ALB
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I noticed this from that newsfeed;
Johnson claims Brexit is leading to pay rises in low-wage sectors.
Back in the Commons Boris Johnson told MPs a few minutes ago that wages are now going up in low-income occupations “in exactly the way that those of us who campaigned for Brexit hoped”.
I don’t remember them promising that but, if that was at the back of the minds of the financiers who funded the Brexit campaign, then they didn’t mind going against the interests of the employing capitalists.
Of course Johnson says anything and everything but, if wages in the low-wage sector do go up, many won’t benefit because their tax credits (the subsidy that the government pays low-wage employers) will go down, leaving them no better off. All that will change is the proportions of their income that come from the state and from their employer.
HGV drivers, on the other hand, who are not on the lowest pay, will be better off. Good luck to them.
Revealing that the authorities in Hong Kong have started to use against trade unionists and others laws that were passed at the time Hong Kong was a British colony:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/09/05/commentary/world-commentary/hong-kongs-sedition/
The 4 September 2020 issue of Jacobin magazine reproduced a revealing tweet from UK XR:
“Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement. We do not trust any single ideology, we trust the people, chosen by sortition (like jury service) to find the best future for us all through a #CitizensAssembly A banner saying ‘socialism or extinction’ does not represent us.”
XR sees talk of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ as politics while they see themselves as ‘beyond politics’ urging all people to bring pressure on governments to do more to tackle climate change. This means that they are basically a pressure group employing direct action and civil disobedience tactics to get capitalist governments to adopt a particular policy.
Leaving the way-out to citizens assemblies is a cop-out. For all the merits of such assemblies, today most citizens will have the same ideas as they express in elections, i.e that they see no alternative to capitalism and so would come up with proposals to be implemented under capitalism.
Sounds like a barrel of fun. South London branch are organising an event at Head Office that day so I think London members will rather go there.
Meanwhile one of the founders of the ICC who later evolved beyond this sort of thing has died. “Internationalist perspective” was the only useful outcome of this idealised “Left Communism”.
They are still essentially a gang of bandits led by mad mullahs. It will be interesting to see how they manage presiding over the operation of capitalism (which is a thousand years in advance of their ideology). Another form of government to add to republic, monarchy, dictatorship, bourgeois democracy as political forms that have failed to make the capitalist economy bend to their Will or benefit the majority.
That’s an odd thing for XR to protest about. I thought they thought humans are a blot in the planet. But, then, they are all over the place.
You’re right. There is some good stuff there if you ignore the quotes from Lenin and talk about capitalism being “restored” in Yugoslavia and the former USSR. “Critical race theory” is a load of dangerous nonsense that by “racialising” everything itself encourages racism, is in fact as the article says a form of “racial sectarianism”.
Incidentally, I think the reference to the Frankfurt School is not to the original pre-WW2 lot but to their current descendants Adorno and Horkheimer. I have tried to read them but have to confess that I gave up, so convoluted is their style of writing. I suspect that they are really just a couple of naked emperors.
Here is former 1960s student and Trotskyist leader Tariq Ali’s view of events in Afghanistan:
Afghanistan war a huge ‘political and ideological failure’: Activist Tariq Ali
Prominent activist and author Tariq Ali has told Al Jazeera it is time for Western powers to learn from their mistakes.
“The first thing which has to be said very clearly and bluntly is that this has been a huge political and ideological defeat for the American empire, for NATO, and for the allies. It will bring hope on that level, to many others who are still struggling, like in Palestine and other parts of the world that this is possible. This can be done,” he said from London.
Ali noted that trillions of dollars had been wasted in the war and the conflict only benefitted “the large corporations linked to the military-industrial complex”.
Talk about history repeating itself. In those days Afghanistan included modern Pakistan. Which might explain Pakistan’s role there, the frontier between the two states cutting across areas inhabited by people with the same language and culture.
Hi LB
Email spgb.discord@worldsocialism.org and ask for an invite.
By the way, there’s a meeting in September too for people in the East (of UK). It’s on Sunday 26 September at 9.00 hours GMT which I think will be some time in the evening for you. Andy Thomas will be speaking on “close up with state capitalism in China” on his personal experience of doing business in China.
The plan is to hold one every month at this time on a Sunday.
I have got hold of and read this 25-page pamphlet attacking “identity politics” as divisive. The first 21 pages are what we say, but on page 22 they contradict what they had written up to then by saying they “support the self-organisation of oppressed groups into autonomous groups.”
This is opposition to organisations that “have (and some still do) pronounced that the separate autonomous organisation of specific groups is diversionary and contrary to a class analysis.”
Yes, some organisations still do.
I have now received a reply to my letter from my local Green Party councillor, Andree Frieze:
“Thanks for getting in touch about this.
Unfortunately, we are not able to bring in UBI trials at a Council level as they require support from Inland Revenue due to the implications over taxation. The motion calling for a trial was to show the Council’s support for it and to put pressure on the Goverment to consider it as an alternative to Universal Credit.
If you’re interested in finding out more and supporting calls for UBI, do check out UBI Lab’s website – https://www.ubilabnetwork.org/. ”This website, which is made up of local groups mostly in the UK campaigning for a pilot scheme to test UBI describes this as:
“UBI is a regular and unconditional payment given to everyone regardless of their income, wealth or work.
A UBI could provide financial security for all, building more resilient economies and giving everyone the resources they need to thrive.”“Financial security for all” and “giving everyone the resources they need to thrive” — all that under capitalism?
No, that seems quite a good summary. The scenario he quotes is what is likely to happen if all the plans announced by governments so far are actually implemented — rise to 2 degrees C by mid century and to a “very likely” range to between 2.1 to 3.5 with the “best estimate” being to 2.7 by the end of the century.
He is right that “a thorough transformation of social and economic systems” would be necessary to achieve the best case scenario of to 1.6 by mid century and between 1.0 and 1.8 by the end of the century with the best estimate of 1.4.
Unfortunately, I don’t think he is thinking of socialism. So unless we get socialism the Paris Agreement aim of an increase of only 1.5 by the end of the century is not going to be achieved.
I wonder what they propose as the solution? The bourgeois ideal of political democracy, where every citizen has an equal say in decision-making, is never going to be realised under capitalism. As long as there is a class that owns the resources whereby society survives, that class is going to have a bigger say, by virtue of their wealth-owning, than the non-ownets. Even so, we have the force of numbers on our side and, when we get our act together, we can outvote them and end their privileged position. Bourgeois democracy is necessarily limited but not so limited that we can’t use it against them.
I have just checked and found I have a copy of the original 1880 French version of Engels’s Socialisme Utopique et Socialisme Scientique, published by a Left Communist group (Le Mouvement Communiste) who comment in their introduction that it does not include the editorial changes Engels made for the German version.
I have to confess it reads better in the context of today. But Engels explains in the text itself of the German edition why he had made the changes — it was to distinguish his position from “the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand” (a better translation would be “overnight”) as well as those who talked of a “free State”.
I also have a French translation of the German version published by the French CP with tendentious subheadings inserted including abolition of the “class State” (to fit in with the official Stalinist position that the Russian State was a non-class one). But even that translates the second reference to the State’s disappearance as “the political authority of the State goes to sleep” (“entre en sommeil”).
