ALB
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Alan, you say: “My position is one of priorities. I still do not see why covid19 is as deserving all the publicity and concentration of resources.”
But if we say that priority should be given to dealing with dengue fever in the swamps of Asia and Latin America over dealing with the current new strain of Coronavirus in the densely populated parts of the world, we are likely to attract the support only of Christians and other do-gooders rather than ordinary people. In fact we’ll be seen and dismissed as just another bunch of do-gooders. Which we are not and must avoid.
We have got to think of something better to say on this issue.
I don’t understand your position. You get worked up about a potential threat that may or may not materialise in 50 years but pooh-pooh an immediate threat to fellow workers.
I am not saying that this pandemic is going to be as bad as the one a hundred years ago but this is what happened then:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
No government can just let the pandemic take its course, as you seem to be suggesting. Even under capitalism those in charge of the central administration can’t be, and aren’t, that irresponsible. If they were that would of course strengthen our case that society’s central administration should not be in the hands of the capitalist class and its political representatives.
That document says that there are a few hundred cases in the UK all acquired by travellers from areas where it is endemic. So not a problem for workers here. Unlike the Coronavirus which is an immediate current threat to the health and life of workers here.
Incidentally dengue fever is a threat to some workers in the US as parts of the US are “tropical”:
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0005744
In fact dengue fever is not the only Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) threatening workers in those parts of the USA. I can see therefore why in the US the amount of money devoted to dealing with these diseases compared with that being made available for combatting Coronavirus might be an issue. It not in the UK or indeed the rest of Europe.
Raising it here could even be counterproductive as, given nationalist sentiments, some politicians will be tempted to call for money to be diverted from the budget to deal with NTDs in other parts of the world to helping workers here.
I don’t think that the government is prioritising the problem here because it affects the rich. I think it is to do with its effect on production as, with so many workers off sick, this will fall and the flow of profits be interrupted. A confirmation as to who the real “wealth producers” are. They will also be concerned with whether the health care system can cope with a huge unexpected increase in sick workers and the cost of dealing with this.
What will also be revealing is, as Alan has raised, how capitalism deals with this global problem compared with how it is dealing with the threat of global overwarming. Will it be each state for itself here too? Or will the existence of a World Health Organisation be of some use?
So there’s no chance of me or any member of the working class in Britain catching it? On the other hand, there is a high chance of thousands here getting the Coronavirus and, as the prime minister has just announced, hundreds dying from it. As a pro-working class party we can’t complain that too much is being done to deal with it compared to what is being done about dengue fever. That won’t wash and can’t be our position. That’s irrelevant to the immediate threat to workers here.
We are not reformist but we must want as much to be done as it takes to protect the health and life of workers. Also the loss of earnings by those who can’t afford to take time off sick. I think that something along those lines would be a much more credible approach.
What is this dengue thing that we are all going to get rather the Coronavirus? What precautions do I have to take to stop getting it ?
And he denounced it as a “foreign virus”, stopping short of saying it was biological warfare by China. You’ve got to give to him. He’s always true to form as the world’s prime idiot.
Now the Minister of Health has spread it:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-51827356
You’ve got to laugh but either she didn’t do what her ministry was telling the rest of us to do or they’re running around like headless chickens.
She’s a raving free-marketeer so maybe she thought she could ignore the advice of the “nanny state”.
Just thought of a stunt, Alan, for the Cop 26 meeting in Glasgow whenever it is. How about placards and t-shirts saying SYSTEM CHANGE NOT LIFESTYLE CHANGE . That’ll get them thinking and wondering.
One of my brothers used to live on a commune for a while. They are experiments in communal living. Academics call them “intentional communities”. When there was a fad for them most of them were more intentional poverty and austerity.
As to the best (least worst) survival mechanism under capitalism, if you ask me I’d prefer to work for an employer rather than live in a commune. Working for the government or a parastatal body is generally better than working for a private employer. More secure and a better pension !
