ALB
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I got confused between SOEs and SBCs. But it didn’t seem to be saying anything particularly new. The fact that the old USSR was ahead for a while in the space race shows that the state can develop one sector of the economy if it throws enough resources at it but this will be at the expense of other sections. I think this is what the present UK government wants to do with hi-tech industries but the EU regards such “state aid” as unfair competition.
What are we to make of this?
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-54138247
Hume was in effect an agnostic and a sceptic who is still studied by all students of philosophy in Britain. He did support slavery and needn’t have done as others at the time didn’t.
That other philosopher taught in all British and American universities, John Locke, drew up a constitution for Carolina which provided for chattel slavery.
Another one, Thomas Jefferson, fathered children with one of his slaves. Rabbie Burns was going to take up a job as a slave overseer in the West Indies.
All this needs to be pointed out of course, drawing attention to the feet of clay of the great philosophers of the rising bourgeoisie. But I would have they that it’s much more important to refute their ideas than pulling down their statues or renaming buildings (as a prelude to banning their books?).
One philosopher who might escape this is Plato since he was at one point bought and sold as a slave himself. Not that it prevented him proposing a caste system as the ideal way to organise society.
If there was that degree of socialist consciousness amongst the general population wouldn’t it also manifest itself politically by sending to parliament mandated socialist delegates not pro-capitalist politicians? That way the change to socialism could be properly co-ordinated and the socialist majority have the power and legitimacy to deal with any possible attempt by any minority to try to hold up the establishment of socialism.
Having said that, I think you could be right that something like what you say could be expected to happen in the last days of capitalism. More likely than the alternative of people rushing to spend all their money before socialism was established.
More from Varouflakis. Now he wants an independent Scottish poond:
History does indeed seem to be moving backwards. Or at least some people want it to.
Yes, elections in the US are a farce from the point of view of formal democracy as those with money like capitalists and capitalist corporations can effectively spend as much as they like to support candidates of their choice. Previous attempts to limit this have been over-ruled by the Supreme Court. This from Wikipedia:
”On February 19, 2013, the Supreme Court announced it would hear McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case challenging the limit on how much individuals can donate directly to political parties and federal candidates. On April 2, 2014, the Court announced its opinion and maintained aggregate limits on campaign contributions were unconstitutional under the First Amendment”.
Marx once referred to Belgium in his day as a capitalists’ paradise. This title has long since passed to the US.
We’ve got one too of course:
It is not clear what the government is up to with its Bill to deliberately break an international treaty signed only last year. I know we have always said that treaties are just pieces of paper that a state can find a pretext to tear up if the interests of its capitalist class require this. It has happened many times.
In this case, however, it is difficult to see what is the capitalist interest, even that of the minority section which was anti-EU and pro-US instead. Northern Ireland is of no consequence to the UK capitalist class; in fact it’s a drain on their resources. So that can’t be the reason.
The only rational explanation would seem to be that it’s a negotiating ploy to get the EU to agree to a better trade deal from the UK point of view. We will see.
This article brings out rather well the diplomatic and electoral duplicity involved, but then we already knew that politicians tell lies to win elections though Johnson is clearly more brazen about this than most others.
The accompanying video is good too on the implications for the Irish capitalist economy.
I assumed that that’s what it is meant to mean but it’s not what it means literally. And is the term Climate Delayer or Climate Change Delayer?
It looks as if it’s a term you ought to discard as quickly as you picked it up !
Alternatively, we could use it to throw at anybody who campaigns for the problem to be tackled within capitalism as they are delaying the establishment of the only framework within which it can rationally and lastingly dealt with ie the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.
And so too therefore will the pink boats and other expensive equipment as well as the glossy leaflets.
But what is this new thing, a “Climate Change Delayer” ? What do you have to advocate or do to earn this epithet ?
Delaying climate change seems like a good idea to me.
All this week the Times has been wreaking its revenge on XR for blockading its printing presses last weekend. It has been publishing the names and occupations of those arrested and what a list of “petty bourgeois” they make.
But more relevant is the article published on Thursday about who has been financing XR. One is “Ben Goldsmith, the financier and environmentalist” and “government adviser”, a trustee of the “Children’s Investment Fund Foundation” which gave XR a grant of £137,000. The CIFF was set up by “the hedge-fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn”.
Why would these members of the capitalist class finance an organisation like XR? In any event, after XR’s latest stunt, it appears they are no longer going to. The Times’s article is headed “Blockade backfires on climate activists”.
So it looks as if they are pissing off capitalists as well as workers. Quite an achievement.
If we want to go down that road a much quicker way would be gene therapy in which a person’s genes are altered to remove some manifest defect. I know this raises ethical problems too eg over what is a “defect”. But I don’t think that anybody would deny, would they, that the genetically-inherited condition Huntington’s Disease, with the horrible fate that awaits those who are going to get it, is something that should be eliminated?
I don’t think Dawkins can be branded as a Social Darwinist (Darwin couldn’t be either) any more than as a eugenist and racist like that idiot Podur does.
The objection to him is that he gave credence to biological determinism as the view that human behaviour is to a large extent determined by human biology. The title of his book of “The Selfish Gene” does this as it gives the impression that there is a gene for selfishness. In fact he argued that the basic unit of biological evolution is the gene rather than, say, a group — an argument for experts in the field to settle for themselves on the basis of the facts. We can just note that in every book he published since that one Dawkins has backtracked on his original claim so as to take account of other influences on biological evolution.
In politics he is not a rabid rightwinger but a wishy-washy middle of the road liberal.
As for Darwin, the “survival of the fittest” does not mean the survival of the strongest in the day to day struggle to survive but the survival in the long run of those with biological characteristics that are the best for surviving in the environment that a group of life-forms finds itself in.
Social (or rather Anti-Social) “Darwinism” has nothing to do with Darwin but was an ideology concocted in the last decades of the 19th century to defend those capitalists who emerge the most successfully from the economic competition amongst them to make the most profits.
What a stupid attack on Dawkins. Dawkins wasn’t advocating eugenics ( as artificial selection to produce humans with particular characteristics) but merely pointing out that this is theoretically possible. Read again what Dawkins tweeted:
”It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work fo
rhumans? Facts ignore ideology.”This is not saying that eugenics should be tried but that, if it were to be, it would in theory work. I don’t think that this can be denied. Whether or not it should be tried is a quite different matter.
The author’s bid to deny that artificial selection has worked with other animals and with plants is pathetic and is indeed based on ideology not fact. The results of artificial selection are all around us, not just in domesticated animals but also in the foods we eat. In fact Darwin got the idea of natural selection to explain the evolution of species from observing how pigeon fanciers bred different types of pigeons.
Of course it “works”. He does have a point that the technique is being misused to produce shows dogs and cats but that’s a different matter.
We have our bone to pick with Dawkins over his Selfish Gene book but he is not an advocate of eugenics nor a racist (nor an islamophobe) as claimed by those who have put him on their list of speakers to be banned and shouted down.
