ALB
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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.”
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.
