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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.
Re the differences over time and space among the various leninist states: when/if the social surplus extracted from the producing class by the appropriating class does not take the form surplus *value* but rather surplus *labor/product*, I greatly favor the term ‘state-feudalism’ over an incestuous use of ‘state-“capitalism” ‘. (And it’s also better than the De Leonists’ ‘bureaucratic state despotism’, about which see note below.
Here is someone, hardly a social-revolutionist but simply a sinologist it seems, who uses and defends the term ‘state-feudalism’ in talking about maoism:
Satya J. Gabriel:
‘What do you mean China is socialist?’:
https://bit.ly/3pbm3Xr‘Political Economy of the Great Leap Forward: Permanent Revolution and State Feudal Communes’:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210302060526/https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/economics/china-essays/4.html(Gabriel does, though, at least in the first of those, confusedly use the term ‘surplus *value*’ when he’s clearly refering to surplus labor/product.)
SLP pamphlet ‘The Nature of Soviet Society’: http://www.slp.org/pdf/others/sov_soc.pdf read from part II on page 23; or for the less patient, from the section heading ‘A New Form of Class Rule’ on page 28; or for the even less patient, from ‘One final question needs to be taken up before closing: What should these new societies be called?’ on page 31. And the second to the last paragraph on page 32 apologising for such an ad hoc term (as ‘bureaucratic state despotism’.)
Re #225077 —
Reading the book (written three years later) is preferable to reading the article. As I said, the author’s position shifted. (For example no more mention of ‘non-market socialism’.) And, as I said, the book is easily downloaded from libgen.
And I don’t think it is at all important (after all, how *long* a suspension?), but in the book, he often refers to money having been ‘abolished’ or ‘eliminated’. He never uses ‘suspend/suspension’. For example: ‘Under the Khmer Rouge, following the abolition of currency, wages were not paid. Instead, food rations assumed the role
of “minimum wages.” ‘Re the differences over time and space among the various leninist states: when/if the social surplus extracted from the producing class by the appropriating class does not take the form surplus _value_ but rather surplus *labor/product* I greatly favor the term ‘state-feudalism’ over the incestuous use of state-capitalism. (And it’s also better than the De Leonists’ ‘bureaucratic state despotism’, about which see note below.
Here is someone, hardly a social-revolutionist but simply a sinologist it seems, who uses and defends ‘state-feudalism’ talking about maoism:
Satya J. Gabriel:
‘What do you mean China is socialist?’:
https://bit.ly/3pbm3Xr‘Political Economy of the Great Leap Forward: Permanent Revolution and State Feudal Communes’:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210302060526/https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/economics/china-essays/4.html(Gabriel does, though, at least in the first of those, confusedly use the term ‘surplus value’ when he’s clearly refering to surplus labor/product.)
SLP pamphlet ‘The Nature of Soviet Society’: http://www.slp.org/pdf/others/sov_soc.pdf read from part II on page 23; or for the less patient, from the section heading ‘A New Form of Class Rule’ on page 28; or for the even less patient, from ‘One final question needs to be taken up before closing: What should these new societies be called?’ on page 31. And the second to the last paragraph on page 32 apologising for such an ad hoc term (as ‘bureaucratic state despotism’.)
schekn_itrch:
1)’In contrast, the whole organisation of society was not thought through well: I would think that people who are interested in doing things well and showing off would have a different organisation of cafes and pubs, for instance.’
Hmm, probably so, yes, good point.
2) ‘how come you are able to make no mention of Strugatsky brothers in your comment?’
Good question. Books I mention in my comments on that libcom page are books I’ve personally read. I’ve never read anything by the Strugatskys, so didn’t mention them. (Or Yefromov — whom sshenfield mentions — either.) …. Just now, I have added an additional comment there on libcom calling attention to the Leon/SS page/Strugatsky&Yefromov.
(I did give Noon Universe a try a few months ago, but owing to certain defects of mine as a reader of fiction (including impatience), in conjunction with the particular structure of that book (a bit like a series of not too connected short stories, it seemed), I didn’t get very far. That’s no reflection on the worthiness of the book of course.)
