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“XR are not saying exactly what a CA would decide because this is up to citizens to decide it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a CA, don’t you think so?”
Entirely agree, Shrenk. But XR have pre-empted what a CA might decide by laying down 2025 as the date by which the government should achieve net zero carbon emissions, don’t you think?
Here is Will Hutton in today’s Observer admitting that what is at issue is which way to run capitalism:
”Once the referendum is won, which, given the polling numbers and gathering economic difficulties, is Remain’s to lose, the argument in the general election to follow will be how to reset British capitalism and society to address the scale of disaffection that fuelled the Leave vote.”
Good point about those Kliman calls the “anti-neoliberals” thinking they can win over people by offering them reforms to improve their economic position as this is all they are assumed to be able to comprehend ie Lenin’s explicit view that the working class are only capable of evolving a “trade union consciousness” but also implicitly held by many non-Leninist left wing reformists like the followers of Bernie Sanders (and in this country of Corbyn).
Nothing however on the MHI policy that socialists should vote for “centrist” Democratic Party candidates to defeat “Trumpism” as a sort of proto-fascism.
Incidentally, is this the sort of thing we could/should be doing (radio broadcasts, I mean, not voting for centrists)?
I don’t disagree with you that Britain withdrawing from the EU does represent turning the clock back in the sense that EU had evolved into a huge free movement zone and that Brexit means restricting the free movement of people to and from the Britain and virtually the rest of Europe. So it’s one of those reforms to capitalism which makes things worse.
But how to oppose it without taking sides in an internal capitalist dispute? There’s also our principle that a socialist party should campaign neither for or against a reform (but only for socialism). Vote Remain in referendum on a personal basis? A socialist couldn’t vote for the LibDems could they, especially as their tactics are likely to provoke a no-deal Brexit? Or any other capitalist party for that matter.
John, that thing from investmentmedia is just one of thousands on the internet attributing the quote to Einstein. Snopes and QI (which specialise in checking quotes) set out precisely to check this quote and found no evidence that Einstein was the first to say it or even said it. Their conclusion cannot be refuted by quoting one of the thousands of unsourced claims that it was Einstein. That would require a verifiable source (chapter and verse) of when and where Einstein said it. They searched for this but couldn’t find anything.
OK, here’s my reply to your charge of “false information misrepresenting the current scientific consensus on the topic”.
You suggest as “the current scientific consensus” what you describe as “the notorious ‘Hot Earth’ article published by Harvard scientists a year ago.” I have read through this and note that it is pretty tentative and full of “coulds”, “mays”, “ifs” and “potentially” and concludes with a call for further analysis:
“Our initial analysis here needs to be underpinned by more in-depth, quantitative Earth System analysis and modeling studies to address three critical questions. (i) Is humanity at risk for pushing the system across a planetary threshold and irreversibly down a Hothouse Earth pathway? …”
Their main argument seems to be:
“We argue that there is a significant risk that these internal dynamics, especially non-linearities in feedback processes, could become an important or perhaps, even dominatant factor in steering that the Earth system actually follows over coming centuries.”
i.e. an uncontrollable runaway global heating.
You interpreted to this in message #189444 of 10 August on the Climate Change thread as meaning:
“According to the latest scientific environmental predictions, there is a good chance of runaway global heating”.
This is going beyond what the paper says. A “significant risk ” is not the same as a “good chance”. A “good chance” suggests that it is more than 50% likely to happen. A “significant risk” will be less likely than this. Others take a different view, including the IPCC according to the wikipedia entry on “Greenhouse and icehouse Earth”:
The IPCC states that “a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.”
In any event, you can’t legitimately read into the paper that it is saying that 6 out of the current 7 million humans on Earth will perish or that the Earth will become uninhabitable this century as a result (the paper’s perspective is centuries, not just the remaining 80 years of this one).
That certainly is not the “current scientific consensus”. So, what is? What can a layperson reasonably conclude? I would say take the position that most scientists take, which would be that of the IPCC.
