ALB
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Are you sure that is a reliable source? It doesn’t seem to be. The Dutch Forum for Democracy party seems to be a far-right white nationalist party:
I thought Putin explained clearly in his speech at the military parade yesterday in Red Square why Russia went to war. Besides fearing NATO moving its bases and missiles right up to its southern border he also saw NATO arming Ukraine for an attack on the two breakaway statelets. Whether or not he was wrong about the first he could well have been right about the second. Which Russia couldn’t let happen. In which case Russia’s invasion would be a pre-emptive strike. We will see what he settles for after Russia captures the rest of the Donbas region.
Borys restates his war aim:
“UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to remain a “steadfast friend of Ukraine as it continues its heroic struggle against Russia’s invasion,” in a written foreword to the Queen’s Speech, marking the state opening of Parliament on Tuesday.
“We will not waver — and we will not let up — until Putin fails,” Johnson said.”He is obviously in his element but to what end? The chances are that he will fall before Putin does.
I can’t think of any, though forcing Germany to pay more for its gas will undermine the competitiveness of a commercial rival.
Britain’s belligerence, as expressed by Borys, Truss and Wally, would seem to be political, even personal. It has even been described as delusional in that Britain thinks that it still has the global clout that it had in the past. Whatever it is, it is malign.
At some point British oligarchs can be expected to put pressure on the government and get it to tone down its rhetoric and bring the matter to an end so that normal profit-making can resume. But there’s no sign of this yet. Maybe we will have to wait until the cost of living crisis and slump in world trade provoked by sanctions get worse.
Good question. Biden has just signed a lend-lease bill to send war supplies to Ukraine. It contains this clause:
“Under the measure, Ukraine can request streamlined transfers of U.S. weapons and other security assistance. The U.S. will get guarantees that the country will replace or reimburse the assets at a later date.”
Not for free then. A merchant of deaths charter. They will paid upfront and the US pick up the tab and then get the money back from Ukraine (if it can). Britain didn’t repay the Ww2 US lend lease till 2006.
Something to be taken into account when assessing some of the wilder speculations expressed here. It’s from Al Jazeera:
“Putin’s speech shows he won’t use nuclear weapons: Ukraine official
An adviser to Zelenskyy has interpreted Putin’s Victory Day speech as indicating that Russia has no interest in escalating the war through the use of nuclear weapons or direct engagement with NATO, the Associated Press reports.
Oleksiy Arestovych pointed to Putin’s statement that Russia would honour the memory of those who fought in World War II by doing “everything so that the horror of a global war does not happen again”.
Translating from “Kremlin speak into Russian,” Arestovych said this means: “There will be no nuclear war. There will be no war with NATO. What will there be? There will be a sluggish attempt to solve three main problems,” which he identified as taking control of the entire Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson regions.
Arestovych said in an online interview that Russia would drag out the war while bleeding the Ukrainian economy with the aim of getting Ukraine to agree to give up these territories.”Of course Arestovych may just be trying to convince NATO that they can safely give Ukraine more and more arms without provoking such an escalation by Russia. But I don’t suppose NATO’s war strategists need his opinion but his assessment of what Russia would settle for doesn’t seem implausible.
Exactly. That’s why NATO won’t do it. Captain Wally is just a windbag like Truss and Borys. But it is still dangerous and provocative talk with the malign aim of prolonging the killing and destruction.
Looking at the serried ranks of trained killers marching past Putin and his generals this morning, I couldn’t help wondering how NATO thinks that Ukraine has any chance of defeating Russia in the end, even with NATO weapons. The Ukrainian armed forces are maybe a couple of rungs above the Afghan army NATO put together but they seem to be an uncoordinated collection of professional soldiers, militias and people who until a month or so ago couldn’t tell one end of a rifle from another. I bet they can’t even march in step, part of training a disciplined army composed of killers who will obey without thinking.
My guess is that if Putin wants the Donbas he will get it. Might is right. That’s the way of the world under capitalism.
The British Minister of War, Ben Wally (also known as Wallace) is now apparently calling for Putin to be killed.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ben-wallace-putin-must-suffer-same-fate-as-nazis-xppslf2kv
What other interpretation can be put on his call that Putin must meet the same fate as Hitler? To be fair to him, he is saying that Putin should be killed only after a Nuremberg-style show trial and not summarily executed like Bin Laden and the ISIS leader.
