Young Master Smeet
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Greek Unions oppose referendum:https://www.etuc.org/press/etuc-supports-greek-trade-union-call-cancel-referendum#.VZP1yixmpMGI suppose if this had happened here, this would be like rump Labour dominated unions opposing the actions of a TUSC (*shudder*) government. Still, it's worth considering this is the voice of people who definitely have the immediate practical benefit of Greek workers as a concern.
Some detail from the report:
Quote:The amount of indirect tax (such as Value Added Tax (VAT), and duties on alcohol and fuel) each household pays is determined by their expenditure rather than their income. The richest fifth of households paid just over two and a half times as much indirect tax as the poorest fifth (£9,500 and £3,600 per year, respectively). This reflects greater expenditure on goods and services subject to these taxes by higher income households. However, although richer households pay more in indirect taxes than poorer ones, they pay less as a proportion of their income. This means that indirect taxes increase inequality of income. In 2013/14, the richest fifth of households paid 15% of their disposable income in indirect taxes, while the bottom fifth of households paid the equivalent of 31% of their disposable income.It is the Tories who have constently privileged VAT and indirect taxes.Another small point is that by using quintiles, they are disguising real inequality: given we know the real income of the top 1 and 10 percents dwarves all the rest, really, by looking at quintiles what we are seeing is inequality within the working class, of aboput four to one, the capitalists are off that scale.
This is kind of the key:
Quote:Their incomes have been boosted significantly by a series of government policies aimed at helping the lowest paid, including Mr Osborne's decision to raise the personal allowance to £10,600.Having cut the taxes we pay, of course the ratio of tax to benefit has fallen.Here's the ONS report which, curiously, the Torygraph doesn't link to:http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/household-income/the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income/2013-2014/etb-stats-bulletin-2013-14.html
Quote:Before taxes and benefits the richest fifth of households had an average income of £80,800 in 2013/14, 15 times greater than the poorest fifth who had an average income of £5,500.Overall, taxes and benefits lead to income being shared more equally between households. After all taxes and benefits are taken into account the ratio between the average incomes of the top and the bottom fifth of households (£60,000 and £15,500 per year respectively) is reduced to four-to-one.Also, note, that the trend is downwards, but the Torygraph report it as up since 1997. And, teh killer line for the left:
Quote:The richest fifth of households paid £29,200 in taxes (direct and indirect) compared with £4,900 for the poorest fifth, though both groups paid a broadly similar proportion of their gross income (34.8% and 37.8% respectively).Final one:
Quote:Cash benefits made up 57.2% of the gross income of the poorest fifth of households (£7,400), compared with 3.5% (£2,900) of the income of the richest fifth.I agre, substantially, with this article, though I'd add that voting as a source of information, rather than simply decision making, may well be integrated into everyday life. At work, i have used Condorcet count machines from the internet to help organise the Christmas lunch, for example: it didn't give straight unequivocal answers, but I think brought in a high degree of acceptance of the final outcome for date and venue.Also, intriguingly, I've recently found a new voting system:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_votingWhich has the benefits of being quick and dirty, but a significant improvement on plurality voting. the reality is that voting is useful for finding out if a matter is controversial or not, so we will need to have votes: to decide whether or not we need to have more votes.
You missed the verb: accept, not declare, determine, decide, but accept. Decision and determination are unnecessary, acceptance is sufficient. Through our democratically organsied society we will in practice demonstrate acceptance and utilisation of scientific products: we won't need a vote to say evolution is true or false, but we will have to vote on evolutionary medicine, and whether to permit certain treatments, etc.
I don't know if the Mod is wanting us to close this discussion (I'm really unclear where the warning is directed TBH). So, I'll risk a short reply here:
Quote:someone has to make a decision as to the truth or otherwise of a production process(my bold) this proposition is false, no-one has to make any such determination, all that is necessry is to accept the veracity of a proposition before initiating action. Whether M4234 is green or blue doesn't matter, unless making a movie set there.
