July 2018 Politics thread

Not possible GEOFF :wink:

Ha! Believe me I do try.

That article is from 2016 for your fyi

ik, thought it was worthwhile to bring in another jewish perspective

Oh, sorry

as you were

1 Like

What’s the overall implication here? That the IHRA working definition (and the NEC’s version) includes examples that should not be considered antisemitic?

Yeah the no UK internal borders was ruled out in the draft legal agreement at the behest of the UK govt I believe. The only option that this leaves us with is the whole UK remaining in the Customs Union and internal market. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

the implication is that the four excluded examples appear to contain some fairly vague wording that, as jewish commentators have said, could be used to stifle criticism of the actions of the israeli state and harm palestinian solidarity. in fact i think 2 of the four are actually in the NEC policy but worked into other examples or whatnot.

the reason it’s a working definition is so it can be continuously tweaked and improved, after all.

edit: when discussing how much or how little criticism of israel’s policies/actions is acceptable, a leftist party does have to consider the palestinian perspective, tbf, since they’re directly impacted by it. trying to balance these interests is obviously not going well for labour so far.

This was what the DUP threw their hissy fit about when May was embarrased into backing down from announcing agreement I think wasn’t it?

Heh.

https://twitter.com/EL4JC/status/1020627025189535744

7 Likes

its pretty shocking how the media libs are playing down john woodcocks sex pest tendencies and playing along with his obvious bullshit eh

https://twitter.com/benton_dan/status/1020784702305730562

‘Growing numbers alienated from the two main parties’ - who currently have around 80% vote share between them
‘24% would vote for far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Islam party’ - well at the moment around 40% would vote Tory who are er…all these things
‘One in three are prepared to vote for an anti-Brexit centrist party’ - either this is BS or all that is holding the Lib Dems back from becoming a political force is changing their name

1 Like

stumbled onto an old politics thread when searching for this one (watching function turned itself off for some reason). it’s quite encouraging how much further to the left this forum has swung compared to even a year ago, when it was already quite left.

1 Like

Ignore Jones…what is this definition of communism?

“Communism is a belief in the power of people to organise their lives as individuals, their social lives, their political and economic lives, without being managed a state”

Eh?

Is not liberal? Or libertarian?

I thought, in simple terms, the political spectrum was based upon being pro equality (left wing) vs pro freedom (right wing)…and that definition seems closer to the latter, for me.

I appreciate that it is my ignorance and I appreciate you replying with patience.

Maybe I need to read more

DUH

Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for commodity production are the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place, and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange. Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value — a use, in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a two stage argument for the labour theory of value. The first stage is to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense of being put on either side of an equals sign, then there must be a ‘third thing of identical magnitude in both of them’ to which they are both reducible. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates the second stage, which is a search for the appropriate ‘third thing’, which is labour in Marx’s view, as the only plausible common element. Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable.

Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; i.e. in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day’s labour power is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Marx’s able expositor Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development , the analysis is problematic.) A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from technical difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this problem now (albeit with unwelcome side consequences), we should recall that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price. But when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. A further objection is that Marx’s assertion that only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an artifact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value. Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.

However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics , picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism that had characterised previous German thought. Accordingly, they take pains to set out the ‘premises of the materialist method’. They start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasising that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. As the material means of production develop, ‘modes of co-operation’ or economic structures rise and fall, and eventually communism will become a real possibility once the plight of the workers and their awareness of an alternative motivates them sufficiently to become revolutionaries.

1 Like

Or, if you wanna put it on one of Owen Jones’ t-shirts:

Public control over the means of production - I’M LITERALLY A COMMUNIST YOU IDIOT!!!

I believe Marx revised that to yards of memes on his deathbed.

2 Likes

Lol, thanks

It’s just I though public control pretty much = state control :man_shrugging:

Oh and @anon26275971 I realise my spectrum was very reductive

Found my band name

1 Like