Wez
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Sympo – you seem to be unaware of the struggle between the ruling classes of the USA, Russia and China for global dominance. The propaganda it uses to mobilize the working class to do its killing is only understandable in this context. It is our job to expose the reality that underlies the ideologies of hate.
‘So Pilger is not defending Russia – he’s merely arguing that it made sense to invade Ukraine because Ukraine was doing stuff that was scary to Russia. In the same way, I suppose, that it made sense for the Nazis to mass murder ethnic groups, whose existence they regarded as a threat.’
Sympo – Are you really comparing the non-existent threat of the European Jewish community to the Nazis with the very real threat that NATO poses to the Russian ruling class?
‘I may seem a Moaning Minnie with some of my posts critical of the support being offered to Ukraine’s refugees but it does make me wonder why similar warm welcomes could not have been offered to other nationalities who also have suffered tragically.’
Alan – just for propaganda purposes and also most Ukrainians are very ‘white’.Ozymandias – paradoxical because we will probably always remember the enigma called Shakespeare for writing stuff like that – that signifies something, doesn’t it?
ALB – I took it as an example of ‘reductio ad absurdum’ in terms of the bourgeois economic argument.
ALB -I just put wages and prices in the search field at the top right of this page. It’s the first article link.
In fairness to Eric Boden (who wrote the quote) I suppose he was just inverting bourgeois economic logic.
‘A brain is just a piece of biological tissue’
It’s also far and away the most complex structure we know of. LBird obviously hasn’t heard of the dialectical relationship between quantity and quality.LBird putting the cart before the horse again – where is the evidence of a mind existing without a brain anywhere in nature?
BD – I’ve looked at the index of my Freud collected works and there’s not one reference to the ‘subconscious’. I’ve always found this term to be a litmus for BS when people start talking about Freud. It matters because the subconscious implies that it is more accessible to the ego but the point is that it is not. Having said that I defer to your knowledge of the German language.
‘For example, does Freud give us example of where HE acts unconsciously? How would he know, if he is unconscious of his act? If he knows, or can get to know, his ‘subconscious mind’, why doesn’t, or can’t, everyone?’
Not content with making a nonsense of Marx’s ideas LBird now shows a complete misunderstanding of Freud. Freud believed that there were several ways that we can become aware of the activity of our unconscious mind – two of which were famously through dreams and through free association. Therapy is about decoding the symbols which are manifested in dreams and free association seeks to bypass the censorship of the ‘super-ego’ and ego. He never referred to something called ‘the subconscious’. Freud sought to understand his own and his patients unconscious activity through these techniques which are relevant to us all but unfortunately the NHS only regards mental health as the province of psychiatrists and drug companies.
‘In order to be exchangeable with each other or with commodities, products of non-wage labour each must have some value, and thus there seems to exist No basic distinction between products of non-wage labour and products of wage labour, as I see it. Evidently, the German Angry Workers’ view that ‘wage labor’ happens to be ‘the precondition for value’, which implies that non-wage labour cannot create value, sounds absurd.’
Prakash – If you produce something exclusively for yourself or as a gift to another then it has use value but no exchange value. If you decide to sell it then its value is determined by the average amount of labour time that other similar objects in the market possess.
‘The meaning of words is set by those that are using them to communicate, is an organic process rather than one set by decree.’
Well you try to define socialism the way we do in the mainstream media without feeling the weight of decree from the owners. Words like ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ etc. are all defined by decree and any deviation will cost you your job as a journalist.
‘I think perpetual misinterpretation is an inescapable feature of human language.’
Perhaps but there is also an Orwellian component here since the powerful get to define words and their meaning and it obviously suits them to define socialism by the Bolshevik interpretation.
