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Some more stuff on Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system.” (Roosevelt 8 May 1935)
“He (President Roosevelt) is fighting to save the capitalist system, and not to destroy it”.— Sir Arthur Willert, Press Officer and Head of the News Department of the Foreign Office, in an article on American politics. (Times, 29 April 1936.)
Of course by “capitalist system” Roosevelt meant private capitalism as production for profit by private enterprises. That survived but how did the workers fare?
“When Roosevelt ran for reëlection in 1936, the unemployment rate was 16.9 per cent, almost twice what it had been in 1930. (…) When Roosevelt ran for the unprecedented third term [in 1940], unemployment was 14.6 per cent.“
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/04/how-the-deal-went-down/amp )By coincidence (I think) Darren has just put this article on his blog showing that the class division cuts across all groups.
Rather cruelly yesterday’s Guardian recalls Boris’s hero Churchill’s description of Roosevelt’s New Deal as “this war on wealth and business, this ruthless war on private enterprise”.
Article from the Socialist Standard here:
“The American South, despite its slave labour, was basically a commodity society in which goods (including slaves) and services were produced for sale on the market with a view to profit. A more fitting designation for the system is <i>Plantation Capitalism</i>.”
Even Peake has admitted that she was wrong, tweeting “I feel it’s important for me to clarify that, when talking to The Independent, I was inaccurate in my assumption of American Police training & its sources.” She didn’t explain why she immediately jumped to the conclusion that the Israeli secret service must have been involved.
According to Cook, she also thinks that we are being ruled by “capitalist, fascist dictators”, another indication of how prone she is to conspiracy theories. On the other hand, she might just be a joke. Citizeness Smith.
Yes, Keynes was merely providing a theory to justify policies already pursued by left-leaning reformists… and others. Not that Johnson is planning to do anything as radical as either Roosevelt or Hitler, essentially not much more than implementing more rapidly spending plans that had already been drawn up.
“You are the idealists and the elitists, very much like Lenin in fact, if you think only of making the rest of humanity into copies of yourselves. In fact, you are wanting others to follow you, in fact if not in theory.”
I am not clear Mutual whether this is you quoting our feathered friend or your own view. It would be rather strange if the latter coming from someone who has put the Party case in the Socialist Standard and other publications for years. But I suppose the “if” would let you off the hook since we don’t actually think only of making the rest of humanity into copies of ourselves.
Our role is merely to help the class struggle that is going on anyway become a conscious struggle to end the capitalist system of class ownership and production for profit and replace it with common ownership and production directly for use, in line with the development of the methods of production that have taken place.
Yes, ever since it came into being capitalism has had a problem of what to do about “the poor” as those who, for one reason or another such as illness, disability or old age, are not able to maintain themselves. Hence the “poor law” and its various successors in Britain (National Assistance, Social Security, Income Support, etc), payable mainly to the “unemployable”, i.e those no employer is going to employ because the quality of their labour power is so low. Even capitalism can’t let such people — and they amount to some 10 percent of the population — die and so has to provide them with the minimum necessary to keep them alive. UBI in its basic form, and in any form that is likely to be adopted, is merely a reform of existing “poor law” provisions, as are the various cash handouts that are also being discuss.
“The traditional view has millions of workers becoming conscious Marxist materialists.”
What traditional view would that be? Certainly not Bukharin (since, as a Bolshevik, he would have thought that under capitalism workers are only capable of reaching a trade union consciousness). Certainly not Marx (as he wouldn’t be so arrogant or such a megalomaniac). Not us either, since we have always talked about a “class conscious” working class majority; which only requires an understanding that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the working class, an understanding of what socialism is and a desire to establish it involving political action. That does not require having read Marx’s philosophical writings or Engels’s Anti-Duhring or indeed any of their writings.
As to “materialism”, most people today in the developed capitalist areas of the world are materialists in practice since, whatever they may profess to believe in when asked, in practice they live their lives without expecting some “non-material” entity to intervene in it.
Added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:
‘Revolutionary Christianity’, August 1921
“Higher prices mean fewer jobs”, October 1921
The Great Discoveries and their economic effects, February 1926
Rationalisation and unemployment, June 1929
Potash and Palestine. Dead-sea Fruit, October 1929
Wicked Bankers and Kind Captains of Industry, November 1929
Armaments and Unemployment, July 1961Just been reminded by a comrade in the south of Ireland that;
”Of course the Greens were in government before (with Fianna Fail) until they were all turfed out of parliament by an angry electorate after the financial collapse debacle of 2008.”
Forgot about that.
You mean like the Hindus? At least they make no bones about the fact that they worship idols and not some airy-fairy nebulous concept.
The Church of England really are a pathetic lot. Now they want to paint the face of the idol they worship black. This won’t please the feminists among them who will want him portrayed as a woman. There is a possible solution. They could make their idol a mixed race hermaphrodite. An earlier group of Christians had a more radical solution— destroy them all, as the soldiers in Cromwell’s army started to do— but then they weren’t C of E.
To be fair, the statement that Long-Bailey didn’t object to was anti-Semitic even if maybe not intentional. Why bring the Israeli secret service into it unless you’ve got an agenda? It was also incorrect. See:
Long-Bailey was being either naive or more probably arrogant in refusing to remove her endorsement of the article as she thought she was irremovable. We don’t need to shed any tears over her fate as she slides down the greasy pole a bit.
