robbo203
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A curious item from The Independent on Dmitry Medvedev.
“Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has predicted war between Germany and France next year and a civil war in the United States that would lead to Elon Musk becoming president.
In his list of predictions for 2023, published on his personal Telegram and Twitter accounts, he also foresaw Britain rejoining the EU, which would in turn collapse.”
“The Putin capitalist regime’s support for Far-right and even fascist political organisations”
Fake news.
_________________________LOL. Anything that contradicts your fervent support of the far-right capitalist regime of Putin and his capitalist cronies is “fake news” by your reckoning, Mr Putin bootlicker.
The Putin capitalist regime’s support for Far-right and even fascist political organisations
“Rubbish, being cowed plays into the Zio-Nazis hands. The only message they understand is violence. Soon the Palestinians will have drones. Lots of drones. A cheap airforce denied all sych previous neo-colonialist movements. The Israelis won’t sleep soundly in their beds anymore. Good, they shouldn’t.”
_____________________________________This idiot thinks the way forward is for Palestinian workers to equip themselves with drones and take on the most powerful military force in that part of the world in their quest to form a new capitalist state. The stupidity – and inhumanity – of nationalism knows no bounds it seems. Expect the Israeli regime to step up its oppression by several notches. Expect the Israeli right-wing to gain yet more political strength and to drown out any dissenting opinion at the polls. Expect thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Palestinian workers to lose their lives as the Israeli military launches a massive military response in retaliation. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before.
Not that a life of a Palestinian worker counts for much in the minds of our bourgeois nationalists of which TS is a prime example. Real workers don’t matter a toss to him, everything has to be sacrificed on the altar of an abstract ideal called “national liberation”. What is that going to achieve anyway? Palestinian workers should be forging ties with Israeli workers just as Ukrainian workers should be forging ties with Russian workers in opposition to the barbarism and inhumanity of capitalist nationalism and its warmongers.
As the Communist Manifesto pointed out, the workers “have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.”
“Really? So violence is never justified? How are the Palestinians supposed to free themselves then in the face of Zionist white supremacist genocide?”
_______________________________________________More pearls of wisdom from our armchair military strategist too busy urging other workers to go out and lay down their lives for Putin’s capitalist regime than to bother volunteering himself for military duties in Ukraine.
As for Palestinian workers, are you serious? Militarily taking on the might of the Israeli state in a war? That would be the shortest suicide note in history. But then again I guess you don’t really care about the lives of Palestinian workers lost or for that matter the lives of Russian workers lost in the dumb cause of capitalist nationalism that you so eagerly embrace.
“It was not hard to predict, as we did over the months, that sooner or later Russia would resort to U.S.-U.K.-Israeli tactics: Quickly destroy everything that sustains a viable society. So they are now doing, arousing justified horror among decent people — joined by those who implement or justify these tactics with the “right agency”: us. The strategic incentive is clear enough, especially after Russia’s battlefield setbacks: Destroy the economy and the will to resist. All familiar to us.”
Both sides have committed war crimes in this capitalist conflict. We should not forget Ukrainian forces shelling of Donbas prior to the Russian invasion. This is what war does to people; it brutalises them. You dehumanize the other side and invent any old excuse for mass murder – like wanting to “denazify” them or whatever.
Ultimately, you cannot separate the means and the ends. If you employ oppressive methods to achieve your goal you will ensure that the goal that you achieve will be oppressive
“I’m not defending anybody. I’m defending the truth”
___________________________
The truth is that war brutalises anyone and everyone who engages in it. Both the Russian and Ukrainian regimes are committing crimes against humanity while blaming the other side for doing just that. They are as bad as each other. To hell with both of them!
Whatever either side may say about it to justify the killing of workers on the other side, this is just a capitalist war being waged for the usual sordid capitalist reasons – resources, markets, sphere or influence, and so on. The nation-state itself is the capitalist political unit par excellance and the issue of sovereignty – whether or not, for example, the Donbas has the “right” to secede – presupposes a capitalist mindset and is a purely capitalist issue about which socialists have no interest whatsoever in taking sides
The sooner Russian and Ukrainian workers abandon this senseless slaughter being carried out for the benefit of their respective masters, the better.
Some interesting links relating to Putin’s bogus claim about wanting to “denazify” Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are remarkably similar in both being repressive right-wing oligarchies but neither would qualify as “Nazi regimes” in any meaningful sense of the term – although of course there are self-identifying Nazis living in living in both countries as well as elsewhere in the world )
https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-truth-about-ukraines-nazi-militias/
“Putin Doesn’t Combat Nazism, He Cultivates It”
How the Putin regime helped the Far Right in Germany. Putin’s claim to want to denazify Ukraine is about as credible as Hitler’s claim to be a socialist
https://theconversation.com/how-russians-have-helped-fuel-the-rise-of-germanys-far-right-105551
Putin’s fascists
Will TS now be urging us to wage war against Russia in order to “denazify” it?
