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Appears alright on my browser. The interview with Paul Mattick Jnr was in the October 2011 Socialist Standard and the one with Andrew Kliman in April 2014.
Sounds interesting. I wonder how the author handles the contradiction in Rosa Luxemburg between her mistaken theory of capital accumulation and how military spending supposedly helps capitalism from collapsing.
The trouble with Michael Roberts is that he stands for nationalisation of the banks and thinks that this has something to do with socialism.
Are we sure it is an ex-member? There was a member of that name but there are more than one person with it even from East Africa. Just put it in a search engine and see how many come up.
The Basque tourist board would say that, but, apart from being the oldest living language in Europe, it’s unverified — and unverifiable — hype. Nobody knows, and never will, what language cave men spoke and it’s certainly unlikely to be “at the seeds of articulate language”. Some people do talk nonsense but in this case I don’t suppose they really believe it.
I don’t know what the Catalan nationalists are complaining about. As far as their language is concerned— the only thing that distinguishes them from other workers — they have got full cultural autonomy just as they would in socialism. The only people to benefit from a separate Catalan state would be local capitalists who wouldn’t have to pay so much tax as they would no longer be taxed to pay subsidies to the poorer regions of Spain.
But there’s a risk it could end in tears if some idiots form a Catalan Liberation Front or a Catalan Republican Army and start assassinating people and throwing bombs around. The Spanish state, with its superior might, will react and the same sort of cycle of violence will begin that the Basque Country and Northern Ireland suffered and have only recently escaped from.
All for nothing, especially since Catalan-speakers cannot even claim to be oppressed because of the language they speak — and if they were the solution would be cultural autonomy not the establishment of a Catalan state.
Looks as if the pro-democracy demonstrators have blown it by resorting to violence. They can’t win against the armed might of the state and will be crushed. The only chance of winning they had was mass demonstrations backed by public opinion. In abandoning that they are doomed.
That was him in 2016. Here he is in 2019:
https://www.thefullbrexit.com/brexit-party-heartfield
Maybe he now believes that the workers of Britain are “super-exploited” by the capitalists of Europe. He was going to stand for the Brexit Party against Corbyn in Islington North in the coming general election but withdrew or was withdrawn. Maybe because they discovered his previous and perhaps continuing support for the Irish Republicanism which, actually, wouldn’t go down too badly in that part of London where they still sing “A Nation Once Again” in some pubs.
The group in this country which defends the theory of super-exploitation the most vehemently is the “Revolutionary Communist Group” and their paper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!. Here’s an extract from what they say they stand for:
“As an imperialist country, Britain depends on the super-exploitation of the labour and resources of oppressed nations (…) Britain derives monopoly profits from the super-exploitation of oppressed nations and these have made it possible to split the working class by creating a privileged section of workers within this country. These workers, a labour aristocracy, constitute the social basis of opportunism. The upper stratum of the working class now dominates the British labour movement and ties it to imperialism – the economic foundation of its status and privileges. The labour aristocracy expresses itself politically through the Labour Party and it controls the trade union movement.”
Classic Leninism of course. They don’t go as far as the writer Robbo has just mentioned as they are only saying that some workers in Britain benefit from “the super-exploitation of oppressed nations”, but they don’t say which workers these are. But they need to as the also say that they support “the struggles of the whole (!) working class to defend jobs, wages and living conditions.” But this means that they support the struggle of some workers to obtain a bigger share of the profits of super-exploitation. But, again, who are they? The railway workers, the post office workers, who? Maybe university lecturers and junior doctors? We need to know.
That’s good news. It looks better than this site, if only because there’s more colour.
It means our case in other languages than English is back. Probably not by accident, the most populated section is Spanish with full translations of two of our pamphlets Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? and Women and Socialism. But this could be because there is also a separate and still active Italian-language blog whose total might exceed Spanish. I’ve not checked but could a link to it be added from the Italian-language section?
I am not sure the “Community” thing will work. We already have three forums on which members are active: here, Spintcom and our Facebook page. Comrades from India and Canada are already active participants on the last one. In all, given that some comrades are only on one of these there must be 30 of us involved in them. Another forum might be spreading ourselves too thinly (I am thinking of the complaint that not enough contribute here).
Anyway, well done to those who did it. Was that you, Matt?
