alanjjohnstone
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Starmer has said he would continue with Tory plans for stiff sentences for climate protesters who block roads
For those with very selective memories, regards the “dirty bomb”, I refer them to page 170 and message 233914 to see that the scare-mongering by Russia of the use of a dirty bomb by Ukraine has a very long pedigree.
The claim was reported as early as March 6
Keeping on saying the same thing does not make it true. However, tell a lie often enough and someone gullible will fall for it.
Is it at all credible that the Ukrainians would contaminate their territory and crops and people with radioactive fall-out, trashing their economy for decades to come?
It is taking the scorched earth strategy to an extreme
There are far easier false flag black ops that could be used to provoke the direct intervention of NATO and alienate Russia from sympathy than such an extreme self-inflicted wound with such deep ramifications.
Is the Chinese dream finished?
“Until recently, everybody thought each generation was going to be better off than the last,” said Alex Payette, a sinologist and director of Montreal-based geopolitical consultancy the Cercius Group. “But now we’re seeing the Chinese Dream hit a ceiling.”
We shouldn’t be surprised
“prawn cocktail offensive 2.0”
Labour is accelerating meetings with leaders of Britain’s biggest companies, as it steps up its efforts to woo the City
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/23/labour-woo-business-prawn-cocktail-offensive
A useful essay on the situation, mostly commentary from exile Iranians.
Solidarity With Iranians Starts With Bringing an End to US Sanctions
However, despite all the crocodile tears shed for the repression of the protests, the West continues to impose the most stringent sanctions and exacerbates the suffering of Iranian people.
“U.S. sanctions on Iran have impoverished ordinary people and strengthened the most repressive aspects of the regime,” notes Shams. “And the regime has responded to the economic pressure by implementing neoliberal reforms that further impoverish the people — and responding with bullets when they protest. As a result, the situation has become more militarized in Iran than ever before — and the constant U.S. threat of war provides the regime with a rationale to keep it that way.”
Shahshahani also calls attention to the political impact of U.S. sanctions for Iranian society. “Sanctions have negatively impacted civil society and women,” she says. “Iranian women leaders have come out strongly against the current ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions as they isolate civil society groups from international funding, impact socioeconomically vulnerable populations, and limit their political space for participation.”
Johnson declines to stand
(what ministerial offer has he been given…foreign secretary again?)So Rishi Sunak it looks like it will be for new PM
How the CCP see itself.
“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.” – MARX – 18TH BRUMAIRE
The Trump Religious Cult
Opening prayer today at Eric Trump and Michael Flynn’s QAnon event: “God, open the eyes of Pres Trump’s understanding, that he will know how to implement divine intervention. And you will not surround him with RINO trash, in the name of Jesus.” pic.twitter.com/56vsiVxzs0
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 22, 2022
Japan and Australia to strengthen their military alliance.
MS reference took us back to a very long exchange and surprising (or not so surprising) there was a link in it to this discussion.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/refugee-literature/ch05.htm
It is clear that communal ownership in Russia is long past its period of florescence and, to all appearances, is moving towards its disintegration. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of raising this form of society to a higher one, if it should last until the circumstances are ripe for that, and if it shows itself capable of developing in such manner that the peasants no longer cultivate the land separately, but collectively;…of raising it to this higher form without it being necessary for the Russian peasants to go through the intermediate stage of bourgeois small holdings. This, however, can only happen if, before the complete break-up of communal ownership, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe, creating for the Russian peasant the preconditions requisite for such a transition, particularly the material things he needs, if only to carry through the revolution, necessarily connected therewith, of his whole agricultural system.
Hopefully we aren’t making the mistake of trying to fit square pegs in round holes since M/E made it quite clear that they mostly restricted themselves to an analysis of western Europe and only touched on different form of social organisation such as oriental despotism.
Engels too commented later in life about communal ownership
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm“common ownership of land is a form of ownership which was, in fact, common to all peoples at a certain stage of development. It prevailed among the Germans, Celts, Indians — in short, all the Indo-European peoples in primeval times; it still exists in India, was only recently suppressed by force in Ireland and Scotland, and, though it is dying out, still occurs here and there in Germany today… Chernyshevsky, too, sees in the Russian peasant commune a means of progressing from the existing form of society to a new stage of development, higher than both the Russian commune on the one hand, and West European capitalist society with its class antagonisms on the other. And he sees a mark of superiority in the fact that Russia possesses this means, whereas the West does not…Now, if in the West the resolution of the contradictions by a reorganisation of society is conditional on the conversion of all the means of production, hence of the land too, into the common property of society, how does the already, or rather still, existing common property in Russia relate to this common property in the West, which still has to be created? Can it not serve as a point of departure for a national campaign which, skipping the entire capitalist period, will convert Russian peasant communism straight into modern socialist common ownership of the means of production by enriching it with all the technical achievements of the capitalist era? Or, to use the words with which Marx sums up the views of Chernyshevsky in a letter to be quoted below: “Should Russia first destroy the rural commune, as demanded by the liberals, in order to go over to the capitalist system, or can it on the contrary acquire all the fruits of this system, without suffering its torments, by developing its own historical conditions?” The very way in which the question is posed indicates the direction in which the answer should be sought. The Russian commune has existed for hundreds of years without ever providing the impetus for the development of a higher form of common ownership out of itself; no more so than in the case of the German Mark system, the Celtic clans, the Indian and other communes with primitive, communistic institutions. In the course of time, under the influence of commodity production surrounding them, or arising in their own midst and gradually pervading them, and of the exchange between individual families and individual persons, they all lost more and more of their communistic character and dissolved into communities of mutually independent landowners. So if the question of whether the Russian commune will enjoy a different and better fate may be raised at all, then this is not through any fault of its own, but solely due to the fact that it has survived in a European country in a relatively vigorous form into an age when not only commodity production as such, but even its highest and ultimate form, capitalist production, has come into conflict in Western Europe with the productive forces it has created itself; when it is proving incapable of continuing to direct these forces; and when it is foundering on these innate contradictions and the class conflicts that go along with them. It is quite evident from this alone that the initiative for any possible transformation of the Russian commune along these lines cannot come from the commune itself, but only from the industrial proletarians of the West. The victory of the West European proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and, linked to this, the replacement of capitalist production by socially managed production — that is the necessary precondition for raising the Russian commune to the same level. The fact is: at no time or place has the agrarian communism that arose out of gentile society developed anything of its own accord but its own disintegration…”
From a reading of those two articles i think M/E recognised that the Mir was not the feudalism of Christopher Hill’s English village but a precurser – the earlier Highland clan type – but that because of new traditions of land distribution were losing its primitive communism character and becoming a peasant family ownership and was now facing encroachment from capitalism. As always M/E are describing things that they knew were already in flux, transforming into another entity…