The Harvard paper calls for “building more effective stewardship of the biosphere”. Yes, that’s what’s needed but human stewardship of the biosphere cannot be effective except on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources. It can never be effective under capitalism with its competitive struggle for profits and its division of the world into rival states which support this struggle.
It’s confusing that you’ve chosen to publish the same post in two different places here. There’s a discussion of Citizens Assemblies in the Socialist Standard Feedback section. Here I will only deal with what you claim as factual mistakes.
- 1. You claim that the article says:
“At this level, this (Citizens Assemblies) is pure reformism, calling on a capitalist government to implement some desirable measure within capitalism.” — this is wrong.
But it doesn’t. It is you who have inserted the words “Citizens Assemblies” which had not been mentioned at that point. What the article is saying is “pure reformism” is the demand mentioned in the preceeding paragraph that the aim of blocking some road was to “force the government to pay attention to the issue of climate change and take urgent and decisive action”. For confirmation, see:
2. You write: “Although this (net zero carbon emissions by 2025) does seem to offer hope amongst their doom and gloom, it doesn’t really as it’s not realisable (not even if socialism were to be established tomorrow).” – well, I suppose the author knows a better proposed date?”
Obviously, if socialism were to be established tomorrow, steps would immediately be taken to reduce carbon emissions with a view to achieving net zero emissions to as soon as possible. I was just suggesting that it would probably not be possible to achieve this by 2025, i.e in only 5 years (climate change is not the only problem facing humanity, there’s also world poverty which could be considered a greater, immediate priority). You want another date? The conventional political parties are already on to it. The government is promising 2050, the LibDems 2040, the Labour Party 2030 and the Trotskyists no doubt 2020. This is only for Britain (as is XR’s 2025 in fact) and so, even if achieved, would not make all that much difference. In fact, will probably be dropped if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit; otherwise the competitivity of British goods on world markets would be undermined.
3. I will reply separately to your charge of “false information misrepresenting the current scientific consensus on the topic”, and on what is the reasonable position for a layperson to take in the face of conflicting scientific opinions.
Actually, it is not clear whether XR is demanding one Citizens Assembly on what to do about climate change or a many such assemblies. I understood it to be one, as their site says (under “The Truth/Our Demands”):
“Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.”
I have not read anything in XR literature that they expect many such assemblies to be set up and for them to come to the conclusion that what is first required is the common ownership of the Earth’s resources. It would be nice to think that they would but, if they were going to, this would also reflect itself in other ways, in for instance not voting for political parties that wanted to retain capitalism but sending instead to parliament and local councils delegates mandated to pursue this, in fact even setting up their own citizens’ assemblies without waiting for the government to do so.
In other words, you are assuming that there is already a widespread desire for common ownership of the Earth’s resources, which XR’s leaders thinks the action of an active 3.5% can substitute themselves for.
I am afraid you are going to have to make another correction to your website, this time in the FAQ section where you say:
“Did physicist Albert Einstein say that charging interest on interest is the 8th wonder of the world? Yes.”
There is no evidence that Einstein ever said this. See:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/compound-interest/
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/31/compound-interest/
This myth is just another example of using some well-known person’s name to try to add some credibility to a trite or dubious statement.
Actually Karl Marx (and probably Adam Smith) argued that the Earth and its fruits had no economic value and so no price because no human labour had been mixed with them. That is why the air we breathe and the Sun’s rays are “ free goods” even under the buying and selling system ( exchange economy) that is capitalism.
The difference between Marx and Smith was that, while Smith thought that an exchange economy was natural, Marx saw it only as a passing stage in the evolution of human society to be followed by a society based on the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial ( human fashioned) resources where wealth will be produced directly to satisfy people’s needs and made directly available for them to take and use without buying and selling. That really would be a different “mode of production “.
From your reply I gather you don’t think this would work because people would take too much?
But if the Earth’s resources (as worked on by past and present human labour) are capable of copiously providing for people’s needs — as they are — why put a price on the products, why subject them to buying and selling? Why not make them freely available for people to take and use in accordance with the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs’?
p.s. if you are amending your website Adam Smith was not an aristocrat. As the idle rich he didn’t think much of them.
