ALB
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Things sound bad both in the US and here. Ironic that so-called "safe spaces" should have resulted in the growth of intolerance or been a cover for it. Best to leave this policy well alone.
perspicacious wrote:Capitalism is a natural by-product of human nature and has been around since the dawn of time.Nul point for that one. That's not a redefinition, just an old chestnut.Even supporters of capitalism recognise that it's not always existed and had a historical origin in what has been called 'the long 16th century'. For instance, from today's papers:http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4611701.ece
Forgot to add that if Cameron had his way and EU migrants were barred from getting tax credits(no chance of that happening though) they would have an income below the meagre official "poverty line" and not be able to survive in a fit state to work. Incidentally, I don't think there is anything in the EU Treaties stopping him barring non-EU migrants receiving tax credits, eg Filipino nurses, so why doesn't he do it? The fact that he is not thinking of doing this suggests he wouldn't do it to EU migrants even if Britain withdrew from the EU. In other words, it's all a bluff to try to steal votes back from UKIP.
Talking, seriously, about tax credits when Cameron claimed on Monday that some 40% of recent migrant workers to the UK are "on benefits" most people would understand (and were meant to understand) that they were "workshy scroungers". But he himself admitted that most of these would be receiving tax credits, i.e would be working and of course in low-paid jobs so the government would be subsidising low-paying employers. A critical analysis of his demagogic claim here:http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/fact-check-43-eu-migrants-claim-benefits/21964
It is not just in areas controlled by the Kurdish Nationalists that councils have been formed to run local services. It's also in some other areas that are no longer controlled by the central government (or the ISIS barbarians) and this despite the presence of marauding armed gangs:http://www.voanews.com/content/with-authorities-gone-local-councils-take-charge-in-syria/3052990.htmlhttp://syriadirect.org/news/after-%E2%80%98marginalizing%E2%80%99-the-east-daraa%E2%80%99s-new-electoral-system-aims-for-equity/This is what you would expect — people are not going to let things fall apart completely. This is what the "soviets" (merely Russian word for "council") must have been like. Nothing particularly special about them and certainly not an instrument to carry out the socialist revolution where stable democratically-elected structures already exist.
ALB wrote:I doubt if he or the new government will last long. It will be interesting to see how long it can survive with a majority of MPs against it.Only 11 days in the event. Who says that parliaments elected by universal suffrage have no say in who forms the government (and so who controls the state machine)? Anarchists and anti-parliamentarians wrong again.Having said that, it will also be interesting to see how long any new leftwing coalition government will last but they will fail for another reason: governing capitalism means that sooner or later they will have to take anti-working class measures which will probably not be acceptable to some of the coalition partners. But then it's not our claim that parliament controls how the capitalist economy operates but only who forms the government and controls the state.
Actually it is not just a question of reintroducing the old blasphemy laws by the back door and extending them to other religions. It's more insidious and dangerous than that. It's an attempt to suppress any criticism deemed by some self-appointed censors to make some people feel offended. Here's the other example given by Aaronovitch:
Quote:Just under a year ago a student anti-abortion group booked a room at Christ Church in Oxford and invited two male journalists to "debate" the issue. A college student leader thought that it was not just rum, but somehow inadmissible, to have two blokes debating an issue of importance to women. Yet the plea to the college to cancel (i.e. ban) the meeting was couched in terms of the "security concerns, both physical and mental, of Christ Church students". When the college authorities caved before this demand they were praised for sending "a strong message that the welfare and safety of our students is more important than an outside group's access to use our space".He also mentioned the ban Cardiff University imposed on Germaine Greer speaking because of her views on transgender people.Now it's started where will it stop? Us being banned for expressing anti-patriotic views which offend patriots? It's a threat to freedom of speech generally. The ex-RCPers behind Spiked are quite good on this. The Weekly Worker lot take a similar position but are not so good.
