ALB
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There is as a good article on this in the Socialist Standard of August 2011:
Ellen Meskins Wood gets more than a mention as does Robert Brenner.
Yes I suppose you can interpret Brexit as the UK being relegated from the Premier Division to the Championship and, if it doesn’t do to well there, to the Third Division North.
On the other hand, like that other state with a former empire, France, the UK has maintained powerful armed forces which allow it to punch above its economic weight. Though delusions of grandeur go with it. I imagine China sees the UK as an island off the European landmass a bit like Taiwan is to the Chinese mainland.
What you are forgetting, twc, is that, in the democratised post-modernist world that our feathered friend thinks Marx meant by socialism, those questions are to be put to a vote of the whole human population, along with others such as does heat burn and does the Earth go round the Sun. If the answer to any is no then that reverses or annuls them.
Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?
Lucky there’s a statistician in the house. Here’s more:
There is an article in next month’s Socialist Standard on the populist radio station TalkRadio under the title Radio Ga-Ga.
Did you notice what he just said —that human activity meets “resistance” ? What from? Surely not from what some people might call “matter” ie the world independent of humans and their activity?
As to Bogdanov, there’s an interesting article here:
As to a criticism of Lenin’s version of materialism, this is not bad (it’s towards the end) even if I say so myself:
“We are social beings. We socially construct our mental/material world. We put that construct into practice. “
That’s what more or less what we’ve been trying to argue here. But this implies that there is something apart from them that human beings in society use to “construct”. The difference between us and our feathered friend is that he denies this. He argues that “our mental/material world” is entirely constructed by the human social mind out of nothing (and, therefore, that when it was the social consensus that the Sun moved round the Earth that was the case).
“Matter has no voice until our thinking gives it so… and yet… it still hurts when you stub your toe on it.“
Yes, but the second part is a step our feathered friend won’t take perhaps because stubbing his toe would undermine his argument that the outside world doesn’t exist until we create it.
Incidentally, you sound like a bit of a post-modernist since whoever else would talk of “ modernists” ( whoever they are!)?
Yes but that’s because they are opposed to civilian nuclear power and are trying to stir up opposition to it by associating it with nuclear weapons. Typical alarmist tactics.
Nuclear power stations are not “nukes” ie nuclear weapons. You can be against nuclear weapons (as all sane people are) while being in favour of civil nuclear power. This is an ill-chosen thread title..
The first three extracts are ok. The last one about the Civil War is more dubious. I wonder which historian wrote it? Do we know so that we can examine their credentials? I see someone has challenged them by asking for a citation. Of course there was a link with 1688. Whigs and Marxists, unite !
What’s worrying here is the Turkish ambition to expand its influence, not to say (Ottoman) empire, to incorporate Azerbaijan. If Turkey sends troops or arms Armenia won’t stand a chance and there’ll be another mass refugee problem.
I thought, TM, that it has been a very useful discussion with all angles being examined as different contributors made different points. We don’t often have controversial discussions here but we should, as that’s one of the reasons the forum is for. Most are with our feathered friend but after 5 years of discussing with a parrot this has become rather predictable and boring.
That’s just what is to be expected under capitalism and I am sure it is true that the military is seeking to use the technology for lethal purposes. But that’s the same with any new technology. Capitalism will misuse it, either for commercial or military ends.
5G technology allows faster data collection and analysis and will be an essential part of what comrades Rozanov and Shannon outlined computers could do in a socialist world. So we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Incidentally, as I think has been pointed out here before, those behind that site and video are notorious conspiracy theorists and fake news distributors. See:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Globalresearch
Anything Michel Chossudovsky is associated with should be looked on with suspicion.