Here’s him saying it today and adding that a LibDem government would be a “government of business”. The LibDems are certainly making a serious pitch to become the main party of the British capitalist class as they once used to be. Whether they will succeed is another matter.
Former LibDem leader, Vince Cable, had already nailed their colours to the capitalist mast when, in an article in City AM on 14 May this year, he confessed:
“Capitalism is being questioned in Britain more intensely than for decades. Some want to destroy it. Others believe that it is the only economic system which works, but want to reform it. I am in the latter camp.”
Just heard Sir Ed Davey, deputy leader of the LibDems, say that they want to “decarbonise capitalism”, so emphasising that they support and want to retain capitalism. Here is his what amounts to a eulogy of capitalism:
This is the bit I like:
“There will of course be a maze of overly complex regulations to cut through – but it must not detract from this vision to rebuild the City as a global centre for sustainable capitalism, where the needs of the planet and people have to come first.”
Makes you wonder what planet he’s living on.
We always knew of course that LibDems were an avowedly capitalist party, but it’s nice to have them confirm this so openly.
Johnson has just described Labour’s promise to provide free broadband for everyone as a “crazed communist scheme“.
It is not clear which part of it he finds “crazy”. Is it the nationalisation of part of BT or that it is crazy to provide any service free? Or he may just be continuing his party’s absurd smear campaign against Labour under Corbyn and MacDonnell wanting to establish a state-capitalist dictatorship in Britain similar to what existed in the USSR, dropping the euphemism “Marxist” for the real smear “Communist”.
That sort of anti-Communism is old hat and is unlikely to go down that well these days, at least not with anybody aged under 40, but in associating the word “communist” with “free services” he may inadvertently be doing us a favour. Yes, broadband will be free in a socialist society; so will telephones, television, gas, electricity, water, transport, health care, education and all other services. What’s crazy about that? Surely the rational purpose of society is to satisfy people’s needs.
What is crazy is the capitalist scheme to require people to pay for these.
There is this article “Lenin, theorist of nationalism” on the WSP (India)’s website here (scroll down) and this article in the May 2017 Socialist Standard “‘Imperialism’ Where Lenin Went Wrong”.
Having said that, I don’t think we can say that one “country” cannot exploit another “country” as long as “country” is understood, not as the whole population living there, but only the capitalist ruling class there.
One capitalist state, acting on behalf of its capitalist class, can exploit the capitalist class of another capitalist state by depriving it of some of the surplus value extracted from its working class and, also, by bringing it about that the capitalist class in that country doesn’t get its full share of the average rate of profit. But this doesn’t concern the working class of that country since it has already been exploited to the limit by its own capitalist class. It’s a dispute between two sections of the world capitalist class over the share-out of surplus value. A case of thieves falling out.
There are 7 candidates standing in Cardiff Central. There, our opponents are, as expected, Labour, Liberal, Tory and Brexit. There is a Welsh nationalist candidate but not Plaid Cymru and also an independent. There is no Green candidate as this seat has been reserved by the “Remain Alliance” for the LibDems.
The Welsh nationalist party is a rightwing outfit calling itself “Ein Gwalad” (Our Country) and is standing in some other seats. Its description on the ballot paper is “Gwalad Gwalad” which is part of the chorus of the Welsh “national” anthem — which will give an idea of how nasty it is. It opposes Plaid Cymru as being too leftwing and in fact Plaid (which simply means “Party”) has on occasion even called itself “socialist”, ridiculously of course.
Nominations closed at 4pm and it turns out that there are 8 candidates standing in Folkestone & Hythe. Our opponents are: Tory, Labour, LibDem, Green, SDP (yes, they still seem to exist), Young People’s Party, and an Independent (Henry Bolton, who was leader of UKIP for a few months).
The Young People’s Party is not really that at all, but a party advocating the views of Henry George, the 19th century supporter of capitalism who wanted to replace all other taxes by a Single Tax on land values. Their candidate, Rohen Kapur, stood there in the 2015, as did we.
The nomination papers for our candidate in Cardiff Central (Brian Johnson) were handed in today and accepted.
As a Labour-held seat there will be a Faragist candidate but, as it’s one of the constituencies in the “Remain alliance” deal, there will be no Green or Welsh nationalist candidate, only a LibDem one.
