ALB
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TM, it looks as if the AstraZeneca vaccine will provide protection for the over 65s. It’s just seems to be that they didn’t do wide enough testing to meet the level of evidence required by some licensing authorities but this evidence will probably emerge in due course. So I wouldn’t refuse it if that’s the one you’re offered. In any event it won’t harm you and will be better than nothing.
Another bungle by this world-beating, buccaneering British firm (though I notice that the flag-waving media have begun to downgrade it to being a British/Swedish firm).
Email received at Head Office today from a group (probably best desribed as “workerist”) with a link to their blog about “peasants” in the Indian sub-continent . They seem to be taking the view that, as in China, the peasants will eventully become wage-workers, with the implicit assumption that this will be good as it’s wage-workers who have an interest in going beyond capitalism (at least that’s how I read them, but I could b e wrong):
I don’t think there is any doubt that the protests are economic. The question is whose economic interests are at stake. It would seem to be medium-sized farmers who fear they are about to lose a guaranteed market. The demonstrators seem in a position to afford tractors which suggests that there are not from the poorest farmers. In fact I think that the poorest farmers are producing for local markets and not to sell to the government to stockpile and so are not concerned by the new laws. See this about poor farmers in West Bengal (where our Indian party is based):
As to the workers in general, as far as I can see their participation has been limited to a one day general strike or general shutdown (bandh) last November or December as a gesture of sympathy and no doubt also a political manoeuvre by opposition parties.
That suggestion on the site of the German television channel that the patents for the vaccines be suspended is presented in this way:
”There is a way out of the dilemma, and that is to share the patents. What may sound like brute socialism is an adequate remedy in a global health crisis.”
Yes it does sound like that. The abolition of all and any private property rights over production will indeed mean the abolition of so-called “intellectual property” rights such as patents and copyright.
Forward to brute socialism !
AztraZeneca seem to be trying hard to be the buccaneering company of the type that the Brexiteers said would be possible after Britain left the EU.
First, they fiddled the results of their tests and had to do some more (causing a delay in getting it out). Now they are trying to renege on a contract with the EU, because they’ve sold the same batch to two different buyers.
Is this just the action of a rogue company or is it capitalist business as normal?
“This is a class struggle”
Just because a struggle involves millions of people doesn’t make it a class struggle in the sense of a struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. The protagonists are medium-sized landowning farmers against a government that wants to introduce measures that will harm their interests and benefit Big capitalists. It’s not anti-capitalist. I can’t see what working class interests are involved. Incidentally, I never suggested it was a struggle between medium-sized farmers and their labourers (even though such a struggle goes on).
I think, Alan, you might have gone a bit native from reading all these activist journals like Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, etc. 😊
I have emailed the World Socialist Party (India) to see if they have something on this. One of their members is a retired professor of agricultural economics so even if they are based in a big city they should know something about what goes on in the countryside.
There’s more on the farmer controversy within the early SPC in J. Milne’s History of the Socialist Party of Canada. Note tht even those who thought that small farmers were “slaves of the farm” akin to wage slaves still thought that the only solution to their problems was socialism (and not, for instance, price support or a guaranteed market):
“Canada at the beginning of the century was mainly agricultural, the prairie provinces overwhelmingly so. To bring about the conquest of political power, which the early Socialists saw rapidly approaching, the position of the farmer had to be considered, since the farmers could be a substantial stumbling block to the Socialist aim unless they threw in their lot with the workers.
To many Socialists the farmer was a capitalist, a small one, true, but trying to become a big one. He owned means of production (land and machinery) and he employed wage workers, paying the “going wage” which, customary to capitalist practice, was the lowest wage possible.
That many in the farming population were desperately poor proved only that they were far down in the ranks of exploiters and could be readily shaken into the ranks of the working class. They were in the meanwhile part of the exploiting class, inclined to think and behave as exploiters.
But it was also believed that the farmers were destined to continue, with limited exceptions, an existence in poverty and must, to improve their lot in life, set aside their own class interests, adopt the Socialist case and work for the ending of capitalism.