Easier said than done of course. To impose victor’s justice you have to be victorious. That would mean not only defeating Russia in Ukraine and driving it out of there but pushing on to conquer Moscow, something neither Napoleon nor Hitler were able to achieve. Wally is billed as a former Guards officer but he never rose above the rank of captain. So his credentials as a military strategist are not very high.
I wonder if workers in Estonia are prepared to put up with the pain inflicted on them by the economic sanctions their government has imposed on Russia. And if so, for how long?
Mutual Assured Depression working out.
We have now have some figures on the QR experiment. Up to 6 May, 31 in Lambeth had used it to access a page on our website. As some 4700 leaflets were distributed that it a rate about 1 per 150 leaflets.
As 150 leaflets can be pushed through letter boxes in one hour, we have to decide whether or not this is “cost effective” in terms of Party members’ time, bearing in mind that it could take about 30 hours member-time to distribute 4700 leaflets.
(Incidentally, it is pure coincidence that the number up to 6 May is the same as the number of votes obtained. This is because perhaps as much as 1500 of the leaflets were distributed outside the ward.)
The figure for Tunbridge Wells for the same period is 4 for 2000 leaflets. At the same rate as in Lambeth it would have been 13. But Lambeth is overwhelmingly Labour while Tunbridge Wells has just been captured by the Liberals from the Tories. We have noticed before that we tend to have less response in non-Labour areas than in Labour ones. In the Tunbridge Wells ward the Labour vote was 10 percent compared with 66 percent in Clapham East.
The next step will be to distribute 4000 to 5000 leaflets with a QR outside of an election time.
I think you underestimate the cynicism of those in charge of a state at war and the extent to which they are prepared to sacrifice their own troops to gain some advantage considered more important.
This video interview below is Russian propaganda but quite effective I would have thought:
https://www.rt.com/russia/555139-ukraine-mariupol-surrender-baranyuk/
Your basic thesis seems to be that everything that has a price will be a product of labour and that this demonstrates the validity of Marx’s labour theory of value.
The trouble is that Marx’s theory is a theory about the value of “commodities”, defined as reproducible objects of use produced for sale. His thesis is that (if there was not production for profit) the value of a commodity would be determined by the amount of labour required on average to produce it from start to finish. As, with increasing productivity, the amount of labour required to produce a particular commodity changes (decreases) so would its value, and this would apply to any produced and unsold before the change in value. So the value of a commodity is the amount of labour required on average to reproduce it.
This is why the labour theory of value only applies to useful things produced for sale that can be reproduced. It does not apply to a product of labour, even one produced for sale, that cannot be reproduced, e.g. a painting, a sculpture or other work of art. The price of such a one-off product of labour does not depend on the amount of labour required to produce it. As you say, it depends on the
market demand for the product, its market price. It has no “value” in the sense of the labour theory of value.Some things that are not the product of labour can also have a market price. Marx mentions honour, conscience, etc. Another is “uncultivated land” in the sense of land that has not been transformed by human labour (more likely to be found in the wilderness or on the frontier of human habitation than in the centre of a town). The price even of land that has been transformed by labour does not reflect just that. It is more like a work of art in that it cannot be reproduced. Its place is where it is and its price therefore depends on the market demand for it for the uses to which it can be put.
Nobody is claiming that “an artist of extraordinary skill possesses more talent than a movie maker or an inventor of a life-saving therapy such as the COVID-19 vaccine.” The only claim is that the price individuals can claim for their exceptional ability depends on the market demand for it. It is not, as you point out, a measure of their usefulness to society. It might in fact reflect the distorted priorities of society.
You can call anything that is bought and sold a “commodity” if you like, but the ironic result of this is that you end up with the bourgeois theory that the price of everything sold depends on the market demand for it since this is the one thing they all have in common.
In Clapham East the local branch spent £265 (from its own funds) on 4000 leaflets. The printer delivered nearly 4700. Nine branch members and sympathisers took part in distributing the leaflets, 6 through letter boxes and the others from street stalls.
This is revealing. The Ukrainian regime has clearly ordered their soldiers in the steel plant in Mariupol not to surrender as any other soldiers in the same hopeless situation would have done weeks ago. They are in effect ordering them to die for the “g[l]ory of Ukraine” as this would be good propaganda. Naturally, their families don’t agree and are protesting:
Note too what happened to the men at the protest.
