alanjjohnstone
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A point to note is that all 5 police officers involved in the beating were african-americans, something to emphasise to BLM that police brutality is State brutality not necessarily racist.
TS has already shown that he has no interest in what Marx says so I will not be surprised if he dismisses what Engels says about enterprises owned by the government.
“…The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with…”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
The financial cost of hosting the refugees is also coming out of the UK foreign aid budget.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2022/10/foreign-aid-robbing-peter-to-pay-paul.html
Membership of NATO will in effect bring Ukraine under its nuclear umbrella so Zelensky and Putin know the nuclear war consequence of the expansion of NATO.
Unfortunately, we do not have unbiased news reporting sources, just as we weren’t in the Syrian civil war, which does make us vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.
TS, once again you fail to comprehend.
It is not about what is said, it is what is done.
Saying you are anti-imperialist, doesn’t make you one if your actions are imperialist in essence.
Although Russia and the former Soviet Union described themselves as anti-imperialist they possessed the same traits as any other colonialist empire.
To quote Marx
“As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.” – 18TH BRUMAIRE
It was economic rivalry that can be seen as the root of the conflict. Ukraine could either forge closer ties with the EU or accept Russia’s proposal that it joins the Eurasian Economic Union. Yanukovych decided not to sign planned Association Agreement with the EU and it was that decision which sparked demonstrations and led to his overthrow.
To integrate with Europe or with Russia?
I have no doubt that both the EU and Russia’s EEU had the intention of turning Ukraine into a vassal state.
TS – ‘Anti-imperialist is actually imperialist.’
An example would be Japan’s the supposed ‘pan-Asianism’ of its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (a development of the earlier New Order in East Asia) against European and American colonialism where Asian countries which would be free from white domination. ‘Asia for Asiatics, was the slogan.
It was all simply an ideological subterfuge for Japan’s own imperialist expansionism.
It would be a parallel with Russia, today, an aim of creating puppet nations serving the interests of Russia
Hitler too would use anti-imperialist propaganda about the abuses by the British and French in their empires.
Maupin is a member of the Workers World Party
The concept of imperialism had been around long before Lenin’s interpretation which is not the definitive analysis.
Here is one of our members Johnny Mercer giving our answer at 10 minutes
“We maintain that the working class, having only their labor power to sell to survive, have no country. War and imperialism for us are a natural and inevitable extension of the war of the marketplace. In other words, nation-states create wars in the pursuit of natural resources, trade routes, labor markets, and spheres of influence. At certain times, it is inevitable that some capitalist nations dominate others, but we don’t accept Lenin’s notion of imperialist and anti-imperialist nations as kind of fixed categories. The problem with Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, as far we can see, is three-fold. Firstly, we hold that it lacks internationalism. Rather than seeing the world as divided fundamentally by wage labor and capital, workers and the bourgeoisie, it seeks to replace this analysis with the notion of imperialist nations and anti-imperialist nations. The anti-imperialist nations engage in a national liberation struggle to free themselves from the domination of the imperialist nations. As far as we’re concerned, national liberation is the right of the domestic bourgeoisie to conduct their affairs without interference from foreign capitalists.
Secondly, we disagree on Marxist grounds with Lenin’s economic analysis, that goes behind the notion of imperialism that Lenin posits. Accordion to Lenin, there were these super-profits, which is the concept that workers in imperialist countries partake in the exploitation of workers in non-imperialist nations by taking some of the surplus value that is created in the third world or in the non-imperialist world and partaking in the exploitation of these countries. The idea is, basically, that it’s a bribe. There is a top section in the working class in the Western world or in the imperialist world that receives extra capital that is exploited from the third-world working class, that they get in exchange for supporting capitalism and imperialism and reforms. Therefore, Lenin thought that national liberation struggle would deprive the western capitalists and their ability to bribe the western working class. So, we disagree.
Firstly, Lenin’s analysis ignores the labor theory of value. As Marx taught us, labor power’s value is determined like all commodities by the amount of labor power that’s invested in it. So higher wages reflect higher training and skill. It almost requires a kind of conspiracy theory to suppose that capitalists give their workers more than their labor power in order to bribe them. It led to the support of the creation of new capitalist nations to benefit the local capitalist class. So instead of the international working-class struggle, it became about the creation of new capitalist nations. Finally, Lenin’s analysis assumes a form of economic determinism, it assumes quite wrongly that workers are less likely to support reformism the poorer they become; the poorer workers become, the more they’re going to become radicalized. Obviously, quite often the opposite is true. In any case we think that the working class will only support socialism if they understand the case for socialism. So, we posit an analysis that is based on revolutionary activity coming out of class consciousness rather than an economic determinist analysis.
I think it’s worth talking about the legacy of anti-imperialism and where it ended up. Everywhere you look, whether it be in Northern Ireland or South Africa, for workers, at best anti-imperialist struggle has led to the creation of new capitalist states to manage their exploitation.
Similar development in France but at least they are taking action to resist the increased pension age.
Armenia, another looming crisis for Russia?
https://countercurrents.org/2023/01/crisis-in-the-caucasus-two-facts-you-arent-being-told/
“…even if Ukraine joined NATO, the Russian-NATO power balance would not change drastically. Realistically, Europe and America aren’t about to launch a major, unprovoked attack on a nuclear/WMD-armed Russia. The Turkey-Caucasus-Caspian-Central Asia belt, however, has long posed an existential challenge for its northern neighbor…”
“…self-professed “anti-imperialists”, claimed Russia was “provoked” and portrayed Ukraine’s resistance as a “Western imperial” plot…Discussions of Russian imperialism have long been overlooked while American, British and French imperialisms have been studied closely and thoroughly…”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/1/24/how-western-scholars-overlooked-russian-imperialism
At war but the corruption continues.
Ukraine’s deputy infrastructure minister, Vasyl Lozinskyi, has been detained and dismissed from his post for allegedly stealing $400,000 (£320,000) intended for purchasing aid, including generators. Lozinskyi colluded with contractors to inflate the price of generators and siphoned off part of the difference, according to Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies. Other national and regional officials are also said to have been involved.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64373950
“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” Japan’s prime minister Kishida said.
28% of people aged over 65
800,000 births last year. In the 1970s, that figure was more than two million.
By 2050, it could lose a fifth of its current population.
In 2020, researchers projected Japan’s population to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century. The population is currently just under 125 million
If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start.
Real wages haven’t grown here in 30 years. Incomes in South Korea and Taiwan have caught up and even overtaken Japan.
I wonder if we could interest him in a further exchange with Paddy via Zoom?
His body language betrayed his scepticism about some of the points Paddy was making.
We won’t convince Brook but we could widen our audience base.
The Conservatives are “testing the water for a different kind of NHS”, Gordon Brown has said.
350,000 patients waited more than 12 hours to be admitted to hospital from A&E last year,
Many Green Party supporters are feeling betrayed.
https://www.dw.com/en/climate-change-german-green-party-supporters-feel-betrayed/a-64470611
Among those disappointed is Luisa Neubauer, leader of the “Fridays for Future” climate movement in Germany. “I don’t know if the Green Party leadership is aware of what it has done.” She fears that many members may turn away.
The “deal negotiated with the energy company RWE threatens to break with the principles of our party,” 2,000 Green Party members wrote in an open letter to Habeck and Neubaur. “We are also breaking with the Paris climate agreement, the government’s coalition agreement and are losing the last bit of trust from the climate justice movement.”
