ALB
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So you go along with the Western media’s narrative that it was “unprovoked” and that it is “Putin’s war”, the personal choice of an evil ruler of an evil empire (and so presumably you can’t blame the US, NATO and Britain)?
Why is it not possible, in the clash of interests between capitalist states for one side to do something that provokes the other side into military action?
It has happened quite often in recent history. To say that one side provoked the other is not to take sides but merely to note a historical fact.
It was obviously a provocative act to expand NATO and its missiles aimed at Russia into Ukraine just as it was for Russia to try to instal missiles in Cuba aimed at America in 1962. On that occasion the provoking state backed down. In Ukraine it didn’t.
In any event, socialists don’t take sides in capitalist wars. We note that it is whole capitalist system with its built-in competitive struggle for profits that is war-prone, with wars breaking out when the rulers of one state judge that a vital interest is at stake that can be defended in no other way.
I wouldn’t have thought so but they might accept a truncated Ukraine joining the EU (if the EU wanted to take on a basket case).
In fact that might even have been part of a compromise solution before Russia invaded but the US was so insistent on expanding NATO yet further East to try to get the better of Russia, so provoking the Russian invasion (in a failed attempt to instal a pro-Russian government in Kiev).
One by of the points in Zelensky’s so-called peace plan is:
“Joint protection by the US and the EU of Ukraine’s critical natural resources and joint use of their economic potential.”
This has led those supporting Russia to investigate what these resources might be:
I don’t think this will be why the West is so keen to incorporate Ukraine into its sphere of influence and, in any event, in resisting this it doesn’t seem to be Russia’s intention to annex the whole of Ukraine.
In any event, an end to the war freezing the current line of contact would leave most of these resources still in Ukraine and so mean the West could still access them. Russia might even accept this as long as Ukraine doesn’t join NATO.
It seems more like Zelensky offering the West something he knows will appeal to them. Senator Graham too is speaking a language capitalists will understand so as convince them to support for US policy there. As a Republican he may even be trying to influence Trump who has been expressing a different view.
We are registered with the Electoral Commission as “The Socialist Party of Great Britain” which we can use on the ballot paper. We can also use “The Socialist Party (GB)” and “The Socialist Party (SP-GB)”.
They are registered as “Socialist Alternative” but have not be using it as they contest as TUSC.
If his great-great-grandfather moved to Britain from Frankfurt the 1850s and lived in the German quarter in Soho in central London he could well have crossed Marx in the street who also moved to Britain at that time and lived in the same area for a while.
Another good find. And it was brought out before Starmer became Prime Minister and so before he was exposed as a greedy and corruptible self-serving hypocrite.
The clothes supplied by Lord Walli was just greed but the tickets to the races was bribery. The betting “industry” was banking on him being so keen a race-goer that he wouldn’t support legislation to curb their activities.
Here’s a demolition job on the Thin Air School of Banking in the tradition of Edwin Cannan an updated version of which was published in March this year:
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-04/working-paper-80-updated-2.pdf
Ok, it is published by the Cato Institute which is a US free-marketeer think tank but then Cannan too was a Classical Liberal economist. And it doesn’t alter the fact that many classical political economists had a better understanding of how banking works than most modern economists.
In any event, all the arguments are there that we have deployed to refute the theory that banks create money out of thin air.
Since we are keeping a record of the Starmer government, this incident which led to the government kow-towing to a “rogue employer” just to get them to invest in Britain ought to be recorded.
The Sultan from Dubai may have turned a corner but the P & O workers never got their jobs back and you wouldn’t want to be a worker under that dynastic regime.
And the US presumes to criticise other states for ballot rigging. I remember following that election but never understood why Gore didn’t take his appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. Perhaps because the US political establishment didn’t want the world to see their presidential election settled by a court or to see their top court endorsing ballot rigging.
So Alex Salmond has died, the snake oil salesman who duped so many workers in Scotland into believing that the solution to their problems was the establishment of a separate Scottish capitalist state. This will be another nail in the coffin of that crazy, anti-working class idea.
You will be pleased to know that the Party has opened a second-hand bookshop in the front part of our premises at 52 Clapham High Street London SW4 7UN.
You will perhaps not be so pleased that people can pay by card using one of those new-fangled card readers.
They’ve only been in for less than 100 days and are beginning to lose votes already.
Maybe because their famous “missions” were perceived as being (1) get into office (2) get more freebies (3) cut pensions.
Serve the “Labour fakers” right.
Thanks. Read it now. Yes, it does describe the brutal theocracy in Iran as it is. Not sure, though, that the aim of the regime there is to impose the rule of Ayatollahs and mad mullahs on the Arab countries where Sunni not Shia Islam is the majority. Imposing barbaric and anti-woman sharia law would be more likely to be what the dynastic rulers of Saudi Arabia would like.
I think it is rather a question of the current rulers of Iran seeking to use Shia minorities in Arab states to further its foreign policy aim of kicking out the US from the region.
What I don’t understand is why the Shia minority in Lebanon — which historically has been a downtrodden group, the bottom of the pile there, beneath the Christians and the Sunnis — should think they have a stake in destroying Israel. As its immediate neighbours it might be thought that they would think in terms of live and let live.
But just as the Israeli Jews allowed themselves to be the US rulers’ cat’s paw in the region so the Lebanese Shia have allowed themselves to be Iran’s. Two big mistakes whose results we are now seeing.
In that by-election in South Acton (Ealing) yesterday, the Workers Party easily beat TUSC. They got 32 votes (1.5%) to TUSC’s 18 (0.9%). The council seat was retained by Labour with 1009 (48.5%) of the votes cast. ReformUK got 159 (7.6%). Mind you, the turnout was only 17.34%.
I wouldn’t have expected Galloway’s party to beat TUSC amongst left-of-Labourites. It must be something to do with national publicity and better name recognition. In any event, TUSC’s claim to represent trade unionists must be as open to challenge as their claim to represent socialists.
I couldn’t open it so I don’t know what it says. But Patrick Cockburn’s articles in the weekend i paper are always good. In a recent one he makes the point that the no decent-minded human being can honestly condone what the Israeli killing machine directed by its present government is doing. They are ordered to kill their opponents’ military and political leaders irrespective of how many ordinary people are as well. In fact they have a calculus of how many can be killed depending on the importance of the intended target. If you happen to live in the same apartment block as one of these or just to be passing by, too bad you are expendable. You will be killed too. See this article from the May Socialist Standard:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2024/05/pathfinders-death-by-algorithm-2024.html?m=0
The Israeli killing machine has reduced Gaza to rubble and has killed tens of thousands of ordinary people. It’s now embarked on doing the same to Beirut.
I realise that this is what a state will do if it considers that its very existence is threatened, but even so.
