ALB
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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.”That’s good stuff. He (and Mau) only need to spell out (which they don’t seem to, though it follows from their position) that governments too are subject to impersonal economic logic of capitalism (“cannot permanently extricate themselves from the coercive laws of an economic system mediated by value”) and so knock the final nail into the coffin of reformism that seeks to make capitalism work for the wage-working majority and their dependents.
Not only that but also the ultimate futility of trying to bring popular pressure on governments and individual capitalist enterprises to get them to act against the logic of capitalism.
This is yet another confirmation of how deep the “democratic deficit” is in the USA which means that its government is in no position to lecture other states on how to organise proper elections.
There is no uniform electoral law and no non-partisan authority to ensure that the whole election process (not just the counting of votes) is fair. Instead each state determines its own electoral laws about who can vote and how which are enforced by elected politicians who use the power this gives them to bias regulations in favour of their party. As we are seeing in this case.
I just listened to that. It confirms that Mau’s basic argument is that what maintains capitalist rule is not just physical force (threatened or actual) and ideology (brainwashing) but also “economic power”. He sees this as an impersonal form of power, an expression of the logic of capital that every market agent (ie not just workers but capitalists too) in capitalism is subjected to through the impersonal operation of market forces.
The book sounds as if it might be heavy going but a reviewer has been found and a review, as well as a comment on his blog about communism, will be appearing in the Socialist Standard.
Mau was interviewed by Jacobin last February. In it he confirms the summary of his argument in the introduction to the interview, headlined “Capitalism Makes Everyone Bend to Its Will, Rich and Poor Alike”:
“In his new book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau argues that to understand and end capitalism, we need to analyze how it not only subordinates the poor to the rich but in fact exerts economic power over everyone — including capitalists themselves.”
This of course is something we have long said and is in fact the basis of our case that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority class of wage workers. Not only capitalist firms but governments too are subject to the “logic of capital” enforced through market competition which dictates that priority must be given to profits and the conditions for profit-making. That reformist governments can’t escape this “mute compulsion” has been confirmed time and time again.
Looks as if we should review it.
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/soren-mau-mute-compulsion-marx-capital-economic-power-domination
“Will happen” ! So Russia is going to conquer all Ukraine and NATO is going to send its own troops in to counter this? And bang, a nuclear war. I don’t think so. Conquering the whole of Ukraine is not even Russia’s war aim, though no doubt they would like to seize Odessa and the whole of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast if they could.
Most observers seem to think that the most likely outcome of the war is going to be a stalemate based on the existing line of contact between the two armies.
According to this there are over 200 other teenagers who have said they will refuse to be conscripted into the Israeli killing machine but that was in August:
“Over 200 high schoolers who are supposed to be on the path to being drafted in the near future to the IDF announced in August that they will refuse their call-up not only because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform but also because of “the occupation.”
