ALB
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It is interesting to see how, in their bid to get people back into the city centres to buy things and keep office rents up, they are emphasising the social relations aspect of work and how not having this by staying at home all the time might harm health and well-being.
A different story from when they are objecting to socialism on the grounds that no one would want to work as without wages there’d be no incentive to.
From those who tried to stop workers going to work by tube, more on how to put people off and lose friends. Disrupt people returning from holiday.
Their actions are neither necessary nor logical. Everybody knows now about the threatened climate crisis and it doesn’t help to exaggerate it as that will tend to make people either sceptical or resigned. Illogical because capitalist governments are doing what they can afford to in the context of international competition to deal with it, and no amount of jumping up and down will, given capitalism, be able to make them do much more. The problem will only be able to be dealt with rationally within the framework of a socialist world of common ownership and production directly for use and not for sale on a market with a view to profit.
Once again their antics risk impeding socialist activity, in this case comrades getting to head office to send out the September Socialist Standard. That reminds me, I must fill up today in case they won’t let me tomorrow or Monday.
Denialism and Alarmism: two sides of the same bad penny?
Following a discussion on Discord about whether or not our case against capitalism should be alarmist on this and other issues (as opposed to pointing to the scientific advances that could be applied in socialism) a comrade has drawn attention to this article;
Denial and Alarmism in the Near-Term Extinction and Collapse Debate
I see my pet hate Roger Hallam of XR gets a well-deserved bollocking,
Surely those selling doners in city centres aren’t Tories. More likely to be Turkish or Cypriot nationalists 😊
Incidentally, today’s papers are reporting that for a short while on Wednesday morning some 60% of electricity generated in Britain came from windpower:
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/wind-power-continues-to-break-records-as-storm-francis-hits-uk
Of course we don’t want to experience the windy conditions that gave rise to this (80 mph winds across the country) to exist all the time, but it shows that even capitalist authorities are beginning to get their act together on this. In a part of the world like Britain why didn’t they think of doing this before? (Ok, I know, it was too expensive).
Note that the backup power sources that operate under all weather conditions are burning gas (so releasing some CO2 but less than from burning coal) and nuclear. In socialism that’s going to be the choice.
The government’s campaign, just launched, to persuade office workers to stop working at home and go back to working in their offices exposes the hypocrisy of its previous talk of it being a ‘moral duty’, a ‘moral imperative’, etc for schoolkids to go back to school.
It’s nothing to do with the supposed risks to their health if they don’t go back to school but to make it easier for office workers to go back to working in their offices so that city centre businesses don’t lose more profits.
In any event the evidence that not going to school is bad for your health is pretty dubious. What are they missing out on other than being trained to be various grades of wage slaves?
You don’t say whether you think it’s a good or a bad idea. I am sure many Greens will think it’s a bad idea but the problem with most renewable energies is that they are intermittent depending on weather conditions like the sun shining or the wind blowing. So some more regular backup source of energy is needed. The small nuclear reactors envisaged would seem to fit the bill while not contributing to green house gas emissions.
In other words, the technical means to deal with the threat of global overwarming already exist and could be applied in socialism.
Good debate in which Bill put the case for socialism excellently. Worth listening to if you’ve a spare 90 minutes.
Good debate. I am not sure that the anarcho-capitalist had come debated anyone before arguing against the existence of the coercive State and for voluntary agreement like him but also against the capitalist economic system of production for the market with a view to profit. But he must surely have come across others calling themselves anarchists who take up this position.
Of course the anarcho-capitalists start from the assumption that the right to property derives from someone having paid for something out of their earnings from work. But, as Bill pointed out, production today is not individual but a collective effort involving all those involved in producing something (ultimately everybody who works); on the argument that the right to property derives from work this would justify socialism as common ownership and from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Not that this is an argument that we use since, as Bill also pointed out, we don’t argue in terms of “rights”. But it is one anarcho-capitalists have to answer but can’t.
It doesn’t imply that at all. Of course science is a human construct — a phenomenon of the mind as Marcos points out — and so is also culturally influenced. What we are looking for is a description that reliably predicts the course of a series or set of phenomena and so is of more practical use.
But you need to be careful, Wez, in case you catch bird flu — and have to self-isolate 😊
I think, perhaps inadvertently, you have put your finger on it: that the language of dialectics is a cultural way of describing observed phenomena learned in particular by those who attended a German university in the first half of the 19th century (like you know who).
In other words, as Marcos has pointed out, dialectics is one way of describing observed changes in phenomena not something that is in the phenomena themselves. It belongs to the realm of human thought not to that of “Nature”.
I am sure it is possible to describe observed changes in this language even if this might be a bit convoluted. Anyway, have a go at explaining how water changes from liquid to gas or how an animal species evolved in terms of changes in “internal relations”. I am sure you can.
We do love philosophy discussions here. But, to be fair, we do discuss other things too,
Heavy going but this is the passage I retained (from the German Ideology):
“where real life starts, there consequently begins real, positive science, the expounding of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of people. Phrases about consciousness end, and real knowledge has to take their place. When reality is described philosophy as an independent pursuit loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which are derived from the observations of the historical development of people. These abstractions in themselves, divorced from real history, have no value whatever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material.” (Marx and Engels 1976, 37)6
