ALB
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The fightback against the “hated ecomob” escalates.
I tried to get a discussion going on this with a thread under General Discussion:
Like the article you quote says, Johnson is trying to claim that the labour shortages are part of a deliberate plan to raise wages. But this is just populist talk, though he is right that the shortages are in large part attributable to Brexit.
Business, which traditionally supports his party, is not amused.
Sounds as if Berns wants to create an anarcho-capitalist utopia. If he does, it will fail (who would want to live in it?) and the anarcho-capitalists will no longer be able claim that “capitalism has never been tried !”
Manchester comrades will be covering this event. They picked up their leaflets last weekend.
Other branches will be covering similar events in London, Cardiff, Swansea, Sheffield, Portsmouth and Brighton as well of course as the main one in Glasgow.
Anyone wanting copies of the leaflets to distribute in their area should contact Head Office (spgb at worldsocialism.org)
Another pro-China event today:
https://nocoldwar.org/news/europe-against-the-cold-war-china-is-not-our-enemyonline-event-23-october
Why do leftists always want to choose one side or the other in inter-imperialist conflicts?
Neither Washington nor Peking but International Socialism !
I see that Boris has once again stolen Labour’s clothes, right down to the same words:
https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/a-green-industrial-revolution/
No wonder Starmer is floundering. As the government is saying it will do what he says he would, he can’t say much.
I think in America they call it a Green New Deal.
They sent that to Head Office too. Transgender Marxism, Gay Marxism, what next? Vegan Marxism? Apart from 3 or 4 titles, it seems they are trying to get rid of unsaleable surplus stock.
In 1995 the Australian Skeptics awarded Tim McCartney-Snape the Bent Spoon Award which they give each year to an Australian, “to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion”
McCartney-Snape was awarded it “for promotion of the beliefs of Jeremy Griffith self described prophet and founder of the World Transformation Movement, the Foundation for the Adulthood of Mankind.”
Scroll down here:
Interesting. I noted this towards the beginning of the last section:
“What can be said with near certainty is that a revolution that does not have substantial participation from engineers is doomed to fail at implementing communism. The material basis for communism is not proletarian rage or mass-scale dispossession, it is centuries of labor now embodied in the form of fixed capital: machinery, buildings, global productive infrastructure, and countless commodities. There is a cruel irony to the fact that communism has been made possible by the brutal subjugation of the majority of the planet’s population into wage labor, but it is indeed mass manufacturing and global distributive capacity that makes a planned social system, controllable by the collective human desire for wellbeing, possible. Capitalism has created the technical means for a society based on the rational safeguarding and expansion of human welfare, but not necessarily the social forms that are conducive to such a society. Engineering, as it currently exists, represents the overwhelming bulk of the technical knowledge existing within capitalism, but is socially composed in a way that would necessarily be dissolved by the establishment of communism.“
Looks as if the workers are beginning to fight back against what the Daily Mail, not entirely unfairly, calls “the hated eco-mob”.
While we are putting the boot into to the Chinese regime, there’s this. A bit unfair, I admit, like kicking a man when he’s down or taking a candy from a baby.
“President Xi was facing the most serious test of his approach to Chinese capitalism last night as Beijing decided whether it could allow a corporate giant burdened with hundreds of millions of debt to go bankrupt” (Times, 21 September).
The Chinese government still occasionally calls itself socialist, though this is more common amongst its fellow travellers and useful idiots abroad. Everybody can see it isn’t, even the Western media as in the news item above. Its economy is ‘state capitalist’ even in the Leninist sense of the development of private capitalism under the aegis of a supposedly ‘socialist’ state. Lenin, however, envisaged only small-scale capitalist enterprises. The Chinese government has allowed and encouraged big corporations to develop and so finds itself in the position of having to cope with problems caused by the workings of a market economy involving big capitalist corporations.
The ‘corporate giant’ that risked going bankrupt is a property company with the wonderful name of Evergrande that epitomises what every capitalist enterprise has to aim at – growing bigger and bigger through the re-investment of most of its profits as new capital.
Founded in 1996, it expanded rapidly in response to a housing boom, borrowing heavily to meet the demand for new apartment blocks. Then, as always happens sooner or later, the boom turned to bust.
The anarchic expansion of the market led to an oversupply of residential property:‘Supply of apartments exceeds demand and many new apartment blocks stand empty or unfinished’ (Times, 21 September).
‘By some estimates, China now has 90 million units of empty houses’ (Simon Nixon, Times, 23 September).
The oversupply is in relation to paying demand not need:
‘ … there are the very high vacancy rates in China with high prices. In cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen property values are “very extreme” relative to average incomes’ (Patrick Hoskings, Times, 21 September).
Evergrande has been left with huge debts that it cannot meet. The fear amongst stock exchange speculators is that its collapse would be China’s ‘Lehman moment’, as in the US in 2007-8 that provoked the Great Recession from which the world has still not fully recovered. They are afraid that the failure of Evergrande would spread from it to its suppliers and from them to their suppliers and so on, and of the impact of the resulting generalised economic crisis in China on the rest of the world capitalist economy.
It might not come to this, but the point is that it could. This shows that the Chinese government, despite being a one-party dictatorship, is as much at the mercy of unpredictable, anarchic market forces as any elected reformist government in the West.
Chairman Xi is finding that capitalism is not a paper tiger.
Here is a silly government handout trying to sell the recent UK-Australia trade deal to the general public.
As can be seen, only 44% of exports are goods and 56% are services, most of which will be financial or legal. Since the UK basically only exports luxury products to Australia (top of the range cars, whisky, ceramics) as Australia can get ordinary stuff from much nearer (including ordinary cars), the main beneficiaries will be the financial sector.
Since higher transport costs are involved in exporting ordinary goods to places further away than the Continent, the main beneficiary of trade deals with further away countries is going to be the financial sector.
Those financiers who funded the No campaign will be satisfied with that, won’t they? And of course the threat of having to submit their financial dealings to stricter, EU rules has been removed.
As to workers, we get a wider choice to buy Australian wine (that comes by sea in huge tanks) and vegemite. Big deal !
How China solves the housing problem.
This article makes some relevant points about Western leftists romanticising the current regime in China. To add to the dossier, so we get all points of view.
The comments section is also interesting.
