and, if there were neither, then workers would have price-free access to what they needed and would (collectively) get the full fruits of their labour. A bit laboured perhaps but at least logical.
Now Boris wants to recreate the Roman Empire. Only one problem — most of what is now Ukraine wasn’t part of it. Actually, there’s another problem (though maybe not for him). It was based on slave labour.
Just realised that I posted this, about the different attitude of the Welsh government, on the wrong thread:
Apparently the Welsh government is not so happy about £30 million being deducted from their allocation to pay to send lethal weapons to Ukraine. It also seems that the Scottish government was making a virtue out of necessity:
‘Not right’: UK Government dips into Welsh and Scottish budgets for £1bn Ukraine military aid
Apparently the Welsh government is not so happy about £30 million being deducted from their allocation to pay to send lethal weapons to Ukraine. It also seems that the Scottish government was making a virtue out of necessity:
‘Not right’: UK Government dips into Welsh and Scottish budgets for £1bn Ukraine military aid
I see that the warmongering Foreign Secretary is exerting her malign influence again. Now she is saying that the UK is supplying “lethal weapons” to the Ukrainian nationalists so that they can ethnically cleanse the Donbass and the Crimea of those who consider themselves Russians (that’s a few million). I am not sure other NATO leaders share her view or even take her seriously but here’s what she is saying;
“The UK’s foreign secretary Liz Truss has said it is a “realistic” ambition to push Russian forces out of Ukraine entirely.
She has told listeners to BBC radio in the UK “All of Ukraine that has been invaded by Russia is illegally occupied. And, ultimately, the Russians need to be pushed out of all of that territory.”
PA Media report that asked whether the Government believes Russia can be pushed out of all of Ukraine within a foreseeable timeframe, she said: “It is realistic, and that is why we are supplying the extra lethal aid we’re supplying.”Is that money they got from their own tax-raising powers or are they just handing back to the central government some of what the central government gave them?
Another question to add to MOO’s list — Will Scotland join NATO? And probably the answer to question 2.
So she’s called her own bluff. But I can’t believe that enough Scotch workers will be stupid enough to vote for something that will disrupt their life to no useful end; since, after the administrative upheaval is over, they will be in the same position as they were before. Mind you, enough English workers did to bring about Brexit.
It doesn’t surprise me that a lot perhaps a majority of people are sympathetic to the railway workers. After all, they are in the same boat, needing to keep their pay up with the rising cost of living.
The discussion between Dave Ward and the bloke from the Institute of Economic Affairs (a free-marketeer think tank) was interesting. Ward put well the case for trade unionism under capitalism and the free-marketeer also put well that capitalism cannot afford a general wage increase for everybody as this would reduce profits, lead to bankruptcies, unemployment, etc.
The obvious answer Ward should have put to this was that the only way out was to replace capitalism by socialism. He might know this but, if he did, he didn’t say so. Instead he called for a new “social settlement” that would somehow rectify the imbalance between the owners of the means of production and workers. In an article in the Morning Star (18 June) he called it “collectivism” by which he seemed to mean trade unions and social protest movements getting together to act collectively to try to improve things.
Reformism of course and of course doomed to fail. But at least it shows an awareness that workers are not going to get much from the Labour Party. Other unions too are deciding to pay only the minimum they have to the Labour Party to affiliate and using the rest of their political fund to finance other campaigns.
I don’t know about “leftists” but “wokies” might be:
https://amp.lbc.co.uk/news/philip-larkin-wilfred-owen-removed-by-gcse-exam-board/
I read somewhere that the Socialist Labor Party of America also supported the right to bear arms enshrined in the US Constitution on the grounds that this also applied to workers should they ever need to. Does anyone know if this was/is the case?
Presumably the various Trotskyist groups do as that would make the insurrection they envisage less difficult.
Shelley got the measure of rulers like him:
I am afraid that the credit for spotting this first must go to YMS who started a thread on it a few weeks ago;
Critisticuffs (the German group “Against Capital and Nation) have produced a detailed analysis of the current conflict between Russia and the US.
https://critisticuffs.org/texts/ukraine-russia-usa
Here is the conclusion, the last paragraph of which can serve as a fitting riposte to Zizek:
“For Russia and the US, what they are and claim to be as nations is at stake: for the one, its “historical future as a nation”, its status as a great power and respected subject in the world of states; for the other, its “unrivalled power”, its unrestricted world domination. Their positions are irreconcilable. They do not tolerate any relativisation, because that would be tantamount to abandoning their posited standpoint.
For both sides, the assertion of their own position, therefore, has the quality of an existential question that must be brought to a decision, a “matter of life and death” and or a matter of the highest principles – “prosperity and security” – respectively.
And so they go at each other. They both use deterrence and threats to impress the other side into accepting their demands and escalate the use of their means of destruction when this fails. They know full well what destruction the other side can bring to the battlefield, and how widely it can define this battlefield. They both insist on their dominance of escalation, their ability to up the ante in response to an escalation of the other side. For now, Russia made the transition to an all out war against Ukraine and kills people in that country to preserve its status as a great power. The superior American side, for now, does not want to get directly involved with its military – indeed it seems increasingly frustrated that it has to take attention away from its rising (economic and thus future military) rival China. For now, America is content with letting Ukrainians fight and die – for their fatherland and the rule-based order that the US implemented after the Second World War. But America’s restraint is nothing but the decision to postpone an escalation to the point when it feels its status as the one superpower in the world is sufficiently threatened.
Only an idiot would support either of these programmes.”
Only just over 46% of the electorate voted. So over half weren’t convinced by any in the parade of clowns.