Together with this interpretation of the farmer’s position in society, there grew another set of ideas which disagreed that they were capitalists. The farmer’s position was essentially the same as the worker’s: he was a wage slave. This attitude became the general one in the Party and was detailed in a pamphlet, The Slave of the Farm, written in 1914 by a prairie member, Alf Budden, published by the Party.
Quotations here are from this pamphlet [9].The farmer, it was reasoned, was a capitalist in name only. He owned the farm and machinery but this ownership was “a grim joke”. He owned neither. “The benefit of capital came to its owners . . . The beautiful things of the earth are theirs, the choicest of labor’s creations, the servility of the courts, the subservience of the press; the parliaments are but their executive committees; the soldiery, police and judge, their obedient slaves” (p. 19).
The farmer neither shares in the bounties nor benefits from the subservience. His means of production had outgrown the limited tools of earlier times, have grown into the great machines needed in increasingly competitive production which he must have to remain in production. But he gains nothing from the greater amounts of goods produced, for he obtains his machine only by placing himself at the mercy of the mortgage companies, machine companies, etc. “The larger the machinery grows the longer he must toil to obtain it, until the point is reached where the last vestige of independence drops off him, and he reaches the status of a wage slave, or at best, manager for a machine company” (p. 33).
There was no escape for the farmer other than the Socialist one, for the greater his production by improved methods the greater the tendency for prices of farm products to go down, the greater the need for even more improved production methods and the greater the hold of the capitalist class on his farm and home. The Socialists carried this message across the plains and locals appeared in farming communities.” (pp.15-16)
The figures in the latest link cited by YMS give the picture:
“Small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land account for 86.2% of all farmers in India, but own just 47.3% of the crop area, according to provisional numbers from the 10th agriculture census 2015-16 released on Monday. In comparison, semi-medium and medium land holding farmers owning between 2-10 hectares of land account for 13.2% of all farmers, but own 43.6% of crop area, the survey showed.”
I daresay that the farmers’ protests are led and supported mainly by the second group of “semi-medium and medium land holding farmers” who will also be those who employ, exploit and even oppress the landless or virtually landless agricutural wage labourers. If the cap of “kulak” fits then so be it.
Actually, this issue has arisen as a practical one in the history of our own movement, in the pre-WW1 Socialist Party of Canada. As the Preface to the SPC pamphlet The Slave of the Farm by Alf Budden (which can be found here on the site of the SPC as well as elsewhere on the internet) put it:
“THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF CANADA, in its treatment of the agrarian question has so far maintained the revolutionary position, counting it more than good tactics to attack the minds and ignore the feelings of those whom it sought to enlighten. Operating, as it does, in a country largely agricultural, and being composed, in the main, of those who having glimpsed both sides of the shield as wage worker and farmer, are enamoured of neither form of exploitation, it has naturally given a great deal of attention to the status of THE SLAVE OF THE FARM.
For some years a polemic raged through the columns of the Official Organ of THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF CANADA, the “WESTERN CLARION,” involving various views and opinions, most of which, however, gradually settled down into two opposing groups.
The position maintained with vigor by the older school was that the farmer stood in the same category as the wage worker, that farm machinery was but an extension of the carpenter’s tool bag or the plasterer’s hoe, and that farmers did not sell wheat, oats or live stock, as such, but labor-power crystallized into these forms.
The younger group, on the contrary, pointed out the impossibility of offering for sale so evanescent an article as the aforementioned, because it was apparent that the commodity labor-power – the thing offered for sale – was not the release of energy, or energy in motion – kinetic, known as labor or work, but was the ability to so perform, the passive or latent energy potential in the physique of the slave. It was contended, therefore, that the commodity, e. g., wheat, was a finished product sold by the farmer in the same way as a merchant sells his goods. And, further, that the view of the farm machine being a mere extension of the wage worker’s tools, was in violent opposition to that very dialectic upon which the Socialist position so impregnably rests. “If,” they argued, “the power loom by growing up, changed not only the form of ownership but reversed its position to the worker, growing from helpmeet to oppressor, why was this not also true of the farm machine?””
