ALB
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How can they tell from the long-range photos that the soldiers come from the Caucasus? Chechens perhaps?
Only Americans use the word “Caucasian” in a non-geographical context so this could be a double fake !
We have not been invited to the online hustings in Lambeth this evening. So we have sent them a statement to be read out at the meeting;
“Statement by Danny Lambert, Socialist Party candidate in Clapham East ward
I make no apology for raising the nature of the present world economic system – capitalism – in a local election. Local councils have to run things inside the framework of capitalism and that restricts what they can do. They are also restricted in that most of their money comes from central government.
The priority under capitalism is profit-making. Having to respect this priority means that what the central government can make available for local social services and amenities takes second place. That’s why they are never as good as they should be, in spite of the efforts and promises of the other parties. Capitalism simply cannot be made to work for the benefit of all. Only a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources can do that.
If you like to know more about Socialism as the alternative to capitalism, call in at our Head Office in Clapham High Street or visit spgb.net.”
Details here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lambeth-community-hustings-tickets-307494082077
Just heard on the BBC radio 4 6 o’clock news someone who voted for Mélenchon in the first round saying he was going to vote Le Pen in the second on the grounds that when there is a choice between cholera and the plague you have to vote for lesser evil. (Actually you don’t, you have to run a mile.)
It’s 16 minutes in here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0016hhq
The last time I heard this advice as to how to vote was during the 2002 second round between Chirac, the outgoing conservative president and Le Pen’s father. The Trotskyists were saying vote cholera by which they meant vote Chirac.
Now, apparently, it’s his daughter who’s the lesser evil. Times change.
According to a news item in today’s papers, the lack of public toilets is indeed a pressing issue:
“Nearly two thirds of public laboratories have been scrapped by local councils, according to the British Toilet Association. Some 60 per cent have gone, it says. The cost of running a public lavatory can reach £15,000 a year. A community scheme in which businesses open their facilities to the public has been adopted by only a third of councils.”
Maybe Red Fightback are on to a good transitional demand after all.
Incidentally, believe it or not, the address of the British Toilet Association is – 2-4 Balloo Avenue, Bangor in Northern Ireland.
You say that “… the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs‘ … seems irreconcilable with very basics of communism …”
But why? The case for communism (or socialism, the same thing) is that today the actual process of production — a vast network of interdependent production units spanning the world — is already “socialised” in the sense that it is already a collective work effort. The contradiction is that, despite this, the products are owned individually (either by individuals or artificial individuals called companies or corporations or states).
Socialism removes this contradiction by “socialising” also the ownership not just of the products but also of the means and instruments for producing them. This means that what is produced is also socially or commonly owned and the question that arises is how to distribute this to people or to give them access to it.
Since work is a collective effort it is not possible to attribute to individuals any particular part, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” seems the most logically communistic way. All the more so, since the existing productive forces are capable of producing enough, even plenty, of what people need.
If you think this won’t work because there would be a large number of idlers, it is up to you to demonstrate why this should be. You won’t be arguing, I hope, that it is because it is “human nature” for people to be lazy?
Now we know all about parish pump politics in Tunbridge Wells described by one of the candidates as a commuter town in the surround of a big metropolitan area.
Our candidate was able to show that he knew what the issues were and how and why they had arisen and that we favour more democratic participation generally; and, in the discussion about measures to reduce carbon emissions locally, that the problem was caused by a global system that had found burning fossil fuels the most profitable way to generate energy.
It is difficult to put across the socialist case in a local election since there are some small measures that a council can take to improve daily living to which we would not be opposed but can’t advocate.
It looks as if online hustings may be a by-product of the epidemic. The whole hustings can still be listened to at the link already given.
