ALB
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The US elections as battle of the multibillionaires : Gates v. Musk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-donated-50-million-223354093.html
I see the Labour leaders are getting into difficulty over what they mean by “working people” in relation to their pledge not to increase taxes on them. The media are having a field day pointing the contradictions — as there are.
Starmer’s attempt is:
“people who earn their living, rely on our [public] services and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble.”
That would rule out a whole generation who can’t write a cheque because they don’t know what a cheque is (or was, as far as they are concerned). But also many workers who do have some savings. It would seem to include just the poorest section of the working class, even if this might not have been what he intended.
Reeves fares somewhat better:
“Working people are people who get their income from going out to work every day, and also pensioners that have worked all their lives and are now in retirement, drawing down their pensions.”
However, this would seem exclude those below retirement age who, for one reason or another, are not actually working — the unemployed, the long-term sick or the disabled. This was probably intentionally in view of the threats the new government has made to make benefit conditions more difficult.
How about: The working class is made up of all those who, excluded from ownership of productive resources, are economically obliged to get a living by trying to sell their mental and physical energies to some employer for a wage or salary.
We have discussed them here before, in 2017:
We also reviewed a couple of Furedi’s books:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/10/defending-modernism-2005.html?m=1
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-nature-of-russian-capitalism-1986.html?m=1
I remember we used to call Living Marxism “Dead Leninism” but they were a phenomenon and the other Trots didn’t like them because they often took up a different position from them on current issues.
I was only counterposing a hypothetical crass assumption to H.Moss’s crass assumption that to say that Russia’s invasion was provoked was to exonerate Russia.
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.
