The BBC 1 'Prime Minister' debate

[Richard Tarleton]

Maybe we can get back to the Tory leadership situation. Andrew Marr's description of Johnson as a "nasty piece of work" seems to have accumulated yet more evidence in the form of the recording of the row between him and his partner which he seems curiously reticent to talk about. Will that be enough to make a difference to the blue-rinse mob I wonder?

Eddie Mair it was https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknew...you/vi-AABU6zi

[DracoM]

Which underlines two things:
[a] is this truly the man the Tories want to lead them and become the UK PRIME MINISTER, FGS?
[b] how much and how badly the BBC misses Eddie Mair

[Bryn]

. . . Indeed, and in fact the most coherent Marxist analyses of the USSR describe it as having been a system of "state capitalism".

I take it that that is not a reference to Mao's critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.

[Serial_Apologist]

Species which stick together do so for sound biological reasons determined by their evolutionary biology and life requirements, rather than through any abstract need - some species go to great lengths to remain solitary, except when they are forced to seek out a mate for reproduction, and then often for only the briefest time......



I've highlighted the pronoun because I'm not clear what it refers to, S_A - Marxist dialectic or capitalism?

My bowdlerised interpretation of the Marxist economic labour theory of value - sorry not to have made that clear.

Your last sentence would seem to be a perfect critique of every state/command economy created in the name of socialism in the last century - where the economy is run by bureaucrats with no aptitude for the task, and a corrupt elite cements itself in power, affording itself every luxury while the people suffer grotesque shortages and waste is on an epic scale (Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela today...). To your list of radical left goverenments one could perhaps add Spain in the early 1930s, where a legitimately elected left wing government was overthrown by a fascist military coup. The unfortunate Salvador Allende's government was not in power for long enough for the corrupt elite to emerge - perhaps his would have proved the exception.

Indeed.

[Serial_Apologist]

No, and certainly not the male counterparts of said mob. I've got to the stage of thinking that even if a prison sentence was on the cards for some reason it wouldn't stop the inevitable unless he was actually incarcerated at the time - and even then how long before he would be out, with said bluerinse-plus refusing to believe his guilt?
Not talking is the new game plan, enforced by his minders I gather, and seems to be working in terms of a clear run at the goal of PM. As with the Leave EU result I suspect there is no 'what happens next' plan once the goal is achieved, since the concept of running the country effectively is not(and has not been for many years) on the Tory agenda.

We've seen this sort of uncritical, unequivocal grass roots right wing support time and time again, and worldwide, if one thinks of The Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, the Marcoses in the Philippines, Thatcher, and Trump today. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote about the triggers for this kind of mass adulation in his book "Fear of Freedom", locating it in a middle layer of society feeling itself disempowered by forces beyond its control, sandwiched between an unaccountable ruling class and a rising organised working class demanding better wages and conditions in conflict with capitalism's capacity to deliver sustainably. He pointed out that the automatic response to such existential isolation was to crave deliverance from above - that almost religious idea that winning the game confers on the powerful inculcated in conservative family values - while at the same time needing a target in lower orders than itself to blame. When one thinks about it one could almost accumulate a chronology of scapegoats: I myself dreamed up a scenario between two people on a date, in which one tells the other she is working class, black, a social worker, gay, and a Muslim. I'm still trying to figure out which of those categories was the one that sealed the fate on that date. And I'm still waiting for the next scapegoat to be dreamed up - it almost became the white unemployed working class male for a time, until "he" declared himself to be the backbone of the Brexit movement, at which point the mythical "he" had to be courted! For today it is the once powerful working class communities based in heavy industry, those most successfully sold the myths of consumerism and home ownership, who have abandoned their once unquestioned loyalty to Labour; for once again, the top-down post-WW2 version of "socialism" part-coopted [sic] from Stalinism, part from Methodist paternalism, rather than Marxism, offered the constantly regurgitated myths about socialism that have proved so handy to right wing propagandists.

