robbo203
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Interesting BBC article on the declining fortunes of Ukraine’s oligarchs (the same might be said of Russia’s oligarchs) as a result of the capitalist war. Particularly interesting is the relationship between the central state and the oligarchs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64075087
The article contends that “The war has only intensified the loss of earnings for Ukraine’s super-rich. But will their demise strengthen Ukraine’s democracy?” Of course, as with Russia, Ukraine hardly qualifies as a democracy – more an autocracy – but the idea that the oligarchs or super-rich are facing their demise (particularly in a country as corrupt as Ukraine which shares with Russia the dubious honour of being one of the most corrupt countries in the world) is utter nonsense. Some of these superrich have simply gone into exile and will no doubt return once the war is over. Zelensky himself has made quite a fortune. Capitalism inevitably produces an oligarchic or superrich capitalist class
This part is particularly of interest:
“The next blow came in late 2021, when Ukraine passed what was known as the “de-oligarchisation bill”.
President Zelensky’s new law defined an oligarch as someone who met three of the following four conditions:
Holding influence over the media or politics
Owning a monopoly
Making millions of dollars a year.All those who qualified were exposed to extra checks and banned from funding political parties.”
More on the parasite king of North Korea – Kim Yong-Un – and his royal entourage
Russia says 63 dead in this missile attack, Ukraine says “hundreds of Russian soldiers died. We don’t know what the true figure is but what a waste of young lives for such a stupid inhumane deluded cause – fighting for the one or the other capitalist warlord and their respective oligarchic cronies
No one is going to win this war except the arms manufacturers. The workers from whichever arbitrary spatial entity – “Russia” or “Ukraine” – will as per usual be the biggest losers
“Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?”
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That’s what David Hume said wasn’t it? – that “The cause must be prior to the effect.” (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739). It’s called mechanical determinism – or hard determinism. Everything is reducible to the order(s) of reality below it and ultimately, I guess, to the level of subatomic particles. Causation is strictly a one-way flow – from the “lowest” (or earliest) to the “highest” order we know of being conscious existence.
The opposite of the hard determinist perspective in relation to the free will question is the indeterminist perspective held by people like Sartre. This asserts the absolute reality of free will. We are absolutely free to choose what we wish which is obviously bunkum. Our choices are evidently conditioned by what is possible
There is however an intermediate perspective called “soft determinism” which seems to me to be the most plausible one and gets around the problems one encounters with an essentially “physicalist” explanation of reality provided by the hard determinists who completely deny the possibility of free will altogether. This soft determinist position is represented by “emergence theory”. This basically holds that a higher order of reality “supervenes” or depends on a lower order but is NOT reducible to that lower order. Non-reducibility is demonstrated by the fact that the higher order can exert “downward causation” on the lower order. For example, mental states can affect brain states and are not simply “determined” by the latter. There is a two-way interaction.
I’ve never really understood why some comrades appear to adopt what seems to be a hard-determinist position. It’s a position that came to the fore with the emergence of mechanical philosophy in the 17th century and, as it happens, lent support to the social contract theories of people like Thomas Hobbes around that time.
Hobbes was a leading exponent of individualist ideology. He posited the idea that human beings once lived in a “state of nature” when existence was (supposedly) nasty brutish and short. These pre-social beings then decided to come together and set up a human society. Hence the idea of a “social contract”. Of course, the whole argument is completely nonsensical but it does conform exactly to the strict one-way flow of causation upheld by the hard determinist model. Empirical individuals had to have preceded social formations according to the logic of that model.
This is surely contrary to everything that a Marxian theory of the individual upholds. According to this, individuals are socially produced. In saying they are socially produced we are acknowledging the possibility of downward causation – from the level of society to the level of the individual. Language itself is a social product, symbolic interactions between individuals only being possible on the basis of shared meanings. A so-called “social contract” could never have occurred between pre-social individuals who lacked the means of communicating their intentions to each other.
If we accept in principle the possibility of downward causation then this refutes the claims of hard determinism but without, at the same time, lapsing into the idealism of indeterminism. Even in a “hard science” like Physics the mechanistic model of the universe has long been discarded before and since Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was formulated back in 1927. We can add to the list of counter-examples such developments as the “observer effect”, the “butterfly effect”, and “entanglement theory” which paint a picture of physical reality that is altogether more complex and mysterious than a hard-nosed deterministic cum mechanical model of the universe would suggest.
If that is true of the physical sciences how much more true would it be of the social sciences which is, after all, our terrain – the terrain of SOCIALists
“Right, cos killing Nazi stormtroopers is actually the moral equivalent of killing Jewish civilians. Lol”
____________________________________Mr Putin Bootlicker
What proportion of the Ukraine forces would you reckon consider themselves to be facto Nazi stormtroopers. What proportion of the Russian forces consider themselves to be facto Nazi stormtroopers? 3%? 5%? 10%? Have you done a social survey (and can you provide us with the evidence?) or is this just complete guesswork on your part? Whatever the case, it doesn’t excuse your disgusting nazi-like reference to workers being turned into “fertilizer” (along with thousands of civilians including children) even if they have been conned into supporting one or the other capitalist warlord in this sordid capitalist conflict.