One NATO country where the population do not support NATO in its war with Russia — as that’s what it has become with the US and its allies openly flooding Ukraine with arms so its proxy forces there can fight more effectively against Russia — is Greece. It is also the one country where Zelensky’s performance before its parliament was a flop as somebody had the bright idea of accompanying it with a video from a Greek-speaking member of the Azov battalion (there is a Greek-speaking minority in the Mariupol area):
https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/04/19/greeks-ukraine-crisis/?amp
It also drew a reaction from local pro-Russia Greek-speakers:
https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/04/20/donetsk-greek-azov-battalion/?amp
This evening at 7.30 there is a hustings in Tunbridge Wells to which our candidate Shannon Kennedy has been invited.
If you see this post in time the hustings can be followed here:
Rosa Luxemburg had a better position on the “national question” than Lenin. She denied that “the right to national self-determination” was a socialist slogan but a demand to set up another capitalist state.
Lenin was an opportunist who urged that any discontent should be used to try to bring down the tsarist regime (probably realistically to achieve that limited aim). However, after the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 these slogans came back to haunt them as nationalists in Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia etc exercised this “right” — which the Bolshevik government then sought to frustrate.
It will be part of the “misinformation” war. If you listen carefully to what the commander of the Ukraine marines holed up there (rather than the leaders of the Azov Brigade) said in a video the other day he hinted that the army high command had ordered them not to surrender and that he had to be obey this order.
The Ukrainian government appears to want them and the civilians they are using as human shields to be killed so as to turn western public opinion further against Russia. It would seem that Putin is seeking to avoid falling into that trap. He will also want to capture members of the Azov brigade alive so he can parade them and their Nazi tattoos on tv. His army already effectively controls Mariupol anyway.
I will take your word for it ! I couldn’t make out what she was saying. It read like she was trying to explain to her children what was going on in some faraway land.
Actually, the production of a diamond might well cost as much in terms of needed labour (prospecting, finding, extracting, polishing, etc) as the development of a vaccine.
As to Messi, his income is a rent and so not dependent on how much he works. He has the monopoly of a unique skill (his prowess as a soccer player) and so the price of which depends entirely on the demand for it. The more he is in demand, the higher he can charge, just as the monopolist of some natural resource (such as a Gulf Sheik) can.
Is his work more “valuable” than than that of a Nobel Prize winner? Probably not, at least not for prize-winners for physical or medical science (though it will be more than that of most of those winning a prize for economics). But that’s the way of the capitalist world where everything has a price.
In a socialist/communist society a good soccer player or a good scientists will be in the same position as everybody else — they will have free access to what they need to live and to enjoy life. That’s what “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” means in practice.
I think that Putin was trying to be funny (believe it or not). Following the coup in 2014 which overthrow the pro-Russia president, the Ukrainian government passed a “de-communisation” law which, among other things, outlawed the Communist Party and ordered the toppling of all Soviet-era statutes including those of Lenin.
Putin is saying that he is an anti-Communist too and is prepared to “decommunise” Ukraine — by undoing what the Bolsheviks did in setting up a fake Ukrainian state as member state of the so-called USSR (“Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”) and indeed of the UN. Which ought to mean that he too is all in favour of toppling of the statues of Lenin.
Putin the humourist, not a side we normally see.
Wolff is a good communicator. He is wrong about the way to stop inflation bring to simply impose a price freeze but that wasn’t his main point here.
He is right that it is the sanctions imposed by the US and Europe that is going to cause more problems than the war itself. It is going to impose pain on the population of the Middle East in terms of a rise in the price of bread. Bread riots can be expected there. It is going to impose pain on the population of Europe in terms of a rise in the price of energy to heat homes and drive cars. Whether the working class there will accept that remains to be seen.
NATO propaganda claims that it is the World v Russia. Actually most of the world — China, India, Indonesia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America — is neutral and won’t be thanking the US and its militarily dependent allies for provoking a global slowdown and a disruption of global trade.
Wolff could be right that this episode could hasten the decline of the US as the dominating world power that it has been since the end of WW1.
To return to what we were discussing the other day, here is chapter and verse from Putin blaming Lenin and “Communists” for creating Ukraine:
