rodshaw
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I personally believe Karl Marx will come back one day and lead us all to socialism. Ah wait, that can’t be right…
To me one significant thing is that Thunberg is saying she doesn’t trust politicians to cut the mustard. She knows it’s useless pleading with them, unlike what she used to say. They are “pretending to take our future seriously”. Still a long way from real socialist consciousness but not to be knocked.
There we go again, the inability to think of a world without money as a practical alternative. One day the penny will drop.
There’s apparently a shortage of about 100,000 lorry drivers and last I read the govt. plan is to let about 5,000 from Europe get temporary visas till the end of the year. Fat lot of help that is, surely. I can see some sort of disruption for months to come, not just at petrol stations but in supermarket supplies and home deliveries. One good thing that may come of it is better rates for the drivers.
And for the rest of us, at least it may mean less lorries trying to carve you up on the motorway. Assuming you have the petrol to get there.
I wonder if we’ll see an intensified campaign for people to switch to electric cars?
Many workers in the UK have been clearly disadvantaged by Brexit. It’s sometimes hard to maintain the WSM position that voting to be in or out of the EU was of no relevance to workers.
I think Rev. Stephens was wrong on both counts – God isn’t going to teach us anything, and a revolution will be manufactured – not by leaders, but (we hope) by the working class.
I’m amazed anyone wants to go abroad at all. The quarantine hotels seem like a nightmare too, little more than prisons, with reports of women getting harassed by the “guards” who are supposed to be looking after them and the companies that administer them trying to pass the buck to the hotels and vice versa.
The Red Arrows want to be the first net-zero air force by 2040:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-58173637
Such ambition – only 19 years away!! That should do it then, the answer to our problems.
Such are the token gestures of the capitalist system.“Has he become the male version of Katie Hopkins, seeking media exposure by making ridiculous statements.”
Clarkson has always made a living out of making ridiculous statements. I read that he’s had Covid himself so you’d think he’d know better. Hyperbole is his stock in trade. You only have to read his nonsense in the Sunday Times every week to see. He’s an arch supporter of capitalism, labels anyone who’s not right wing a socialist, and takes great amusement in winding them up. A bit like his fellow ST writer Rod Liddle. He’s also until recently been a climate change denier but may have slightly changed his tune on this because he’s bought a farm with some of his millions and at least nominally has something to lose by it.
If faced with the calm and collected arguments of the WSM he’d probably just give us a raspberry.
You just can’t win with capitalism. Lockdowns damage the economy (well, for most). Removing them causes hundreds of thousands of people to be pinged into self-isolation, damaging the economy.
Same old same old, isn’t it. Maybe we should invite the Global Alliance for a Green New Deal to a debate, and suggest they become the Global Alliance for World Socialism. They can’t think beyond governments and economics.
Ten or twenty years from now, how much impact is a ‘Green New Deal’ really going to have on all the crap being spewed world-wide into the atmosphere, even if governments get serious about it?
I read somewhere, or was told by a party member, that the biggest polluter of all is the armed forces. So maybe they’ll start dropping green bombs.
Such paucity of ideas and imagination. But what can you expect from the advocates of profits before all.
After the flooding in Germany I wonder what token gestures the government will make there. The writing on the wall gets bigger and bigger.
If he fears the word capitalism is becoming a bad word, presumably Luntz’s objective is to make capitalism sound nicer and therefore appear nicer without wanting people to actually change it. At least he didn’t manage to find a nicer word to foist onto people, which is something.
As for socialism being more popular, of course that word means at least as many different things to different people as capitalism does, generally centred on reformism and state palliatives. When 36% of people equate it with common ownership and the total abolition of capitalism (whatever it’s called by then), we’ll be getting somewhere.
On the slightly related subject of space travel by humans, the view of space scientists like Brian Cox seems to be ‘we’re plundering and ruining the planet, let’s go into space to find another to plunder and ruin’.
At least it’s nice to see some mega-rich types eating humble pie. They must have foreseen some opposition but not this much.
As to the merit-based, pyramid-based model of the professional football world, as espoused pretty much universally by those who opposed the ESL, maybe as socialists we could say that it’s ok if restricted to sport but I’m sure we don’t subscribe to it for society in general.