As an aside, of course, some small farmers are tennants only, and so may well come round, but anyone with a freehold would be expected to oppose us on general principle.You're right, the key is association, and a worldwide association. We can't have a small farmer misusing land to frustrate a democratically agreed plan. We wouldn't need to send in cosacks to take their estates, the first step would be simply to make enforcement of property right impossible in law, followed by actively destroying the food market through production, using any large estates we (the democratic free association) have taken over. There'll be no need of grain seizures or troops to take over the farms.We are the propertyless working class, and our aim is to abolish the distinction between town and country, we can't do that by siding with property owners, whom the Pope is trying to keep onside with his encycle.
Quote:As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.as a couple of ol' gadgees once wrote.Wilfull ignorance is the chief weapon of the peasant (and rightly so, look what happens when you learn stuff). And you're right, declaring the end of private property would be met with howls in the abstract, mercifully capital is destroying the small farmer and we can take over the great estates of capitalist farming. Maybe, we can convince them as they see their small holdings being sucked into big estates, that they are better off with common ownership.
Quote:And who argues that 'tides are turned by voting'? Talk about straw men! In fact, it just shows me that you haven't got a clue what this discussion is about, but just have a vague idea that the 'mob' are going to destroy science, if that lot are allowed to discuss and vote upon knowledge!Last I checked, wearily, you maintain that truth is subject to consensus of the people, and by voting we can make something true. Now, we can, according to that proposition, make it tue that high tide is at noon not midnight.Consciousness is just a part of stuff, not distinct from, apart from, a pale reflection of, but an integral part of stuff. All thought is comes from stuff doing stuff.
And Stuff is shorter yet: however, I am convinced that stuff existed before consciousness, and the world is not a dream of God, and thought alone does not change the world. No amount of voting can change the timing of the tides: although ideas, like the Swansea tidal barrage can change them when turned into action.
There are many things I can't touch, some fundamental particles are passing through me right now (I forget which species), doesn't mean they aren't parts of matter. Ideas cannot exist without brains, words, humans to concieve and carry them, without signifiers to convey them. I cannot exist in the world without changing it and being changed by it. Ideas are as much to subject to cause and effect as a rock is, and ideas have effects also.Ideas are not a pale shadow of the world, nor a relfection, but part of the ongoing process, a brain cannot exist without thoughts and ideas just as mjuch as an idea cannot exist without brains.I won't use idealism-materialism because I think it's a term that is misleading, unecessarilly fully of letters compared to the much shorter materialism.The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
Just a quick aid, Wikipedia is good on this:
Quote:Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are the result of material interactions.It's as simple as that. The extension is, then, that ideas, perceptions, concepts, etc. are themselves material, and part of material processes. Thorough materialist monism opposes theoretical dualism that affirms some sort of distinction or opposition between matter and ideas, or, indeed, primacy of one over the other (since they are both the same thing).
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/tax-credit-cuts-hit-north-9514175
Quote:It is reportedly being considered that they will be cut back to the 2003 level, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated would reduce entitlements for about 3.7m low-income families with children by an average of £1,400 a year, reducing spending by about £5bn.Labour says that 148,000 North East families – or 56% of the total – benefit from tax credits.ADVERTISING House of Commons figures also show that 70% per cent of those claiming them in the region are in work.[…]Figures reveal that 62% of children in poverty live in homes where at least one adult works in a part-time or insecure job with low pay rates that are boosted by these tax credits.Obviously, part of the idea of tax credits was to target child poverty, and the costs of raising a new generation of workers directly, and avoid giving money to childless workers unnecessarily. This could well cause a rise in general wages, but to the benefit of the childless.
Really not sure about this:
Quote:Here we should also take into account the gendered aspect of the conceptions of work that is being used. What is being focused on is the abolition of work in terms of privileged ‘male’ forms of industrial and ‘productive’ work, whilst the female dominated ‘private’ work of care and social reproduction which is harder to eliminate is largely overlooked insofar as it is even acknowledged as work at all. Thus in taking its technological underpinnings directly from the late capitalist present luxury communism seems in danger of also continuing its basis in gender oppression.Labour saving devices in the home have been a big part of the story of automation, robots and virtual people would be able to take on a great many "care" functions. Automation in hospitals is in full swing. When nanotech clothes clean themselves, monitor our health signs and talk to expert diagnostic systems (and even talk to us) it will save social reproduction labour.