[DracoM]

But many of those white working class / heavy industry groups are - or so it seems to me - being dismembered and are now trying to vote for populist regimes etc out of what seems ominously like a kind of desperate nostalgia for the time when they still WERE empowered and valued. At times, Brexit movements look like a kind of diluted revenge on what they take to be those forces that disempowered them.

The frightening thing is that the chances of that past age ever returning and re-empowering them are so remote as to be delusions inevitably bound to be disappointed, and out of that disappointment, .............well, what next?

[Richard Barrett]

Eddie Mair it was

Oh yes, pardon me.

Something that I read someone else said about him was that his strategy is to look carefully for where the crowd is headed, then run out in front of them and shout "follow me!" - that seems to fit well with his opportunistic posturing over Brexit.

[Serial_Apologist]

But many of those white working class / heavy industry groups are - or so it seems to me - being dismembered and are now trying to vote for populist regimes etc out of what seems ominously like a kind of desperate nostalgia for the time when they still WERE empowered and valued. At times, Brexit movements look like a kind of diluted revenge on what they take to be those forces that disempowered them.

The frightening thing is that the chances of that past age ever returning and re-empowering them are so remote as to be delusions inevitably bound to be disappointed, and out of that disappointment, .............well, what next?

Well as I see it, under a rationally planned system, people wouldn't need to be employed for the long hours that secure part of the surplus value creamed off to maintain the rich and their wasteful system which preesently pertains. Things wouldn't "need" to be as expensive as they are - price being determined differentially according to social position by the economic power of the consumer, as well as by availability. Shortages result from blockages that result from the unplanned character of capitalist production and distribution - or, at best because attempts to plan through mitigating the worst effects socially tend to kill the baby out of kindness, if you like - which is one of the problems with Kenysianism.

There would undoubtedly be mistakes made, in the first place more than along the way as lessons were being learned; but "market research" would be being directed primarily to fulfilling basic needs in the first instance, and with communities' proposals and inputs. Such drawbacks as strong-minded individuals ruling the roost at community get-togethers were looked at when the "Planning Through Landscapes" scheme was devised in the early 1990s. It was being successfully applied in the Thames Chase Community Forest when I did my thesis on it in 1994; however it was effectively withdrawn when sponsoring bodies, which included local authorities then already under spending restrictions as well as the Forestry and Countryside commissions, withdrew their sponsorship on grounds that the decision-making process was taking "too long" and exceeding lead times, although it turned out that those lead times had themselves been radically foreshortened in order to "speed things up". But common sense tells one that bottom-up decision-making would invariably take into account degrees of urgency, just as in a war situation, and people would be delegated to higher democratic bodies mandated with that in mind.

When one comes to think about it, given that "value" consists of the productivity of the worker, and that that productivity has swollen massively, exponentially, initially through the mechanisation fostered by the Industrial Revolution, and more recently by robotisation and IT, all that tacit wealth built up in the product - though it may not in purely numerical terms be anything like the amount of money supplied as the attempts made by fiscal institutions to align the amount of money out there with the real "value-added" economy, as well as all the waste in speculation and locking up capital in property - one man or woman working on a computer screen operating an entire production line once operated by x hundred workers holds phenomenal power in his or her hands: he or she can literally shut down an industry at the touch of a mouse. But so can a highly paid stockbroker shut down a national economy by secreting funds into a "safe house" economy whenever a left wing government threatens to come to power.

