Moo
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A great SS article, titled: ‘Israel – Another Capitalist State’ by Steve Coleman: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1984/no-955-march-1984/israel-another-capitalist-state/
We talk about Palestine, however, Palestine doesn’t really exist; the West Bank is a settler-colony, while the Gaza Strip is the Palestinian equivalent of a Native American Indian reservation.
From the March ’84 Socialist Standard article: Transition Period to Socialism?:-
‘The further development of capitalism did eventually create the material basis for world socialist society, as Engels recognised in 1891 when, in contrast to what he said in 1847 about the impossibility of establishing socialism then “at one stroke”, he now spoke in terms of socialism being possible “perhaps after a short transition period”. In the same introduction to the republication of Marx’s 1847 talk on Wage Labour and Capital Engels referred to the technological developments of his day and wrote of the productivity of human labour increasing “day by day to an extent previously unheard of”.
‘Engels was writing in the middle of a period which had been called the second industrial revolution which saw the invention and application to industry and production of the electric motor and the internal combustion engine. These and other technological advances showed that it had become possible to produce enough to eliminate want throughout the world and to satisfy people’s needs, as Engels put it, “in ever-increasing fullness”. At the same time the imperialist expansion of the European powers into the other continents meant that capitalism had come to embrace the whole world in its system. Then in 1914 came the aptly-named first world war which marked the clear emergence of capitalism as the unchallenged and predominating world system.
‘From this time on world socialism could have been established at any time, without society passing first through a period of state capitalist development of the means of production. The means of production had become sufficiently developed for society to pass directly from capitalism to socialism, once the political conditions for the establishment of socialism were fulfilled.’
This is similar to what you’re writing about Bijou Drains: it’s from the booklet – ‘Questions of the Day’ (’78 edition), under the title – ‘Socialism and the less developed countries’:
“In view of the fact that the bulk of the world’s wealth is produced in the capitalist parts, we can say that capitalism is the predominant social system in the world today.
“The Socialist Party of Great Britain rejects the suggestion that the workers must wait for capitalist production to predominate everywhere [which it has done by now] before trying to establish Socialism. A socialist society has been possible for many years now, for as many in fact as its industrial basis has existed. As soon as the workers of the world want to, they can establish the common ownership of the means of production and distribution and bring planned production to meet human needs.
(…)
“To sum up, we can say that the less developed countries might present Socialism with a few problems, but they do not constitute a barrier to the immediate establishment of Socialism as a world system. Nationalism and colonial independence are not matters that ought to concern workers. Everywhere, in the less advanced as well as the more advanced countries, the workers should be striving for Socialism.”
– DJP
No particular citations, other than in the Communist Manifesto, when Marx & Engels acknowledged that socialism couldn’t exist in just the more industrialised countries of that time (1848). Capitalism had to spread over the globe to make socialism possible.
All I know about the minimum wage is that rich ‘journalists’ lose their minds, and say it will destroy the economy, every time it’s slightly raised.
Jesus, He Knows Me – Genesis
I was going to put this in ‘Underplayed Classics’, but it fits in well here.
Best lyric: ‘God will take good care of you. Well, just do as I say, don’t do as I do.’
Refusing to send weapons to Israel would be a much better way of ending this conflict than calling (i.e. asking) for a ceasefire.
In 1944, the Stalin regime forcibly re-located the Crimean Tatars from Crimea to Kazakhstan. In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament recognised this as genocide.
I’m not saying what’s happening in the Gaza Strip now is genocide, but it makes you think.
‘Labour’s betrayals’
In other words, the Labour Party discovering that wage-slavery cannot be run in the interests of the wage-slaves.
Isn’t a better word for ‘reformists’, ‘broken system fixers’ because they think the market is broken & needs to be fixed by the government?
As we, of course, know, the market isn’t broken – it’s functioning as intended; it controls what governments can & cannot do – not he other way around.
