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Looks as if Zelensky has been taken in by Borys’s bluff, bluster and bombast. But then Zelensky’s not too bad at that sort of thing himself (though he doesn’t seem
to be partying while the Donbass burns).I have had a quick look and it seems to be an argument in favour of central planning as practiced in historical state capitalist economies (I saw references to the USSR), a demonstration that it could work under ideal conditions (which were absent in the USSR). I could be wrong but that’s what the articles in Spanish seem to be suggesting.
I thought that Pieter Lawrence and Robin Cox had convincingly argued that this this would not be necessary in socialism and that for most consumer goods and services production and distribution could be more or less self-regulating, operating like the market today except that demand would be real need not paying demand.
In this case, central planning would only need to be indicative or apply only to infrastructure projects.
“What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of the ideology that people choose or whether people’s ideology is caused by the signatures we found…”
That’s a commendably honest conclusion from the research results. So often researchers — and even more those who report their results — forget that correlation doesn’t mean causation and that, if A and B go together, conclude that either A caused B or that B caused A without offering a plausible way this could happen (and/or ignoring that some third factor could cause both).
We are not arguing over the meaning of the word “same” but of the word “reproducable” and the words “capable of being reproduced”.
Yet another war for oil, then. Tempting but it also assumes that this would be why the West was so keen to incorporate Ukraine into its sphere of influence. Was it? Could a case be made out for this?
Article here from 2020 about Ukraine’s natural gas reserves. Ironically, the West might now be more interested in developing them than they were before Russia invaded.
By coincidence Imposs1904 has been putting the articles on his blog from the June 1957 Socialist Standard including 50 Years Ago. This from 1907 contrasts the views of August Bebel, the most well-known leader of the German Social Democratic Party and Gustave Hervé, a French leftwinger who at that time was promoting “anti-patriotism”.
The article’s headline makes it quite clear what we thought of Bebel’s position. For the record, when the First World Slaughter broke out Hervé became a rabid French nationalist overnight. Bevel had died in 1913.
Here is the not entirely unfavourable review of the English translation of Kropotkin’s book on the French Revolution when it was published in 1910 that appeared in the Socialist Standard of the time.
Here is ex-Trotskyist Paul Mason putting the case for NATO arming Ukraine. No surprise there since he’s now a “Starmerite”. What is galling is that he invokes Marx and Karl Liebknecht in support of this.
Here’s a couple of passages from his article.
“The Marxist tradition never had a problem with supporting wars waged by states where they served the interest of the working class, or of anti-imperialism — from Marx’s support for the French Republic in 1870, to supporting the USSR against Nazism, to solidarity with Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.”
[This point is dealt with in chapter 13 of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/the-socialist-party-and-war-1950/#ch13 ]
“For Karl Liebknecht, it [anti-militarism] was about recognising that the standing army, separate from the people, brutalising its recruits and using them against strikes and colonial uprisings, was an essential part of the capitalist system. The way to combat militarism was through agitation, education, political rights for soldiers and through international disarmament, removing the excuse for the arms race.
But Marxist anti-militarism has never been pacifism. In the new situation of the Zeitenwende Germany, like all democracies, will need to modernise its armed forces and spend more on them. Die Linke should not oppose this.”[Liebknecht did advocate those army reforms but he saw the way-out as international working class action to replace capitalism with socialism, not agreements between capitalist states.]
https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/the-crisis-in-die-linke-5fbdc71ee8ec
We weren’t the only ones to get it wrong. So, apparently, did the Great Zelensky.
Ah! I can see now why you are confused.
You are interpreting “reproduce” in a very literal sense. Of course you can’t use the same material from nature to make more than one example of a use-value. But what you can do is use other material from nature to produce more examples of the same use-value. That is all that is meant by “reproduce” in this context: produce the same use-value again; make another example of it.
It is quite possible to produce more vials and more vaccine. It is happening as we speak. This is not producing a new use-value, but reproducing an already existing one. What can’t be done is to keep on using the same material from nature to do this. But nobody is claiming that you can.
Nor is anybody saying that the production of some new use-value is the reproduction of anything. If it was, it wouldn’t be new. But it will normally be possible to produce more examples of it.
Changes in form may certainly lead to the creation of new things
Exactly. So what are we arguing about?
Production is changing the form of materials that originally came from nature into something useful that didn’t exist before. It is not creating those materials, just changing their form.
Of course new use-values are being produced all the time but they are not being created from nothing, but from materials that originally came from nature. The labour expended in developing a new use-value such as a covid vaccine is part of the socially necessary labour involved in producing it from start to finish. And of course vials containing it are reproducible.
“I cannot see any good reason why the labour theory of value should fail to hold true for new, reproduced amounts of value.
Who says it doesn’t? Except that when a use-value is reproduced its value won’t necessarily be the same as when it was previously produced. This wouldn’t be the case if in the meantime, due to increasing productivity, the amount of socially necessary labour to produce would be less.
The point about a commodity having to be reproducible to be subject to the labour theory of value is precisely this: that the value of a commodity made a few years previously, when the amount of socially necessary labour to produce it was higher but which was not sold, is not that but the current, lower amount of socially necessary labour to produce it.
In other words, the value of a commodity is the amount of socially necessary labour to produce it now and not what it was at the time it was produced, i.e it is the amount of socially necessary labour to reproduce it.
Production doesn’t create anything new. It merely changes the form of materials that originally came from nature. To say that something is reproducible doesn’t mean that the nature-given material from which it is fashioned has to be able to be reproduced (that’s impossible) but that it can be reproduced by using other material that came from nature.
It really is that simple to understand.
In the case of pearls, this doesn’t mean that humans have to be able to make them but that the work of getting them from nature (the bottom of the sea) — which is the productive labour involved in producing them for human use — can be repeated as long as nature produces pearls.
The point of this is that if something cannot be reproduced — such as a particular work of art or land in a particular location — then the labour theory of value does not apply to it, even if it is sold or produced for sale.
Sir Kareer Starmer descends to yet another low:
