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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.
Since we’ve just been joined by our first troll since re-opening, another p.m.: To restore the way to deal with them that we had before, whatever it was. Was it moderating their posts before they appeared or something like that?
Actually, Richard Montague did write a short story called General Immunity Serum (A work of fiction?) which was proposed in 2003 as a Socialist Party pamphlet but the Executive Committee turned it down. Fortunately, someone else picked up the text which is available on the internet here:
http://right.is/politics/2015/02/general-immunity-serum-short-story-16348.html
Some copies were printed before the EC turned it down and were not supposed to circulate but of course they did. I have a copy and there are others in our archives.
It is also included in the Within The System that you mention.
Another work of fiction criticising capitalism is Castaways of Plenty. A Parable of Our Times by W. E. Hawkins, a science fiction writer influenced by the Technocracy movement (it was first published in 1935). Details here:
https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/content/castaways-plenty
If anyone wants a copy of Pieter Lawrence;s The Last Conflict they can get one from our Head Office.
It looks as if the end-of-history-is-capitalism man disagrees with the White House’s economists and has gone over to the reformist camp they criticise:
There is one passage where they make rather a large concession to the advocates of reformism and/or state capitalism:
In modern models of capitalist economies, there is, of course, an ample role for government. In particular, there are public goods and goods with externalities that will be inefficiently supplied by the free market. Public goods are undersupplied in a completely free market because there is a free rider problem. For example, if national defense, a public good enjoyed by the whole country, were sold at local supermarkets, few would contribute because they would feel their individual purchase would not matter and they would prefer others to contribute while still being defended. Consequently, the market would not provide sufficient defense.
The market doesn’t do this in other cases too, not that state intervention can rectify this.
