ALB
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There is this classic: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams.
”Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944.”
I agree, James, with Alan. This is not a good idea. It is unfair and illogical to blame someone for what their ancestors did.
But, since part of the primitive accumulation of capital that set capitalism going cane from the profits of the slave trade, in standing candidates against any party or candidate that supports capitalism we are doing our bit to topple a system that benefited from modern chattel slavery.
Moderator, is there any way if changing the misleading title of this thread? A question mark instead of an exclamation mark would do.
In 1910 the Socialist Labor Party of America published a speech by Jules Guesde, head of an opposition faction within the reformist “socialist party” In France, in which he argued that there was nothing socialist as such in cooperatives and that their only use to the socialist movement was to provide funds for it. At least he showed a higher understanding than Wolff.
Just got round to reading these last two articles. The second one is actually not too bad. The first gives a good enough definition of capitalism as being based on the employer/employee relationship (the wages system) but then confuses things by at one point calling the old USSR, China, etc state capitalist and at another socialist.
As to be expected, he advances his solution that worker coops are the way forward, at one point even describing them as “communist”. They do abolish the employer/employee relationship for those involved but they are not communist because they are envisaged as still producing for sale on a market; whereas communism (socialism) implies that the democratically-run productive units would not be producing for the market, precisely because what they produced would belong to the whole community (“communism”) and be there to be distributed in non-market ways, either free distribution, free use or taking for free.
This is not bad considering they’re way-out Trots:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/29/musk-j29.html
”All of this boils down to the fact that the profit and wealth of the capitalist is not the result of his own labor, but the labor of others, the workers. “The surplus value,” Marx explained in his earlier work, Value, Price and Profit, “or that part of the total value of a commodity in which the surplus labor or unpaid labor is realized, I call Profit.”
Or, in the somewhat oversimplified version laid out by Musk: “Gib me dat for free.”
Perhaps because they didn’t think they could get away with giving him a Jewish accent. Or to associate the BLM with ‘Marxists’ ie Cahmunists?
Actually that’s quite a good summary of Das Kapital in a nutshell. It’s what capitalists say to the workers when they take the surplus value that workers produce over and above the value of their wages.
In fact we could produce a t-shirt with the same meme but instead of “hungry Santa” saying “as the capitalist said to the worker”.
Looks as if the government in England gave in too readily to the business lobby and have now been forced to row back in a bid to avoid a second wave.
South African? Interesting article here on slavery in the Cape region. Some of the slaves came from outside Africa, from India, Indonesia and Madagascar. A few even from West Africa.
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-slavery-and-early-colonisation-south-africa
Yes indeed. What a pathetic criticism of the BBC from someone employed by a rival state-owned broadcaster, that owned by Qatar whose political system is still “oriental despotism”. He seems to want to suppress the fact that African rulers also played a part in the transatlantic slave trade (as well as locally).
No mention (of course) of Arab slavers in the service of orientalist despots or of Islam’s theological justifications of slavery. Nor of the link in Arabic between the word for slaves and blacks. You’ll never here anything about any of these on Al Jazeera.
From today’s Times ( of London), Mr Biden said “that he would provide $150 billion in business loans and grants for ethnic-minority-owned businesses”.
There is clearly a lot of anger about but it is so misdirected. What do those who pulled the statue down want? It can’t be to return to the situation before the Spanish conquest as that is impossible. And if it’s monetary compensation they want that would only help them survive a little better under capitalism. Socialism is literally the only way out but I suppose they will say they want “something now”. That may make some sense if they also saw and worked for socialism as the solution, but not instead of it.
Articles by Hardy from the 1920s with our criticism of Labour and Social Democratic parties just added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:
Some I.L.P. Distortions of Marx, August 1922
Labour Governments. The Australian Fiasco, December 1923
The capitalist principles of the I.L.P., January 1925
The Road to Power. An exposure of the Social Democrats in Germany, July 1925
The failure of the Co-operative Movement, January 1927
What the Labour Party wants, September 1927
Housing Reform Examined. An illustration from Vienna, December 1927
The Labour Machine in Conference, November 1928They are much more currency cranky than the party of the sane name in the UK.
With their endorsement of the US Federal Reserve conspiracy theory and their mistaken belief that private commercial banks can somehow create money to lend out of thin air, I don’t think we have all that much in common with them.
