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Exchange of emails between a comrade and XR.
Our member wrote:
“Like you, I am extremely worried and concerned at the devastation being wrought on our environment, people and the species (with no voice), with which we share the planet. I have been to a number of your meetings and can only respect the tireless efforts being made by your members. Their dedication and concern is palpable.
That said, and given your numbers and (hopefully) growing support, would not the efforts of XR and its members be better aimed at changing the system in its entirety? Climate change is just a symptom, albeit terrifying, of Capitalism. War, hunger, homelessness, starvation and poverty are also symptoms and those caught up in any of these have little time to think of global warming. Unless Capitalism is replaced then no amount of reforms (if achieved at all) will solve the main issue – profit at all costs. We need a new world order that does not put profit before the environment.
If your energies were channeled into the efforts of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (link attached) all the above ills could be addressed. I sincerely hope you succeed in your aims but when have reforms ever really worked in the past – especially with so little available time?”XR replied:
“We were not set up with the intention of advocating for any specific type or kind of system to change to – and it would be extremely difficult to change to that advocacy now, advocating for any system would be to undermine our current demands and principles.
I was a member of the SPGB over 40 years ago.
It was its policy then (which aligns with the thoughts of Karl Marx himself) that Capitalism doesn’t require a revolution to fail, as it will inevitably fall apart as a victim of its own internal contradictions, I’d be surprised if its policy has changed.
As I know now the SPGB has 300 members, whilst Extinction Rebellion has over a million supporters worldwide, and by and large they all seem to agree with our current demands.
Hope this helps,
Tony Marone
Public Engagement Working Group”Three observations:
1. Eat shit. Ten million flies can’t be wrong.
2. What an admission that XR is not advocating a change of system but is merely campaigning for “demands” within the existing (capitalist) system.
3. It is not our view that capitalism will automatically collapse of its own accord through its contradictions (which is why we are checking his claim to have been a member).
Here’s what we said at the time about the election and subsequent ejection of the first Labour Government in 1924:
The Labour Party seems to be relying a lot on being able to conjure up “growth” to honour its rash election promises.
Earlier this week, Darren Jones who is the would-be chief secretary to the Treasury was reported as saying:
“If we are successful in growing the economy in the way that we think we will be, then that creates more investment” (Times, 4 January).
This is a strange argument as business investment is what brings about growth. So any growth that might take place would be as a result, not the cause, of business investment. He’s put the cart before the horse and expects it to pull the horse.
But it’s not only creating new business investment that the growth they think they can conjure up will bring about. A speech by their would-be Health Secretary, god-botherer Wes Street, was reported under the headline: “Labour says it would rely on growth to fund pay rises to the NHS” (i paper, 6 January).
On the same page the same paper reported the clueless Labour Leader himself:
“Sir Keith reiterated his comments on Thursday that economic growth was key to creating wealth and improving living standards.”
But if a Labour government under Starmer is not as lucky as the Blair Labour government was in happening to be in office during a period of growth, and there is no growth at the rate Labour think they can bring about?
Back to Darren Jones:
“If we are not [successful in growing the economy], then the fiscal rules come first and are non-negotiable.”
So. fiscal conservatism, otherwise known as austerity.
In any event, no government can control growth — that depends on business investment. This may or may not happen when a Labour government is in office but if it does it won’t be due to anything that government did. It would have happened anyway, even under a Tory government.
Governments don’t and can’t control capitalism. It’s rather the other way round — what they do is to react to what the operation of capitalism, as it passes through its cycles of boom and slump, brings about.
The government here is beginning to realise the potential impact on the price level here as a result of a consequence of the war in Gaza. They may be preparing to use this as an excuse if they don’t get the rate of increase in the price level down to 2 percent. It will be “we were blown off course by outside events” again. Which won’t be untrue, but they contributed to these outside events by supporting the continuation of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
As I was in Waterstones yesterday I had a look inside the book by Rachel Reeves, the would-be future Chancellor of the Exchequer, on “The Women who Made Modern Economics”.
So Labour’s shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has been exposed as a common plagiarist.
A comrade tried to buy this book today but was told that it has been withdrawn from circulation. So she has pleaded guilty as charged.
Unfortunately the war is still going on and so there are still protests against it. There will be local demonstrations all over the country this Saturday in preparation for another national one in London on the following Saturday (13 January). Local Party members and sympathisers will be leafletting some of these, including in Portsmouth and Folkestone as well as Oxford and London.
Every day makes it clearer that the Gaza War is an aspect of a wider conflict of economic interest in the Middle East over oil and trade routes.