Aren’t you over-egging the pudding slightly?
Maybe, but what is this section 230 they are all talking about?
I agree of course that Twitter is a private profit-seeking corporation and that it is free to exercise its private property rights in accordance with the “contract” you have no choice but to sign to use its facilities. What I was questioning, as well as the inefficacy of censorship as a way to try to ban the circulation of any idea true or untrue, was the logic of their position of banning someone for expressing a particular untruth but not others for expressing some other untruth.
As it’s a profit-seeking corporation there must be a commercial reason for this. I was trying to speculate on what it might be.
I don’t see what Twitter want to achieve by banning people from expressing a false idea. It’s not going to change the banned person’s view or that of anyone else. And there will be plenty of other false ideas expressed there.
All I can think of is that they want to curry favour with the new administration to show that they can self-regulate in order to avoid being regulated by some outside authority.
But the First Amendment in the US on freedom of speech is sacrosanct, much more so than here in Britain, so expressing the false view that the elections were rigged will never be suppressed there. And why should it anyway?
This article cited in the first of the links Alan has just given has convinced me that socialists cannot even sympathise with let alone support the Indian farmers’ protests. It’s a protest of small property-owners against being sold out to big capitalist corporations, not a workers’ movement. These land-owning farmers don’t hesitate to use the vilest of methods when their labourers ask for more pay:
https://m.thewire.in/article/agriculture/farmers-protest-caste-rural-punjab-landowners-labourers
Just checked. No, the SWP are not covidiots. Their line is to criticise Bungling Boris’s handling of measures to deal with the pandemic. Common or garden populist stuff that vanguard parties specialise in, in accordance with Lenin’s tactic of trying to exploit any discontent to “build the party”.
Just realised that that article from Countercurrents Alan posted a couple of days ago partially answers this question. The author is the general secretary of a union representing agricultural workers. He laments the fact that so few agricultural workers are involved in the campaign:
“However, only the more conscious sections of agricultural labourers have yet participated in this on-going struggle. The vast section of agricultural labourers is not yet aware about the harmful effects of these laws upon their lives. Even the unorganized section of this class, who are the majority, perceive this agitation as an issue of the land-owners only and remain distant from this struggle. The weak organizational situation of agricultural labourers and the pain of casteism are among the several factors behind this.” (my emphasis)
According to wikipeia, the Khet Mazdoor Union is run by the “Communist” Party. As this party is even more opportunist and reformist than the French Workers Party Engels criticised in 1894 it is not surprising that it would want to involve agricultural workers in a struggle by their employers. His argument seems to be that the workers should support their employers as the government is planning to deprive them of a previously guaranteed market.
The article by Engels which YMS cites is largely a criticism of the agrarian programme adopted by the Frenh Workers Party in 1894. He took particular objection to one passage which stated that it was
“expedient to extend this protection also to the producers who, as tenants or sharecroppers (Metayers), cultivate the land owned by others and who, if they exploit day laborers, are to a certain extent compelled to do so because of the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected.”
To whih Engels retorted:
“Here, we are entering upon ground that is passing strange. Socialism is particularly opposed to the exploitation of wage labor. And here it is declared to be the imperative duty of socialism to protect the French tenants when they “exploit day laborers”, as the text literally states! And that because they are compelled to do so to a certain by “the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected”!”
So, for him, support for farmers who exploit wage-labour was non-socialist even if they were themselves exploited.
Do we know if the striking Indian farmers are employers (= exploiters) of wage-labour? According to this from 2019, there are 144.3 million (In think thst’s right if a crore = 10 million) agricultural labourers in India:
“However, while announcing direct income support of ₹6,000 annually to farmers in the interim Budget, the Centre left agriculture labourers high and dry though rural casual labourers constitute the single largest segment of the country’s workforce. Most agricultural workers are asset-less or asset-poor. There are 14.43 crore agricultural labourers, who constitute 55 per cent of the people involved in agriculture in India.”
Are they inolved in the protests and demontrations or is it just the farmers? What are the unions representing agricultural wage workers saying about the bandh?
Anybody know?
