ALB
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Did I hear right, Alan, did he just say that we should live in mud huts in the future? I think he said his name was Ted Trainer.
This is more like it:
https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html
Love the title of the book being reviewed: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts. It seems to make some good points too:
…[G]rowth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:
“The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.”
Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated — no longer “free” — and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won’t mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can’t solve the problem, because it’s always fighting a rear-guard action:
“…[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.”
Here’s another book from the same stable (spotted by comrade Imposs1904):
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/05/walmart-without-capitalism.html
We gotta review it. Bound to better, as the reviewer says, than the hair-shirt stuff and people scratching around for potatoes that we’ve been hearing about.
I recall that in his original book on state capitalism in Russia Tony Cliff did liken the USSR to Ford, i.e. as a single capitalist entreprise without internal competition or market links between its sections. Not sure, though, that the USSR was like that as there were market links between the legally-different state enterprises.
Comrades who didn’t read down to the end will have missed these two interesting SPC calendars :
Socialist Party of Canada 2019 Calendar £19.25:
https://www.zazzle.co.uk/socialist_party_of_canada_2019_calendar-158951425439478504Greatest Impossibilists 2019 Calendar £19.25:
https://www.zazzle.co.uk/greatest_impossibilists_2019_calendar-158115142299860432More added (click on title) to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:
Who wants an Incomes Policy?, September 1962
Prices since the 1200s, August 1969Trade Unions in a trap, March 1978
The Tories and the Closed Shop, August 1979
Economists’ bunk exposed, March 1984Just checked (didn’t want to go by her name alone) and that Mcdonagh woman is a Roman Catholic and a practising and active one. So what a cheek to accuse anticapitalists of being antisemitic. As if it wasn’t the Roman Catholic church that virtually invented antisemitism and sustained it for centuries. Her slander is like arguing: the Catholic religion teaches that the Jews killed their god, ergo they are anti Jewish people.
Here’s a transcript of what she said. At about 7.36 John Humphries asks her if she thinks it’s the case that the Labour Party is not taking antisemitism in its ranks seriously.
MacDonagh: I’m not sure that some people in the Labour Party can because it is very much part of their politics, of hard left politics, to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as finances of capital, ergo you are anti Jewish people.
Humphries: In other words, to be anticapitalist you have to be antisemitic?
MacDonagh: Yes. [pause] Not everybody but there’s a certain stand of it.
Just heard a silly Labour MP, Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Morden in London, say on the radio that if you are anti-capitalist you are anti-semitic because this means you are against rich Jews. She said such people, by which she meant anti-capitalists, had no place in the Labour Party. Which in a sense is true – if you are against capitalism there is no place for you in the Labour Party as it is a party that has always supported capitalism. But of course you can be against capitalism without being anti-semitic.
Having said that, the sort of “anti-capitalism” that circulated at the Occupy camps and within Zeitgeist a few years ago (attacks on “banksters” and finance capitalists, currency crankism, New World Order, conspiracy theories) did have an anti-semitic tinge with leaflets frequently singling out the Rothschilds. It seems that some who were influenced by these ideas joined the Labour Party as part of the Corbyn intake. Not his fault of course, but it brings out the importance of our view that banking is not the essence of capitalism but this is just one sphere of capitalist investment for profit that is not particularly worse than any other spheres.
The pre-WW1 German Social Democrat August Bebel is supposed to have described anti-semitism as the “socialism of fools”. The “anti-capitalism of fools” might be a better description.
Four of the gang of eight were Lab & Coop MP’s but I don’t think that represents any ideological commitment merely that their election campaigns were financed by the Cooperative Party. Like all Labour MPs what they wanted was a “better capitalism.” And still do of course.
I don’t know where that party gets its money from, not from me as a member of the co-op I hope.
I wonder how that fits in with May’s statement to parliament last Wednesday that part of her withdrawal deal is a commitment to continue to match, after Brexit, the EU’s environmental protection regulations:
As well as changes to the backstop, we are also working across a number of other areas to build support for the Withdrawal Agreement and to give the House confidence in the future relationship that the UK and EU will go on to negotiate. This includes ensuring that leaving the EU will not lead to any lowering of standards in relation to workers’ rights, environmental protections or health and safety.
I wasn’t going to bother to read this but thought I had better since he’s a local MP in the area where our Head Office and we have a collection of his leaflets. These show what a hypocrite he must have been when he was the Labour MP. Here’s what the Socialist Standard had to say about him in May 2015.
Since he never disguised the fact that he stood for a “better capitalism” I don’t know why felt out of place in the Labour Party:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/06/chuka-umunnas-speech-better-capitalism-full-text
That report is not saying anything different than I am trying to say.
We know definitely that, unless the rate of emission of CO2 is stabilised, average global temperature is going to continue to rise and that this will affect sea levels, the weather, and regional agricultural and ecological conditions. (In fact it will continue to rise for a while even if emissions were stabilised tomorrow, as an effect of past emissions). The question is by how much and to what extent. This is where the speculation begins.
Not, however, wild speculation but speculation based on certain assumptions. In drawing up scenarios of what might happen in the future, scientists have to make two basic assumptions. First, about the link between a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and the rise in average global temperature. Second, about what humans do, or do not, to reduce or compensate for CO2 emissions.
As to the first, nobody knows with certainty what it is. The standard that scientists have chosen is an estimate of by how much the global average temperature would rise if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled. This is not easy to calculate as there are feedbacks. Once these have been taken into account, the figure they come up with is anything between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, variously described as ‘the best estimate’, ‘most likely’, or even ‘the best guess’. It is in fact a ‘guestimate’, albeit an informed one.
Polar ice-core records show that in the pre-industrial past the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was for centuries 280 ppm. Today it is 410 ppm. If present trends continue it will reach 560 ppm, i.e., double, by 2050. In that case, in the period after that date until the end of the century average global temperature would gradually rise to 1.5°C or by 4.5°C above pre-industrial levels or by anything in between. As average global temperature has already gone up by about 1 °C since pre-industrial times we are talking about a possible further rise by the end of the century of between 0.5°C and 3.5°C. That’s as accurate as you can get.
The trouble is that there would be a huge difference in effects between the lower and the higher figure. All we can safely say is that if CO2 emissions continue to increase, so global average temperature will go up and so the effects of this will be felt. Since most of these effects will be negative CO2 emissions should be reduced in any event.
No need to exaggerate.
Macpherson was an old fool who wanted to make it a crime to express racist comments in your own home.
Meanwhile the UN has gone “anti-Semitic”:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-47399541
Sounds as if the ex-Labour MP for Peterborough just released from prison for telling a lie would make a worthy member of this new band of discredited and discreditable professional politicians. In fact, compared with the other ex-Labourites in it, she’s almost a saint.
The author seems to have been carried away a bit. Of course the BBC carries out propaganda (for British capitalist interests just as RT does for Russian) but propaganda that pushes “human extinction”? The author seems to forget that Sir David Attenborough never seems to be off BBC2. Or maybe they’re just a bit writer, e.g they should have put a colon not a comma after “Western ‘intervention'”.
