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I know that the group behind this site are not the most reliable, being one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism but is what they say here true?
“In the aftermath of the DSA’s meeting, what Chretien tellingly referred to as “our government” agreed to send Ukraine $40 billion in military aid. Every single DSA member of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, voted to support the aid package. Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders, who are not technically DSA members, also voted for the bill.“
He is certainly still opposed to electing people to take technical decisions. But in episode 12 of his podcast series Revolution Now! (2 December 2020) he does speak of “economic democracy” but it seems to be limited to taking part in designing the system:
“In a future economy that’s truly efficient, it will be truly integrative and you will have an economic democracy where people participate through CAD systems and design, as I touched upon the prior podcast. They will engage a network like Amazon, and such robust infrastructure that Amazon currently possesses would be utilized for efficient and sustainable design production and distribution and recycling.”
This would seem to be a change of language from what he was saying ten years when he didn’t even mention the word “democracy”.
What about the workers?
https://www.epsu.org/article/ukraine-attack-dismissal-rights-pushed-under-cover-martial-law
Here’s what the Zeitgeist Movement has to say on this. They seem to be siding with the “cyber communists”.
“Two people are born every second on this planet, and each one of those humans needs a lifetime of food, energy, water and the like. Given this fundamental need to understand what we have, the rates of depletion and, invariably, the need to streamline industry in the most efficient, productive way, a Global System of Resource Management must be put in place. It is just common sense. This is an extensive subject when one considers the technical, quantitative variables needed for implementation. However, for the sake of overview, it can be stated that the first step is a Full Global Survey of all earthly resources. Then, based on a quantitative analysis of the properties of each material, a strategically defined process of production is constructed from the bottom up, using such variables as negative retroactions, renewability, etc. (More on this can be found in the section called Project Earth in the ZM lecture called “Where Are We Going?”). Then consumption statistics are accessed, rates of depletion become monitored, distribution is logically formulated, etc.. In other words, it is a full Systems Approach to earthly resource management, production, and distribution, with the goal of absolute efficiency, conservation, and sustainability. Given the mathematically defined attributes, as based on all available information at the time, along with the state of technology at the time, the parameters for social operation within the industrial complex become self-evident, with decisions “arrived at” by way of computation, not human opinion. This is where computer intelligence becomes an important tool for social governance, for only the computation ability/programming of computers can access and strategically regulate such processes efficiently, and in real time. This technological application is not novel. It is simply ‘scaled out’ from current methods already known.”
Peter Joseph on the word “socialism” from a tweet the other day:
“Folks also need to stop using the word Socialism as an activist foundation because it is antiquated and lends to perpetual misinterprrtation. Better to simply speak of the train of thought behind public health and sustainability. The logic of a new social system is self-evident.”
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.
