Young Master Smeet
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Quote:The Irish government will ask the European Court to revise its judgement in the case of a group of men who said they were tortured in Northern Ireland.Those who became known as the hooded men claimed they had been tortured after being interned in 1971.
This news stiory led me to the angriest I can remember in a long while. The BBC news reader on 5Live, interviewing one of the victims started asking questions along the lines of 'Considering the situation at the time, isn't this understanable?'. I couldn't believe my ears, how far does the British state have to go before journalists will stand up and act remotely decently? The man being interviewed decribed how he blieved he would die when being pushed blindfold from a hellicopter (it was only a couple of feet off the floor, but he couldn't know that. In the torture playbook the faked execution is a standard practice).The RTE programme can be viewed here:http://www.rte.ie/news/player/prime-time/2014/0604/
And therein lies the difference. The conquest of political power does need to be organised by the working class, but it emphatically doesn't need leninist organisations running its campaigns and struggles. And socialist understanding isn't going to arise from a campaign against water meters.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30326384Interesting and useful peice here.
Quote:And that debate is given added urgency by the sheer pace of technological change. This week the UK government has announced three driverless car pilot projects, and Ben Medlock of Swiftkey sees an ethical issue with autonomous vehicles. "Traditionally we have a legal system that deals with a situation where cars have human agents," he explains. "When we have driverless cars we have autonomous agents… You can imagine a scenario when a driverless car has to decide whether to protect the life of someone inside the car or someone outside."Those kind of dilemmas are going to emerge in all sorts of areas where smart machines now get to work with little or no human intervention. Stephen Hawking's theory about artificial intelligence making us obsolete may be a distant nightmare, but nagging questions about how much freedom we should give to intelligent gadgets are with us right now.And if you can have that ability to make judgements, you can have the ability to kill as well…
Quote:What is unique about him – and he will be the first of many, I’ll wager – is that he doesn’t need the conventional media to support him. He can take on Murdoch and the Daily Mail because his voice is not limited to their platforms. He can respond to the “hypocrite” accusations within hours online and hundreds and thousands will watch it. He tweets to nearly 9m followers, broadcasts via YouTube and writes best-selling books. He is not going to go away.http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1037/ireland-we-need-a-united-marxist-party/
Quote:The most interesting difference with previous upsurges is the level of organisation. The protests against water metering began early in the year on an estate in Cork city. Residents and supporters blocked access to stopcocks and prevented the installation of meters. Gardaí were called and the situation resulted in a stand-off. Residents refused to back down and after several months Irish Water contractors were forced to give up. At the same time similar protests began on estates in Dublin and spread to Drogheda, Galway, Limerick, Donegal and many other parts. Throughout the country people are organising on their streets and estates to stop the metering. They are blocking access not only to stopcocks, but to entire roads and sometimes towns, to keep out the contractors. Social media is awash with reports of confrontations with the gardaí and contractors, and of the ‘water fairies’ who are busy sabotaging any work that has been done.So, the working class are organising in their own defence, and the Weakly Wanking publishes an article about how a party is needed to lead these movements.
And now, the streets of England:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30316458As well as testing the practicalities, the trials will road test insurance and financial implications. Of course, it will be years before we can download an app that summons a driverless car to take us wherever we want, I suspect in the meantime it will be coupled with human drivers: so black cab drivers already threatened by sat-nav are about to be made obsolete by driver plus computer cars. Mail delievry trucks, even some lorries will become automatic, so lorrie drivers will be deskilled.This is a tremendously disruptive technology.
Well, I think the party position (as such) would be that vegetarianism/veganism is not a question of individual morality, but will have to be a decision of the democratic production within socialism. I'd suspect that there will be some meat, it's a way to use scrub lad that we can't otherwise farm. And I have an ace plan for sealing off the Medditerranean and turning it into a genetically modified whale farm (we could use the fur as well).
Quote:The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides guidelines for estimating livestock emissions on a regional level. Direct emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from livestock worldwide has been recently estimated: they represent about 9% of total GHG emissions caused by human activity.Quote:Consequently, beef releases more emissions than pork and chicken per ton of meat traded. Dietary preferences are a strong driver of livestock emissions, with beef generally related to substantially more GHG emissions per ton of meat traded than pork and chicken, and much more than vegetables. Therefore, substituting pork, chicken or vegetables for beef in the diet could reduce livestock emissions.Admittedly:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_electionThis does show UKIP eating both main parties (though Tories got eaten first). In my travels looking for a particular chart (I'll find it if it kills me) I do find a lot of right-wing paper talking up UKIPs inroads into the traditonal working class. On policy issues, it's worth noting UKIP playing the democracy card, both in its call for a referendum, but also Carswell is into direct democracy as well, this could also be a way of understanding their growth. KLabour has basically to turn its back on democracy (indeed, direct democracy could well be a reaction to the gramscian hegemonic strategy of Blairism)…
SP,Start with your own day. You break your time up to achieve various tasks. So, eating, washing, household chores, etc. Some time you spend "at work". Value, in a sense, is like doing such a breakdown for the entire of humanity. In order to make that work, people need to know that the goods they receive are equal in effort to the goods they give away, otherwise between us someone would be putting unecessary amounts of eeffort into a given task.That's it, it's that simple. If that's not clear, you'll need to tell us how it's not clear, and ask some questions about what's confusing you.
The concept of rock certainly is a product of human labour, but not necessarily social labour, and thus it doesn't need to have value.
Lbird,I dropped rock because we're discussing value, and rocks aren't (generally) the produce of human labour.
LBird,Ah, I see. Considering this thread is about explaining value, I read your question in that light, rather than as a general question about epistemology. What soylent green says about a car, a watch, a brick, is that they are parts of a human, created by human labour, and twhen you enter into any relationship with that object, you are entering into a transferred human relationship with the human beings who brought it before you (even if they are now present). So, I suppose the philsoophical basis of soylent green is historical matrialism… *ta-ra-oops* (Comedy trombone).
I'm now lost. You say I didn't answer a question that I thought I was answering, so I don't see how scrolling back a few posts would do me any good, I'd only find the question I thought I'd answered.AFAICS you asked "what is the underlying philosophical basis of 'soylent green', in your view, that allows us to explain day-to-day, simple experiences of workers, in the first place, as an inital step, and thus provide a basis for an explanation of something much less obvious, that is, the concept of 'value'?" And I answered that because soylent green revealed that a popular consumer product was in fact human flesh, this is a useful way into understanding that the commodities which we 'consume' in capitalism which appear to use as simple objects that stand in relation to our cash, are in fact the products of (and part) of human labour, we eat the lives of our neighbours. Seeing that the world we live in is a created one (created by us as humans in co-operative labour) is an important political step to seeing that the world can be re-made. Also understanding that modern life is created by other people's labour is a step to understanding the poltitical case for socialism: we make the world sotgether, shy shouldn't we share it.Finally, I'd suggest the cannibalism motif gets to a certain revulsion that I think you're aiming for with your social acid trope.