So in reality, the bod or lass in his or her bedroom on a computer or on a mobile phone in the street sending generalised incitements to gather outside the Bank of England in order to shut down one of the world's centres of capital exchange (read money laundering) has little power by simple virtue of physical presence, even when massed, to effect capitalism's overthrow. In the end, one sector of the capitalist world economy can be collapsed rendering upper middle class homes in say Mayfair worthless by speculation alone, so old folks having to sell up to afford a care home are just small in symptomatic terms. In such an emergency some kind of barter might well be instituted, literally by spontaneous community initiative, such as has happened with so-called Letts systems, in which (as I understood them) people's skills could be swapped on the assumption of relative value equality: You fix my car, and I'll re-decorate your home. But some kind of currency would have to be introdeuced as regulatory desiderata would quickly come into play to avoid allegations and conflicts. One intermediary idea that has been put forward for an alternative, and which I suppose should be in a radical government's thinking, is for a social wage, like the current living wagte, but paid by central government, which everyone would automatically be paid, irrespective of employed or unemployed, fixed at a fair figure for meeting basic needs such as food, heating and rent at the very least. But it should be said that, far from absolute equality, with the state owning all land and property and everyone being on the same income, Marx argued for some differential between top and bottom earnings, based on the length of time needed for apprenticeship in the job, though this would not be of the order of differentiation that has always been the case ever since ruling classes were invented! The assumption socialist have always held - call it "faith" if you like - is that people would be differently motivated from how they presently are in a society that firstly met basic needs for shelter, warmth and food rather than security in this insecure world and the status associated with having to secure it.

[Richard Tarleton]

Oh yes, pardon me.

Something that I read someone else said about him was that his strategy is to look carefully for where the crowd is headed, then run out in front of them and shout "follow me!" - that seems to fit well with his opportunistic posturing over Brexit.

Indeed - I couldn't agree more. And the "right-wing media" is currently giving him a good kicking.

That wasn't meant as a smartarse correction, rather to give the much-missed and deadly Mair his due.

[Joseph K]

But it should be said that, far from absolute equality, with the state owning all land and property and everyone being on the same income, Marx argued for some differential between top and bottom earnings, based on the length of time needed for apprenticeship in the job, though this would not be of the order of differentiation that has always been the case ever since ruling classes were invented! The assumption socialist have always held - call it "faith" if you like - is that people would be differently motivated from how they presently are in a society that firstly met basic needs for shelter, warmth and food rather than security in this insecure world and the status associated with having to secure it.

SA - what I think you're describing is the socialist stage in Marxist theory, which is meant to give way to communism or 'free communism' with the disintegration of the state. I think there are aspects of Marxism that are variance with other aspects. IIRC there are something like 10 demands at the end of the communist manifesto which have a state capitalist nature about them. I am a bit hazy on how one makes this leap from socialism to free communism... while I don't consider myself an anarchist - I do think the state ought to be captured, on a global scale, as well as other institutions, but at the same time this ought to be by a grassroots movement, not by a Leninist intelligentsia. At this point the concept of money would become redundant, I'd say - certainly things like mass rent strikes would effect something in that direction. Money is just debt really, or springs from debt...

Off topic again, sorry. But here is Yanis Varoufakis's excellent preface to The Communist Manifesto -

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/20/yanis-varoufakis-marx-crisis-communist-manifesto

He's generally positive about it as you can imagine, but points out what he thinks are its weaknesses. But I think he's right to say that it is by and large a liberal or even libertarian text.

[MrGongGong]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brexit-strikes-a-bum-note-for-u-k-artists-as-eu-gigs-dry-up-11560771000?fbclid=IwAR0c4GzYq2ocuwW2tB4IPCQv-_85XKe8npuzvJi9zeKxcZV8fvEEIHdt1Qo

[Serial_Apologist]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brexit-...ZV8fvEEIHdt1Qo

Somehow I don't think I'll be subscribing to The Wall Street Journal, just to read that article.

[Pulcinella]

I'm pleased that the Tories seem to be changing their policy regarding the homeless: offering up Number 10 to some bloke who gets thrown out of his girlfriend's flat and presumably has nowhere else to go, having reluctantly given up a former grace and favour residence associated with a previous position.

[MrGongGong]

Somehow I don't think I'll be subscribing to The Wall Street Journal, just to read that article.

That's odd
I didn't need to

Will have a look again

[cloughie]

I'm pleased that the Tories seem to be changing their policy regarding the homeless: offering up Number 10 to some bloke who gets thrown out of his girlfriend's flat and presumably has nowhere else to go, having reluctantly given up a former grace and favour residence associated with a previous position.

Hang on he could be selling ‘Big Issue’ yet!