ALB
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Here’s more on our LibDem opponent:
https://www.lambethlibdems.org.uk/vauxhall-war-by-election-candidate
He talks a lot here about “our community” as if all those living in the ward formed a community with a common interest. But this is an area which physically shows the division of society into two classes. The rich living in luxury high rise flats overlooking the Thames. The poor living in social housing away from the river. The class division couldn’t be more evident.
They seem to be going for the gay vote which is not insignificant in this part of London:
Yes, the best immediate thing that could happen from a working class point of view, is a ceasefire to stop the killings, maimings and destruction of homes and infrastructure. Ok, that would freeze the situation as the existing “line of contact” but at least workers whichever side of it they find themselves on will stop being killed — the absolute priority from a working class point of view. It won’t solve any other working class problem but at least it would stop that. The is no justification for any other position and those who urge the fighting to continue are, as you say, to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
“Workers Power”, the Trotskyist group that Paul Mason was once in, and him have both pursued the same trajectory. Both have entered the Labour Party and both support the Ukraine state in its war with the Russian state.
Here’s the position of the League for a Fifth (or should that be the Fiftieth?) International:
“ … Russia, under its autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, is clearly the aggressor and the Ukrainians, who rallied in huge numbers to the defence of their country, have every right to fight back and drive the invader from their country … “
https://fifthinternational.org/content/first-year-ukraine-war
It’s a validly expressed point but certainly not a valid point.
Incidentally, Mason has apparently been having difficulty in getting selected as a Labour candidate. Could it be that he once wrote a book called Postcapitalism and that the Labour leadership don’t want to risk a candidate who envisages going beyond capitalism, both because they are afraid the Tories might use it as a stick against them and because they don’t want to go beyond capitalism?
“Slava Ukraini” has an unsavoury history. During the last world war in Nazi-conquered Poland (which then included western Ukraine) the Ukrainian nationalists were allowed some freedom. When they shouted this slogan they raised their outstretched right hand above their shoulder. No doubt it was what they shouted when they massacred Poles and Jews.
It is better translated as “Gory to Ukraine” which it has only ever brought.
Here are the rags at the end of a pole that Lizzie is prepared to die and kill for and, worse, urge others from afar to die and kill for:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Austrian_flags
The good soldier Svejk had other ideas. Hopefully there are some of the them in the Ukranian and Russian armed forces.
I liked the one for the Austrian navy, an armed tourist cruise ship on the Danube, to ward off attacks by Hungarian or Slovak cruise ships?
Fortunately, Austria is not and cannot be a member of NATO and so cannot supply arms to Ukraine to keep the killing and destruction going. Not that that need stop Lizzie or Paul Mason signing up as a mercenary to fight for the Ukrainian regime and plant its flag on the end of a pole on some bombed out village or town.
Here’s something on one of our opponents — the Green Party candidate, standing for an impossible return to the small-scale capitalism from which the present corporate capitalism evolved while in the meantime trying to impose a green agenda on existing capitalism in place of its built-in priority of profit-making (another impossibility).
A rather high-profile candidate for a local council by-election but no doubt to help raise her profile as the local Greens’ candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Vauxhall in the general election some time next year.
Nominations closed on 4pm yesterday and it’s just us against the usual suspects — Labour, Tory, Liberal, Greens:
The ward is Labour and normally they should win again. The electorate is 6,400 but last May only 27% voted. It will be even less this time as a by-election.
He wants to a Labour MP in the tradition of other former Trots. Sounds like he would make a good one. If he plays his cards right, he might even end up as a junior minister.
It seems that Mick McGahey’s joke did have sone basis in fact. There was a party called the British Section of the International Socialist Labour Party and it did contest municipal elections in Edinburgh. Here’s the results of the 1936 elections.
Scroll down to South Leith. It seems that McGahey exaggerated at bit. Their candidate got 27 votes. Which was 0.3 percent of the votes cast.
Our candidate in Tunbridge Wells got 0.5 percent. Which is 1 in every 200 people who voted. Which if repeated throughout the UK and if there was exact proportional representation would mean 3 MPs.
While we are wandering off topic, I didn’t realise that in Edinburgh in the mid-1930s there was a strong sectarian Protestant party. You live and learn.
That reminds of the joke that Mick McGahey, the Communist Party miners’ leader in Scotland, used to tell about an organisation in Edinburgh called the International Socialist Labour Party. They had ten members in the constituency, enough for them all to sign the nomination paper. Their candidate got 11 votes — and was expelled for reformist vote-catching.
Here is Milei explaining some of the implications of anarcho-capitalism as a nightmare dystopia where everything, literally everything, is subjected to being bought and sold:
“In June of last year, he referred to the sale of organs as “just another market” during a radio debate. “Who are you to determine what [a person] does with his life?” Milei questioned. Things then spiraled out of control. Days later, a journalist asked him if he subscribed to another theory that suggested “the sale of children.” Milei replied, “It depends,” and further got himself tangled up. “Shouldn’t the answer be no?” the journalist pressed. “If I had a child, I would not sell it,” Milei said. “The answer depends on the terms in which you are thinking; maybe 200 years from now it could be debated.”
Milei is promising to abolish the Central Bank of Argentina, echoing the demand of US currency cranks who want to abolish the Federal Reserve.
It would be instructive to see what would happen if he did actually abolish it. We would then see if banks on their own can “create credit” without being part of a system involving a central bank which uses them to put new money into circulation. With no central bank to issue new money it would certainly stop inflation.
But his plan still involves a central bank — ironically, the US Federal Reserve itself as that would be a consequence of his plan to “dollarize” the Argentine economy (“Dollarization is the term for when the U.S. dollar is used in addition to or instead of the domestic currency of another country”.)
So, we wouldn’t actually see what would happen in a capitalist state if there was no central bank at all.
Milei calls himself and is called an “anarchist-capitalist” but whether they would regard him as one of them is another matter. We know them of old and have debated against them many times, in both writing and speech. So it would be interesting to see one of them have a go at trying to implement their policy (even though it might be thought that an anarcho-capitalist president was a contradiction in terms).
She’s lucky that Einstein is dead. I have just re-read that article of his and you are right he really would have wiped the floor with her. Here are the arguments she would have had to have dealt with:
“The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free.”
“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.”
“Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an ‘army of unemployed’ almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before. This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.”
His argument is mainly directed against private capitalism but that’s precisely what she is defending and wants to see more of.
Instead of a debate she could do a talk on “Why Einstein Was Wrong”. That would bring them in.
What we are talking about here is an imaginary debate between two people who happen to be astrophysicists, not as such but as ordinary people who are reasonably well-informed.
Added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/index.htm
Fallacy of a National Incomes Policy, August 1965
Inflation and Prices (part 1), July 1965
Inflation and Prices (part 2), August 1965
Inflation and Prices (part 3), September 1965
Inflation and Prices (part 4), October 1965
George Orwell: War Broadcasts and War Commentaries, December 1987
