robbo203
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“The reality is that we do not support the killing of our fellow workers and we do not instigate the murders of any member of the working class.”
Exactly. I don’t see what the issue is Paula. Anyone who supports that and the cause of nationalism should be vigorously opposed. You´ve opposed this stupid barbaric war in no less vigorous terms and good on you
I didn’t realise Lizzie45 was a pro-Ukrainian nationalist, I thought she was a buddy of that pro-Russian nationalist troll True Scotsman who used to frequent this forum. At any rate, she has now shown her true colours
“Slava Ukraini!” eh Lizzie45? No wonder she has been so belittling towards socialists of late…
Of course you can’t, with your overly simplistic world view.
Yet every time a kindergarten, school or hospital is bombed; every time atrocious war crimes, rapes and hideous acts of torture are uncovered; every time a family weeps over the grave of a loved one, the obligation to resist such barbarism is reinforced.————————————–
So I take it then that you consider it perfectly justifiable even obligatory to continue this barbaric ridiculous war in order to avenge the “war crimes, rapes and hideous acts of torture”. Who do you have in mind to be the target of this revenge? Or, talking about simplistic worldviews, do you imagine one side is squeaky clean and the other side full of nasty war criminals?
War brutalizes everyone and here you are, warmongering and calling for revenge. It’s a bit pathetic don’t you think? What’s that gonna achieve? I tell you what it’s gonna achieve – yet more “war crimes, rapes and hideous acts of torture” and innocent civilians on both sides being killed in their sleep by missiles. And so it will go on and on – tit for tat, tat for tit until there is nothing left to fight over and nobody left to fight.
My comment was with reference the so-called Ukrainian counter-offensive which. four months in. has made very little impression on the front line but has already cost the regime thousands of lives It is fairly obvious that Ukraine stands no chance of achieving its goal of retaking Donbas and Crimea and may very well lose more territory if and when the expected Russian offensive starts up (again). That was the context in which I said: “I cannot understand the mentality of those who want to drag it out any longer just so they can stick some tacky piece of cloth on a flagpole somewhere”. It is stupid even from a capitalist standpoint let alone from a socialist standpoint. And it means throwing thousands of more lives into the meat grinder to achieve little or nothing.
And here you are suggesting such action is not only justified but obligatory FFS. I will assume you have suddenly taken leave of your senses and have not thought it through
It looks like there is some kind of concerted movement backed up by the nationalistic-minded Ukraine Solidarity campaign and misguided individuals like Paul Mason to get the British Trade Union movement to support increased military aid for Ukraine.
https://labourlist.org/2023/09/why-unions-must-not-vote-to-support-open-ended-war-against-russia/
Mason himself has unironically compared Ukraine to the Republican side in the Spanish civil side. While I have never considered Ukraine to be a fascist state there are unquestionably fascistic elements in the regime and its military (as there are on the Russian side as well)
This stupid war seems destined to drag on for a long time with thousands more lives being lost utterly pointlessly in the meat grinder. I cannot understand the mentality of those who want to drag it out any longer just so they can stick some tacky piece of cloth on a flagpole somewhere. It’s sick.
Let’s hope, for your party’s sake, that Danny picks up more votes than the 11 Shannon Phileas Fogg Kennedy, or whatever his/her name was, received in a recent local election, and who, according to the grapevine, threw in the party towel shortly afterwards in desperation.
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You love taking the piss, don’t you? Never anything helpful or constructive to say. Talk about a wet towel. Got anything else that you can do that would brighten up what is otherwise presumably a miserable existence? Why are you so obsessed if you are so convinced we are going nowhere, eh? I can’t fathom it. Weird (to say the least)
So you’re saying that people don’t like change but a minority was able to enact change against the wishes of that majority?
What on earth are you going on about? Reference was being made to the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism where the overwhelming majority, the peasantry, had no say in the matter
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Given that there WAS a transition from feudalism to capitalism even if the overwhelming majority, according to you, had no say in the matter (really?), what could have prompted the minority in this case to push for a change in this direction?
According to your dogmatic arch-conservative interpretation of history, “People generally hate change, particularly change which is untried and untested”. Well at some point in time capitalism was most definitely “untried and untested” so what, according to you prompted the minority then to try it????
It’s the same with your assertion (with its Thatcher-like overtones of “there being no alternative”) that since people generally hate change, particularly change which is untried and untested…” capitalism remains the only game in town.”
What makes you so cocksure that this is the case and what makes your position any different from, say, the feudal nobility who could not conceive of a world in which capitalism prevailed and they were reduced a mere sideshow or beheaded?
ps On the subject of people generally “hating change” wasn’t one of the core ideals of the Enlightenment period that of continual progress and improvement? Have people abandoned these ideals today in your opinion?