Israel has bombed Beirut in Lebanon and Damascus in Syria and now the US has bombed Baghdad in Iraq and is planning to bomb Yemen. All making it clearer that this is not just a question of Israel seeking to exterminate Hamas (with hundreds of thousands of civilians as collateral damage) but that the issue at stake is wider.
At the moment this wider conflict is a low-intensity war with each side — the US and Iran — pulling its punches but still a war resulting from the conflicts of economic interest between capitalist states that is built into capitalism.
Like we say in the editorial in this month’s Socialist Standard, if you want peace, prepare for socialism.
Well, Stuart, if you click here:
https://moneyweek.com/economy/giving-thanks-for-capitalism
You see:
“Why you should give thanks for capitalism
Capitalism puts the food on the table. Be grateful and don’t expect more than it can give, says Stuart Watkins.”Are you saying that you didn’t say that? Or that you did, but didn’t mean it? Or that you were simply making the trite point that under capitalism workers get fed plus the socialist point that workers shouldn’t expect more than they get under capitalism?
Apart from the tendentious definition of capitalism (he was trying to define private enterprise capitalism), the opening subheading is odd too:
“Capitalism puts the food on the table. Be grateful and don’t expect more than it can give.”
Of course workers get fed under capitalism, otherwise they wouldn’t be fit to produce the wealth needed for society to survive or the profits that the capitalist economy runs on.
Chattel slavery in the American South also put food on the table for the slaves there.
Also of course capitalism doesn’t put enough food on the table for many even in the advanced capitalist parts of the world. If capitalism wants to claim benefit for feeding most workers then they must accept responsibility for not feeding everybody adequately. In fact, why doesn’t it feed everybody?
Mind you, it is good advice to not expect of capitalism more than it can give. There is no point in trying to reform capitalism to work in the interest of the wage-working majority as it can’t be. Conclusion: get rid of it.
Incidentally, Cobden was a bit of an nutter too. This factory owner was opposed to Factory Laws, defended adulteration as legitimate competition, and wouldn’t tolerate trade unionism. Most of his fellow capitalists and their political representatives thought that was silly and went ahead and agreed to all the things he opposed.
Cobden’s “classical liberalism” was just a policy and ideology to further the interests of one section of the capitalist class at one time. It has been inherited by a section of Big Business that is opposed to too much government interference in how they run their run their own profit-making. But it is not the mainstream capitalist view. For some reason ex-comrade Watkins has chosen to enrol as one of the champions of this particular sectional capitalist interest.
You are mixing two things up. Some capitalists evidently have more money than brains by having bunkers built but the state is not controlled by individual capitalists. It is their executive committee whose remit is to look after the overall general interest of a country’s capitalist class.
The decision whether or not to go to war rests with those who control the state on behalf of the capitalist class. Those who control the three major nuclear states do not consider a nuclear war to be on the overall general interest of their capitalist class. They don’t mind “conventional” wars against other states but seek to avoid direct military action against each other by using proxies instead. Wars and preparations for wars are built-in to capitalism, but a nuclear apocalypse isn’t.
Concerning global warming, have a look at the digression on the thread about two ex-socialists who have gone over to the other side to see why individual capitalist firms are compelled to act as they do, especially #249532. They are not doing it because they are not bright.
I don’t think anybody, quite apart from “we”, thinks that. It seems to be just you.
All three big nuclear Powers — the US, Russia and China — have been studiously avoiding getting into direct military confrontation with each other and have even established lines of communication to prevent this happening by accident.
That will be because they don’t want a world war with nuclear weapons. What benefit could their ruling classes get from that?
While we have been discussing how the production and distribution of wealth could take place in a socialist society as necessarily one without markets or money, ex-comrade Watkins has been at it again. This time he has excelled himself as an outright apologist for “free market” capitalism, alongside those hired by big business at the institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute to do this. Big business subsidises organisations like these to resist government regulation of their “freedom” to seek profits where they judge best.
Further confirmation that the Gaza War is not just a war of savage revenge by Israel. In fact that shots have already been fired in what is a wider, regional conflict over oil and trade routes.
“Britain’s defense minister warned on Monday that London is “willing to take direct action” against the Houthis.
“We are willing to take direct action, and we won’t hesitate to take further action to deter threats to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea,” Defense Secretary Grant Shapps wrote in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.”And:
“Iran’s Alborz warship has entered the Red Sea after passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.
Since 2009, Iranian warships have been operating in open waters to “secure shipping lines, fight against pirates and conduct other missions,” Tasnim said.
This comes as Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis have been targeting vessels in the Red Sea for weeks, justifying their actions as support for Palestinians amid the ongoing war between the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel, which began on October 7.”
