ALB
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What do Greenpeace expect? The government negotiators and capitalist enterprises involved in such deals can’t help it. If fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables they’d be mugs not to do deals based on this as, if they didn’t, they would increase production costs and so undermine competitivity — and somebody else would come along and negotiate the cheaper fossil fuels deal. That’s the way it is under capitalism, especially on the international field where, unlike within capitalist states, there is no international body that can enforce measures in the longer term interests of capitalists and their system.
From today’s Times without comment:
“Britain will not diverge from European rules “just for the sake of it” after Brexit, Sajid Javid said yesterday, as he softened the government’s rhetoric on future EU trade talks.
In a move to reassure business, the chancellor said that while ministers were determined that Britain would not become a “rule taker” from Brussels, it did not mean the UK would necessarily diverge from European standards.
“We will be a sovereign and independent country,” he told a lunch for British executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “But we’ll always protect the interests of British businesses throughout this process and we’ll maintain high standards — not because we are told to, but because we want to.””
Electricity has been seen as essential for a future communist society by all sorts of critics of capitalism. From Lenin’s “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” to Kropotkin’s detailed interest in it in Fields, Factories and Workshops as providing the basis for production in a decentralised society. Both were right. But you can’t will the end without willing the means.
What’s wrong with electricity grids, national and international? They are a sign of how production is inter-related and part of the material basis for a worldwide socialist society. We will still need them in socialism. Small is not particularly beautiful. It is just small.
As you hint at, this is a measure of the waste of capitalism as a system not of how much each individual uses.
Taking total consumption and dividing it per head of population creates the illusion that ordinary people are to blame and that the way out is for us to cut down our personal consumption. But this wouldn’t make much difference. The other mistaken conclusion is that cutting down population would help. Ironically, by cutting down the figure by which total consumption is divided this would increase the figure for consumption per person!
Which all goes to show that consumption per head (they do it for individual countries too to show how the population there gets better off from year to year as capitalist production and waste goes up) is a misleading and pretty meaningless figure.
Yes we do have an arrangement with the WSPUS to offer contacts there the 3-month trial subscription and quite a few have taken it up. And we do get requests from Australia too. In principle it is open to people anywhere. However, we ignore all requests from Ukraine and Russia. Once bitten twice shy.
I see what you mean. Workers cooperatives, mutualist financial institutions, etc. But who is Chris Wright anyway to deserve top of the bill treatment ?
Most new applications for membership now come through the internet. So, apart from election inserts, do most requests for a free three-month trial subscription to the Socialist Standard. This is something we want to increase as it allows contacts to get a better understanding of our position. We operate on the theory that the more people take this up the more will take out a permanent subscription. In fact it’s virtually the only way of increasing subscriptions.
The advertisement for this can be found in two different places on our website, under Publications/Socialist Standard and Contacts. The second is the easiest to find. So if comrades active on other forums and comments want to draw attention to this offer here’s the link:
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/3-free-standards/
I think we are to an extent but the lesson would be that we should concentrate on saying how horrible capitalism is rather than how nice socialism would be.
But look at the question again:
“Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world.”
This leaves open the answer that capitalism could/should be reformed so as to change this rather than done away with completely, So why isn’t this “resonating” with reformists or vice versa? Why did the Labour lose the election? Why did the Australian Labor Party not win the election down there? And why will Sanders if he is selected lose the coming US elections; in fact why will Warren?
The answer is that it probably is resonating with more but not enough people. Which I think answers your specific question.
Even if he was tricked into saying it by some scumbag journalist, that would be in accordance with Hallam’s previously expressed views. He has said rationing must be imposed on people and commandeering private property (which all governments give themselves the power to do in time of war, and do) would be expected by him to deal with a climate emergency in which he thinks millions are going to die. It’s a Nuremberg trial and shooting those found guilty that the scumbag journalist would have tricked him into saying. But he always has come across as a raving nutcase and it is possible that this was one of his ravings.
Why haven’t XR dumped him? The trouble for them is that their other leaders share his end-of-the-world-is-nigh analysis, from which false premise he has drawn some conclusions as to what this means would have to be done. Did somebody say ecofascism? The dictatorship of the 3.5 percent?
Yes, there is a confusion in Pena’s article between “labour” as the creator of the “value” that underlies the exchange value/price that products have in a market economy and work as what transforms materials that originally came from nature into something to be used by humans. The latter exists whatever the type of society humans live in and is in fact a condition of human existence.
Humans have to transform parts of nature — the definition of “production”— in order to live. No doubt the amount of human energy needed to be expended to produce some particular thing could be measured and would be a legitimate area for scientific study, but it would have nothing to do with the Marxian labour theory of value.
Despite Pena’s and similar criticisms “value” is not something material in the sense of something tangible even though it is the characteristic of something that is. Pena makes great play of the word used by Marx’s English translator — “congealed” — to describe this, but it is not meant to be taken literally. It could equally be expressed by the word “acquired” as it is something that products of labour have when, and only when, they are produced for sale on a market. It is why in a socialist society, where products will not be produced for sale, they will not have such a “value” despite involving an expenditure of human labour.
Anyway, Robbo has written a detailed refutation of Pena’s criticism of the Marxian Labour Theory of Value that should be appearing in the March Socialist Standard.
If you are going to say what our position in the second world slaughter “effectively” was (other than socialist internationalism) it would have to be pacifist. What was, rightly or wrongly, being “effectively” said was that limited political democracy was important for the working class but could not or should not be defended by war. This is not the same as the “left communist” position that “bourgeois democracy” is not worth defending as bourgeois democracy/fascist state same difference.
Agreed. But the editorial never said that what we have under capitalism is democracy. It merely remarked that the 2016 referendum was “a democratically-made decision”. A choice was put before the electorate, votes were cast and counted, and a majority obtained for one of the choices. So, was it “democratically made” or not? Ray seems to be saying that it wasn’t but his arguments for saying so imply that no vote or election under capitalism can be described as “democratic”. Which I don’t think we can say is the case.
Actually, under capitalism democracy is not much more than the counting of heads (which is Britain is done fairly and accurately) but it is significant for us where the result of the counting decides who gets to control political power.
The other aspects of (“bourgeois”) political democracy are important too, in particular the freedom to organise trade unions and parties and the freedom to publish journals and pamphlets and to hold meetings.
If you don’t want to use the term (limited political) “democracy” to describe this situation you will have to find some other way of distinguishing it from political dictatorship where these facilities don’t exist. Otherwise you end up like those “left communists” who don’t think it matters whether the working class is living in a “bourgeois democracy” or a fascist state.
I see that one of the obscure non-entities standing for the leadership of the Labour Party called Rebecca Long Bailey or something like that has probably thrown away her chance of taking over from Corbyn, if she ever had one, by her position on this issue,
It’s a bit ironic that the Corbynite standard-bearer should be a member of the Pope’s Brass Band.