Fairly obvious I would have thought. Capitalism didn’t require a politically conscious and overwhelming majority to bring it about. Only a relatively small and sufficiently motivated minority prepared to take risks.
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A totally irrelevant argument by the looks of it. According to your arch-conservative dogmatic view of the world, “people generally hate change”. If that were true homo sapiens would still be roaming the African savannah.
You try to get around this obvious nonsense by first asserting that it is “particularly” (or maybe you mean, “only”) change that is “untried and untested” that you have in mind and that can never happen. This begs the obvious question. The kind of change you have in mind that presumably IS possible to make, having been “tried and tested”, must have at one point been untried and untested before it was tried and tested. But how is it ever going to be tried and tested if, according to you, “people generally hate change” and are inherently reluctant to experiment? Explain
Secondly, you assert that “Capitalism didn’t require a politically conscious and overwhelming majority to bring it about”. That is true enough but quite beside the point. We are talking about the motivation to bring about a different society, NOT the method…
What you really want to say, I guess, is that the majority will never want to establish an alternative to capitalism or are incapable of ever wanting to do that. Again this is a mere dogmatic assertion for which you supply no evidence whatsoever. You no more possess a crystal ball than we do.
Apart from that this implies a very naive way of looking at how ideas catch on and spread. Socialist ideas are not propagated in a vacuum but in a social environment that is at the moment very much hostile to them. We cannot say whether such ideas will ever catch on and spread, or how that might happen, but if it does happen it is very likely that the spread of these ideas will take an exponential form as the social climate adapts to accommodate them.
The socialist movement is at the moment tiny and inconsequential but that doesn’t mean it has to be forever and forever and that there is some law in human nature (which evidently bypassed us few human beings who happen to be socialists!) that human beings must always spurn socialism. That´s just ultra-conservative ideological hogwash.
In many ways, if David Graeber’s argument is to be believed people are already halfway there in the way they behave – in their “everyday communism”
Hmm, more than likely they voted to retain the status quo.
People generally hate change, particularly change which is untried and untested.Which is why capitalism remains the only game in town.
…………………….If people hate change how come capitalism exists? Wouldn’t it have been better to have stuck with feudalism? Your qualifying (or cop-out) argument might be that “capitalism! was tried and tested on a small scale before being generally accepted (how? by a show of hands? LOL) could equally apply to a communist or socialist society. See David Graeber´s concept of “everyday communism”
Not a video but a book that I’ve just come across doing an internet search. Have we heard of this guy before?
The more you search the more you come across people on our sort of wavelength -whether in book form, article form, or video form even if the terminology might be sometimes quite different…
It’s a big world out there and there are more and more reasons to be cheerful. We are not as alone as we might think
There is also the “Moneyless Society” FB site which seems quite active. I posted something there a few days ago which got 248 likes and 168 shares – easily my most “successful” FB post. The group currently has 24.1K members
The establishment of your dream world requires the understanding and implementation by a majority. That’s what makes it fundamentally different to all the other societal changes that have ever taken place.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
==============================Lizzie45
This is about as convincing as those who say “socialism is inevitable”. And no less dogmatic.
The truth is we don’t know. It might not but then again it might. But even if socialism is never going to happen, that would not invalidate being a socialist and putting forward the case for socialism, one bit. To the extent that any of us as individuals make a difference to the world that we live in today, I cannot think of anything that would make a better difference than this
A quite comprehensive and readable analysis of the current situation in Ukraine, for those who are interested in the military angle. At any rate, there seems now to be no prospect of the so-called counter-offensive gaining traction. Which begs the question – why continue? Why throw more workers (Ukrainian and Russian) into the meat grinder that is this utterly senseless and destructive capitalist conflict?
The sooner both parties sue for peace the better. Who gives a fig about the colour of the piece of tatty cloth you attach to the flagpole on your local town hall? Only a sociopath would want this madness to continue …
And just in case you think that by “no way” there’s still a remote chance, there isn’t — none, zilch, nada, rien, nichts, niente, not going to happen.
What if you have £300,000,000 to spend instead of £300,000?
Still nothing!
…………………………….That’s just a ridiculous thing to say. In any case, why do you care? You never have anything positive to say about the SPGB anyway.
A quick look on the net and I came up with this option, which would leave us £300,000 to the good, if the valuation for Clpaham High Street is correct, and not taking into account the fact that we might be able to get it a bit cheaper:
https://www.loopnet.co.uk/Listing/399-401-High-St-London/27999763/
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That does look quite an attractive option actually. I have never really liked the narrow frontage of HO
