ALB
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Incidentally those DNA tests are fun but not terribly reliable or meaningful:
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/05/seven-big-misconceptions-about-heredity/
Bakunin would be in trouble if he was a member of the Labour Party. No wonder he was kicked out of the IWMA.
So what? Anyone here know who their third cousins are let alone met them. What is a third cousin anyway?
Will that be before the world comes to an end through global overheating? I don’t suppose it matters as it seems that one way or another we’re doomed (and gloomed) 🙂
Here is the “educational material” on antisemitism that the Labour Party has just put out. Not bad, to tell the truth (though it still supports the “right” of mythical “nations” to so-called “self-determination”):
http://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/No-Place-for-Antisemitism.pdf
I will believe that Facebook is a threat to States when Zuckerberg announces a Facebook Army and gets the permission of states to start recruiting.
If Facebook is so powerful vis-a-vis states why are they asking states for permission to set up their new international payments system?
There was an article in last Wednesday’s Times which neatly illustrated that the ruling class is well aware that wars are not fought over ideologies or for humanitarian reasons but over material reasons such as sources of raw materials, markets, investment outlets and trade routes, as socialists have always said.
Headed “In the next war, we’ll need the Royal Marines. Other nations are scaling up for an amphibious conflict over trade but Britain is ill-prepared“, the author (Roger Boyes) argued that British capitalism would need marines to protect trade routes, e not just the Hormuz strait in the Persian Gulf “through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes”, but also the Bab el-Mandeh strait linking the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and the Malaccan straits “through which 80 per cent of China’s oil passes from the Indian Ocean”.
And of course Gibraltar, a convenient place from which to seize Iranian tankers without taking into consideration that two can play at that game, as the seizure of a UK tanker passing through the Hormuz strait shows. The UK, which is playing in the same League as Iran despite its imperial(ist) pretensions, is in a weak position here as more UK and other tankers pass through Hormuz strait than Iranian ones through the straits of Gibraltar. They are going to have to back down unless they want to provoke a war in the Persian Gulf which not even Trump wants.
There were a number of motions about feminism, patriarchy, sex equality, gender oppression that were voted on. Some were carried. Some were not. The one you are referring to reads:
“This Conference is of the view that a person can be a socialist as well as a feminist”
and was carried by 63 to 27.
The other resolutions that were carried were:
“This Conference rejects the definition of capitalism as “male-dominated class society” and the view that “capitalism and patriarchy are aspects of the same thing”. Capitalism is based on the subordination of the working class to the capitalist class, which is not the same thing as the subordination of women to men. Conference further notes that the more advanced capitalism is the less the discrimination against women.” (Carried 84 votes to 10).
“This Conference reaffirms that the abolition of class oppression will itself entail the abolition of gender oppression”. (Carried 83 votes to 9).
“This Conference repudiates the view that capitalism will itself abolish the oppression of women.” (Carried 60 votes to 18).
“This Conference instructs the EC to establish an ad-hoc committee to look into ways of encouraging more female membership, to report to Conference 2020.” (Carried 64 votes to 30).
As Shaun Commack wrote:
“Postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of objectivity and absolute truth, which obviously brings it into conflict with the labor theory of value. However, postmodernism is also highly skeptical of logic and coherence, so we end up with a postmodern labor theory of value, in which an individual’s subjective value is the objective value of the object. Both absolute objective value and negotiated value are rejected. This introduces a problem, which is solved by group identity.”
Just mumbo jumbo if you ask me.
We shouldn’t be discussing this here of course, but we are. (I don’t know if it is technically possible to move this to “General Discussion”? )
Anyway, what Trump is doing is playing “identity politics” (the target “identity” group being “white” Americans). It’s all very well minorities engaging in this, but it’s dangerous and potentially counter-productive as others can appeal to it too, with more chance of success if the “identity” is the majority. Better to emphasise what workers have in common, not what differences can divide them.
I have found the quote. It’s in chapter II of Mein Kampf on the internet:
“For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. ”
At the time he would have been in his late teens or early twenties.
Earlier he had described what seems like a scene from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. At the time he was working as a building labourer (since he was born in 1889 it would be almost exactly the same time as events in Mugsborough):
“I drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread somewhere off to one side, and cautiously studied my new associates or reflected on my miserable lot. Nevertheless, I heard more than enough; and often it seemed to me that they purposely moved closer to me, perhaps in order to make me take a position. In any case, what I heard was of such a nature as to infuriate me in the extreme. These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the ‘ capitalistic ‘ (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience, etc. ”
His fellow workers certainly understood the socialist case (which is more than can be said of Owen’s) !
Yes but he believed the crap he spouted, ie wasn’t cynically pretending to be antisemitic just to win power. No doubt some of the capitalists who financed his party were but not him.
Found it. On Wikipedia in the entry on Hitler’s religious views. It’s a quote from Mein Kampf about his views when he first moved to Vienna before WW1:
“When he arrived in Vienna as a young man, Hitler claimed, he was not yet anti-Semitic: “In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith.” He thought that anti-Semitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: “The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles.” Instead, Hitler argued that Jews should be deplored on the basis of their “race”.”
I don’t think we can use that quote as his final, considered opinion.
There is a reasonably balanced article in the June issue of History Today on antisemitism, “Antisemitism: the Socialism of Fools”, from which I learnt a couple of things I don’t know before:
- That it was not August Bebel, the pre-WW1 leader of the German Social Democrats, who coined the phrase “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” but a certain Austrian Liberal politician called Ferdinand Kronawetter.
- That J. A. Hobson, author of a 1902 book Imperialism, was a bit of antisemite. It doesn’t surprise me as a lot of people were those days. What is surprising (though perhaps not) is that Corbyn should be accused of antisemitism for not mentioning this in an introduction to a new edition of the book. Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism on imperialism relied in large part on Hobson’s book but he didn’t mention this either, but nobody has accused him of being antisemitic for not doing so. I daresay I have written about Hobson’s book without mentioning it either. But where does this absurd sort of deduction stop? Churchill is on record as making antisemitic remarks at the time of the Russian Revolution. Does this mean that anybody who writes about Churchill (Boris Johnson for instance) but doesn’t mention this is an antisemite?
