ALB
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So Starmer has said he is a socialist. The best comment on this comes from the SNP MP quoted here:
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24348401.labour-keir-starmer-calls-progressive-socialist/
This could be a gaffe that will cost him tens of thousands of votes. After assiduously pursuing Tory votes by trying to convince them that the “changed”Labour Party is the same as the Old Conservative Party he throws it all away by an impromptu reply extracted by a clever journalist.
His PR team must be tearing their hair out.
All the papers picked this up too so, for future reference, we now have a record that he said this on 27 May 2024.
For example:
Discussion of it on the Labour Bankruptcy thread.
Meanwhile Starmer tells the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason that he’s a socialist:
Starmer told me today he sees himself as a socialist. For those scared of that label, he said he saw it as putting ‘the country in the service of working people”.
Here at 18.04
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-69063295
I don’t know how long this will be visible if somebody wants to take a screenshot of it for the record.
When talking to capitalists he proclaims Labour as the Party of Business. When it comes to election time and he needs workers’ vote to further his career he says he wants to serve working people.
Even if he really meant this, he won’t and couldn’t as capitalism can never be made to do his.
Still, if he wants to be judged on whether or not he does this, let him be judged by that.
If the Tories win, but they won’t, will they? Looks like they have gone bonkers. That won’t even get them many votes, except perhaps in Tonbridge Wells and other places where retired colonels live.
Measures to soften up the population to accept increasing state spending on weapons of individual and mass destruction, probably in fact also aimed at the Russian government in accordance the doctrine that “if you want peace, prepare for war”. Which has a certain perverse logic under capitalism. And one reason why resources will always be wasted on preparations for war and disarmanent remain a dream as long as capitalism lasts.
By way of contrast:
So the ball is in the West’s court. But they don’t really want an end to the conflict. The US’s stated aim from the start has been to weaken rather than defeat Russia by keeping it bogged down in a never-ending war. But they might have to compromise as they’ll soon be down to the last Ukrainian.
That letter in last week’s Weekly Worker has provoked a full page reply to it and another letter:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1492/minimal-symmetrical-errors/
Apparently SPEW’s reform programme was not the pre-WW1 Social Democrats’ “minimum programme” but was supposed to be Trotsky’s “transitional programme”. However, the author (Mike McNair) realises that “in practice, what is ‘transitional’ turns out to be merely what is currently popular – “attractive-sounding reforms”.”
Like we said. SPEW have been advocating these sorts of reforms for so long that they have come to really believe that they could be achieved under capitalism and is in practice a common or garden reformist party.
McNair goes on to argue that by “minimum programme” the pre-WW1 Social Democrats meant a more complete (or less incomplete) political democracy. No doubt they did stand for this but I think it wasn’t just this but did include social measures to be achieved within capitalism as well. In any event, it was these that got them electoral support and made them prisoners of their reform-minded voters and led to them eventually becoming ordinary reformist parties.
Mind you, it’s their own fault as, to curry favour with the demonstrators, they had a leaflet calling for a “socialist intifada”.
They just meant a mass uprising. That will teach them to be opportunist (but it won’t)
Yes, we shouldn’t let this pass unchallenged.
Actually, Gove is being unfair to SPEW. They don’t agree with the SWP and RCP position of “smashing Israel”. I have been at various Gaza events and can confirm their lit sellers do not join in the chants of “from the river to the sea”. They are for a “two-state” solution, with a Labour government in Israel and a Labour government in Palestine co-operating.
Just seen that they have already replied to him pointing this out:
As you say, Gove has not done his homework.
A lurker on this forum has drawn attention to this article entitled “Were Neanderthals More Than Cousins to Homo Sapiens?”
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/hominin-species-neanderthals/
Interesting. On another thread TM wrote that the humans and chimpanzees are “cousins”. One of the articles linked on the same page as the above describes Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as “cousins”. I realise that the point being made in both cases is that two species are related in the sense of sharing a common ancestor species.
Taken literally, a (first) cousin is someone who shares common grandparents. The table at the beginning of this article
would mean on this strict definition that it is gorillas who would be our first cousins and chimps our siblings (and old world monkeys our second cousins — same great-grandparents).
Neanderthals are of course much closer to us than that. In fact, are they even a separate species? If not, they are us.
Well, well. So the International Court of Clowns wants to indict NuttyYahoo. So we are going to see if Might is Right. Or if international law is more than a scrap of paper. And who are the hypocrites.
Of course the US and its allies are subsidising bogus NGOs with a view to trying to bring in a friendly government. Russia too no doubt with a view to maintaining in power a friendly government. These are the sort of intrigues that used to go on in the Balkans in the first half of the last century (and the assassination attempt on the prime minister of Slovakia the other day suggests they still are).
I noticed this:
Russian troops currently occupy some 20% of Georgian territory
This will be in two breakaway areas inhabited by non-Georgian speakers. It is looking like that is the way the Ukraine war could end — with Russia continuing to hold what it has occupied and Ukraine (and the US and its allies) having to accept this fact on the ground without recognising its legality.
The members who attended the SPEW meeting on “Reform or Revolution?” in Vauxhall on 25 April report that, in answer to a question as to whether the revolution they envisaged would abolish money and private property, replied that capitalism had not yet sufficiently developed the forces of production for that.