Incidentally, look what’s become of the commune my brother lived on. It’s been integrated into capitalism too:
http://www.lowershawfarm.co.uk
I have read the whole article properly now. Presumably he wrote it and the book to justify the Weekly Worker’s demand for Britain to become a Republic. Obviously the monarchy can’t survive into socialism but it’s unclear whether the WW wants one now under capitalism. If they do, then the SWP member who Lewis criticises for saying “we don’t want to be like the US and France” was correct — that’s what we would say: there is no difference between a capitalist republic and a capitalist constitutional monarchy, so this is a non-issue.
It is also odd, for someone who has a PhD for a study of the period, to write that Waldeck-Rousseau, the entry into whose cabinet by nominal socialist Millerand in 1899 caused a scandal in socialist circles, was the butcher the Paris Commune. That was General Galliffet who was the Minister of War (in those days they called a spade a spade) in his cabinet; which made Millerand’s action all the more reprehensible.
The SPGB was represented at the Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam in 1904 and a report of the Bebel v Jaures debate that Lewis mentions appeared in issue No 1 of the Socialist Standard.
Also, I don’t think that Marx and Engels did use the term “commune state” as Lewis states.
Yes, Lenin made Kautsky the most well known renegade since Judas Iscariot. But it’s a Leninist lie to say that Kautsky voted for Imperial Germany’s war credits in 1914. He wasn’t even a member of the Reichstag and in internal discussions urged abstention. Pretty weak in the circumstances but not the same as voting for. When the German SDP split over the war issue in 1917 he went with the pro-peace USPD (Independent SPD).
Actually of course it was Lenin who reneged — on Marx’s view of the socialist revolution.
That’s exactly what we say and of course and why you quoted it. It is an expansion in clearer terms of what Engels wrote in his 1891 post script to Marx’s pamphlet in the Paris Commune if 1871, The Civil War in France:
“In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.”
This contrasts with Lenin’s view that the present state should be completely smashed and replaced by a new one based on the dictatorship of a vanguard party. In the debate between Kautsky and Lenin on the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” Kautsky wiped the floor with Lenin.
In the end Kautsky became a open reformist. It is significant that, while the Party published as separate pamphlets the first three sections of his explanation of the German Social Democratic Party’s 1891 Erfurt Programme, we omitted the fourth part which explained its programme of immediate democratic and social reforms.
We will definitely get a copy of that book to review but not quite sure how with it’s price of £121. So maybe we will just comment on Lewis’s article !
Yes, there is something in common between being doomed by this virus and being doomed by global warming. It’s the concept of a “reasonable worst case scenario” as something that has some slight chance of happening but probably won’t.
I don’t know why the government has mentioned the remote possibility of 80 percent of the population getting it and a million dying. This was bound to frighten some people and lead to panic buying.
We’ll see but won’t have to wait till 2100 to find out if it was necessary to scare people by invoking a “reasonable worst case scenario”.
Actually it’s more us than anarchists who say that there must be a majority in favour (“educated” or, rather, “self-educated”) before the social revolution to end capitalism is attempted.
Most anarchists (of those who are communists, that is) believe that communist consciousness (or socialist consciousness, as we usually call it) will develop during the course of trying to end capitalism initiated by an “active” or “conscious” minority. All Leninists and, if there are any these days, followers of Blanqui believe that a majority communist consciousness can only develop after capitalist rule has been overthrown in an insurrection led by a conscious vanguard at the head of a mass of merely discontent workers and others.
So he has a point. Anarchists and Leninists do share a common belief in a minority-initiated insurrection against capitalist rule. To be fair, though, that’s where it stops. At least the anarchists don’t want the minority to become the new ruling class — though a new one could well re-emerge if the majority don’t come to want communism.
How are the mighty fallen. Wolff just advocating a variation of the profit-sharing that the Liberal Party here used to promote. Only difference is that under his scheme all the profits go to the workers — if, that is, the worker-owned enterprise makes a profit, which in any event it is obliged to pursue and most of which it has to re-invest to stay in business. Just like any other business model producing for the market.
