ALB
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Obviously nothing significant is going to be done by 2020. But I don’t think this will result in an “existential threat”. If the average global temperature rises by 2030 by the predicted 1.5 degrees, this will certainly cause problems in some parts of the world but won’t represent a threat to the existence of human life on the planet Earth (which is presumably what “existential threat means”). That would require a rise in average global temperature by much more than 1.5 degrees. I am not sure either that it would mean the beginning of “runaway global warming”, i.e, the beginning of a process that could not be stopped (not even in socialism).
I can understand what Gutteres is using such language — it’s to try to shock governments into doing something. But there is a danger in crying wolf.
If an “existential threat” does emerge I don’t think the capitalist governments of the world would just sit back and do nothing. After all, that would be a threat to them and their system. I don’t know what they would do but they would be bound to do something. I don’t know if the fact that they haven’t unleashed a nuclear war is a precedent for them stepping back from the brink.
Interesting and confirmation of an aspect of our case against movements for “national independence”. One of the arguments the Irish Nationalists used was that a separate Irish state was needed to protect and revice the Irish language. It has failed. The most vibrant Celtic language is Welsh and that has surviced without needing a separate State to sustain it. In other words, language and a state don’t have to be linked, as of course they won’t be the case in socialism.
I wasn’t defending the editor’s “joke” but merely pointing out that he lost his job as a result of a twitter campaign against him. He was bound to lose it anyway as he had damaged his employer’s commercial interest by alienating existing and potential customers. It’s since come out that he is an Old Etonian so he’s likely to land on his feet.
The lesson of this incident is that you need to be careful what you say on social media and emails, even private ones.
Alanj wrote:
I don’t think we can frighten fellow-workers into socialism.
Excactly. We can’t and we shouldn’t try to. That would be counter-productive as fear makes people open to authoritariansm.
What we have got to offer in hope. We need to be technological optimists and point to what kind of different world is possible given the degree of technological development that has been reached and is still to come.
But there are people around, many concerned about climate change, who criticise technology, who even blame technology. They don’t like genetic engineering (which can increase food yields). They don’t like nuclear energy (which is an obvious alternative source of energy to burning fossils fuels). And now they have turned their guns on plastics (the obvious alternative use for fossil fuels instead of burning them).
Yes, capitalism misuses technology like everything else, but technology is the hope of the future. We should defend it, not join the anti-progress brigade who criticise it.
There’s another vegan joke in today’s Sun
How do you know if someone if a vegan. Don’t worry. They’ll tell you.
It would be nice to think that people tell the same joke about Socialists.
Editorial from yesterday’s Times:
The editor of Waitrose’s Food magazine is not a fan of vegans. When a freelance journalist suggested to William Sitwell,that he feature some vegan recipes, he emailed back his idea for “a series on killing vegans, one by one”. This exchange, for which Mr Sitwell has since apologised, encapsulated how many people feel about vegans and veganism. They regard it as an irritating and disruptive fad promulgated by zealots and eccentrics.
You can say that again.
The combination of arguments in favour of at least a reduction in eating meat is too compelling to be dismissed. It should remain a choice, and campaigners should be aware of the line between argument and hectoring, but at least we can acknowledge that vegans have a point.
Yes, ok. Even I eat less meat than before (not even once a day) but not because of vegetarian and vegan hectoring.
p.s. The unfortunate Sitwell has since been hounded out of his job by a twitter campaign against him.
Pakistan is rather behind Ireland on this issue. So are some other countries:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-46046074
Good point. What can be abolished “overnight” is capitalist ownership and control of the means of production. All that requires is a decision by the state, once the socialist-minded working class has won control of it, to abolish the laws granting them this. What cannot be introduced overnight would be the full implementation of the principle of “from according to their ability, to each according to their needs” as that requires the reorganisation and reorientation of production.
I think the point that was being made was that there isn’t, and hasn’t been for decades, a century even, any need for a “transition period” during which there would be a further development of capitalism but under state control.
Hope the new forum has inherited the same facility as the old one had to delete and ban nuisance spammers like this one.
So Marx didn’t hold that capitalism paved the way for socialism by creating its material basis? That must have been Groucho Marx. Here’s what Karl Marx wrote in his Preface to A Critique of Political Economy:
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
I’d say by within a generation of Marx’s death in 1883, i.e by the end of the 19th century. By then, capitalism had come to dominate the whole world (a phenomenon some called “imperialism”, which began to be noted and commented on at this time). Also, with the application of electricity and chemistry to production and other technological advances(what has been called the “second industrial revolution”, see : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution ) the possibility of producing enough for all had been reached. In short, the material basis for socialism as a world system had been created,
Not an occasion to open a bottle of champagne I agree but perhaps worth a single muted cheer. After all, although we don’t advocate reforms we are not against all reforms on principle but can recognise that some can be of benefit.
Here’s the result of the referendum:
Good news of course but it remains to be seen what secondary legislation will replace it.