You may consider Russia holding on to Crimea, Donbas, and its other imperialist acquisitions to be a “victory”. But it would be a victory for Russian capitalism, not the Russian working class who will pay for this stupid senseless war with their blood
But I come from a family that doesn’t just contemplate art but actually practises it !
https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/robin-buick/517
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Those sculptures, I have to say, Adam, are very impressive. I’ve tried my hand at sculpturing with terracotta clay myself but am a complete novice by comparison with this. Still, I can recognize a very accomplished artist when I see one and your brother is very clearly one of them !
“You’re so impatient. Unlike you, the Russians are in no hurry. Their aim is to demilitarize Ukraine. To grind their troops to fertilizer. The Ukrainians are obliging by sending more and more reserves into the meatgrinder.”
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Big deal. And so what if the repugnant capitalist regime of Putin manages to hang on to its imperialist gains in Crimea and the Donbas in its war against the equally repugnant capitalist regime of Zelensky? The victor will be Russian capitalism. The losers as always in any capitalist war will be the Russian (and Ukrainian) workers. I bet the thought of that must be working you up into a state of quivering orgiastic anticipation: Team Putin and his fellow capitalist cronies enlarging the surface area of Glorious Mother Russia.
Meanwhile to relish in the thought of fellow workers being reduced to “fertilizer” is frankly sick. This is the language of those who wished for the “final solution” in Nazi Germany. Disgusting.
Just as Ukraine has its Nazi supporters in this capitalist conflict so too has Russia. An interesting youtube video
“Bezos is one of a number of the super-rich that has faced criticism in light of their growing wealth — and as stated, COVID-19 didn’t do much to quell the financial growth of these moguls. If anything, most reports suggest that the rich have just gotten richer, and the poor have just gotten poorer.
Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates, himself one of the longtime richest people in the world, has weighed in on whether people should be able to accumulate this type of wealth. “For the first time in my life, people are saying, ‘Okay, should you have billionaires?'” Gates told Forbes. “If you really implemented something like that, the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose.”
The issue of extraordinary wealth remains mired in controversy. However, financial indicators point to the vast accumulation of riches continuing, and research shows that the era of the world’s first trillionaire may only be a few years away. ”
https://theweek.com/finance/1019328/the-rise-of-the-worlds-first-trillionaire
A curious item from The Independent on Dmitry Medvedev.
“Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has predicted war between Germany and France next year and a civil war in the United States that would lead to Elon Musk becoming president.
In his list of predictions for 2023, published on his personal Telegram and Twitter accounts, he also foresaw Britain rejoining the EU, which would in turn collapse.”
“The Putin capitalist regime’s support for Far-right and even fascist political organisations”
Fake news.
_________________________LOL. Anything that contradicts your fervent support of the far-right capitalist regime of Putin and his capitalist cronies is “fake news” by your reckoning, Mr Putin bootlicker.
The Putin capitalist regime’s support for Far-right and even fascist political organisations
“Rubbish, being cowed plays into the Zio-Nazis hands. The only message they understand is violence. Soon the Palestinians will have drones. Lots of drones. A cheap airforce denied all sych previous neo-colonialist movements. The Israelis won’t sleep soundly in their beds anymore. Good, they shouldn’t.”
_____________________________________This idiot thinks the way forward is for Palestinian workers to equip themselves with drones and take on the most powerful military force in that part of the world in their quest to form a new capitalist state. The stupidity – and inhumanity – of nationalism knows no bounds it seems. Expect the Israeli regime to step up its oppression by several notches. Expect the Israeli right-wing to gain yet more political strength and to drown out any dissenting opinion at the polls. Expect thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Palestinian workers to lose their lives as the Israeli military launches a massive military response in retaliation. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before.
Not that a life of a Palestinian worker counts for much in the minds of our bourgeois nationalists of which TS is a prime example. Real workers don’t matter a toss to him, everything has to be sacrificed on the altar of an abstract ideal called “national liberation”. What is that going to achieve anyway? Palestinian workers should be forging ties with Israeli workers just as Ukrainian workers should be forging ties with Russian workers in opposition to the barbarism and inhumanity of capitalist nationalism and its warmongers.
As the Communist Manifesto pointed out, the workers “have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.”
“Really? So violence is never justified? How are the Palestinians supposed to free themselves then in the face of Zionist white supremacist genocide?”
_______________________________________________More pearls of wisdom from our armchair military strategist too busy urging other workers to go out and lay down their lives for Putin’s capitalist regime than to bother volunteering himself for military duties in Ukraine.
As for Palestinian workers, are you serious? Militarily taking on the might of the Israeli state in a war? That would be the shortest suicide note in history. But then again I guess you don’t really care about the lives of Palestinian workers lost or for that matter the lives of Russian workers lost in the dumb cause of capitalist nationalism that you so eagerly embrace.
“It was not hard to predict, as we did over the months, that sooner or later Russia would resort to U.S.-U.K.-Israeli tactics: Quickly destroy everything that sustains a viable society. So they are now doing, arousing justified horror among decent people — joined by those who implement or justify these tactics with the “right agency”: us. The strategic incentive is clear enough, especially after Russia’s battlefield setbacks: Destroy the economy and the will to resist. All familiar to us.”
Both sides have committed war crimes in this capitalist conflict. We should not forget Ukrainian forces shelling of Donbas prior to the Russian invasion. This is what war does to people; it brutalises them. You dehumanize the other side and invent any old excuse for mass murder – like wanting to “denazify” them or whatever.
Ultimately, you cannot separate the means and the ends. If you employ oppressive methods to achieve your goal you will ensure that the goal that you achieve will be oppressive