But you are not proposing a different mode of production! Just a different currency system, retaining production for the market ie an integral part of what the comrades in India mean by ‘the prevalent mode of production.’
Very revealing article in today’s Times by Simon Nixon, their chief leader writer, explaining the split in the capitalist class over Brexit. After pointing out that there is more to it than short-term betting against the pound, here are extracts of what Nixon points out:
“One of the surprises of Brexit has been the strong support for leaving the European Union in some parts of the City and among a handful of Britain’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. This support is in contrast with the continued anxiety over Brexit among the bulk of Britain’s business leaders. Yet this division among Britain’s business elite is perhaps not so surprising when one considers the extent to which the two groups sit on different sides of an important faultline in global capitalism. What makes hedge fund support for Mr Johnson significant is not that they are representatives of disaster capitalism but that they are manifestations of what might be dubbed “oligarchic capitalism”.
The hedge fund industry sits at the apex of the shadowy world of offshore finance that emerged in London in recent decades. This world is quite distinct from the traditional business of the City, which is serving as a domestic capital market for British and, since the creation of the single market, EU companies. Titans of the hedge fund industry insist that they owe their fortunes to their unrivalled acumen for trading. In reality, they owe much of their success to the unique conditions that made London such fertile ground for the development of their astonishingly lucrative activities. They are the beneficiaries of the explosive growth in global offshore finance that followed the dismantling of exchange controls around the world, the collapse of communism and the emergence of a new global class of super-rich seeking to shield their wealth from national authorities. (…)Crucially, London possessed the expertise to make the most of the opportunities presented by offshore finance. Over time, it has developed an entire economy designed to service the needs of oligarchic capitalism, from lawyers to accountants to art dealers.
Nor is it surprising that prominent hedge fund tycoons have turned out to be enthusiastic Brexiteers. The hedge fund industry likes to operate in the shadows. It manages private pools of capital and believes that this entitles it to be exempt from the more onerous rules that govern the rest of financial services. What turned much of the industry so virulently against the EU was the introduction of the Alternative Investment Managers Directive in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which imposed modest reporting requirements on the sector. Although the impact of these rules was close to nil, this shot across the bows was deeply resented. Whereas the EU’s status as a regulatory superpower has bought benefits to most sectors, creating opportunities to reap economies of scale across a single market, for the hedge fund industry it poses a threat.” (emphasis added)
They used a part of their wealth to fund the Leave campaign in 2016 and Johnson’s Tory leadership campaign and are now expecting to reap the benefits. Whether the representatives of what might be called mainstream UK capitalism in Parliament will be able to stop this remains to be seen. Given that elections are the key to political power it seems that in the end it will be up to the working class to decide, either in a general election or a referendum. But why should we take sides? It won’t be the People v Parliament, but “oligarchic capitalism” v “mainstream capitalism”, cholera or the plague.
Boorish seems to be proposing basically that Northern Ireland stay in the Single Market but not the Customs Union, which is quite a big concession since it will involve regulatory controls on goods entering NI from the mainland. It meets the EU demand that the integrity of its single market be retained.
If NI’s land border with the Republic had not historically been a bone of contention there wouldn’t be a problem with NI leaving the Customs Union and so customs controls to check that any tariffs due had been paid. But this is a political not an economic problem.
There is no economic reason why the EU needs to support the aim of a united Ireland. In theory there could be some compromise solution. We will see. In any event no change is proposed before the end of next year.
That article makes some good points. Click here to read it directly:
https://areomagazine.com/2019/10/01/bad-psychology-why-climate-change-wont-be-solved-by-better-decisions-at-the-supermarket/
The conclusion is interesting:
“The only sustainable behaviour we should be talking about is voting for responsible politicians who promise to do whatever is needed to lower emissions, be they left of centre or right of centre. Everything else is a climate distraction.”
But so is voting for politicians promising to do something, if only because in the context of capitalism they can’t do much in face of capitalism’s economic laws. But (among other things) voting to elect delegates to end capitalism by enacting the formalities to usher in common ownership and production for use not profit, the only framework within which the problem can be rationally tackled, is another thing.
We could even say that “Everything else is a climate distraction.”
