h.moss@swansea.ac.uk
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“The war in Ukraine is a trial of strength between the Western capitalist bloc and the Russia capitalist state. Naturally, socialists don’t take sides in such a war and are wary of the propaganda of the rulers of the state they live under.”
How can anyone argue with that? But that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that the Russian regime is especially and horribly repressive. If anyone doubts that, they need only listen to the recent Radio 4 Book of the Week serialisation of Navalny’s memoir. Okay, Navalny wasn’t a paragon, but the way he was crushed underfoot by Putin and the Russian state is something to behold.Probably not a good idea to write Starmer offf or to assume that Farage will get any further than he’s already got.
Yes, the ‘Place Where I Live’ articles really are worth a read. I’d forgotten about them, but the are all, among other things, so well written and so well observed.
Yes, Michael Roberts’ politics truly are all over the place. Among other things, like other so-called ‘Marxists’ (e.g. Richard Wolff), he has a soft spot for China imagining its authoritarian form of state capitalism as somehow less dire than that of the West and therefore not to be wholly condemned. In fact here he’s even saying that China is not capitalist at all.
I’m not going to watch this video of Richard Wolff, because I’ve watched too many of his in the past and know that, despite being an ‘intellectual’, his take on socialism is to be seriously avoided – if, for nothing else, because he’s got a serious hard-on for state capitalist China.
A lot of their stuff seems pretty good with many things we can agree with. But suddenly you get this:
Most of all we celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China – Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been making a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivations or stock options. Following the Chinese great Belt Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other, in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures like roads and trains as well as agricultural products, as well as military defense. The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa has been set up as an alternative the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As socialists we support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist.
1 With the best will in the world, it’s one hell of a stretch to see what’s happening in Germany at the moment (ugly as it is) as some kind of Nazism.
2 When we’re hypothesising about what might happen if there’s minority opposition to socialism when the vast majority want it, we’ve got to see it in terms of a majority will imposing itself in the way that seems best at the time. Nothing to do with a state, which is the expression of a property owning or controlling minority’s interest.
The kind of Fascism existing in Germany and Italy (and Spain) in the 30s and 40s is pretty unlikely to re-occur in advanced capiatlist countries. It’s largely an expression of either remnants of pre-capitalist societies or a backward form of modern capitalism which simply couldn’t be revived – at least not for any length of time. Governments in the West that are often called fascist or neo-fascist nowadays (e.g. Italy, Hungary) are not the politically repessive type that existed in earlier times.
Then as someone has said, socialism will not come out of nowhere. Before it can be established, socialist consciousness will have to have spread over large parts of the globe, and if, when a large majority decide they can establish it, violent opposition from opponents (which would be manifestly undemocratic) will have to be dealt with (by force if necessary – but hopefully not). If the socialist majority decide they have to set up a police force or some other body of coercion (e.g. army) to do this, then so be it. Only when sopcialism is fully established with more or less universal cooperation can we say definitively that coercion will definitely be out of nthe question.
