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Unfortunately this clashes with our Autumn Delegate Meeting.
Re the attached leaflet, although it is true that capitalism and the impersonal economic forces it unleashed has to be destroyed before anything constructive and lasting can be done to tackle the problem of threatened global overwarming and that this has to be done by the working class struggling to end capitalism by establishing worldwide socialism as the framework within which to deal with the problem, I don’t think that the answer is to step up the industrial class struggle in the hope that it might become consciously socialist and political. A much more directly socialist political approach is needed.
One good thing about recent developments has been the abandoning of the silly slogan of “Think Globally, Act Locally” and its replacement by a common sense recognition that what is required to deal with threatened global over-warming is global action.
As to our friend John Pozzi, I think that last time he presented his scheme here it ended, perhaps rather cruelly, in us misspelling his name as Ponzi.
It’s not just or even essentially financiers betting that the pound will fall, which a no-deal Brexit would result in. Someone like Odey will be equally prepared to bet on the pound rising through Britain not leaving. In fact he probably has.
It’s that they don’t want such activities strictly regulated by the EU. The Tory MEP Daniel Hannan (re-elected in May) listed the sort of things that the financiers who funded the Leave campaign objected to:
“a financial transactions tax, a ban on short selling, restrictions on clearing, a bonus cap, windfall levies, micro-regulation of funds.”
For the record, here is a list of some of the people Hammond is referring to, together with their agenda:
Here is the answer to the question posed in an article in next month’s Socialist Standard “Who would benefit from a no deal Brexit?” given by Philip Hammond who until a month or so ago was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, i.e. the treasurer of the British capitalist state, who we must assume knows what he’s talking about on these matters:
“Johnson “is backed by speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit — and there is only one outcome that works for them: a crash-out no-deal Brexit that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring,” Hammond wrote in the Times on Saturday. “
This is similar to Corbyn’s claim that no deal would be a”bankers’ Brexit”, though more accurate in that it those involved, and who financed the Leave campaign in 2016, are not so much bankers as speculators, hedge fund operators and vulture capitalists who don’t want to be subjected to EU regulation of their particular financial axtivities.
Hammond represents the mainstream UK capitalist view which wanted to Remain but, in view of the result of the result of the referendum, now wants to settle on a deal which would keep Britain in the frictionless single EU market. It is clear from Hammond’s statement that they recognise that the Leave campaign was financed by a maverick section of their class in its own sectional interest.
More grist for our view that the whole business is a dispute within the British capitalist class in which the working class has no interest and should not take sides. But what a sorry sight to see so many workers getting so passionately involved on one side or the other.
Shouldn’t this subject be discussed in the World Socialist Movement section here as it essentially concerns internal party affairs?
Oh them, the old Eurocommunists founded by Spanish Communist Party leader Santiago Carrillo. Some of them are advisers to Corbyn.
I think that them and Podemos contest elections as a joint list?
Corbyn is sitting on the fence over Brexit so as to keep the Labour Party together. But he is also trying to do something with which we can have some sympathy — to take current political debate away from this issue and discuss the problems ordinary people are facing. While we say Neither Brexit not EU but socialism he is saying Either Brexit or EU we need reformism. It seems that in the current political atmosphere he is facing the same uphill task as us.
Meanwhile the Brexiteers are employing the dangerous language of surrender, treason and betrayal. As Andrew Sparrow commented in the Guardian’s daily live coverage of the issue on Thursday (at 11.20):
”The argument against such language is that it is inflammatory because it frames Brexit, an issue that is supposed to be about trading relationships with friendly countries, in terms of warfare, with the EU depicted as an enemy power.”
Yes, Brexit is basically all about trading relationships and so, as far as working people are concerned, not worth getting worked up about either way.
According to the Spanish newspapers Errijon’s difference with Podemos and Iglesias is that he is more favourable to the governing so-called “socialist” party the PSOE (which translates as Spanish Socialist Workers Party!) and wants to see a “progressive alliance” government.
Sanchez the outgoing prime minister has described Errijon as a “possiblist” (presumably as opposed to Iglesias who had raised impossible demands as a condition for supporting a PSOE government and which has led to a general election in November).
So it is “possible” that Errijon sees himself as a future minister. In other words just another reformist and/or careerist.
Perhaps Robbo in Spain can cast more light on this.
Read this online pamphlet while I was away. It is very good. I know it is on the WSPUS site but we should consider promoting it too. In any event those here who haven’t read it yet should.
Brian, of course there will be shortages, some temporary, some permanent, in a socialist society but the solution won’t be “economic” (in terms of money costs, prices, etc) but technical, a question of organisation and conscious choice.
If you check back in this and other threads on the subject you will see I have guessed that the aim of limiting the rise in global average temperature to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2099 is unlikely to be met.
What I have been objecting to is other, alarmist guesses of a rise of 5. 6, or 7 degrees.
A rise of 2 degrees will still cause problems (rising sea levels, mass population movements, more extreme weather) that capitalism won’t be able to cope with properly. But it won’t be the extinction of humanity or the end of the world.
Yes, and what they mean by scarcity isn’t the normal meaning, i.e a shortage of something, but the non-existence of “sheer abundance” (of everything growing on trees). So, for them, “scarcity” will always exist with some form of market system the best way to deal with it.
“I fail to see how socialism will not be economising on scarce resources.“
Brian, to see economics as being about “economising on scarce resources” is accept precisely the basic assumption of academic bourgeois economics. All their textbooks define economics as the study of how societies allocate scarce resources between competing uses. On this assumption, economics will always exist whereas Marx’s position was that it was the study of the impersonal forces governing the production and distribution of wealth that arose when items of wealth were produced to be sold on a market with a view to profit. So, what is being studied is an “economy”. Since in socialism there is no production for sale or profit it is not an “economy”.
Of course socialism will not want to waste scarce resources but the way they are used will be decided by conscious decision not market forces. Production will be under human control. Which is what socialism is all about, so that it can be directed at satisfying human needs.
