ALB
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William Morris wrote somewhere that adulteration would be inconceivable in socialism as a society where production was directly for people to use, and asked why on Earth in such a society would substandard stuff be produced?
This also means that there would be no need for Trading Standards officers either.
Not content with turning against the Russian-speaking minority, the Ukrainian nationalists now want to deal with the Hungarian-speaking minority. And we’re supposed to support the Ukraine regime to uphold “democratic values”.
I have now read that article on General Caffarelli and while he is reported as saying “I contend that the laws that sanction property sanction a usurpation, a theft”. But he then went on to say that, as it would be inconvenient to abolish them, the best that could be done would be to modify them to make them less unfair. So Napoleon probably didn’t hear the case for common ownership, after all, at least not from Caffarelli.
It was, actually. Having said that, those who vote for the raving loony monsters are making a point — a protest against conventional politics and its irrelevance to the life of ordinary people, taking the piss out of its empty election promises by making absurd ones. It’s an alternative to abstention and going fishing on election day. Understandable if not particularly constructive.
There are 17 candidates including Piers Corbyn and Laurence Fox not to mention Count Binface and the Monster Raving Loony Party. It’s a farce. That’s why we stopped contesting by-elections some years ago now. But they are still occasions when people think and talk about politics more than usual.
I don’t think this analysis by this Trotsky group stands up. I don’t think that Prigozhin was attempting to seize power or appealing to some “pro-NATO faction within the Russian ruling class”. (Who are they anyway? – I can’t see any section of the Russian ruling class being “pro-NATO” any more than there being a pro-Russia section of the US ruling class. Some might have thought the invasion of Ukraine unwise or a mistake and wanted to deal with the NATO threat to their state in a different way, but that’s not the sane thing.)
It seems more like a demonstration to win some concessions for his business (after all, he runs a profit-seeking company). If they had wanted to, those in control of the Russian state could easily have stopped a few tanks at any point on their way to Moscow. I would have thought, from their point of view, they handled it quite well, dealing with it without needing to use violence.
It was dramatic stuff in the short time it lasted but this “Prigozhin affair” risks being blown up out of all proportion like the 6 January riot in Washington in 2021. I can’t see it having any effect on the course of the war.
Actually “Another Ernst Roehm . . . same fate awaits” was one of the comments on Sputnik here:
Not quite. But Minsk must be better than Siberia.
Looks as if he has been taking advice from the Grand Old Duke of York as well as from Montgomery;
In his 1962 book Bonaparte in Egypt J. Christopher Herold wrote:
“During the voyage to Egypt in 1798. When Bonaparte in his pose as intellectual was holding debates on all kinds of themes, a three-day discussion of property was inspired by Rouseau’s theories about inequality. General Caffarelli maintained that property was only ‘usurpation and theft’, and produced an elaborate blueprint for its abolition.” (p. 53).
This suggests that Napoleon was aware of the case for “communisme”.
More on Caffarelli’s views in this article in French entitled “Un socialiste inattendu: Le général Caffarelli du Falga.”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40939686
Maximilien Caffarelli died in 1799 at the age of 43 as a result of a wound sustained in the campaign.
(Thanks to the late comrade Jack Bradley who gave me a note in this years ago.)
More on the stab-in-the-back myth as to why Germany lost WW1 which Putin has adopted to explain why Russia didn’t win it either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth
A writer in the Guardian has also picked up Putin’s reference to 1917:
“Putin compared Prigozhin’s actions to the “intrigues” that he said brought down the Russian army, and then the state itself, in 1917. He’s not wrong – this is not unlike the way Russian army units left the front en masse during that military collapse.”
I don’t think that’s the parallel. I would have thought it’s more like the Kornilov attempted coup in September 1917:
In his emergency televised speech today Putin seems to be likening Prigozhin’s action to the overthrow of the pro-war Kerensky provisional government in November 1917 or to the overthrow of the tsar in March that year:
“Therefore, any actions that split our nation are essentially a betrayal of our people, of our comrades-in-arms who are now fighting at the frontline. This is a knife in the back of our country and our people.
A blow like this was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was fighting in World War I. But the victory was stolen from it: intrigues, squabbles and politicking behind the backs of the army and the nation turned into the greatest turmoil, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, and the loss of vast territories, ultimately leading to the tragedy of the civil war.”http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/71496
This was the argument of the Russia Whites (and also of the German nationalists who argued that Germany would have won had its army not been stabbed in the back).
Putin is clearly a raving Russian nationalist. What sort of other person could really believe that Russia would have won the war on the eastern front if there hadn’t have been a revolution against the Tsar in Russia in 1917?
Which makes it the more odd that so many Stalinists (such as our late scotch friend) and Trotskyists should be supporting Russia in the current war.
Stopping the war and slaughter on the eastern front was about the only good thing the Bolsheviks did. (Ok, they also smashed the power of the Russian Orthodox Church — which Putin has restored.)
Because I have a bank account with Nationwide, which is a “mutual” owned in theory by its members, like all other account holders I get their annual report and a chance to vote in it. This has just arrived.
It confirms what the papers said.
“Net interest income” was up from £3,562 million in 2021 to £4,498 million in 2022.
“Administrative expenses” only increased from £2,234 to £2,423 million. Result: profits went up from £1,597 to £2,229 million, an increase of 40 percent.That this will be due to interest paid to depositors increasing much more slowly than interest paid by those with a mortgage is confirmed by the fact that the the amount lent as mortgages increased by only 1.7 percent.
Anyone with an account with Nationwide can see the figures for themselves. They are on pages 21 and 22 of the booklet they will have been sent.
You also get a chance to vote on the salaries of the directors and top managers. The chairman got £525,000, the chief executive £889,000 and another executive £690,000. Nobody’s labour power is worth anything like that. They are creaming off a share of the profits. I always vote against.
Sputnik is reporting this as attempted coup:
Some of the comments are interesting with some taking an anti-Putin and pro-Prigozhin position.
Deposits by savers are not the only source of funds for banks to lend. They can also have recourse to the money market. They call this “wholesale” borrowing as opposed to “retail” borrowing from savers.
This is referred to in today’s Times:
“The extent to which banks profit from the spread between savings and mortgage rates depends on how they fund their loans. Banks that have more savings on their books than mortgages and therefore use the deposits to fund their home loans will profit more from a wider spread . However, banks with more mortgages than savings will use money markets to price their loans.”
A banker is quoted as saying that “margins on money market loans were generally about 0.5 per cent plus another 0.5 percent for risk.”
That would explain why banks and building societies would prefer to finance mortgages from deposits by savers rather than by borrowing from other financial institutions via the money market.
In any event, even if not all mortgages are made from deposits they still have to be funded from some source, not from thin air.
The other point to bear in mind of course is that banks (unlike building societies) make loans for other purposes than buying a house.