He's got a point except that the idiots he's criticising are not "cultural Marxists" as Marx himself was a staunch defender of free speech and opponent of all censorship. David Aaronovitch in a much more temperate and better argued article in last week's Times called them "soft Stalinists":http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4604877.eceHe gave as one example of these people at work:
Quote:A few weeks ago an ex-Muslim called Maryam Namazie was, for a while, prescribed by Warwick University Students Union. Namazie is a very brave and sometimes abrasive Marxist who does not care much for religion — the religion she knows best being Islam. The student union justified its decision by referring to a "duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus" …. That risk assessment, having been taken in articles written by Namazie, concluded that "she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on the campus." What would be inflamed, who incited and to what was never specified. But the image … was invoked of students made to feel subjectively uncomfortable to the point of feeling somehow threatened by people just talking.The idiots, with their self-arrogated "duty" to conduct a "risk assessment" of speakers, who tried to ban her were later, quite rightly, made to back down. Aaronovitch went on to point out:
Quote:The appeal to the subjective — to an experience that cannot by definition be questioned (if you say you feel something, who can possibly contradict you?) is a gift to the political authoritarian. All he or she has to do is to invoke the requisite feeling among a section of the masses in order to justify the proscription.He concluded:
Quote:Even the original “no platform for fascists” was wrong, as I realised a few years later. But because it seemed to require objective criteria it was far less damaging than what, routinely, is going on now.Good stuff. The sort of “political correctness” he is criticising is dangerous. We socialists should denounce it and not leave this to ranting, rightwing American professors..
While they all stand for a stateless, moneyless, wageless society based on common ownership of the means of living, the first two and the 4th (which I think might be a couple of individuals rather than a group) are against electoral action envisaging that the socialist revolution will involve a violent, armed confrontation with the capitalist state. I don't think the Marxist Humanists are necessarily against putting up candidates or voting but maybe to try to obtain reforms.I'm not sure about Critisticuffs but the other three will have illusions about the nature of the Russian Revolution (as some sort of socialist revolution that went wrong, one of the great illusions of the 20th century).Aufheben and Mouvement Communiste employ an over-philosophical and difficultly penetrable language but that's because they don't see any point in trying to explain socialism (or communism, as they prefer to call it) to workers on the assumption that they spontaneously are or will become socialist in the course of the final confrontation with the capitalist state. The language employed by the other two is more our cup of tea — and no doubt of workers generally.
I don't believe this one from today's Daily Mirror website:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/isis-savages-gun-down-200-6798484It sounds too much like German troops bayoneting babies in WW1 and don't think even the koran would authorise such a mass killing of children. They are savages, though.
Have the Mexican bandits done this yet:http://www.syriahr.com/en/2015/11/during-sohr-follow-up-for-islamic-state-trading-in-sabaya-distributing-sabaya-to-the-disabled-militants-nude-marketing-on-social-media/They still think they are in the 7th or 8th century, the sick bastards.
DJP wrote:Vin wrote:Wasnt Kautsky a member of the German SDP that voted for ww1?Or am i thinking of another bloke?Yes that was him
No it wasn't. That's part of the oft-repeated Leninist lie about the "renegade Kautsky". He was not a member of the Reichstag and so didn't have a vote. His position is summarised on the Marxists Internet Archive as:
Quote:In 1914 the crisis struck and war was declared. At the meeting of the Reichstag caucus on 3 August 1914 which decided to vote for the war credits next day, Kautsky, not a member of the Reichstag himself, stated that the character of the war could not be determined, and therefore the right to defence of the fatherland had to apply to all countries involved in the war. He wanted the Party to demand from the government an assurance that it wanted no conquests, and if the government agreed the war credits should be approved, if not, not.Naturally, there was no chance the government would agree so, had he been an MP, Kautsky would have been committed to voting against the war credits. But even Karl Liebknecht, who was a member of the Reichstag and was opposed to the war, only abstained on the 4 August vote. Five months later, though, he did vote against them, the only MP to do so. It took Kautsky another five or so months to come out against the war:
Quote:In June 1915, about ten months the war had began and when it had become obvious that this was going to be long sustained and appallingly costly struggle, he issued an appeal with Bernstein and Haase against the right and denounced the government’s annexationist aims.For an assessment of Kautsky's political carreer see this obituary the Socialist Standard published on him in 1939:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1939/no-413-january-1939/kautsky%E2%80%99s-work-socialism
