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I am quite satisfied with the paper copy delivered through the post. A subscription doesn’t cost much.
I have been following events in Ukraine and have noticed that recently more articles are appearing critical of the Ukraine regime. It seems that ukraine fatigue is setting in. Zelensky may even end up being seen more as a Nero than hero (apologies to the front cover of this month’s Socialist Standard).
Revealing discrepancy here between what is said now and what was said at the time.
This from the Times of 3 August:
“The Royal College of Music in London has suspended one of its tutors after he was filmed performing outside the remains of a bombed theatre in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Alexander Romanovsky, a pianist born in Ukraine who has performed as a soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, played outside the site of an attack that Amnesty called “a clear war crime”. More than a dozen people died in the bombing in March. Mariupol fell to Russian forces in May after Ukrainian troops, who had retreated to the Azovstal steel plant, surrendered.”At the time there were reports that hundreds had been killed in the bombing of the theatre:
“Close to 600 people died in the Russian airstrike on the Mariupol drama theatre on March 16 evidence from an Associated Press investigation suggests.”
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6440722
There are two possible explanations for the discrepancy. Either the 3 August Times reporter was wrong (though technically 600 is more than 12) or that the earlier figure of 600 was a product of the Ukrainian lie factory.
At least he’s not a Leninist or anarchist insurrectionist, not what Neil Kinnock once called a “toy town revolutionary”. Workers here are not going to go along with that sort of thing.
Yes, apart from seeming to be a good trade union negotiator, politically he is a reformist but a rather timid one if what he wants to do is merely redistribute wealth from the rich to the workers. That was what the Labour Party used to say what they would do, but it’s a losing battle as the tendency under capitalism is for the rich to get richer, with the result than any redistribution away from them that might be achieved is eventually overcome by what capitalism is all about — the accumulation of capital (Picketty produced figures to show that, even if he imagined that it could be reversed). And anyway it presumes the continued existence of a class of rich people.
Socialists of course don’t advocate a redistribution of wealth within capitalism. What we stand for is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth-production, currently monopolised by the ruling owning class. We want these taken away from them and vested in the community as a whole. The end of the division of society into the rich and the rest. A quite different approach and proposition. A revolution in the sense of a complete change in the basis of society. That, not reformism, is the alternative to toy town insurrectionism.
I have found a reference to Kinnock saying getting betrayal in first, though not to when he would have originally said it. It is in an article in the Independent by Andrew Marr on 19 April 1995.
It is no accident that the article was about the relationship between the Labour Party and the trade unions. Here’s what Marr wrote:
”One day, it seems, Tony Blair is likely to be in Number Ten and, therefore almost certainly, will be in confrontation with public sector workers. He has, in Neil Kinnock’s rueful phrase, got his betrayal in first.”
Substitute “Keir Starmer” for “Tony Blair” and Marr could have been be writing today.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/blair-can-dump-unions-but-not-the-poor-1616359.html
That’s good. The more that do that the merrier. But let’s hope he’s not going to join the Scotch Nats. In any event he is wrong about Starmer & Co going after voters in “the shires of England”. Labour’s leaders know that it has no chance there and have left the field(s) there free for the Liberals to go after Tory voters. Their strategy is to win over voters in urban areas of England. They may have miscalculated this time as there is quite a bit of sympathy from other workers with the RMT and other strikers.
Starmer seems to be following Neil Kinnock’s advice of “getting the betrayal in first”, ie, before being elected, instead, that is, of waiting to be in government to do this. As a self-styled “government in waiting” he wants it to act as it will, and will have to if it was the government.
(Incidentally I’ve searched on the internet to find this quote from Kinnock but haven’t been able to find it, if anyone knows when and where — and if — he said it.)
Sharon Graham of Unite hit the nail on the head when she said that Labour was “becoming more and more irrelevant to ordinary working people”.
I don’t know if it means anything but we have received a couple of enquiries in recent weeks about membership from people resigning from the Labour Party.
Sacked for going on a picket line ! Confirmation that the Labour Party not just isn’t the party of the working class but no longer even wants to be considered to be. Good, the more people that realise this the better.
There is a certain logic in Starmer’s position. He supports the present system of class ownership and production for profit and wants to run the political side of it. He understands that he can’t do so in the interest of the working class and in fact that this involves coming into conflict with them.
On the other hand his position might simply be that he and the rest of his team want to further their careers and become ministers of the crown and have calculated that supporting strikes will lose them votes.
Actually Macron probably does see autonomy for Russian-speakers as part of any settlement in Ukraine (at least he did once). It’s Borys and Truss (who seems likely to take over as prime minister for a couple of years) who want in effect to ethnically cleanse them, sending millions to Russia as refugees.
While the politicians talk about manipulating interest rates and tax levels, it looks as if workers are taking their own action to try to mitigate the effects of the current rapid rise in the cost of living. Good on them.
Easier said that done. As long as the ruling class control political power no amount of minority civil disobedience will be able to drive them out. They have the upper hand because they control the coercive power that is the state.
On the other hand, if a majority want this the easiest way to do it is to use the ballot box, where available, to win political control, accompanied of course by mass organisation outside parliament ready to take over control of productive resources and, if need be, back up the result of the ballot.
I was not suggesting that workers will turn against the war on socialist grounds. In fact it is more likely to be on populist grounds — why should we suffer because the government wants to support a war in “some faraway land”? I was just suggesting that the war will become unpopular.
Nor was I suggesting that workers “will rise because of hardship”. But I don’t think they will accept lying down their standard of living being cut. In fact they are not. Ok, it is not manifesting itself in a massive growth of socialist understanding (though I would expect some growth however little) but only in increased trade union activity. But it is not nothing.
I don’t agree that, faced with the immediate prospect of an atomic war, workers would simply prepare to die. I doubt if you really think that either.
Meanwhile in Britain there are politicians promising “growth, growth, growth” as if governments could bring this about just by willing it. The two most prominent at the moment are Sir Keith Starmer QC and Liz Truss.
The UK government is also anticipating having to impose more “pain” on workers in pursuance of its policy of supporting the Ukrainian oligarchs against the Russian ones.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/30/millions-homes-warned-winter-blackouts/
It remains to be seen how much and how long workers will put up with this pain. The likely interim Prime Minister to take over in September, the ineffable Liz Truss, will delight in imposing this to help the Ukraine regime but it could be her undoing. Workers may come to recognise that they have no interest in the war there.
Much better than in Durham but I see that at one point he distinguished “the middle class” from the “working class”. He seems to be advocating a sort of non-revolutionary syndicalism.
The original of the abstract of his research will put you in an even worse mood when you consider how clearly he wrote when he used to write for the Socialist Standard.
How far did you get before you gave up, realising that “those within the academy” speak a different language, unintelligible to the rest of us !