“there has been no mention from Moscow that their intention is to remove the illegitimate government.”
Shall I say it more slowly so you can understand child? D-e-N-a-z-i-f-c-a-t-i-o-n.
______________________________Sigh. Here we go on. More drivel from our resident bore and Putin bootlicker.
Why is the Ukrainian regime considered to be a “Nazi regime” but not the Russian regime when they are both so remarkably similar in practice and outlook – i.e repressive, right-wing oligarchies that muzzle their opponents, restrict free speech and pretend to be democracies
How does it make sense for one “Nazi” regime to try to de-Nazify another?
“Get involved with people who share similar base belief systems like getting rid of Capitalism and proposing a resource-based economy with communal ownership.”
But, Covvie, these beliefs are quite alien to what the Labour Party stands for – whether in the past (Old Labour) or the present (New Labour).
Those (few) people left in that organisation who still talk in terms of “getting rid of capitalism” as opposed to reforming or modernising it, generally have in mind, by “capitalism”, merely private enterprise. They equate capitalism with private enterprise and the free market and imagine that nationalisation etc is somehow non-capitalist or even “socialist”.
But it’s not. Nationalisation, state interference in the market economy and state welfare have also been closely associated with the (explicitly anti-socialist) Political Right – historically speaking. Look at the example I earlier gave of Bismarck; there are many other such examples. State capitalism is not the province of the Left only and, in any case, it’s got nothing to do with socialism as we are using the term here in its classical Marxian meaning as a synonym of communism – a stateless moneyless wageless and non-market alternative to capitalism. Or what you call a “resource-based economy”.
This is the frustrating thing for us as socialists. I can appreciate the point you make about the need to approach those who see themselves as socialists (but don’t hold our definition of socialism) in a positive and constructive manner. Unavoidably, however, the interactions between us and them will have to eventually boil down what Schumpeter called (in relation to the market econony) an element of “creative destruction”. We cannot pretend that we share the same objective when we don’t. One of us has to give ground if the other viewpoint is to prevail.
What you might be thinking of is that we share much the same values and have the same broadly pro-worker outlook. I can go along with that and this might indeed be a useful basis for a fruitful discussion with such people. But we have to be honest and open about where we differ.
The socialist movement, in the sense of people wanting to establish the kind of society we are talking about here, is indeed small and has made little progress in all the years it has been operating. But is not going to make more progress by accommodating itself to a conception of socialism that is, in fact, a form of capitalism, however humanised or reformed that capitalism may be.
All that is going to achieve is to change us from an organisation advocating for socialism in the explicit sense that we are talking about here, into an organisation advocating something else. We may attract more members but it won’t be for the cause we currently espouse.
There are deluded leftists who defend this brutal disgusting capitalist state. I just cannot fathom it all. This is a regime that ruthlessly exploits its working class so a pampered coterie of privileged parasites can live in luxury and yet has the effrontery to call itself the “Workers Party”
Came across this which might be of interest
The usual line of argument put forward in defence of the regime is that it is some kind of bulwark against American imperialism. This obsession with anti-imperialism fails to grasp that the roots of modern imperialism lie in capitalism. Imperialism as such is not the problem only the symptom of the problem. The problem is capitalism itself. This is what these deluded leftists seek to draw our attention away from in their support for the capitalist state of North Korea in the name of so-called anti-imperialism
“we used to have a real Labour party that took the poor out of the slums by giving them social housing, gave them legal aid, free healthcare, the welfare state, public transport and national industries.”
_____________________________One could argue, Covvie, that these things would have come about anyway, given the contingent conditions of capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – irrespective of which political party came to power. There was a considerable degree of economic consensus between the capitalist political parties with respect to Keynesian economic policies. There was also considerable support among the Tories for things like the welfare state and the NHS.
Samuel Courtauld, a Tory industrialist, enthusiastically endorsed the Beveridge Report during the war on the grounds that nationalised health care would be more efficient than the old ramshackle system of private health care in the prewar years. Similarly Quentin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, argued along the lines that if “we don’t give the workers reforms they will go for revolution” (or words to that effect). The welfare state is not necessarily the province of the capitalist Left; think of Bismarck in late 19th century Germany. The state capitalist policies introduced by his right-wing regime to improve workers’ health (and by extension industrial productivity) drew increasing interest from the British capitalist class at the time who wanted to adopt much the same measures and were concerned that Britain was falling behind Germany in the industrial league table.
Of course, since the contingent conditions of capitalism changed in the post-war era, notably, since the rise of so-called neoliberalism in the 1970s, the policies of political parties – Labour and Tory – seeking to administer capitalism have correspondingly changed. This is why appealing to some distant memory of “Old Labour” when it was in power is quite misleading.
Firstly because the circumstances were quite different and arguably needed the reforms Labour introduced to facilitate the smoother and more efficient exploitation of workers at the time and secondly because these reforms would almost certainly have been introduced as well had their Tory opponents been in power instead – albeit in a slightly different form
