alanjjohnstone
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Gesture politics to appease Ukraine’s Western donors or genuine anti-corruption purge?
And if Putin who has mishandled and mismanaged the invasion is then replaced by the ambitious Prigozhin, ALB?
TS – “how else is healthcare, education, pensions, infrastructure, etc subsidised and paid for?”
Any Marxist will tell you – from the surplus labour of the worker as per the Labour Theory of Value.
So you seek the same wealth distribution as in Vietnam as positive.
Vietnam had 458 people with a net worth of above $30 million in 2019. The number of ultra-high net worth (UHNWI) individuals in Vietnam is projected to hit 753 by 2024. Vietnam had five billionaires by the end of 2019, with the figure expected to rise to six in 2024.
How do those rich people acquire their wealth?
Again any Marxist will tell you. From the theft of labour of the workers according to the Labour Theory of Value.
TS – “the Somalis what it’s like having no state.”
The Somalis actually have more than one state.
Or do you refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the breakaway republics Somaliland and Puntland?
I note no mention of the Kurds in Syria and their movement to create an independent state from Syria.
Just as you rightly criticise the Ukrainian government of discriminating against Russian-speakers, Syria forbids the use of the Kurdish language.
TS – “Socialists can and do have states. Where you got the idea that states must be capitalist”
If by your earlier definition socialism means “An economy organised around providing for peoples’ needs rather than maximising profits for the capitalist class.”
Would you care to name these non-capitalist states?
You offered an example: “Yes, Gazprom makes a profit but the shareholders are the Russian people, not a select group of capitalist investors.”
But individuals who own Gazprom stock do receive dividends from profits made, not the Russian people. Last September Gazprom shareholders had a dividend payout totalling 1.208 trillion roubles ($21 billion) – 50 roubles per share. Half the shareholdings are not owned by the Russian government but by individuals and foreign corporations .
I also take it you understand the nature of buying government bonds. The income derived by the government from Gazprom partly goes to repaying the Russian bond buyers and the interest due to them.
The ordinary Russian citizen does not benefit directly from the state ownership of Gazprom as you presume.
TS ‘The very existence of the entity known as Russia is at stake.’
(Changed from earlier wording ‘The existence of the Russian state is at stake.’)
And why should any worker care?
“The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.” The Communist Manifesto
It is Russia and Ukraine and all other nation-states around the world that we should seek to eliminate.
Our case is that it should not simply be the Russian worker to wish defeat upon its government but that workers everywhere should aspire for the same.
“The existence of the state and the existence of slavery are inseparable” – Marx
Do you oppose another Russian Revolution that deposes the Russian oligarchy from power and ownership?
A defeat for Russia could possibly facilitate and lead to such a social revolution.
A defeat for Ukraine merely brings occupation and the imposition of a puppet regime.
TS endorses Lenin’s concept of imperialism.
Does TS also accept Lenin’s idea of revolutionary defeatism in that working people cannot win in a capitalist war and should advocate a class war instead to bring about one’s “own” nation’s defeat?
“…Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. A revolution in wartime means civil war: the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one, hand, facilitated by military reverses (‘defeats’) of governments: on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat…”
More on the French resistance to pension age increase
France and the Dilemma of Electoral Politics in the 21st Century
“giving voters something to vote against can, at best, temporarily retard the advance of the false friends of the people. Decades of fealty to the “lesser evil” myth has only spawned an ever more skeptical, cynical, frustrated electorate, desperate for an alternative. Absent a left that stands for something, voters will continue to consider faux-populism as a legitimate alternative.”
BuzzFeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment Is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/our-way-forward
“the driving force of capitalism’s dynamism is not technology, but competition between capitalist firms, which drives them toward “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,” as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observed. Automation, the use of technology to increase the productivity of labor, is also driven by competition. If your company can use ChatGPT to produce three high-impact articles using the same amount of labor time it takes my company to produce one by hand, your company will have a decided competitive advantage.”
BuzzFeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment Is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/our-way-forward
“the driving force of capitalism’s dynamism is not technology, but competition between capitalist firms, which drives them toward “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,” as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observed. Automation, the use of technology to increase the productivity of labor, is also driven by competition. If your company can use ChatGPT to produce three high-impact articles using the same amount of labor time it takes my company to produce one by hand, your company will have a decided competitive advantage.”
BuzzFeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment Is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/our-way-forward
“the driving force of capitalism’s dynamism is not technology, but competition between capitalist firms, which drives them toward “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,” as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observed. Automation, the use of technology to increase the productivity of labor, is also driven by competition. If your company can use ChatGPT to produce three high-impact articles using the same amount of labor time it takes my company to produce one by hand, your company will have a decided competitive advantage.”
More on the Tunisian Ghost Election
https://www.dw.com/en/after-tunisias-ghost-election-what-comes-next/a-64570028
“He promised serious reforms but we haven’t seen anything,” she said. “People have had it with these promises and that’s why they boycotted the last two elections. They don’t believe this regime is going to find an answer to their problems, especially their economic problems.”
There is much discussion in the media over the supply of sophisticated fighter planes to Ukraine and one of the reasons offered for not supplying those is that elaborate training is required.
While this may be one of the reasons, I think the real problem is that NATO has tried to make this war a war of defence and limited to within Ukraine’s official pre-2014 frontier, ignoring the annexations of Crimea and the Donbas
Long-range missile systems were provided only on the condition that they were not used on Russian rear lines
in its territory. There has been the occasional attack on Russian airfields but by drones and kept purposefully ambiguously vague.With aircraft travelling at high-speed interception, aerial dogfights would be bound to cross into Russian legal air-space. It provides Russia with further excuses that NATO was provoking not just a proxy war on Ukraine soil but a direct attack upon Mother Russia itself, an unnecessary escalation, risking total war.
The report found that “carbon inequalities within countries now appear to be greater than carbon inequalities between countries. The consumption and investment patterns of a relatively small group of the population directly or indirectly contribute disproportionately to greenhouse gases. While cross-country emission inequalities remain sizeable, overall inequality in global emissions is now mostly explained by within-country inequalities by some indicators.”
The report also found that although overseas climate aid – a key focus of the recent Cop27 climate negotiations – would be needed to help developing countries reduce their emissions, it would not be enough and developing countries also needed to reform their domestic tax systems to redistribute more from the wealthy.
The finding is further evidence of the growing divide between the “polluting elite” of rich people around the world, and the relatively low responsibility for emissions among the rest of the population. It confirms a growing body of work suggests that a “polluting elite” of those on the highest incomes globally are vastly outweighing the emissions of the poor.
It shows that people on low incomes within developed countries are contributing less to the climate crisis, while rich people in developing countries have much bigger carbon footprints than was previously acknowledged.
On January 19, some 1.1 million voiced their opposition to the proposed shake-up.
Around one million people are expected to take to the streets nationwide against plans to boost the age of retirement from 62 to 64.
Sixty-one percent of French people support the protest movement, a rise of three percentage points from January 12.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has said raising the age of retirement was “non-negotiable”.
Yet, the head of the independent Pensions Advisory Council as saying: “Pension spending is not out of control, it’s relatively contained.”
After reaching a preliminary agreement with the IMF to secure a $1.9bn loan and finance the 2023 budget last year, Saied’s government is now gearing up to implement ravaging new austerity measures the financial institution presented as a prerequisite to sealing the deal. These policies will likely include the complete elimination of food and fuel subsidies, the slashing of public health, education, and social protection spending, and the privatisation of key public companies.
History suggests Saied’s decision to adopt austerity policies dictated by the IMF will sooner or later sound the death knell for his authoritarian and undemocratic regime.
Tunisians will once again rise to try and save their democracy and ensure that they remain able to put food on their tables. Another Tunisian uprising is in the making.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/1/30/tunisias-democratic-backsliding-its-the-economy-stupid
