ALB
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It looks as if wiser counsels are beginning to prevail:
“French President Emmanuel Macron has said he thinks a deal to avoid full scale war in Ukraine is possible and that it is legitimate for Russia to raise its own security concerns.
Before talks in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, he called for a “new balance” to protect European states and appease Russia.”“However, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba appeared to play down the threat of an imminent invasion, tweeting on Sunday: “Do not believe the apocalyptic predictions. Different capitals have different scenarios, but Ukraine is ready for any development.”
The electoral system is the US has always been flawed, even corrupt, from a democratic standpoint, with gerrymandering, partisan election officials, problems with voter registration, siting of polling stations, etc. I don’t know if it is getting worse or if it is this applies across the whole country. Part of the problem is that the two main parties are electoral machines concerned with winning at all costs.
I don’t think the Republicans are out to destroy the electoral system, just to play it in their favour. That’s not democratic but it’s not the same thing as destroying political democracy.
Obviously socialists are concerned about political democracy. We want it to exist as a means for a socialist majority to win power and effect the revolution from capitalism to socialism more or less peacefully. We are also concerned that formal democratic procedures should be supported by a democratic culture.
If political democracy is under threat naturally we protest and always have done but what else can we do?
The policy of forming a “united front” with others who are not socialists but who favour political democracy doesn’t work and doesn’t advance our cause of socialism (which is why we exist). So we can’t do that, even less vote for them or tell others to, as Chomsky, Kliman and others advocate. The most we could do without compromising our socialist integrity would be to vote for or against some measure if it was put to a referendum.
The “united front with non-socialists” policy doesn’t work because it involves support for capitalism which creates the problems which lead some to blame democracy for them.
For instance at a lesser level, if the Republicans make gains in November this will be because some who voted for the Democrats two years ago either don’t vote or change to voting for the Republicans. Why would they do that? Because, I suggest, the Democrats have failed to solve the problems they face.
Ok I am not on the spot but I don’t think the admittedly flawed political democracy in the US is under threat of destruction. There is a fringe of raving rightists who want to destroy it but I don’t think that either the Republican leaders or the vast majority of those who vote for them want this. So we are talking hypotheticals here.
We have on this forum one person saying that the end of civilisation is nigh due to global warming and another that it is nigh due to a coming nuclear war. Why do people find it easier to conceive of the end of the world than of the end of capitalism, I think somebody once asked (I can’t remember who. I think he was called Jackson or Jamieson or something like that)?
For a start, NATO has said it won’t react militarily to any Russian invasion of Ukraine. Second, Russia is not going to invade Poland or the Baltic states, which would provoke a military response. Third, Biden and Putin and their generals are not that mad.
First, he said, extremists become the majority and respecting the rule of law becomes secondary to winning at all costs.
If extremists become the majority there’s not much that can be done about it. They will get their way. The real problem is why they would become the majority. The main reason will be the failure of democratic reformists to solve the problems capitalism creates, providing the opportunity for extremists to say that democracy not capitalism is the cause of these problems. This suggests that the answer is not to join and promote the democratic reformists. That won’t stop the rise of extremists. The democratic reformists are not the lesser evil. They are part of the evil. Their tactics and failures fuel extremism. Socialists cannot support or vote for them. We must insist that the only way out is socialism and promote that and only that.
Yes, it is surprising that Wolff is regarded as the most important contemporary exponent of Marxian economics in the US whereas he puts forward a theory of exploitation which he himself admits is not that of Marx.
We have been pointing this out for years, on the theoretical as well as polemical level as here and here.
Yes, we have been using that quote for years. See here, for instance, it’s the last quote there.
It’s good that capitalism has become a dirty word — that’s grist to our mill — but she is using it to mean unrestrained free market capitalism. Which leaves her open to the interpretation in one of the comments:
FaceTheClimateEmergency
@DorothyBeach
3 Feb
#AOC is talking about a movement towards a more humane #capitalism that many democracies in Europe have. She said extremist people are pushing an agenda for extreme capitalism and because that have money are overly influential (a Putin model btw).As an elected Democratic Party representative that’s what she’s doing in practice. And, as the Yahoo article mentions, the long-term alternative to which she is committed is a market economy of workers’ co-operatives which, whatever it is, is not socialism.
Two of us went to a meeting last night of the Roger Hallamite wing of XR which, after the failure of Insulate Britain has now rebranded itself as Stop Oil.
They are planning spectacular disruptive actions in March and this was a meeting to recruit volunteers, prepared to risk imprisonment, to join their campaign. It was not run democratically as no questions were allowed. At the beginning an attempt was made to physically eject a climate denier who was technically physically assaulted (unfortunately I didn’t know how the video on my phone works but it was recorded by others); so much for these people’s training in non-violence.
After a 40-minute talk, by it has to be admitted a good speaker, the meeting was broken up into three groups. I don’t think either we or the climate deniers there would have been given a chance to express our views as the aim was clearly to identify likely civil disobedience volunteers. They want a minimum of 1000 to sign up. Anyway we left at this point. It reminded me of an event I once went to which was to try to get people to sign up to regularly ordering a crate of wine (I just went for the free bottle) in which the organisers weeded out those unlikely to do this so as to concentrate on likely suckers. So it was more that type of meeting than a normal political one.
Politics were involved of course and the underlying assumption was still that of XR that political and social change can be brought about by as little as 3.5 percent of the population practising civil disobedience. The speaker gave three instances of this tactic working: the Civil Rights movement in the US, the collapse of the “Communist” regimes in Eastern Europe, and the Arab Spring, particularly the first. The first point to notice about this is that these were political changes, changes in the political superstructure of capitalism that were compatible with the operation of capitalism as an economic system. What XR, Insulate Britain and now Stop Oil are demanding are reforms that come up against the economic laws of capitalism which not even government action has been able to change. So their campaign has no chance of succeeding.
But the aim they put forward is not their real aim. Their real aim is to getting a movement going towards their imagined 3.5 percent trigger point. The speaker virtually admitted this when, after conceding that the campaign to get the government to insulate all homes in Britain had failed, said he was going to make it “easy this time” for the government to give in; this time, they were going to demand something much less — that the government refuse to grant any more licences to extract oil or gas in and around Britain. Since the Danish government has already done this, presumably they are banking on the British government following suit.
Their aim is to get what the speaker called a “win” through the direct action of as few as 1000 people, in the expectation that this would lead to more and more “wins” and more and more people doing civil disobedience until the government does more to stop global warming. It’s a bit like the Trotskyists “transitional demand” tactic except that they expect a win rather than a lose will spur people on to follow them.
What particularly annoyed me about the meeting was what the two other speakers said. One a “middle class” woman directly appealing to other, middle class women to do something to give some meaning to their bored life. She specifically said they didn’t expect poor people to come forward as they recognised that they couldn’t afford to. An Anglican priest said said that participating in such action made him feel “authentic” and described his elation as part of a group scrambling down to block the M25. So they are doing this to make themselves feel better? What self-indulgence at other people’s inconvenience.
Anyway, expect more Insulate Britain type disruption in March (though the speaker did say this was unlikely to involve blocking motorways again).
Now it’s Rushi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is being accused of practising “socialism”. Mind you, the accuser is Bone by name and bonehead by nature.
Maybe it is a question of semantics but, if you are going to have a meaningful discussion, the terms used do need to be clearly defined.
There is a whole range of breaches of “law and order” ranging from nation-wide revolution to local riot. Insurrection is near one end of the spectrum while riot is at the other end. In between might be rebellion and revolt.
A distinction can also be drawn between armed attempts to overthrow the government (revolution) and armed attempts to resist the implementation of a particular law. It seems that at the time of the US Insurrection Act of 1807 the word “insurrection” meant the latter and if the 6 January event had occurred at any time up to, say, the 1850s it could have been classified as an insurrection. In more recent times the Act has been used against riots.
In Britain the terminology has been different where there were both Insurrection Acts (applied to Ireland, the land of armed conspiracies) and the Riot Act. This suggests that in English law the 6 January event would have been regarded as a riot rather than an insurrection.
So insofar as semantics are involved maybe it’s the difference between the use of the term “insurrection” on the two sides of the Atlantic? But politics are involved too, with the Democratic Party having an evident vote-catching interest in labelling (labeling!) the 6 January event an “insurrection”.
So Ukraine isn’t a proper “bourgeois democracy” that Western politicians and media give the impression it is. In fact the political and economic superstructure in Ukraine is not much different than that in Russia. So the argument that it is “democratic” while Russia isn’t and that “we” must support it to defend “democratic values” doesn’t wash.
The present tensions are not about that but about the US-led Western capitalist bloc wishing to incorporate Ukraine into its sphere of influence and capitalist Russia resisting this. Naked power politics. Not an issue worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.
No, it isn’t. And the Wikipedia entry doesn’t say that. The present Ukrainian government might aspire to but it has not happened and probably won’t for the time being. Russia has made it clear that it, if it did, this would be a cause for war and NATO has no intention of defending Ukraine militarily. They are only rattling economic sanctions.
