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With some relevance to Trump / ‘insurrection’ etc hysteria generated by liberals and leftists, a couple recent articles by Glenn Greenwald:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-histrionics-and-melodrama-around
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/senate-democrats-use-the-jim-crow
Does this mean that celtomaniacs residing outside of Britain and Northern Ireland will at long last have internet access to the gaelophone BBC Alba?
Similarly, in the January 2004 Socialist Standard (in a review of the pamphlet by the group ‘Antagonism’ which attempted a Pannekoek/Bordiga synthesis), with asterisks marking my emphasis:
‘The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia put the clock back in the sense that **before the First World War the radical wing of the international Social Democratic movement was making progress towards positions similar to those of the Socialist Party in Britain** but, after 1917, most of those involved were side-tracked into supporting the Bolsheviks. For many this was only a temporary dalliance, but […].
Who? Luxemburg/Panekoek/? ? In what way similar? They opposed craven opportunism it’s true, but apart from that did their radicalism not consist of supporting extra-parliamentary poltical activity (mass strikes and the like), an abomination unto the SPGB?
In Fitzgerald’s ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain and The Socialist Labour Party’ appears:
‘The International Congress was held at Amsterdam in 1904. While these congresses have never been purely Socialist congresses (as they allow organisations, that can by no stretch of language be called Socialist, to be represented thereat), yet this remains the only regular international gathering whereat the majority of Socialist parties are represented. This of course is well known to the various national parties, and a steadily growing section are endeavouring to ensure that future congresses shall be Socialist and nothing else.’
I have seen similar intimations before, but what can this ‘a steadily growing section’ possibly refer to? The SPGB had no minimal program. What party of the Second International also had no minimal program, or what faction of what party advocated having no minimal program? Otherwise, what might ‘Socialist and nothing else’ mean?
( If I am not mistaken, the US SLP by this time had no minimal program, but De Leon held that other countries with member parties in the International contained the remnants of feudalism, and so he had no objection to these parties outside of the US advocating reforms. (Including of course the UK SLP)).
Further concerning his Lordship …
Lord Deben says:
“ [Farm animals] are essential for the mixed farming system, which is the way to return the vitality of the soil. […]If everybody were a vegan, then we wouldn’t have the healthy soil that we need.”
1) My first reaction to that was to think how utterly capitalist the premise behind it was. To his mind, of course it is impossible that these animals could be raised for the ‘mere’ sake of healthy soil. After all, under the present regime (the only one imaginable for him), the reason they are raised is because their end-products (meat/milk/eggs) can be sold for monetary profit.
2) Apart from that, is it indeed the case these animals are necessary for healthy soil? I have not the slighest idea, but see:
https://www.biocyclic-vegan.org, whose introduction contains this sentence: ‘special emphasis is placed on the promotion of biodiversity, healthy soil life, the closure of organic cycles and on systematic humus build-up.’
and/or https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/what-is-veganic-farming , whose introduction contains this sentence:
‘Veganic farming, a mostly unknown yet vital new way of stewarding the Earth’s lands, can help preserve the environment, regenerate soil fertility, and replenish the biodiversity around it, which helps tackle greenhouse gas emissions and financially empower farmers across the globe. But what exactly is vegan farming?’
The Times article ‘Scientist warns […]’ is behind a paywall. But such article are seen from time to time in the popular press, so the content is perhaps not stunningly different.
Not having read the article I will nontheless recklessly say that in the links below, two doctors and a couple of dietitians present a very different view. (One of the doctors, according to Wikipedia, ‘a Master of the American College of Cardiology, a leading cardiovascular pathologist, and the current editor of both the American Journal of Cardiology and the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings’; and the other doctor, a former president of the American College of Cardiology.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1312295/
And supposing the Times article also said something about ‘not enough protein’, here’s something by one of the two authors of the 2009 ‘Position of The American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets’ (the abstract of which can be read here — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864 — and which begins: ‘It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases’. I would put emphasis on the words ‘appropriately planned’. … As opposed to a vegan diet composed of coca-cola and french fries.[UK: ‘chips’? ‘fries’?])
https://www.vrg.org/nutrition/protein.php
(If credentials proved anything, which they don’t, hers aren’t bad either: https://www.umass.edu/sphhs/sites/default/files/Reed-Mangels-CV-website-9-16.pdf)
‘Very odd, though, that they should describe a system they admit to be based on the exploitation of wage-labour as some kind of feudalism rather than of capitalism.’
A non-marxian use of ‘wage-labour’ is all that is, if that is indeed the term they used.
Those (including self-intentifying marxists) who advance the view that the myriad leninist state at one point in time or another were not capitalist (in the *marxian* sense) but some other system of undesirable,un-progressive/regressive exploitation will use such terms as ‘wage-labor’ and even ‘capital’ (when they should properly say ‘means of production’ for the latter) as a kind of set of default/analogous terms.
(As for anarchists, Kropotkin, unlike many other classical anarchists, did not believe in the marxian labor theory of value at all yet he used the terms ‘wage-labor’, ‘capitalism’ etc. Nothing strange in that.)
ALB: I swear on the Bible (just kidding!) that until I tried it again just now — over many years mind you — material on the SLP site has always been ‘protected’ from copy/pasting. (At least on this Win XP I use, not that should make and iota of difference.) I might speculate that SLP member Bernard zealously reads this forum, saw what I said about the impossibilty of copy/pasting, and suggested to the party Head that this was not a clever idea.
reply to # 225403
Surely the matter should not be left here, without attention to response from the other side.
Alan, you are charged with finding more substantive vegan rejoinders to what his lordship says than what I off-hand offer below:
https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/farmers-ahdb-campaign-against-veganuary
I did not know until reading your post above who was in charge of doing covers, but in any case apologise for my extremely intemperate tone.
Forgot to give the link: http://www.slp.org/pdf/others/marx-stal.pdf
I also clearly recall the SLP using ‘industrial feudalism’ It must be that they had no fixed term; thus the pamphlet linked to above uses something different.
… ah here is such a usage in a pamphlet of their’s from 1950.
Page 3, end of para 2 :’The system they have built up is in fact better described as a form of industrial feudalism’
(The site is set up so that you *cannot* copy-paste text. Why in God’s name [just joking!] do such a thing?)
‘Simon Wiesenthal Center Releases its Global Anti-Semitism 2021 Top Ten List’: https://www.wiesenthal.com/assets/pdf/global_anti-semitism_2021_top_ten.pdf
Number 3 is the BBC. Number 5 is Jewish Voices for Peace.
